James Hankins, Historian

James Hankins an American intellectual historian whose scholarship focuses on the Italian Renaissance. He serves as general editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and as associate editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. He previously held a professorship in history at Harvard University and was a visiting research fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture in the spring of 2018.

In 2012, he received the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America. In December 2025, he announced his departure from Harvard University to join the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, citing his view that Harvard was no longer committed to the teaching of Western civilization’s history.