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,

#5951

Jill Y. Crainshaw

#86434
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Jill Yvette Crainshaw is an American theologian and liturgical scholar. Crainshaw earned a bachelor of arts degree at Wake Forest University in 1984, followed by a Master of Divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1987. She then completed a doctorate at Union Presbyterian Seminary, in Virginia, in 1997. Crainshaw is the Blackburn Professor of Worship and Liturgical Theology at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, and served as interim dean of the seminary between the terms of Gail R. O'Day and Jonathan L. Walton. She was appointed Vice Dean of Faculty Development and Academic Initiatives in 2019.
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#5952

Paul MacKendrick

#109974
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Paul Lachlan MacKendrick was an American classicist, author, and teacher. Biography MacKendrick was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, but most of his productive years had been lived in Madison, Wisconsin.
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#5953

Angela McCarthy

#170486
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Angela Hannah McCarthy is a New Zealand history academic, and as of 2018 is a full professor at the University of Otago. Academic career After a PhD titled ' 'Seas may divide' : Irish migration to New Zealand as portrayed in personal correspondence, 1840-1937' at Trinity College Dublin, she moved to the University of Otago, rising to full professor. In 2008 McCarthy received $612,000 in Marsden grant funding.
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#5954

Max Krochmal

#186263
Overall Influence
Max Krochmal is an American historian. He is an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University. He won the Organization of American Historians's Frederick Jackson Turner Award in 2017 for Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era.
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#5955

Alan Forey

#182662
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Alan John Forey is reader emeritus in history at the University of Durham and an authority on the history of the military orderss of the middle ages. In 1994, his work was collected and published in the Variorum Collected Studies series as Military Orders and Crusades.
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#5956

Christopher Harper-Bill

#170118
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Christopher Harper-Bill was a British historian who was a professor of history at the University of East Anglia. He had previously taught Medieval History at St. Mary's University College . Harper-Bill's research interests were "the ecclesiastical history of England from the Norman Conquest to the eve of the Reformation, and particularly in the edition of episcopal and monastic records." Harper-Bill was completing a four-volume edition of the acta of the bishops of Norwich from 1070 to 1299.
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#5957

Heinz Kamnitzer

Heinz Kamnitzer
#141392
Overall Influence
1917 - 2001 (84 years)
Heinz Kamnitzer was a German writer and historian. He was part of the political-cultural establishment and a vocal government supporter in the German Democratic Republic . Life Early years Kamnitzer was born into a Jewish family in Berlin at the height of the First World War. His father was a pharmacist. His younger brother Peter was an architect and a professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, who emigrated to Los Angeles. In 1931 he joined the Socialist school students' League, and in Autumn 1933, while still at school, Kamnitzer was arrested for undertaking illegal political work.
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#5958

Leslie Brown

#148766
Overall Influence
1954 - 2016 (62 years)
Leslie Brown was an American historian. Life Leslie Brown was born in New York City and grew up in Albany, New York. She graduated in 1977 from Tufts University with a B.A. in sociology, and from Duke University with an A. M. and Ph.D in History 1997. Following her graduation, she was a bartender, managed stores for CVS and McDonalds, drove trucks for Ryder, and worked at Skidmore College in the Admissions Office and as director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program. From 1990 to 1995, while a graduate student at Duke University, she co-coordinated "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South", a project based at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
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#5959

Philippa Maddern

#154949
Overall Influence
1952 - 2014 (62 years)
Philippa Catherine "Pip" Maddern was an Australian historian and academic, who was Director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Biography Maddern was born in Albury, New South Wales in 1952, to Elsie and Ivan Maddern. Her father was a local headmaster. Maddern spent much of her childhood in Morwell, in Gippsland. She did a double Honours degree at the University of Melbourne in History and Indonesian Studies, graduating in 1983. In 1985 Maddern graduated from the University of Oxford with a DPhil for research that was later published as Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442.
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#5960

Glyn Harper

#153675
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Glyn John Harper is a New Zealand historian who specialises in the military history of the 20th century. He has published several books on New Zealand's participation in the First and Second World Wars.
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#5961

Werner Lorenz

#145852
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Werner Lorenz is a German structural engineer and a historian of construction technology. He held the chair for the construction history and structural preservation at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, where he has been an honorary professor for the construction history since his retirement. He was also managing director of the Berlin engineering office Lorenz & Co. from 1999 to 2018 .
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#5962

