James Hankins will be Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School in the 2026–2027 academic year. A intellectual historian, he is currently a Visiting Professor at the Hamilton School, having taught at Harvard University for the past 40 years. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and the winner of the Academy’s Serena Medal for Italian history (2024). He was awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America in 2012. He was a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 2014. His main research interests are the history of Renaissance political thought, the history of Platonic philosophy and 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 public-facing 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.
Selected Publications
The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 1987 (ed. and tr.), with Gordan Griffiths
Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., 1990
Repertorium Brunianum: A Critical Guide to the Writings of Leonardo Bruni, vol. 1, 1997
Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, 2000 (ed.)
The Lost Continent: Neo-Latin Literature and the Birth of European Vernacular Literatures, 2001 (ed.)
Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology, 6 vols., 2001-6 (ed.) (with Michael J. B. Allen)
Leonardo Bruni: History of the Florentine People, 3 vols. 2001-7 (ed. and tr.)
Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., 2003-4
The Rebirth of Platonic Theology, ed. James Hankins and Fabrizio Meroi (Florence: Olschki, 2013)
The Recovery of Ancient Philosophy in the Renaissance. A Brief Guide (with Ada Palmer), 2008.
Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in the Italian Renaissance (Belknap Press, 2019).
Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena (Harvard, 2023)
