James Hankins was born in Philadelphia in 1955 and was privately educated. He attended Duke University, receiving a BA magna cum laude in Classics in 1977. He received his Ph.D. in History at Columbia University in 1985, where he worked under Eugene F. Rice and Paul Oskar Kristeller. He has received grants from the Fulbright Commission, American Academy in Rome, Columbia Society of Fellows, theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His two-volume work, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (1990, third printing 1994) won a prize for the best book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas.