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 History,

#5651

Eila Campbell

#67798
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Eila Muriel Joice Campbell was an English geographer and cartographer. She was best known for her work on Domesday Geography of England and her work on the international journal, Imago Mundi. Early life and education Campbell was born on 15 December 1915. She was educated at Bournemouth School for Girls and Brighton Diocesan Training College. After graduating from Birkbeck College, University of London in 1941, Campbell worked as a teacher in Southall, west London while also working as a part-time assistant at Birkbeck College. Campbell received an MA with distinction from Birkbeck in 1946.
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#5652

Jerzy Zathey

#163211
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Jerzy Krzysztof Stanisław Zathey was a Polish historian of Medieval and Renaissance culture, librarian, manuscripts expert. He was a co-originator of the scientific method of elaborating medieval manuscripts. Publisher of numerous source documents .
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#5653

Kathryn Shevelow

#169876
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Kathryn Shevelow is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, United States. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. In 1999, she won the Earl Warren College Outstanding Teaching Award, and in 2005 she received UCSD's Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. She grew up in southwestern Ohio and earned her doctorate from UCSD.
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#5654

Peter M. Harman

#174904
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Peter Michael Harman was a British historian who was Professor of the History of Science at the University of Lancaster. Career Harman was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, the son of Herbert and Gertrude Heimann. He studied at Oriel College, Oxford and later at the University of Leeds. He was Assistant Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and at the University of Cambridge where he was a Fellow of Clare Hall , before being appointed Lecturer at the University of Lancaster in 1974. He was appointed Reader in 1993 and Professor in 1999 until his retirement in 2007.
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#5655

Gérard Dédéyan

#149334
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Gérard Dédéyan is a French professor of medieval history at the Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, a member of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences and associate member of the Collège de France. He studied Classical Armenian with .
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#5656

Sharra L. Vostral

#125716
Overall Influence
Sharra L. Vostral is a Professor of History and Science and Technology at the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. She has written two books about menstruation and history: Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology and Toxic Shock: A Social History.
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#5657

Claus Bundgård Christensen

#169944
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Claus Bundgård Christensen is a Danish historian and associate professor at Roskilde University known for his books related to collaboration and crime in Denmark during and following World War II. In 1998, he, and historians Niels Bo Poulsen and Peter Scharff Smith, published the book , acclaimed for its non-apologist and detailed description of the Danes who volunteered for service in the Waffen SS on the Eastern front. Their 2016 book has been translated to Dutch.
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#5658

Michael David-Fox

#127438
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Michael David-Fox is an American historian who studies modern Russia and the Soviet Union. Biography David-Fox received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Yale University. David-Fox has been a professor at the Higher School of Economics since 2014, and director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a founding editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, for which he received the 2010 Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
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#5659

A. J. R. Russell-Wood

#175195
Overall Influence
1939 - 2010 (71 years)
Anthony John R. Russell-Wood was a leading historian of colonial Brazil, the Portuguese Empire, and the broader Luso-Brazilian world. Life Russell-Wood was born in Wales. He was educated at Rossall School and Oxford University and became a member of the faculty of the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971; at the time of his death, he was the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of History. He died, aged 70, in Baltimore, Maryland.
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#5660

Ray Beachey

#145493
Overall Influence
1915 - 2010 (95 years)
Raymond Wendell Beachey was a Canadian educator, historian and academic best known for his work at Makerere University in Uganda in the 1950s and 1960s. In this capacity he tutored many important African leaders including Benedicto Kiwanuka, Yusuf Lule and Mwai Kibaki, but was concerned that Uganda was not ready for independence at the time it was granted and saw the dictatorial regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote as the result of the haste with which the British withdrew from the country. He was also an historian of East Africa and published several important works on the subject.
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#5661

Hilde De Ridder-Symoens

#110074
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Hilde De Ridder-Symoens was a Belgian historian. She was Professor of Medieval History at the Free University of Amsterdam and Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Ghent . Her research focuses on educational history and the history of universities. She edited the first two volumes of Cambridge University Press's A History of the University in Europe . Together with C.M. Ridderikhoff she published Les livres des procurateurs de la nation germanique de l'ancienne Université d'Orléans, 1444-1602 .
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#5662

François Bluche

#30308
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
François Bluche was a French historian. He painted a largely positive portrait of Louis XIV in his biography, attributing to him substantial cultural and political achievements. Bluche saw Louis as a precursor to enlightened despotism and argued that his reign witnessed the birth of modern France. In his view both Louis' creation of a centralised, powerful monarchy and his wars of conquest benefited the French people. The book was translated into English by Mark Greengrass and published in 1990. Peter Burke labelled Bluche a "neo-traditionalist" who had written a "moderate but firm apologia f...
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#5663

