Serena Medal

Professor James Hankins FBA was awarded the 2024 Serena Medal for decades of distinguished scholarly work that has established him as the world’s leading authority on Italian Renaissance humanism.

Hankins has had a huge influence, not only through his many publications and his decades of teaching and doctoral supervision, but also through the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a series presenting Italian Renaissance Latin texts with facing translations, of which he has been sole general editor. The achievement is without parallel among historians of early modern intellectual history.

James Hankins, elected to the British Academy in 2014, is an intellectual historian specialising in the Italian Renaissance. He has taught at Harvard for 40 years, being appointed a full professor in 1992.

A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he attended Duke University, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in Classics (1977), before going to Columbia University for PhD work in history.

While at Columbia he served for eight years as research assistant to Paul Oskar Kristeller, who also was a member of his degree committee. His revised dissertation was published as 'Plato in the Italian Renaissance' (2 vols., Brill, 1990).

Married to the palaeographer Virginia Brown, he spent many years travelling around Italy, conducting manuscript research in over a hundred Italian and European collections.

In 1998 he founded the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a bilingual text series modelled on the Loeb Classical Library, whose remit is to publish Latin humanistic texts of the Italian Renaissance. The library will publish its 100th volume in Spring 2025.

Hankins is also the author of 'Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy' (Harvard University Press, 2019), described in the Times Literary Supplement as 'perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought'.

"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

2023 Professor Bonnie J. Blackburn FBA, Independent scholar

2022 Professor Zygmunt Barański, University of Cambridge

2021 Professor Lucrezia Reichlin FBA, London Business School

2020 Professor Jill Kraye, University of London and the Warburg Institute

2019 Professor John Foot, University of Bristol

2018 Professor Roger Parker, King's College London

2017 Professor Martin McLaughlin, University of Oxford

2016  Professor Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Queen Mary University of London

2015  Dr Brian A’Hearn, University of Oxford

2014  Professor Chris Wickham FBA, University of Oxford

2013  Professor Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, University of Padua

2012  Professor Richard Bellamy, University College London

2011  Professor Patricia Fortini Brown, Princeton University

2010  Professor Anna Lepschy, University College London

2009  Professor Giorgio Chittolini, University of Milan

2008  Professor Philip Gossett, University of Chicago Università “La Sapienza” Rome

2007  Professor Conor Fahy

2006  Professor Paul Ginsborg

2005  Mr Ronald Lightbown

2004  Professor William Weaver

2003  Professor Stuart Woolf

2002  Professor John Woodhouse

2001  Professor Michael Hirst FBA

2000  Professor Giulio Lepschy FBA

Download PDF of Serena Medal winners before 2000

In 2026, eligible nominations are for scholars in Italian Economics.

Nominations for this award are open from 1 December to 31 January and may only be made by Fellows of the British Academy. Entries should be submitted electronically via this nomination form.

The deadline for submissions is 31 January each year. Nominations will be reviewed, and the winner selected, by the relevant panel.

If you have any queries submitting a nomination please email [email protected].