Died March 10, 2005
David Hankins was an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
Following high school, Hankins spent one year studying at the University of Leiden which, some 300 years prior, James Boswell's father and uncle had also attended. He graduated from Tufts University in 1958, and in 1962 received a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. He taught English literature for 30 years at the University of Connecticut, retiring in 1992.
Hankins was the son of Professor John E. Hankins (1905-1996) and Nellie Pottle Hankins, the younger sister of Frederick Pottle and an important Boswellian scholar in her own right. He died shortly before the publication of The General Correspondence of James Boswell 1757-63 , the ninth volume in the Research Series of correspondence in the Yale Boswell Editions, which he had edited together with James J. Caudle.