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,

#2701

Jehuda L. Wallach

#65986
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Jehuda Lothar Wallach was an Israeli military officer and military historian. Early life and education The son of Louis Wallach and his wife Minna Rothheimer, Jehuda Wallach attended school in Mannheim, Germany, before he emigrated at age fifteen with his parents in 1936 to the British Mandate for Palestine. After graduating from high school, he lived for some years in Beit Zera on the south shore of the Sea of Galilee, a kibbutz that had been founded nearly a decade earlier by immigrants from Austria and Germany. While in Beir Zera in 1940, he married Chava Turetzky, with whom he later had t...
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#2702

Aleks Buda

#36882
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Aleks Buda was an Albanian historian. After completion of his education in Italy and Austria, he returned to Albania. Although his education was in literature, he made a career as a historian during the socialist period in Albania. He was a member and president of the Academy of Sciences of Albania.
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#2703

Santos Juliá

#31432
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Santos Juliá Díaz was a Spanish historian and sociologist. Biography Born in Ferrol in 1940, he spent some of his first years in Vigo, moving soon to Seville, where he studied at the Instituto San Isidoro. He took studies in Theology, but graduated in Sociology. He was a strong admirer of Manuel Azaña.
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#2704

Rafał Wnuk

Rafał Wnuk
#79833
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Rafał Wnuk is a Polish historian, editor of several historical periodicals, employee of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance . Wnuk was a student of the Polish historian Tomasz Strzembosz.
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#2705

Stuart Banner

#60969
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Stuart Alan Banner is an American legal historian and the Norman Abrams Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Banner also directs UCLA's Supreme Court Clinic, which offers students the opportunity to work on real cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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#2706

Daniel T. Rodgers

#61246
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Daniel T. Rodgers is an American historian. He is an emeritus professor at Princeton University, and the author of several books. Early life Rodgers was born in 1942 in Pennsylvania. He graduated from Brown University in Engineering, and from Yale University with a Ph.D.
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#2707

Blaže Ristovski

#39690
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Blaže Ristovski was a Macedonian linguist, folklorist and historian. He graduated from Faculty of Philology in Skopje with a PhD in Philology. He was the director of the Institute of Folklore "Marko Cepenkov" in Skopje and a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts and honorary member of the Writers' Association of Macedonia. He died on November 28, 2018, at the age of 87.
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#2708

Maycie Herrington

#89151
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
Maycie Herrington was an African-American history conservator, social worker, and community volunteer known for her work to preserve the history of the Tuskegee Airmen. She was involved with the Tuskegee Airmen from World War II, when she worked for the Red Cross while her husband Aaron trained to become a fighter pilot. Herrington died on May 24, 2016, at the age of 97.
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#2709

Ruth Kark

Ruth Kark
#23568
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ruth Kark is an Israeli historical geographer and professor of geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor Kark is a well-known researcher and expert in the field of the historical geography of Palestine and Israel.
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#2710

Michael Epkenhans

#91314
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Epkenhans is a German military historian known for his works dealing with the German Imperial Navy. He was the director of the Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung in Friedrichsruh from 1996 to 2009. In February 2009 he became the director of research for the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt der Bundeswehr in Potsdam. Following a reorganisation in 2013, the organisation became the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr.
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#2711

Hugo Ott

#60773
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Hugo Ott was a German historian and academic. Biography Ott earned a doctoral degree in 1959 with a thesis on the history of Saint Blaise Abbey in the Black Forest. From 1972 to 1997, he was chair of economic and social history at the University of Freiburg. In 1980, he wrote a biography of Hans Filbinger alongside and . He was a member of the scientific advisory board of the research center Forschungsstelle Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Südwesten, headed by at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He held discussions with pastor , who talked of the inequity within ...
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#2712

Mark Stoyle

#41273
Overall Influence
Mark J. Stoyle is a Tudor and Stuart British historian who specializes in the English Civil War, the nature of magic and witchcraft and the identity of key areas such as Cornwall and Wales during the early modern period. He is Professor at the University of Southampton, and also does much work on the history and landscape of Exeter where he previously lived and taught.
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#2713

