The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Anthropology,
#2801
Frederic Wood Jones
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Frederic Wood Jones FRS , usually referred to as Wood Jones, was a British observational naturalist, embryologist, anatomist and anthropologist, who spent considerable time in Australia. Biography Jones was born in London, England, and wrote extensively on early humans, including their arboreal adaptations , and was one of the founding fathers of the field of modern physical anthropology. A friend of Le Gros Clark, Wood Jones was also known for his controversial belief in the view that acquired traits could be inherited, and thus his opposition to Darwinism. He taught anatomy and physical anth...
Go to Profile#2802
Robert Redfield
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Robert Redfield was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist, whose ethnographic work in Tepoztlán, Mexico, is considered a landmark of Latin American ethnography. He was associated with the University of Chicago for his entire career: all of his higher education took place there, and he joined the faculty in 1927 and remained there until his death in 1958, serving as Dean of Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946.
Go to Profile#2803
William Bascom
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.
Go to Profile#2804
Ralph Beals
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Ralph Leon Beals was an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, a former president of the American Anthropological Association, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He worked on community development in Egypt with UNESCO and studied Mexican students in American universities. His brother was journalist Carleton Beals.
Go to Profile#2805
Marvin Opler
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Marvin Kaufmann Opler was an American anthropologist and social psychiatrist. His brother Morris Edward Opler was also an anthropologist who studied the Southern Athabaskan peoples of North America. Morris and Marvin Opler were the sons of Austrian-born Arthur A. Opler, a merchant, and Fanny Coleman-Hass. Marvin Opler is best known for his work as a principal investigator in the Midtown Community Mental Health Research Study . This landmark study hinted at widespread stresses induced by urban life, as well as contributing to the development of the burgeoning field of social psychiatry in the ...
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Ronald Berndt
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Ronald Murray Berndt was an Australian social anthropologist who, in 1963, became the inaugural professor of anthropology at the University of Western Australia. He and his wife Catherine Berndt maintained a close professional partnership for five decades, working among Aboriginal Australians at Ooldea , Northern Territory cattle stations , Balgo and natives of New Guinea .
Go to Profile#2807
T. B. L. Webster
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster was a British archaeologist and Classicist, known for his studies of Greek comedy. Background He was the son of Sir Thomas Lonsdale Webster. During World War I he attended Charterhouse. As a student at Oxford University, he first studied Greek vases that John Beazley had brought in, but soon switched to Menander and developed a lifelong interest in Greek comedy that resulted in "reconstructions of the plots of lost plays and ... collections of evidence from widely disparate sources bearing on the history of the Greek theater".
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Kathleen Kenyon
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.
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Victor Ehrenberg
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Victor Ehrenberg was a German Jewish historian. Life Ehrenberg was born in Altona, Hamburg to a noted German Jewish family. He was the younger brother of Hans Ehrenberg and the nephew of the jurist Victor Ehrenberg, and a nephew of economist Richard Ehrenberg.
Go to Profile#2810
Carleton S. Coon
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist. A professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, he was president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.
Go to Profile#2811
Thomas Griffith Taylor
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Thomas Griffith "Grif" Taylor was an English-born geographer, anthropologist and world explorer. He was a survivor of Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica . Taylor was a senior academic geographer at universities in Sydney, Chicago, and Toronto. His writings on geography and race were controversial.
Go to Profile#2812
Richard Goodchild
1918 - 1968 (50 years)
Richard George Goodchild was a British provincial Roman archaeologist. He was one of the pioneers of archaeology in Libya. Education and career Goodchild's interest in archaeology was raised as a schoolboy at Cranleigh School, an independent boarding school in Surrey. From 1936, he attended the University of Oxford to study history. There he got to know the University of Oxford Archaeological Society who undertook excavations in the area around Oxford. During one of these excavations, Goodchild learned, among others, the archaeologist Olwen Brogan and the later pioneer of aerial archaeology, John Bradford .
Go to Profile#2813
Morris Steggerda
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Morris Steggerda was an American physical anthropologist. He worked primarily on Central American and Caribbean populations. Life and career Steggerda was born in Holland, Michigan, the son of Sena and John Steggerda. He was of Dutch descent. He received an A.B. from Hope College in 1922, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology of the University of Illinois, in 1923 and 1928 respectively. His first academic position was as assistant professor of zoology at Smith College , but most of his career was spent as an investigator with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Cold Spring Harbor, New York .
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Franz Cumont
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Franz-Valéry-Marie Cumont was a Belgian archaeologist and historian, a philologist and student of epigraphy, who brought these often isolated specialties to bear on the syncretic mystery religions of Late Antiquity, notably Mithraism.
