James Hankins

James Hankins
Professor James Hankins holds a collection of books from the I Tatti Renaissance Library
Born	1955 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Education	Duke University, Columbia University
Occupation	Renaissance intellectual historian
Employer	Harvard University

James Hankins (born 1955) is an intellectual historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He is the General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library and the Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. He is a professor in the History Department of Harvard University.

In 2012 he was honored with the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award of the Renaissance Society of America.

Hankins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He took an A.B. in Classics from Duke University (1977) and M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in History from Columbia University (1985). At Columbia he worked with Eugene F. Rice and the historian of philosophy Paul Oskar Kristeller, serving as the latter's research assistant for six years. In 1985 he joined the history faculty at Harvard University.

Hankins' monographic work centers on the history of philosophy, theology, literature and political thought. Since 1998 he has been General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, which he founded together with Walter Kaiser, Director of the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Under Hankins' editorship the series has published over fifty volumes between 2001 and 2012 and sold close to 80,000 volumes. Since 2003 he has also been Associate Editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Translations and Commentaries, Annotated Lists and Guides, a publication founded by his mentor Paul Oskar Kristeller in 1945. He is the author or editor of over twenty volumes and more than eighty articles, essays and book chapters. Many of his shorter writings are accessible online, via "Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard" (DASH).