Faramerz Dabhoiwala

#71351
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Faramerz Noshir Dabhoiwala is a historian and senior research scholar at Princeton University where he teaches and writes about the social history, cultural history, and intellectual history of the English-speaking world, from the Middle Ages to the present day.
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#2714

Haim Beinart

#37319
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Haim Beinart was an Israeli historian and academic administrator. Originally from Russia, he was a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as the dean of humanities at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He specialized in the history of Iberian Jews.
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#2715

Nicole Loraux

#42359
Overall Influence
1943 - 2003 (60 years)
Nicole Loraux was a French historian of classical Athens. Biography She was born in Paris and died in Argenteuil. She graduated in Classics at the École normale supérieure des filles . In 1965, she obtained the agrégation de lettres classiques , before writing a PhD thesis under the supervision of Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
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#2716

Douglas Johnson

#53805
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Douglas William John Johnson was a British historian. He was Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham from 1963 to 1968, and Professor of French History at University College London from 1968 to 1990.
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#2717

C. Martin Wilbur

#67603
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Clarence Martin Wilbur was the George Sansom Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University from 1947 to 1976. Biography Born in Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur went at an early age with his parents to China, where they worked with the YMCA. He returned to Ohio for college, graduating from Oberlin College in 1931. His first job after receiving his PhD from Columbia University in 1941 was with the Field Museum, in Chicago, where he prepared for publication a study of plant migration left by Berthold Laufer after his death and developed a monograph on slavery in the Han Dynasty.
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#2718

David B. Danbom

#40210
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David B. Danbom is a historian, author, and was a professor of agricultural history at North Dakota State University, for more than forty years. Danbom spent nine years on the Fargo Historic Preservation Commission. Danbom also served as president of the Agricultural History Society.
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#2719

John V. Tolan

#45722
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
John Victor Tolan is a historian of religious and cultural relations between the Arab and Latin-speaking civilizations of the Middle Ages. Biography He was born in Milwaukee and received a BA in Classics from Yale , an MA and a PhD in History from the University of Chicago, and an Habilitation à diriger des recherches from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris .
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#2720

Robert Browning

#67810
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Robert Browning, FBA was a Scottish Byzantinist and university professor. Early career Browning was born in Glasgow in 1914. He attended Kelvinside Academy in that city. He entered the Humanities department of Glasgow University in 1931, graduating in 1935. As Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College, Oxford, he acquired first class degrees in Mods and Greats as well as several prizes . During his time at Glasgow University, Browning became proficient in several Eastern European languages, beginning with Albanian.
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#2721

R. J. Q. Adams

#39284
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ralph James Quincy Adams is an author and historian. He is professor of European and British history at Texas A&M University. Bibliography Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900-18 Edwardian Conservatism The Great War, 1914-18: Essays on the Military, Political and Social History of the First World War British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, 1935-39 British Appeasement and the Origins of World War II Bonar Law Europe, Crisis and Conflict: 1890–1945 Balfour: The Last Grandee "Britain ...
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#2722

Mark Gregory Pegg

#108776
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Mark Gregory Pegg is an Australian professor of medieval history, currently teaching in the United States at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His scholarship focuses upon heresy, the inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade, and the history of holiness. Apart from these specific scholarly pursuits, he writes more broadly about what shapes and defines the medieval West from 200 to 1500. He is the author of The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, and Beatrice's Last Smile: A New History of th...
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#2723

Mark Felton

#45169
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Mark Felton is a British author, historian, and filmmaker. Felton has written over a dozen nonfiction books. He also runs several channels on YouTube covering different historical subjects of the 20th and 21st century, mainly covering topics related to World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He is an alumnus of the University of Essex and has also served as a lecturer at that institution.
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#2724

Hillar Palamets

#104583
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Hillar Palamets was an Estonian historian and radio presenter. Biography Palamets was born in Tallinn on 13 July 1927. In 1951, he graduated from Tartu State University, specialising in Soviet Union history. From 1961 to 1996 he taught at Tartu University.
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#2725

Sergey Radchenko

#17493
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sergey S. Radchenko is a Soviet-born British historian. He is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and visiting professor at Cardiff University. He has served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University .
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#2726

Juhani Paasivirta

#98181
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Juhani Paasivirta , Finnish historian, PhD 1947. Paasivirta became in 1951 associate professor in political history at Helsinki University and was 1965-83 professor on the subject at the University of Turku; research professor 1980–83.
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#2727

