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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Education,
#2951
Franz Xaver Kraus
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
Franz Xaver Kraus was a German Catholic priest, and ecclesiastical and art historian. Early life Franz Xaver Kraus was born in Trier in 1840. He completed his studies in the Trier gymnasium, began his theology in 1858-60 in the seminary there, and finished it in 1862-64, having passed in France the time from the autumn of 1860 to the spring of 1862 as tutor in distinguished French families. He was ordained a priest by auxiliary bishop Matthias Eberhard of Trier, 23 March 1864. Even after he became a priest, he continued his studies in theology and philology at the universities of Tübingen, F...
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Grace Foster Herben
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Grace Ida Foster Herben was an American educator and missionary. The daughter of a minister and the wife of another, her career became intertwined with that of Rev. Stephen J. Herben after their marriage. Beforehand she served as the dean of women at Allegheny College, and afterwards she worked with the Northwestern Branch of the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. She was a delegate to the 1910 World Missionary Conference, and was the only woman to serve on the New Jersey Council of National Defense during World War I.
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Zhan Ruoshui
1466 - 1560 (94 years)
Zhan Ruoshui , was a Chinese philosopher, educator and a Confucian scholar. Biography Zhan was born in Zengcheng, Guangdong. He was appointed the president of Nanjing Guozijian in 1524. He was later appointed the Minister of Rites , Minister of Personnel , and then Minister of War at Nanjing of the Ming dynasty.
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John Behan
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Sir John Clifford Valentine Behan , the first Rhodes Scholar from the state of Victoria, was an Australian educationalist and lawyer, the second warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and "beyond the college life [at Trinity,] he was a sound and far-seeing secretary in Australia of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust for 30 years from 1922 to 1952".
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Hugh P. Baker
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Hugh Potter Baker was a graduate of the Michigan State College of Agriculture; Yale's School of Forestry ; and the University of Munich . He was the second and fourth Dean of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, from 1912 to 1920 and 1930 to 1933.
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Jean Balthasar Schnetzler
1823 - 1896 (73 years)
Johann Balthasar Schnetzler was a Swiss naturalist. In 1840/41, he studied at Polytechnic Stuttgart and, for a period of time, taught French classes at the Schaffhausen gymnasium. From 1844 to 1847, he furthered his education at the University of Geneva and, from 1847 to 1867, worked as a science teacher at the progymnasium in Vevey. In 1864, he became an associate professor, and, from 1871, was a full professor of botany at the Academy of Lausanne. From 1879 to 1881, he served as academic rector.
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Heinrich Gustav Hotho
1802 - 1873 (71 years)
Heinrich Gustav Hotho was a German historian of art and Right Hegelian. He is famous for being the compiler and editor of Hegel's posthumous work Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik . Biography During boyhood he was affected for two years with blindness consequent on an attack of measles. But recovering his sight he studied so hard as to take his degree at Berlin in 1826. A year of travel spent in visiting Paris, London and the Low Countries determined his vocation.
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Augusto Weberbauer
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Augusto Weberbauer was a German naturalist, botanist and university professor. He conducted systematic exploration of Peru in search of new plant species. Weberbauer received his PhD in botany at the University of Breslau , continued his studies in natural sciences at universities in Heidelberg and Berlin. He taught at the University of Breslau. He was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin to develop botanical research in Peru . In 1905, he delivered 5200 species of seagrass which he had collected in Peru. The Peruvian government hired him to develop the Zoo and Botanical Garden in 1908.
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John Berrien Lindsley
1822 - 1897 (75 years)
John Berrien Lindsley was an American Presbyterian minister and educator in Nashville, Tennessee. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, and educated at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he married an heiress to the Carnton plantation and ministered to slaves and the poor. He was Professor of Medicine at the University of Nashville and co-founder of its Medical Department . He served as the Dean of the Medical Department from 1850 to 1855, and as the Chancellor of the University of Nashville from 1855 to its demise in 1873.
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Bradford Knapp
1870 - 1938 (68 years)
Bradford Knapp was the President of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University from 1928 to 1933. Biography Bradford Knapp was born in Vinton, Iowa, on December 24, 1870, to Seaman A. Knapp. In 1899, he attended Iowa State College and graduated with a B.A. in chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1892. In 1894, he attended Georgetown University and received a B.L. from the University of Michigan in 1896. In 1909, he worked as an assistant for his father in the Bureau of Plant Industry of the United States Department of Agriculture. From 1911 to 1915, he took up his father's position as Chief of Farm Demonstration Work.
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John Green
1867 - 1922 (55 years)
John Alfred Green was a British educationalist, professor of education at Sheffield University.