Umberto Laffi

#182177
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Umberto Laffi is an Italian historian. He has been named as Emeritus Professor at Università di Pisa where he has taught History of Greece, History of Rome or Latin Epigraphy. He is also a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
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#5664

Barry Reay

#172984
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Barry Reay , now retired, was formerly professor of history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a specialist in the history of sex and gender. Selected publications Edited Radical Religion in the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1984. Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, St. Martin's, 1985.Sexualities in History: A Reader, Routledge, 2002.
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#5665

William E. Kapelle

#118681
Overall Influence
William E. Kapelle is a medieval historian at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He received his B.A at the University of Kansas in 1965, and his M.A. in 1970. Kapelle received his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, and has taught at Brandeis University for more than twenty years.
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#5666

Kazimierz Godłowski

#63285
Overall Influence
1934 - 1995 (61 years)
Kazimierz Godłowski was a Polish archeologist and historian specializing in the prehistoric period. He was the son of Włodzimierz Godłowski, a professor at the Wilno University, who was murdered by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 Katyń massacre.
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#5667

Carolyn Burke

#76648
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Carolyn Burke is an Australian-born American writer, translator, and author of four biographies. Her first was a life of the English poet Mina Loy, published in 1996 and reprinted in 2021. She has also written books about the American photographer Lee Miller, the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, and the interwoven lives of four iconic figures of American art, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury.
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#5668

Anke te Heesen

#147597
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Anke te Heesen is a German historian of science and professor for the History of Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on the development and organization of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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#5669

Huang Jianli

#162204
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Huang Jianli is Associate Professor of Chinese History at the National University of Singapore. He is also a research associate at the East Asian Institute and an Invited Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, Nanyang Technological University. Huang was the 2011 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia.
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#5670

Gregory J. W. Urwin

#110264
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Gregory J. W. Urwin is a professor of military history at Temple University and the author of several books and articles. He has been at Temple University since 1999. His wife Cathy Kunzinger Urwin is also a professor and author. She wrote Agenda for Reform: Winthrop Rockefeller as Governor of Arkansas, 1967–1971, University of Arkansas Press, 1991. He is a contributing author to Encyclopædia Britannica. He received the General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation and the Harold L. Peterson Award from the Eastern National Park and Monuments Association. He has...
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#5671

Kenneth McNaught

#116297
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Kenneth William Kirkpatrick McNaught was a Canadian historian. He is known for his 1959 biography of Co-operative Commonwealth Federation founder J. S. Woodsworth, A Prophet in Politics, and his 1982 book The Pelican History of Canada.
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#5672

Deidre Brown

#128055
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Deidre Sharon Brown is a New Zealand art historian and architectural lecturer. Brown currently teaches at the University of Auckland and is the head of the School of Architecture and Planning. Additionally, she is a governor of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, a member of the Māori Trademarks Advisory Committee of the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, and a member of the Humanities Panel of the Marsden Fund. In 2021 Brown was made a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
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#5673

Pierre Aubé

#102785
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Pierre Aubé is a French medieval specialist and the author of a number of books. He was a professor at Rouen. He was married to organist and composer Odile Pierre. Works 1981: Baudouin IV de Jérusalem. Le roi lépreux.1983: Les Empires normands d’Orient, XIe-XIIIe siècles.1985: Godefroy de Bouillon, Fayard.1988: Thomas Becket, Fayard.1999: Jérusalem 1099, Actes Sud.2001: Roger II de Sicile. Un Normand en Méditerranée, Payot.2001: Éloge du mouton, Actes Sud.2003: Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, Fayard.2007: Un croisé contre Saladin. Renaud de Châtillon, Fayard.In collaboration :1996: Atlas de l’histoire de France, sous la direction de René Rémond, Perrin.2000: Jérusalem.
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#5674

James T. Sears

#162074
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
James T. Sears is an American educator, historian, and activist. He is a former professor at the University of South Carolina, Trinity University, Harvard University, and Penn State. The author of books about LGBT history and sexuality education, his archive of correspondence, research notes, interviews is located at the Rubenstein Library of Duke University with ancillary materials at the College of Charleston Special Collections.
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#5675

Eric Andrews

#97354
Overall Influence
1933 - 2001 (68 years)
Eric Montgomery Andrews , also known as E. M. Andrews, was an Australian historian, academic and author. He was born in London and gained his first degree at the University of Oxford. He completed a Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and taught history at the University of Newcastle from 1967.
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#5676

