Professor Linda Pellecchia received her B.A. from Smith College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She also attended classes at the University of Florence in Renaissance art history and history. Her field of specialty is Italian Renaissance architecture with a particular focus on Florence and Rome in the 15th and early 16th centuries. She is interested in seeing architecture, especially palace design, in the context of the social and political ideologies of the Florentine and Roman elite. Equally important in her research is examining how Italian patrons reshaped their lives and environment based on the ancient world. Whether struggling to understand Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture (the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity) for ideas on how to organize their own houses, or combing through ancient fables for appropriate models of moral behavior for decorating a modern palace staircase, Italian patrons were eager to demonstrate their intellectual prowess and to show themselves as the equals of ancient princes and patricians.​

Pellecchia was the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor at Davidson College from 1983-1985. She also served as the Senior Architectural Historian (1988-89, on leave from UD) at the Getty sponsored Foundation for Documents of Architecture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She has been the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including: Senior Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize fellow in Art History at the American Academy in Rome. She is the author of numerous articles across a variety of internationally prominent journals. These include two book-length studies, "From Aesop's Fables to the Kalila wa-Dimna: Giuliano da Sangallo's Staircase in the Gondi Palace in Florence" (I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance, 2011-12); and "Architects Read Vitruvius: Renaissance Interpretations of the Atrium of the Ancient Roman House" (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1992). She has also recently published a comprehensive documentary study of the Gondi Palace in: "Il Palazzo di Giuliano Gondi e Giuliano da Sangallo. The Palace of Giuliano Gondi and Giuliano da Sangallo" in Gondi: Una dinastia Fiorentina e il suo palazzo. A Florentine Dynasty and its Palace (Polistampa, 2013).​