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Samuel Harris
1814 - 1899 (85 years)
Samuel Harris was the fifth president of Bowdoin College and the first to be an alumnus. After having left Bowdoin in 1871, he went on to teach at Yale Divinity School for 25 years. Career Harris was born in East Machias, Maine, on June 14, 1814, and attended Washington Academy in the same town. After having graduated from Bowdoin in 1833, he attended Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. Harris had been a pastor in Conway, Massachusetts, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from 1841 to 1855 and had taught at the Divinity School in Bangor, Maine, before becoming president of Bowdoin in 1867.
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John Hancock
1808 - 1890 (82 years)
John Hancock was an English naturalist, ornithologist, taxidermist and landscape architect. Working during the golden age of taxidermy when mounted animals became a popular part of Victorian era interior design, Hancock is considered the father of modern taxidermy
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Annie Riley Hale
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Annie Riley Hale was an American teacher, writer, and social critic. In her lifetime she was known for her criticism of Theodore Roosevelt and her anti-suffrage and anti-vaccine activity. Family Annie Riley Hale was born in Rogersville, Tennessee in 1859. Hale was married to James Richards Hale, a lawyer, who died in 1897. She had three children, including the feminist Ruth Hale who as an adult opposed many of her mother's views. Hale was also a cousin of John K. Shields, a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court and U.S. Senator.
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Carl Wille Schnitler
1879 - 1926 (47 years)
Carl Wille Schnitler was a Norwegian art historian. He became noted for his national orientated writings on art history, which spanned from the antiquity to his contemporary society. He became best known for his work Slegten fra 1814, which became a primer in Norwegian historiography.
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Peter D. Martin
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Peter Dean Martin was an American college professor and bookstore owner, known for his founding of the City Lights Bookstore. He was the son of Carlo Tresca and Sabina 'Bina' Flynn, and the nephew of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
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Alexis Rannit
1914 - 1985 (71 years)
Alexis Rannit was an Estonian poet, critic and literature researcher. Biography He was born in Kallaste, in the Governorate of Livonia of the Russian Empire . He spent his childhood in Saint Petersburg. In 1939, he graduated from the University of Tartu. He studied applied arts. He did research on Lithuanian literature and knew personally many Lithuanian authors. From 1938 to 1940 he worked as a correspondent of the Riga newspaper Segodnya.
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Ronald Edmonds
1935 - 1983 (48 years)
Ronald R. Edmonds was an American educator, author, and pioneer of effective schools research. Early life and career Edmonds was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He received a B.A. in American history from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in American history from Eastern Michigan University, and a certificate of advanced study from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Ernst Kühnel
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Ernst Kühnel was a German art historian who specialized in Islamic art. He was notable for his research on the connection between Islamic and Coptic art, particularly in textiles. Kühnel served as director of the Museum of Islamic Art from 1931 to 1951, and was a professor at the University of Berlin from 1935 to 1954. He was also a consultant for the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., and president of Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft .
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Stella Kramrisch
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Stella Kramrisch was an American pioneering art historian and curator who was the leading specialist on Indian art for most of the 20th century. Her scholarship remains a benchmark to this day. She researched and taught Indian art history for more than six decades on three continents. After writing her dissertation on the essence of early-buddhist sculpture in India, she was invited to teach at Kala Bhavana in Shantiniketan and went on to teach at Calcutta University from 1924 to 1950. In Europe, Kramrisch worked at the Courtauld Institute, London . From 1950, she was professor at the Univer...
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Maria Montessori
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, becoming one of the first women to attend medical school in Italy; she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
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David Talbot Rice
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
David Talbot Rice was an English archaeologist and art historian. He has been described variously as a "gentleman academic" and an "amateur" art historian, though such remarks are not borne out by his many achievements and a lasting legacy of scholarship in his field of study.
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Henry-Russell Hitchcock
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Henry-Russell Hitchcock was an American architectural historian, and for many years a professor at Smith College and New York University. His writings helped to define the characteristics of modernist architecture.
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Ellwood Patterson Cubberley
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Ellwood Patterson Cubberley was an American educator, a eugenicist, and a pioneer in the field of education management. He spent most of his career as a professor and later served as the first dean of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in California.
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William Heard Kilpatrick
1871 - 1965 (94 years)
William Heard Kilpatrick was an American pedagogue and a pupil, a colleague and a successor of John Dewey. Kilpatrick was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th century.
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George I. Sánchez
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
George Isidore Sánchez was a pioneer in American educational scholarship and civil rights activism, originally from the state of New Mexico. He served on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, held several concurrent teaching, chair, and dean positions at The University of Texas at Austin from 1940 until his death. Sanchez also acted as the 13th president of the League of United Latin American Citizens , while spearheading several landmark civil right aimed court cases focusing on equal educational opportunities for Chicano Americans and opposing the use of racially-biased standardized...
