The Serena Medal is presented annually to individuals who have made significant contributions to advancing the study of Italian history, philosophy, music, literature, art, or economics.
In 2024, Professor James Hankins FBA has been honored with the Serena Medal in recognition of his extensive and distinguished scholarship, which has positioned him as a leading global authority on Italian Renaissance humanism. Hankins has profoundly shaped the field not only through his numerous publications and decades of teaching and mentoring PhD students but also as the general editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a series that brings Italian Renaissance Latin texts together with English translations. His contributions in this area are unparalleled among historians of early modern intellectual history.
Elected to the British Academy in 2014, Hankins is an intellectual historian with a specialization in the Italian Renaissance. For 40 years, he has been a member of the Harvard faculty, achieving the rank of full professor in 1992. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hankins earned his undergraduate degree in Classics at Duke University, graduating magna cum laude in 1977. He then pursued his PhD in history at Columbia University, where he worked for eight years as a research assistant to Paul Oskar Kristeller, who also served on his dissertation committee. His doctoral thesis was later revised and published as Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Brill, 1990, 2 vols.).
Hankins, who was married to the renowned palaeographer Virginia Brown, spent many years conducting manuscript research throughout Italy and Europe, examining collections in over a hundred libraries. In 1998, he established the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a bilingual series modeled after the Loeb Classical Library, with a mission to publish Latin texts from the Italian Renaissance. The library is set to release its 100th volume in Spring 2025. In addition to this monumental work, Hankins is also the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019), a work hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought." Hankins was also the Garwood Visiting Fellow for the 2022-23 academic year.
"I am deeply honoured to be awarded the Serena Medal for 2024 and humbled to see the list of previous honourees, containing as it does so many giants of literature, philosophy, and scholarship. I am gratified that the Academy has seen fit to honour a long career devoted to the conduct of traditional historical and philological scholarship in Italian Renaissance history."
- Professor James Hankins FBA, August 2024
We are deeply proud of Professor Hankins' continued dedication to excellence in his scholarly work. Link to the Serena Medal announcement can be found here.