Kirsti Andersen

Kirsti Andersen
#30526
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kirsti Andersen , published under the name Kirsti Pedersen, is a Danish historian of mathematics. She is an Associate Professor of the History of Science at Aarhus University, where she had her Candidate examination in 1967.
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#2728

Reid L. Neilson

#77424
Overall Influence
Reid Larkin Neilson is the assistant academic vice president for religious scholarly publications at Brigham Young University . He was the Assistant Church Historian and Recorder for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 2015 to 2019, and the managing director of the church's history department from 2010 to 2019.
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#2729

Melvin Small

#45218
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Melvin Small is an American academic working as a distinguished professor emeritus of history at Wayne State University in Detroit. Education Small earned a Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College in 1960 and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1965.
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#2730

Leopold H. Haimson

#69033
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Leopold Henri Haimson was a Belgian-born American historian whose work focused on the history of the Soviet Union. For most of his career he taught at Columbia University . Haimson was born in Brussels to Russian émigré parents. In 1940, fleeing the Nazi invasion, the Haimson family escaped first to France and then to the United States, where they would settle. Enrolling at Harvard University at the precocious age of 15 , he stayed at the same institution until he received his PhD in 1952. He was a member of faculty at the University of Chicago from 1956. He joined the faculty at Columbia in 1965 as a professor of Russian history and a member of the Russian Institute.
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#2731

Margaret Conrad

#71916
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Margaret Rose Conrad is a Canadian historian specializing in the fields of Atlantic Canada and Women's history. She held the Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at the University of New Brunswick before retiring in 2009.
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#2732

David Edwin Harrell

#35488
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
David Edwin Harrell Jr. was an American historian best known for his scholarship of religion in the United States. Harrell was born in Jacksonville, Florida to parents David Edwin and Mildred Lee Harrell . He attended David Lipscomb College as an undergraduate, and Vanderbilt University as a graduate student. He received a Ph.D. in 1962.
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#2733

Jerry D. Thompson

Jerry D. Thompson
#21954
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jerry Don Thompson is Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas. He is a prolific author of books on a variety of related topics, specializing in the American Civil War, the history of the Southwestern United States, and Texas history. According to WorldCat, two of his books are available from more than six hundred major libraries worldwide – Confederate General of the West: Henry Hopkins Sibley, and Civil War in the Southwest: Recollections of the Sibley Brigade.
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#2734

Helmut Berding

#63501
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Helmut Berding was a German historian. Biography Berding studied history, philosophy, and Romanesque studied at the University of Göttingen from 1959 to 1961. He then studied history, philosophy, and education at the University of Cologne from 1961 to 1967. He spent the majority of his career working as a history professor for the University of Giessen.
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#2735

Karl Ferdinand Werner

#88531
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Karl Ferdinand Werner was a German historian. He particularly studied historiography, the Early Middle Ages and the origins of European nobility. Works * Die Entstehung des Reditus regni Francorum ad stirpem Karoli, Diss. 1950. * Aufstieg der westlichen Nationalstaaten, in: Historia Mundi, VI, 1958 * Untersuchungen zur Frühzeit des französischen Fürstentums, 8-10 Jahrhundert, 1960 * Das NS-Geschichtsbild und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 1967 * Die Nachkommen Karls des Grossen bis um das Jahr 1000, in: Karls des Großen Lebenswerk und Nachleben, IV, hrsg. v. W. Braunfels, 1967 * Das Frankenreich 486-911 ., 1967, 1972 * Structures politiques du monde franc .
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#2736

Giovanni Filoramo

#86182
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Giovanni Filoramo is an Italian scholar of gnosticism. A professor of History of Christianity at the University of Turin and he has published a number of books. Bibliography L’attesa della fine. Storia della gnosi , English transl. A history of Gnosticism Il risveglio della gnosi ovvero diventare dio Cristianesimo e societa antica Religione e modernita: il caso del fondamentalismo Manuale di storia delle religioni Veggenti, profeti, gnostici. Identita e conflitti nel cristianesimo antico Cristianesimo La Chiesa e le sfide della modernita
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#2737

