Unearthing a Forgotten Genius

Professor of History at Harvard, founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, James Hankins is one of our great living scholars. People forget what that means and what it costs. One thing it means, let me tell you, is that Hankins’s Harvard colleagues have not recognized him with an endowed chair. Ha ha ha! they say. In the same department, President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust treads the boards as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. Ha ha ha! says the President Emerita, author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (“A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America”).