Go to Profile#2815
Phyllis Kaberry
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Phyllis Mary Kaberry was a social anthropologist who dedicated her work to the study of women in various societies. Particularly with her work in both Australia and Africa, she paved the way for a feminist approach in anthropological studies. Her research on the sacred life and significant role of the Aboriginal women of Australia proved to be a controversial topic, as anthropology during her years of early fieldwork was male-dominated, filled with the misconceptions that men were the superior in any aspect of life. Contributing proof of women's significance to societal development and org...
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Oscar Broneer
1894 - 1992 (98 years)
Oscar Theodore Broneer was a prominent Swedish American educator and archaeologist known in particular for his work on Ancient Greece. He is most associated with his discovery of the Temple of Isthmia, an important Panhellenic shrine dating from the seventh century B.C.
Go to Profile#2817
Ernest Becker
1924 - 1974 (50 years)
Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death. Biography Early life Ernest Becker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrant parents. Serving in the infantry during World War II, he would help liberate a Nazi concentration camp. After he completed his military service, Becker attended Syracuse University in New York. Upon graduation he joined the U.S. Embassy in Paris as an administrative officer.
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Berthold Ullman
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Berthold Louis Ullman was an American classicist. Life and career Ullman was born in Chicago to Louis Ullman and Eleanora Fried. He was educated at the University of Chicago . He joined the faculty at Chicago and also taught at the University of Pittsburgh and Iowa State University. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1925 until 1944 before moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, becoming Kenan professor of Latin and department chair. Ullman's library collection formed the core of the present classics department library at the University of North Carolina. Ullman was also president of the American Philological Association in 1935.
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Raoul Naroll
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Raoul Naroll was a Canadian-born American anthropologist who did much to promote the methodology of cross-cultural studies. Early life and education Naroll was born in Toronto, Ontario but was raised in Los Angeles and attended UCLA at the age of 16, dropping out in his junior year to join the military.
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Cyril Fox
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Sir Cyril Fred Fox was an English archaeologist and museum director. Fox became keeper of archaeology at the National Museum of Wales, and subsequently served as director from 1926 to 1948. His most notable achievements were collaborative. With his second wife, Aileen Fox, he surveyed and excavated several prehistoric monuments in Wales. With Iorwerth Peate, he established the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, and with Lord Raglan, he authored a definitive history of vernacular architecture, Monmouthshire Houses.
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Glyn Daniel
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Glyn Edmund Daniel was a Welsh scientist and archaeologist who taught at Cambridge University, where he specialised in the European Neolithic period. He was appointed Disney Professor of Archaeology in 1974 and edited the academic journal Antiquity from 1958 to 1985. In addition to early efforts to popularise archaeological study and antiquity on radio and television, he edited several popular studies of the fields. He also published mysteries under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees.
Go to Profile#2822
Marcus Niebuhr Tod
1878 - 1974 (96 years)
Marcus Niebuhr Tod, OBE, FBA was a British historian and epigraphist. He was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, from 1903 to 1947, and Reader in Greek Epigraphy at the University of Oxford from 1927 to 1947.
Go to Profile#2823
Abram Kardiner
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Abram Kardiner was a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic therapist. An active publisher of academic research, he co-founded the Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Clinic for Training and Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City . Kardiner was deeply interested in cross-cultural diagnosis and the psychoanalytic study of culture. While teaching at Columbia, he developed a course on the application of psychoanalysis to the study of culture and worked closely with anthropologists throughout his career.
Go to Profile#2824
Donald Thomson
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Donald Finlay Fergusson Thomson OBE was an Australian anthropologist and ornithologist. he is known for his studies of and friendship with the Pintupi and Yolngu peoples, and for his intervention in the Caledon Bay crisis.
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Felix M. Keesing
1902 - 1961 (59 years)
Felix M. Keesing was a New Zealand-born anthropologist who specialized in the study of the Philippine Islands and the South Pacific. He came to the United States in the 1940s and taught at Stanford University, California, 1942–1961.
Go to Profile#2826
Earnest Hooton
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Earnest Albert Hooton was an American physical anthropologist known for his work on racial classification and his popular writings such as the book Up From The Ape. Hooton sat on the Committee on the Negro, a group that "focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time."
Go to Profile#2827
Veronica Strang
Veronica Strang is an author and professor of anthropology affiliated to Oxford University. Her work combines cultural anthropology with environmental studies, and focuses on the relationship between human communities and their environments. Strang's publications include the books 'The Meaning of Water' ; Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water' ; 'What Anthropologists Do' , 'Water Nature and Culture' and most recently 'Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis' , which is based on a major comparative study of water deities around the world. Furth...