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Tamezo Mori
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
, was a Japanese naturalist in Chōsen . He taught at a preparatory school for Keijō Imperial University in Seoul from 1909 until he was expelled by the American forces in 1945. Primarily an ichthyologist, he published numerous works on the zoology of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. Some of these, such as his Checklist of the Fishes of Korea and the 1934 Coloured Butterflies from Korea, are still in print.
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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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Stanley B. Freeborn
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Stanley Barron Freeborn served as the first chancellor of University of California, Davis between 1958 and June 1959. Prior to being the first chancellor of UC Davis, Freeborn was the dean of the College of Agriculture at UC Berkeley. Following his death in 1960, UC Davis renamed its assembly hall to Freeborn Hall in his honor.
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Louis Grodecki
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Louis Grodecki was a French art historian. A disciple of Henri Focillon since 1929, shortly after his arrival in France, and naturalized French in 1935, he met art historian Erwin Panofsky in 1949 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Grodecki is famous for his work on romanesque stained glass, of Paris, Picardy and the Nord-Pas de Calais region. His most notable works are about the stained glasses of Chartres Cathedral, in particular a complete catalogue which he never finished. He was a reviewer for the doctoral dissertation of E. Wayne Craven.
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Jodie Hunter
Jodie Margaret Roberta Hunter is a New Zealand academic, of Cook Island Māori descent, and is a full professor at Massey University. Hunter researches mathematics pedagogy, with a particular interest in culturally responsive teaching of mathematics to Pasifika students. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow and has been a Fulbright Scholar.
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John Berryman
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Sirarpie Der Nersessian
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Sirarpie Der Nersessian was an Armenian art historian, who specialized in Armenian and Byzantine studies. Der Nersessian was a renowned academic and a pioneer in Armenian art history. She taught at several institutions in the United States, including Wellesley College in Massachusetts and as Henri Focillon Professor of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University. She was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, its deputy director from 1954–55 and 1961–62, and a member of its Board of Scholars. Der Nersessian was also a member of several international institutions such as the British Academy , the Ac...
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Walter William Spencer Cook
1888 - 1962 (74 years)
Walter William Spencer Cook, also known as Walter W. S. Cook in citation was an American art historian and professor. He specialized in Spanish Medieval art history. He was an emeritus professor from New York University and he helped found the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. He had a prominent role in introducing eminent German art historians to the United States.
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Franklin S. Harris
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Franklin Stewart Harris was president of Brigham Young University from July 1921 until June 1945, and president of Utah State University from 1945 to 1950. His administration was the longest in BYU history and saw the granting of the first master's degrees. Under his administration the school became an accredited university. He set up several colleges, such as the College of Fine and Performing Arts with Gerrit De Jong as the founding dean. Harris was an agricultural scientist, holding a doctorate in agronomy from Cornell University. He had served as the agriculture department head and head...
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Elbert K. Fretwell
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Elbert K. Fretwell was an American academic and early leader in the field of youth development through recreation and extracurricular activity. He served as the second Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts of America , serving from 1943 to 1948. Upon his retirement from the BSA, Fretwell was given the title of Chief Scout.
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Otto Brendel
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Otto Johannes Brendel was a German art historian and scholar of Etruscan art and archaeology. Biography In 1928, he received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius on the topic of Roman iconography of the Augustan period. While at Heidelberg, Brendel studied with many notable scholars, including Franz Boll, E. Wayne Craven, Alfred von Domaszewski, Friedrich Karl von Duhn, Richard Carl Meister, Eugen Täubler, the literary theorist Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Jaspers, and the classical art historians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Zimmer. ...
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Françoise Henry
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Françoise Henry was a scholar of early Irish art, archaeologist, and art historian. While at University College Dublin , she founded the Department of History of European Painting in 1965, and was head until she retired in 1974.
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Harold Wethey
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Harold Edwin Wethey was an American art historian and educator. From 1940 to 1972, Wethey was a professor of art history at the University of Michigan. Career Born in Port Byron, Wethey received a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages from Cornell University in 1923, and then a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from Harvard University in 1931 and 1934, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was on the sculptor Gil de Siloé and was titled "Gil de Siloé and Sculpture in Burgos under the Catholic Kings." He taught at Bryn Mawr College and Washington University in St. Loui...
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Robert Kloster
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Robert Kloster was a Norwegian museum director and art historian. Family He was born in Bergen as a son of physician Robert Emil Kloster and Alette "Ada" Falsen Wiesener . In April 1932 in Paris he married Wibecke Trane Kielland , a daughter of Jonas Schanche Kielland and sister of Thor Bendz Kielland.
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Felton Grandison Clark
1903 - 1970 (67 years)
Felton Grandison Clark was an African-American academic administrator from Louisiana. He served as the president of Southern University , a historically black university and land-grant college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 1938 to 1969. During this period, he led decades of expansion that resulted in the number of students increasing from 1,500 to over 11,000. By the time of his retirement, SU had grown to be America's largest historically black university by enrollment.