Patricia Loew

#168720
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Patricia, "Patty" Loew is a journalist, professor, author, and community historian, broadcaster, documentary film maker, academic and advocate. She has written extensively about Ojibwe treaty rights, sovereignty and the role of Native American media in communicating Indigenous world views.
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#5963

Jeremy Varon

#128622
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Jeremy Peter Varon is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. He is the author of the books, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies and The New Life: The Jewish Students of Postwar Germany . He cofounded and coedits The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis.
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#5964

Jessica Marie Johnson

#183077
Overall Influence
Jessica Marie Johnson is an American historian and Black studies scholar specializing in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. She is an associate professor in the department of history at the Johns Hopkins University Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. In 2020, Johnson published a Black feminist history of the founding of New Orleans titled Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World.
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#5965

Francille Rusan Wilson

#68188
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Francille Rusan Wilson is an American historian, who is best known for her research on black labor, social movements and black women's history. Early life and education Francille Rusan Wilson attended both segregated and desegregated schools in St. Louis County, Missouri. She earned a B.A in political science from Wellesley College. During her time at Wellesley, she co-founded a black student organization called Ethos and was heavily involved in the student activist movements that is responsible for bringing black studies to Wellesley. Later on, Wilson attended Harvard University to receive a master's degree in Social Studies.
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#5966

Susan J. Pearson

#186545
Overall Influence
Susan Jennifer Pearson is an American historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As an associate professor at Northwestern University, she received the 2012 Merle Curti Award for her book The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America.
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#5967

Susan Hogan

#146097
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Susan Hogan is a British cultural historian. Hogan is Professor in Cultural Studies & Art Therapy at the University of Derby. Personal life Hogan married Philip Douglas in 1988, and then divorced in 1998. Hogan's mother-in-law was noted anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas. She has two children: Emile and Eilish.
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#5968

Nancy Struever

#118435
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Nancie Schermerhorn Struever is an American historian of the Renaissance. She is a professor emerita in the department of comparative thought and literature at the Johns Hopkins Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences where she joined the faculty in 1974. Struever was previously a professor at the Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
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#5969

Edgar Hartwig

#174942
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Edgar Hartwig is an East German historian. In the GDR he taught scientific socialism at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar until 1989 and, within the framework of the "Arbeitsgruppe zur Geschichte der bürgerlichen Parteien" at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, he presented the history of the Pan-German League and the German Agrarian League.
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#5970

Peter Jan Margry

Peter Jan Margry
#152515
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Peter Jan Margry is a Dutch historian and European ethnologist who works at the University of Amsterdam and, since 1993, also at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences research center Meertens Institute in the Netherlands. Previously, he worked in The Hague and Den Bosch where he held positions as archivist-researcher, historian and archival inspector successively at the Dutch National Archives, the Court of Audit and the Province of North Brabant. During the 1990s he was also active as a consultant on document heritage, working in Suriname and Papua .
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#5971

Robert V. Hine

#142041
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Robert Van Norden Hine Jr. was a memoirist, historical novelist, and history professor who wrote several books. He is perhaps most famous for his 1993 memoir Second Sight, which recounts his experience of becoming blind at age 50 and partially recovering his sight 15 years later with the benefit of a high-risk operation.
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#5972

Michael Tracey

#186107
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Michael Tracey is a British-American academic and television producer with a specialty in public service broadcasting. He acquired notability as a result of his tenure as the head of the Broadcasting Research Unit in London, a British think tank dealing with media issues, and later with his investigative reporting on the death of JonBenét Ramsey. He is the author of The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting and the Production of Political Television. He is currently a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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#5973

Henry R. Winkler

#135469
Overall Influence
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
Henry Ralph Winkler , historian, was president of the University of Cincinnati from 1977 to 1984. Winkler was the only UC graduate to hold the office of president of the university. He was selected to serve as president in December, 1977. Prior to his position at Cincinnati he served as vice president of Rutgers University. He was succeeded at Cincinnati by Joseph A Steger.
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#5974

Gabrielle Houbre

#182269
Overall Influence
Gabrielle Houbre is a French historian. She is a lecturer at the University of Paris VII: Denis Diderot and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Specializing in 19th century history, she pursues research of gender, history of sexuality, the body, sensitivities, and youth.
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#5975

Aado Lintrop

Aado Lintrop
#90086
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Aado Lintrop is an Estonian poet, religious researcher and folklorist. He graduated from the University of Tartu with a degree in Estonian and Finno-Ugric philology in 1995. The same year, he also received a master's degree in Estonian and comparative folklore. He received his doctorate from the University of Tartu in 2000 in Estonian and comparative folklore. From 1979 until 1990, he worked at Estonian National Museum. Since 2000, he has been working at the Estonian Literary Museum.
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#5976