Ann Douglas

#29535
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ann Douglas is an American literary historian who specializes in intellectual history. She is the Parr Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Biography Douglas attended Milton Academy, received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and B.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She taught at Princeton University from 1970 to 1974 and was the first woman to teach in Princeton's English department and the first woman to be offered assistant professorship at Harvard. She then joined Columbia's faculty. Her research interests include 20th-century American intellectual and cultural history.
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#2738

Mohamed Adhikari

#39155
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mohamed Adhikari is a professor of history and author of several books on both Coloured identity and politics in South Africa as well as on settler colonialism and genocide. He is a professor at the University of Cape Town. He was born in Cape Town in 1953, matriculated from Harold Cressy High School in 1971, and obtained a bachelor's degree at the University of Cape Town in 1980.
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#2739

Elizabeth Jeffreys

#60678
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Elizabeth Mary Jeffreys was a British scholar of Byzantium. She was Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, 1996–2006.
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#2740

David Van Reybrouck

David Van Reybrouck
#35391
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
David Grégoire Van Reybrouck is a Belgian cultural historian, archaeologist and author. He writes historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry, plays and academic texts. He has received several awards for his works.
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#2741

Karen Parshall

#30816
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Karen Hunger Parshall is an American historian of mathematics. She is the Commonwealth Professor of History and Mathematics at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and Department of Mathematics. From 2009 to 2012, Parshall was the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts in Sciences at UVA, and from 2016 to 2019 she was the chair of the Corcoran Department of History.
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#2742

Hrvoje Matković

#59513
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Hrvoje Matković was a Croatian historian. Matković was born in Šibenik. He finished gymnasium in Šibenik, and graduated history in 1947. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1971 at the University of Zagreb.
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#2743

Richard Toye

#50155
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Richard John Toye is a British historian and academic. He is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He was previously a Fellow and Director of Studies for History at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, from 2002 to 2007, and before that he taught at University of Manchester from 2000.
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#2744

Barrie Dobson

#66896
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Richard Barrie Dobson, was an English historian, who was a leading authority on the legend of Robin Hood as well as a scholar of ecclesiastical and Jewish history. He served as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge from 1988 to 1999.
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#2745

David Horner

#57866
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David Murray Horner, is an Australian military historian and academic. Early life and military career Horner was born in Adelaide, South Australia, on 12 March 1948. He was raised in a military household—his father, Murray Horner, had served in New Guinea during the Second World War. Like Murray, David Horner attended Prince Alfred College. Horner was a prefect and served on numerous committees including the yearbook, debating, cadets, and student christian movement.
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#2746

Martin Goodman

#50760
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Martin David Goodman, FBA is a British historian and academic, specialising in Roman history and the history and literature of the Jews in the Roman period. Early life and education Goodman was born into an English Jewish family. Goodman noted that "[t]he family practised little beyond a Sabbath-eve dinner each Friday, an annual family Seder and occasional attendance at services in Bevis Marks Synagogue." Goodman's paternal grandfather was the secretary of the London congregation of the Iberian Jews for many years.
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#2747

Kenneth Baxter Wolf

#64774
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Kenneth Baxter Wolf is an American historian and scholar of medieval studies. Biography Wolf is the John Sutton Miner Professor of History and Professor of Classics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he has taught since 1985.
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#2748

Alan Powers

#49976
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan Powers is a British teacher, researcher and writer on twentieth-century architecture and design. Early life Powers was raised on the borders of Hampstead Heath and in Suffolk. His father Michael was an architect member of the Architects' Co-Partnership, UK. Powers trained as an art historian at the University of Cambridge, gaining an undergraduate degree and a PhD.
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#2749

Claude Lepelley

#31702
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Claude Lepelley was a 20th-21st-century French historian, a specialist of late Antiquity and North Africa during Antiquity. His thesis, Les cités de l'Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, defended in 1977 under the direction of William Seston, profoundly changed the understanding of the urban world in the 3rd and 4th centuries; far from declining, the cities of Africa had some prosperity.
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#2750

Michael Jones

#52895
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michael Christopher Emlyn Jones is a British historian. He was born in Wrexham, Wales. He studied history at Oxford, and taught in Exeter, then Nottingham from 1967 to 2002, specialising in French medieval history.
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