Jesús Escobar is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. He teaches courses and publishes scholarship on art, architecture, and urbanism in the early modern, transoceanic Spanish Empire. Escobar is the author of two books, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy (Penn State University Press, 2022). Both won the Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the Society for Iberian Global Art, and both have Spanish-language editions (Editorial Nerea, 2008; Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2025). His current book project considers the late-seventeenth-century itineraries of two American-born friar-scholars, tracing their individual experiences of the built environments of Mexico, Peru, Spain, and Italy, as well as places in between. With Michael Schreffler of the University of Notre Dame, Escobar is co-author of Architecture in the Spanish World, 1500 to 1800, a book under contract with Princeton University Press. Escobar has served on the Board of the Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians and is Editor for the scholarly book series, Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, published by Penn State University Press.