Arwin D. Smallwood

#186695
Overall Influence
Arwin D. Smallwood is an American historian. He chairs the history department at North Carolina A&T and has written about U.S. history. He was a professor at Bradley University in the 1990s, Brandeis University from 2001 to 2003 and was then a professor at the University of Memphis for years.
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#5977

A. C. S. Peacock

#186206
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Andrew Charles Spencer Peacock FBA is a British historian and author. He specializes in the histories of the Seljuk Empire and Ottoman Empire. Life He was born and raised in Hampshire, England. He completed his PhD in Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge.
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#5978

Jon H. Roberts

#139145
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Jon Harlan Roberts is an American historian currently serving as the Tomorrow Foundation Professor of History at Boston University. Education BA, University of Missouri, 1969MA, Harvard University, 1970PhD, Harvard University, 1980
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#5979

Gerhard Besier

#174835
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Gerhard Besier is a German Lutheran theologian, historian and politician best known for his work on church-state relations in the Third Reich and in the German Democratic Republic. Work Besier's publications have focused on church history, including church history during the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, and religious freedom issues in contemporary society. His views on religious freedom follow the libertarian American model, a stance which has made him controversial in Germany.
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#5980

Jacob Darwin Hamblin

#177633
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Jacob Darwin Hamblin is an American professor of history, specializing in international aspects of science, technology, and the global environment. His 2013 book Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism won two prestigious awards: the 2014 Paul Birdsall Prize and the 2016 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize.
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#5981

Chandak Sengoopta

#180073
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Chandak Sengoopta is a professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. His major research interests include the history of European medicine, the history of modern science in India and the cultural history of modern India. Sengoopta unites these interests through focus on the fundamental theme of identity and how sexual, racial and cultural identities are constructed, interpreted and disseminated in different historical contexts.
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#5982

Victoria A. Harden

#181350
Overall Influence
Victoria Angela Harden is an American medical historian who was the founding director of the Office of NIH History and the Stetten Museum at the National Institutes of Health. Most known for organizing conferences and publishing works on the history of HIV/AIDS, Harden also authored books on the history of the NIH and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. She is a past president of the Society for History in the Federal Government.
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#5983

Claudio Zanier

#179113
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Claudio Zanier is an Italian historian specialising in the history of East Asia and South East Asia, and in the history of silk, in particular. Career Zanier is a historian specialising in the history of East and South East Asia. He has held academic positions in Italy, and has been a visiting research at many institutions. \
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#5984

Krzysztof Strzałka

Krzysztof Strzałka
#154336
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Krzysztof Strzałka is a Polish political scientist and diplomat, between 2018 and 2023 serving as an ambassador to Slovakia. Life Education and scientific career Strzałka graduated from political science at the Sapienza University of Rome and from history at the Jagiellonian University . He has also completed post-graduate studies in management and business at the Jagiellonian University. He has received NATO, the Foundation for Polish Science, the Lanckoroński Foundation scholarships. In 1999, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in humanities, presenting thesis on Italy–Poland relations between 1939 and 1945.
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#5985

Charles Till Davis

#149950
Overall Influence
1929 - 1998 (69 years)
Charles Till Davis was an American medieval historian of Tulane University who was an authority on Dante Alighieri. Career Charles Davis attended Davidson College before earning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied under the Italian historian Alessandro Passerin d’Entréves. Davis's doctoral dissertation, Dante and the Idea of Rome, was published by Clarendon Press in 1957. He taught history at Tulane University for over forty years and served as President of the Dante Society of America from 1991-1997. He was elected fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and was a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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#5986

Anne Berthelot

Anne Berthelot
#74099
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Anne Berthelot is a French professor of Medieval French literature and studies. She is currently teaching at the University of Connecticut since 1990. Career Anne Berthelot is an since 1980, and a graduate of the École normale supérieure. She obtained the from Paris-Sorbonne University in 1982, with her dissertation entitled . Then she pursued a Doctor of Letters at Paris-Sorbonne University in 1987, with the research work under the direction of the Romanist and Medievalist .
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#5987

Andy Horowitz

#130618
Overall Influence
Andy Horowitz is a historian and author. In 2021, he won a Bancroft Prize for his book Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 about the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana and the aftermath of the disaster.
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#5988

