A Conversation on the Future of the Classics

James Hankins is a historian of the Italian Renaissance and a powerful voice in the movement to reform American education. 2025 marks his fortieth year of teaching at Harvard University, where he has focused on the classical tradition, political thought, the movement of humanism, and late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern European history. His career has taken him to many distinguished institutions, including Oxford University, where he was Carlyle Lecturer in 2010 and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in 2014; the American Academy in Rome (Rome Prize 1981–82, residency 2014); the American Academy in Berlin (2013); and Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence (Fellow 1988–89, Visiting Professor 1992 and 2007). Many of his most precious hours have been spent in the great libraries of Europe. Dearest to his heart are the Riccardiana and Laurenziana in Florence, the Vatican Library in Rome, and Houghton Library at Harvard.

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. His research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He has written or (co-)edited 22 books, published about 270 papers and reviews, and created the interactive digital project "Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World." He has also held positions at the Universities of Vienna, Cambridge and Chicago as well as visiting appointments in Paris, Innsbruck, New York, Abu Dhabi, Copenhagen and Zurich. In April Princeton University Press published his most recent book, What Is Ancient History?