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Herbert Youtie
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Herbert Chaim Youtie was an American papyrologist. "Youtie raised papyrological research and publication to a new exemplary standard. At the time of his death he was internationally recognized not only as the world's most distinguished interpreter of documentary papyri, the person to whom would-be editors of texts turned first when difficult problems arose, but also as a sage, who combined a mastery of Greek and an unrivalled feel for all aspects of daily life in Greco-Roman Egypt with a philosophical cast of mind and profound human understanding."
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Alfred Bellinger
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Alfred Raymond Bellinger was an American archaeologist and numismatist. He taught at Yale University and took part in the Dura-Europos excavations and published the book: Dura final report, VI, The coins.
Go to Profile#2830
Ellis Minns
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Sir Ellis Hovell Minns, FBA was a British academic and archaeologist whose studies focused on Eastern Europe. Educated at Charterhouse, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge studying the Classical tripos including Slavonic and Russian. He lived briefly in Paris before moving to St Petersburg in 1898 to work in the library of the Imperial Archaeological Commission. Returning to Cambridge in 1901 he began lecturing in Classics.
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Câmara Cascudo
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Luís da Câmara Cascudo was a Brazilian anthropologist, folklorist, journalist, historian, lawyer, and lexicographer. He was born in Natal, Northeast Brazil. He lived his entire life in Natal and dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian culture and he was a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. He was also interested in music and was a co-founder of the Natal Instituto de Música in 1933. The institute of anthropology there now bears his name.
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Louis Dupree
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Louis Dupree was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and scholar of Afghan culture and history. He was the husband of Nancy Hatch Dupree, who was the Board Director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University in Afghanistan and author of five books about Afghanistan. The husband and wife team from the United States worked together for 15 years in Kabul, collecting as many works written about Afghanistan as they could. They travelled across the country from 1962 until the 1979 Soviet intervention, conducting archaeological excavations.
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George Ewart Bean
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
George Ewart Bean was an English archaeologist and writer who specialized in classical Turkey. His father William Jackson Bean was a botanist, author, and curator of Kew Gardens. Bean was educated at St Paul's School, London from 1916 to 1921. He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge and won the Schoolbred Scholarship and the John Stewart of Rannoch Scholarship for Classics.
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John E. Stambaugh
1939 - 1990 (51 years)
John Evan Stambaugh was an American classical scholar and professor at Williams College. Stambaugh was educated at Trinity College and then at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. in 1967. Stambaugh taught at Williams from 1965 until 1990 and was a specialist in the field of Greco-Roman religion as well as early Christianity. In addition to teaching at Williams, Stambaugh was a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. and a faculty and managing committee member and chair of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy.
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David L. Clarke
1937 - 1976 (39 years)
David Leonard Clarke was an English archaeologist and academic. He is well known for his work on processual archaeology. Early life and education Clarke was born in Kent, England. He studied at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, from which he obtained his PhD in 1964 under the supervision of Grahame Clark.
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Ruth Bunzel
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Ruth Leah Bunzel was an American anthropologist, known for studying creativity and art among the Zuni people , researching the Mayas in Guatemala, and conducting a comparative study of alcoholism in Guatemala and Mexico. Bunzel was the first American anthropologist to conduct substantial research in Guatemala. Her doctoral dissertation, The Pueblo Potter was a study of the creative process of art in anthropology and Bunzel was one of the first anthropologists to study the creative process.
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Albert B. Reagan
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
Professor Albert B. Reagan was an American author and historian of Native American history. He was professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University and documented Native American customs and folklore in New Mexico, Arizona, Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, and Utah, for tribes that include the Jemez people, Navajo people, Ojibwe people, Quileute people, and Ute people.
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Philip Wheelwright
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Philip Ellis Wheelwright was an American philosopher, classical scholar and literary theorist. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a stockbroker, and died in Santa Barbara, California. Wheelwright was educated at Princeton University, with a B.A. in 1921 and a Ph.D. in 1924 with his dissertation "The Concepts of Liberty and Contingency in the Philosophy of Charles Renouvier," the French Kantian philosopher who so influenced William James.
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Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton
1889 - 1939 (50 years)
Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton FSA was a British anthropologist. He was educated at Radley and Exeter College, Oxford, and he was Reader in Physical Anthropology at the University of Oxford between 1928 and 1939. He conducted field work in Sudan, India, Malta, the United States, China and Mesopotamia, and in 1913 he excavated Lapithos in Cyprus under the direction of professor John Myres and Cyprus Museum curator Menelaos Markides. During his extensive travels he documented his work through photography; the pictures are currently in the Pitt Rivers Museum. In the 1930s he carried research in Oxford with anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood.
