Distinguished Scholar of Renaissance Humanism and Western Intellectual History
James Hankins is a Professor of History at Harvard University and Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. An intellectual historian, he taught at Harvard University for 40 years. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and won the Academy’s Serena Medal for Italian history in 2024. He was awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America in 2012. He was also a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, in 2014.
Hankins’s primary research interests are the history of Renaissance political thought, the history of Platonic philosophy, and the history of the classical tradition. He is the founding editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press) and associate editor of the Catalogus Translationum and Commentariorum (Union Académique Internationale).
His essays, reviews and opinion pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, The New Criterion, The Claremont Review of Books, The Spectator (World), Public Discourse, and The American Mind. He strongly defends the need for the revitalization of Western history in higher education and authentic academic freedom.
Hankins received a Ph.D., M.A. and M.Phil. in History from Columbia University and an A.B. in Classics from Duke University.