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Hjalmar Broch
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
Hjalmar Broch was a Norwegian zoologist and university professor at the University of Oslo . His specialty was biology of lesser marine animals; he published extensively on the biology of fish. Biography Hjalmar Broch was born in 1882 at Horten, Vestfold, Norway. His father was grocer and brewery owner Johan Anthony Zinck Broch ; his mother was Fanny Harriet Caroline Gamborg . An older sister, Lagertha Broch , became a noted children's author, and an older brother, Olaf Broch , became a noted linguist, specializing in Slavic languages. His younger sister Nanna Broch was a noted social worker...
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Lotte Brand Philip
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Lotte Brand Philip was a German art historian, professor and expert on Netherlandish art, one of the most notable and incisive experts on 14th- and 15th-century art to have studied under Erwin Panofsky. Born a Christian of Jewish descent, she resisted state intimidation to leave Germany, only moving to the United States in 1941. She began her new life as a jewelry designer, before establishing a career as an art historian and writer, and taking professorship at a number of universities, including New York University and Queens College, Flushing. During her long career, Brand wrote highly reg...
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Edward J. Sparling
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Edward J. Sparling was an educator who was the founder of Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois. Edward Sparling was born in Panoche, California in 1896. Sparling received a B.A. from Stanford University and his Master's and Ph.D. from Columbia University where he lived in the International House of New York. During World War I, Sparling served in the U.S. Army as a flying instructor. In 1936 to 1945 Sparling became president of Central YMCA College in Chicago and served there until 1945 when he incorporated Roosevelt College, which would admit students regardless of race or religion. The college became a university in 1954 and Sparling stepped down as president in 1963.
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Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Walter-Herwig Schuchhardt was a German classical archaeologist and art historian born in Hanover. He specialized in ancient Greek art, particularly sculpture and art from the "Parthenon era" . He was the son of archaeologist Carl Schuchhardt .
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Richard Krautheimer
1897 - 1994 (97 years)
Richard Krautheimer was a German art historian, architectural historian, Baroque scholar, and Byzantinist. Biography Krautheimer was born in Germany in 1897, the son of Nathan Krautheimer and Martha Landmann . Krautheimer's cousin, Ernst Kitzinger, would also become a prominent Byzantinist. Krautheimer fought in the First World War as an enlisted soldier in the German army . Between 1919 and 1923, he initially studied law at, successively, universities in Munich, Berlin, and Marburg under faculty who included Heinrich Wölfflin, Adolf Goldschmidt and Werner Weisbach. During these years, he briefly worked on the state inventory of Churches for Erfurt .
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Ernest Ewart Unwin
1881 - 1944 (63 years)
Ernest Ewart Unwin was an Australian Quaker educationist. Born in England, he held a variety of positions in several Quaker schools before lecturing at the University of Leeds, his alma mater. A conscientious objector during World War I, he emigrated to Australia in 1923 to headmaster a school in Hobart. After enlisting the financial assistance of Quaker organisations in the area, Unwin oversaw great expansion of the Tasmanian education system, creating and serving on several Boards of Education at local and state level for both community schools and the University of Tasmania.
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Wilhelm Kubitschek
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Wilhelm Kubitschek was an Austrian classical historian, epigrapher and numismatist. From 1875 he studied history, epigraphy and archaeology at the University of Vienna, where his teachers included Otto Hirschfeld and Otto Benndorf. Afterwards, he furthered his education in Berlin as a student of Theodor Mommsen. From 1881 he taught classes at gymnasiums in Hollabrunn and Vienna, and in 1887 qualified as a university lecturer in ancient history. In 1896 he became an associate professor at the University of Graz, and during the following year, returned to Vienna as curator of the Imperial Coin Collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
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Geoffrey Webb
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Geoffrey Fairbank Webb CBE was a British art historian, Slade Professor of Fine Art and head of the Monuments and Fine Arts section of the Allied Control Commission during World War II. Early life Webb was born in Birkenhead, to John Racker Webb, who worked at Booth’s Steamship Company, and his wife Elizabeth Hodgson Fairbank. Webb was the only child of his father’s second marriage. Most of his step-brothers and -sisters were old enough to be his uncles and aunts. His mother died when he was fifteen and his father later married again. His closet ties growing up were with his eldest stepsister...
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Hans Tietze
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Hans Tietze was an Austrian art historian and member of the Vienna School of Art History. Life and work The son of a Jewish lawyer, Tietze grew up in Prague in a German speaking environment. In 1893, his family moved to Vienna, Austria. From 1900 to 1903, he studied archaeology, history and art history under Alois Riegl, Julius von Schlosser and Franz Wickhoff at the University of Vienna. In 1903, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation, supervised by Wickhoff, on the topic of medieval typological representation. In 1905, he wrote his Habilitationsschrift on Annibale Caracci's frescos at the Pal...
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