Milwaukee, WI – The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has announced that Professor James Hankins, a distinguished scholar of Renaissance humanism and Western intellectual history, is a 2026 Bradley Prize recipient. Professor Hankins will receive the award at the Bradley Prizes ceremony on Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
Now in its 22nd year, the Bradley Prize is awarded to individuals whose extraordinary work exemplifies the Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.
“Professor Hankins has devoted his career to exploring and defending the great ideas that form the moral and intellectual foundations of the West,” said Rick Graber, president and CEO of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. “Through his scholarship and teaching, he has illuminated the enduring relevance of classical learning, the humanistic tradition, and the principles of ordered liberty. The Bradley Foundation is pleased to recognize Professor Hankins and his scholarly contributions, which have played a vital role in ensuring that the intellectual inheritance of Western civilization is passed to coming generations.”
As in the past, this year’s award recipients were chosen by the Bradley Prizes Selection Committee, after careful review ofover 60 distinguished nominations.Each award carries a stipend of $300,000.
James Hankins is a Professor of History at Harvard University and Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. An intellectual historian, he taught at Harvard University for 40 years. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and won the Academy’s Serena Medal for Italian history in 2024. He was awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America in 2012. He was also a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, in 2014.
Hankins’s primary research interests are the history of Renaissance political thought, the history of Platonic philosophy, and the history of the classical tradition. He is the founding editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard University Press) and associate editor of the Catalogus Translationum and Commentariorum (Union Académique Internationale).
His essays, reviews and opinion pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, The New Criterion, The Claremont Review of Books, The Spectator (World), Public Discourse, and The American Mind. He strongly defends the need for the revitalization of Western history in higher education and authentic academic freedom.
Hankins received a Ph.D., M.A. and M.Phil. in History from Columbia University and an A.B. in Classics from Duke University.