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Johan Gunnar Andersson
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Johan Gunnar Andersson was a Swedish archaeologist, paleontologist and geologist, closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s. Early life and polar research After studies at Uppsala University, and research in the polar regions, Andersson served as Director of Sweden's National Geological Survey.
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Richard Frank Salisbury
1926 - 1989 (63 years)
Richard Frank Salisbury , also known as Dick Salisbury, was a Canadian anthropologist, specializing in the field of economic anthropology and anthropology of development. His primary fieldwork and subsequent publications dealt with the Tolai and Siane people of Papua New Guinea and the Cree of Northern Quebec.
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Eckhard Unger
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Eckhard Unger was a German assyriologist. Unger who was the curator of the Istanbul museum described the remains of Balawat Gates that are still in the Istanbul Museum. Unger was fully aware that the major parts of the gates were in London and Paris as he had visited both locations and discussed them with the respective curators. In 1916, as curator of the Archeological Museum of Istanbul, he identified and described a copper-alloy object in the museum collection as an ell or measuring rod from Nippur. Dating to the first half of the third millennium BC or even earlier, possibly the oldest known measuring device, it supposedly defines the Sumerian cubit at about 518.6 millimetres.
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Terence Mitford
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Terence Bruce Mitford FBA FSA was a Scottish archaeologist and classicist. He spent his whole career at the University of St Andrews, and had a special interest in the history and archaeology of Cyprus and southern Turkey, making many expeditions to these areas. His academic life was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served with the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service.
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Arthur E. Gordon
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Arthur Ernest Gordon was an American classical philologist and epigraphist. Life and career Born in Marlborough, Vermont, Gordon studied classical philology at Dartmouth College, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1923. He continued his studies at the American Academy in Rome. In 1925 he became a lecturer in Latin at Dartmouth College and in 1928 at Western Reserve University. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1929, where he worked with Tenney Frank, and afterwards briefly taught Latin and Ancient History at the University of Vermont. Gordon was invited to the University ...
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Ursula McConnel
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Ursula Hope McConnel was a Queensland anthropologist and ethnographer best remembered for her work with, and the records she made of, the Wik Mungkan people of Cape York Peninsula. First trained at University College London, then supervised by Professor Alfred Radcliffe-Brown in the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, McConnel was one of the first women to be trained in anthropology and then go out to observe Aboriginal Australians in remote areas, systematically documenting, recording, and describing their culture, mythology, beliefs, and way of life.
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Alexander Goldenweiser
1880 - 1940 (60 years)
Alexander Aleksandrovich Goldenweiser was a Russian-born U.S. anthropologist and sociologist. Biography Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1880. He emigrated to the United States in 1900. He studied anthropology under Franz Boas, and earned his AB degree from Columbia University in 1902, his AM degree in 1904, and his Ph.D. in 1910.
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John Otis Brew
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
John Otis Brew , was an American archaeologist of the American Southwest and director at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Many of his publications are still used today by archaeologists that conduct their work in the American Southwest. J.O. Brew was a titan in the world of archaeology for his attempts to "preserve our archaeological heritage".
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Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann was a German ethnologist who served as Professor of Ethnology at the University of Mainz and Chair of Ethnology at the University of Heidelberg. Biography Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann was born in Düsseldorf, Germany on 1 October 1904. He gained his abitur in Düsseldorf in 1925. Mühlmann subsequently studied anthropology, ethnology and sociology at the universities of Freiburg, Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. Among his teachers were Eugen Fischer at the University of Freiburg. Eugen Fischer, Edmund Husserl, Fritz Lenz, Siegfried Passarge, and Richard Thurnwald. Mühlmann gained his Ph.D.
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John M. Allegro
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
John Marco Allegro was an English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was a populariser of the Dead Sea Scrolls through his books and radio broadcasts. He was the editor of some of the most famous and controversial scrolls published, the pesharim. A number of Allegro's later books, including The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, brought him both popular fame and notoriety, and also complicated his career.
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Vincent Desborough
1914 - 1978 (64 years)
Vincent Robin d'Arba Desborough, FBA, FSA was an English historian and archaeologist. His is credited with discovering the Greek Dark Ages. Life and career Born on 19 July 1914 at Tunbridge Wells, Desborough's father was Latvian and his mother British. He was schooled in France and Switzerland before attending St Augustine's in Ramsgate and Downside School. He then studied classics at New College, Oxford, from 1932, graduating in the second class in 1936. He completed the BLitt at Oxford under Sir John Myres's supervision. In 1937, he was awarded the Macmillan Studentship by the British Schoo...
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