Charles Fanning

#126320
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Charles F. Fanning, Jr. is an Irish American historian and academic. Life He grew up in Norwood, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard College in 1964, with a master's in 1966, and from the University of Pennsylvania with a master's and doctoral degrees, in 1968 and 1972. He taught at Bridgewater State College, and at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1993 to 2007. He and his wife, Frances, live in Carbondale, Illinois. They have two children, Stephen, born in 1982 and Ellen, born in 1984.
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#5677

Jennifer Guglielmo

#134848
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Jennifer Guglielmo is a writer, historian and associate professor at Smith College, specializing in the histories of labor, race, women, im/migration, transnational cultures and activisms, and revolutionary social movements in the modern United States. She has published on a range of topics, including women’s organizing in garment, textile and domestic work, working-class feminisms, anarchism, whiteness and the Italian diaspora.
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#5678

Jonas Nordin

Jonas Nordin
#174357
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Jonas Nordin is a Swedish author and historian, and from October 2018 professor in History of books and Libraries at Lund University. Biography Nordin studied history at Stockholm University, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2000 for his dissertation Ett fattigt men fritt folk. Nationell och politisk självbild i Sverige från sen stormaktstid till slutet av frihetstiden , an investigation of the public national and political orientation during Swedish "Great Power Era" and Age of Liberty .
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#5679

W. Caleb McDaniel

#142013
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
William Caleb McDaniel is an American historian. His book Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History. He is also an Associate professor of History at Rice University.
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#5680

Wolf-Heino Struck

#161248
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Wolf-Heino Struck was a German historian and archivist. He was director of the Hessian Central State Archives in Wiesbaden. He earned acclaim for his research of the history of the Lahn region. Life and career The son of middle school teachers, he attended the Realgymnasium until 1929. After graduation he studied law at the University of Freiburg, with an emphasis on legal history, economics, and state law. From the winter of 1929 until the summer of 1930 he studied at Humboldt University of Berlin. He studied German, English, and German studies in Berlin from the winter of 1930 until the summer of 1931 and continued his studies at the University of Rostock in the winter of 1931.
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#5681

Ronald E. Shaw

#181878
Overall Influence
1924 - 2001 (77 years)
Ronald E. Shaw was an American historian. Life He served in the Army from 1943 to 1946. He graduated from the University of Rochester with a Ph.D. He taught at Wayne State University, and Miami University from 1954 until 1993, the first W. E. Smith Professor of History.
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#5682

Mark Honigsbaum

#85021
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian and journalist specializing in the history and science of infectious disease. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Journalism at City, University of London.
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#5683

Joan Cadden

#92929
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Joan Cadden is Professor Emerita of medieval history and literature in the History Department of the University of California, Davis. She served as president of the History of Science Society from 2006 to 2007. She has written extensively on gender and sexuality in medieval science and medicine. Her book Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Age: Medicine, Science, and Culture received the Pfizer Prize in 1994, from the History of Science Society, as the outstanding book on the history of science.
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#5684

Tracy Adams

#51779
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Tracy Adams is a medieval historian who teaches in New Zealand. A scholar of Medieval French and English literature and feminist theory, she is best known for her work on Isabeau of Bavaria. Career Adams received her BA in English from the University of Minnesota , followed by an MA in English from the University of Texas . From 1995 to 1996 she studied French and Latin medieval literature at the University of Geneva, and returned to the US for a PhD in French at Johns Hopkins University, which she earned in 1998 with a dissertation on love in romance, "Motus and Permutatio: An Anthropology of Love in the Twelfth Century Romance".
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#5685

Lew Brownstein

#84280
Overall Influence
Lewis Jacqueline Brownstein is a historian, author, and professor along with being the former Chair of the Political Science and International Relations Department at SUNY New Paltz. His main speciality of expertise is on the region of the Middle East more specifically but not limited to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Lew Brownstein earned his Ph.D. from the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1969. One of his biggest accomplishments besides his work published are the lectures he gives on a wide range of topics involving international affairs in variou...
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#5686

Alexandre Astier

#104717
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Alexandre Astier is a French writer on the religions in India. He is the author of several books on Hinduism. He is a member of the "Centre de recherche sur l'Extrême-Orient" of the Université Paris-Sorbonne.
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#5687

Kristie Macrakis

#104852
Overall Influence
Kristie Irene Macrakis was an American historian of science, author and professor in the School of History, Technology and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was the author or editor of five books and was widely known for her work at the intersection of history of espionage and history of science and technology.
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#5688

Jan Čermák

#153763
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Jan Čermák is a Czech linguist, literary scholar, and translator. Since 2022, he has been the Vice-dean of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. Čermák's research is focused on the history of English, with particular interests in Old and Early Middle English morphology and morphonology, word-formation and literary language. He is a specialist in Old and Middle English literature, with particular interests in heroic poetry, romance and the Alliterative Revival. He also wrote a book on the Finnish Kalevala.
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#5689