Diana Dumitru

#176814
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Diana Dumitru is a Moldovan historian. She is considered the leading scholar of the fate of Bessarabia's and Bukovina's Jews during the Holocaust. Works
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#5989

Manfred Jessen-Klingenberg

#176277
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Manfred Jessen-Klingenberg was a German historian. He is regarded as "one of Schleswig-Holstein's most distinguished regional historians". Jessen-Klingenberg studied history and Latin philology at the University of Kiel. After obtaining his doctorate in 1962, he became Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the Chair of Schleswig-Holstein and Nordic History. Then from 1975 on, he worked as a teacher and university lecturer at the Kiel University of Education and University of Kiel. The latter appointed him honorary professor in 2000. From 1998 until his death he chaired the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary and Regional History at the University of Flensburg.
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#5990

James M. Banner Jr.

#180326
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
James Morrill Banner, Jr. is an American historian whose scholarly specialties are the history of the United States, of the discipline of history, and of historical thought. He has served in a number of different academic and public capacities.
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#5991

Jean-Pierre Vallat

#174618
Overall Influence
1951 - 2021 (70 years)
Jean-Pierre Vallat was a French historian and archeologist. A member of the , he was a professor emeritus of Roman history at Paris Diderot University. Biography After he finished secondary school at the , Vallat studied history at the from 1971 to 1975. He then studied at the French School of Rome from 1978 to 1981. In 1982, he became a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, a position he held until 1988.
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#5992

Michel Antoine

#72030
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Michel Antoine was a French, modernist historian. A specialist of the state apparatus and the political civilization of the eighteenth century, Antoine was an archivist and paleographer, curator at the Archives nationales, research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and professor at the University of Caen, then director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études from 1987.
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#5993

Laurence B. Mussio

Laurence B. Mussio
#134568
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Laurence B. Mussio is a Canadian business historian, author, professor, management consultant and special advisor to senior executives, best known for his publications in finance, communications, political economy and reputation management.
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#5994

Lucy Bland

#180818
Overall Influence
Lucy Bland is a British professor of social and cultural history at Anglia Ruskin University. Much of her work focuses on the history of British sexuality, feminism, gender relations and race relations between the 1880s to 1980s. Her book 'Britain's "Brown Babies"' won the Social History Society prize for best book of social and cultural history for 2019. Her research is now online as a digital exhibition: www.mixedmuseum.org.uk/brown-babies. The exhibition won the 2021 Museums Association's best 'Digital Engagement Award'.
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#5995

Peter Iver Kaufman

#186918
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Peter Iver Kaufman is an American philosopher. He is the George Matthews and Virginia Brinkley Modlin Chair in Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond and is an emeritus professor of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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#5996

Frances C. Roberts

#173752
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
Frances Cabaniss Roberts was an American historian. She was a founding member of the University of Alabama in Huntsville who was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. Early life and education Roberts was born on December 19, 1916 to parents Richard H. and Mary Roberts. She was the great-granddaughter of Col Septimus D. Cabaniss, whose papers she later used to write her dissertation.
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#5997

Mireille Cébeillac-Gervasoni

#170732
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Mireille Cébeillac-Gervasoni was a French director of research at the CNRS in Paris. She was a specialist of Latin epigraphy and Republican and Imperial Roman history who published numerous research on the ruling local elites of the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. She also devoted much time on the history and epigraphy of Ostia Antica.
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#5998

Luis González Vales

#170957
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Luis Ernesto González Vales was a Puerto Rican historian. He held the post of Official Historian of Puerto Rico, having succeeded Pilar Barbosa. Education A graduate of Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in history from the University of Puerto Rico, González Vales obtained his master's degree from the Columbia University of New York, where he also carried out doctoral courses. He was Professor of history of the University of Puerto Rico and Associate Dean of the Faculty of General Studies of the Río Piedras campus from the University of Puerto Rico. He held the position of Executive Secre...
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#5999

Willard M. Wallace

#186959
Overall Influence
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
Willard Mosher Wallace was an American historian who taught at Wesleyan University from 1945 to 1981. He attended Wesleyan University, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a PhD in history. He won a Guggenheim fellowship.
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#6000

David McLean

#108064
Overall Influence
David A. McLean has been professor of history at King's College London since 1999. He joined King's in 1978 after having been a Draper's Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge since 1973. McLean received his BA from the University of Hull and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. McLean was visiting professor at Hiroshima Shudo University in 2002 and at Nihon University in 1985. His research interests include the economic and diplomatic history of modern Britain, educational development in nineteenth century British schools, and the history of medicine.
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