Son of Jamaican immigrants, he spent his pre-school and first school years in Kingston, Jamaica, before returning to Brooklyn in 1979.
Accepted at School of Visual Arts for matriculation in September, 1988, he instead attended Brooklyn College, where he shifted to the study of Ancient Greek.
He graduated from Brooklyn College in June, 1992 and attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1992 to 1998, where he earned his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Classical Languages and Literatures.
Rankine received a Ph.D. in classical languages and literature from Yale University in 1998, on the subject of moral agency in Seneca.
[2][3] Rankine was assistant head of the School of Languages and Cultures and director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Classics at Purdue University.
[5] Since 2016 Rankine has been the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond, where he also serves as Director of the Arc of Justice Institute, an interdisciplinary diversity and inclusion initiative.
Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (2006), which received a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title award in 2007, Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theatre of Civil Disobedience (2013) and co-edited The Oxford University Handbook: Greek Drama in the Americas (2015) with Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell.
Oxford University Handbook: Greek Drama in the Americas, co-editor with Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, and Justine McConnell.
P. Rankine 2015 ‘The World is a Ghetto:’ Postracial America(s) and the Apocalypse,” chapter for Houston Baker’s The Trouble with Post-Blackness, Columbia University Press,.