Allison Blakely

#91583
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Allison Blakely is an academic historian. Life He graduated from the University of Oregon, and from the University of California, Berkeley with an M.A. and Ph.D. He taught for thirty years at Howard University 1971–2001. He has taught at Boston University since 2001.
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#5690

Doug Weaver

#91315
Overall Influence
C. Douglas Weaver is an American author, historian, and Professor of Religion. A Baptist, Weaver has taught at Baylor University and Mercer University. He has authored multiple books on the history of Pentecostalism and the Baptist church.
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#5691

Cindy Hahamovitch

#176610
Overall Influence
Cindy Hahamovitch is an American historian, and the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of Southern History at the University of Georgia. She has won a Merle Curti Award, a Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and a James A. Rawley Prize .
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#5692

S. R. Mehrotra

S. R. Mehrotra
#87299
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Sri Ram Mehrotra was an Indian professor of history who published on the history of the Indian independence movement, the Indian National Congress, the life and work of its founder Allan Octavian Hume, and on the writings and philosophy of Gandhi. He also wrote a biography of Pranjivan Mehta, an important but little-known influence in the Indian independence movement who supported Gandhi. Mehrotra was known for his meticulous detail to sources and care in interpretations and published several annotated collections of sources and letters relating to Hume and towards the end of his life, Dadabh...
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#5693

David M. Lubin

#152767
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
David M. Lubin is an American writer, professor, curator, and scholar. He has published six books on American art, film, and popular culture. In a much-noted survey of scholarship in American art written for the Art Bulletin, Stanford art historian Wanda Corn identified Lubin, then at the start of his career, as "one of the most provocative representatives" of a new mode of "interpretive criticism has transfigured the close-up study of the single work of art." According to the French cultural historian François Brunet, "Lubin shows himself to be an innovative, indeed, iconoclastic historian o...
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#5694

C.L. Sonnichsen

#121101
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Charles Leland Sonnichsen was a Benedict Professor of English at the University of Texas, El Paso. In addition to being a noted Southwestern historian and folklorist, he was a prolific author and screenwriter. Among his many books are The Mescalero Apaches, Alias Billy the Kid and Tucson: The Life and Times of an American City. Sonichsen was the 23rd president of the Western Historical Association.
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#5695

Albert Henry

#119639
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Albert Henry was a Belgian Romance philologist and a Walloon activist. Biography A Romance philologist at the Université libre de Bruxelles and a graduate of the École pratique des hautes études at the Paris Sorbonne, Albert Henry studied literature in the second half of the twentieth century. His work is marked by an attachment to Wallonia and his friendship with the poet Saint-John Perse, of whose poetic work he organized the critical edition. A medievalist, he edited numerous Romance literary works, including those of François Villon.
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#5696

Jan Lucassen

#182352
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Johannes Mathias Wilhelmus Gerardus Lucassen is a Dutch historian. He studied history at Leiden University and obtained his PhD at Utrecht University in 1984 with Migrant Labour in Europe 1600-1900. The Drift to the North Sea . He specializes in the history of labour, the long-term development of labour relations, migration and monetisation in relation to the development of wage labour.
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#5697

Mark L. Grover

#182636
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Mark L. Grover is an American expert on Mormonism in Brazil and an author on religion in Latin America. Biography Grover was born in Malad, Idaho and is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He served as a Mormon missionary in Brazil. He has a Ph.D. in Brazilian History from Indiana University.
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#5698

Rani Dhavan Shankardass

Rani Dhavan Shankardass
#101270
Overall Influence
Rani Dhavan Shankardass is an Indian social historian and global expert on prison reform. She is the Secretary General of Penal Reform and Justice Association and the President of Penal Reform International.
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#5699

Annette D'Agostino Lloyd

#171368
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Annette Marie Lloyd is a silent film historian and author of numerous books on silent film and television, particularly on the life and works of actor Harold Lloyd. Between 2000-05 she was a celebrity biographer and production coordinator at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. She was formerly an adjunct professor of speech communication at Hofstra University and an adjunct professor of communication at William Paterson College.
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#5700

Eric Godley

#159313
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Eric John Godley OBE, FRSNZ, Hon FLS, Hon DSc , AHRNZIH was a New Zealand botanist and academic biographer. He is best known for his long-running series of in the popular magazine New Zealand Gardener and his "Biographical notes" series that ran in the New Zealand Botanical Society Newsletter and which is the prime resource on the lives of many New Zealand botanists.
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