History of the prize
It was endowed by Mr Arthur Serena after Great Britain’s alliance with Italy in the First World War. The medal was first awarded in 1920.
Eligibility
In 2025, eligible nominations are for scholars in Italian Philosophy.
In 2026, eligible nominations are for scholars in Italian Economics.
How to nominate
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].
2024 winner (Italian History)
Professor James Hankins FBA has been 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, August 2024
Previous winners
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