Background
Hankins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Hankins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He took an Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Duke University (1977) and Master of Arts, Master of Philisophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in History from Columbia University (1985).
He is a professor in the History Department of Harvard University. 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.
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).
In 2010 he was Carlyle Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford.
In 2014 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.