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,
#4451
William Conrad Gibbons
#47948
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
William Conrad Gibbons was an American historian and foreign policy expert. Life and career Gibbons was born in 1926 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to Howard and Jessie Gibbons. He entered the University of Virginia in 1945. His studies were interrupted in order to serve in World War II but he returned to finish his college education at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia and was graduated in 1949. Dr. Gibbons went on to earn his Masters and Ph.D. in Government from Princeton University in 1957 and was in the 1954–55 class of the American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship Program.
Go to Profile#4452
Francis Loewenheim
#79572
Overall Influence
1927 - 1996 (69 years)
Francis L. Loewenheim was an American historian at Rice University. He was one of the leading authorities on modern diplomatic history. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Loewenheim came to the United States with his parents in 1934, one year after the Machtergreifung. He grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and received bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Cincinnati and his doctorate in 1952 from Columbia University.
Go to Profile#4453
Elliott Horowitz
#109558
Overall Influence
1953 - 2017 (64 years)
Elliott S. Horowitz was a Jewish historian. A native of Queens, New York City, Horowitz was educated at Yeshivat Kerem be-Yavneh, and received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1975. He received his doctorate from Yale in 1982. His dissertation was "Jewish confraternities in seventeenth-century Verona: a study in the social history of piety".
Go to Profile#4454
Kenneth R. Bartlett
#115138
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth R. Bartlett is a Renaissance historian, author, and professor at the University of Toronto, where he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1978. He was editor of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme from 1985 until 1990 and President of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies from 1982 until 1984. Prof. Bartlett was the Founding Director of the University of Toronto Art Centre, and sat on the Board of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art from 2001-2015. He was the Director of Faculty Programs in Arts and Science for 13 years, and in 2002 he was named the first Director of the Of...
Go to Profile#4455
François Bucher
#111182
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
François C. Bucher was a Swiss-born American Medievalist, art historian, writer on medieval and contemporary art, and distinguished professor emeritus of medieval art and architecture at Florida State University.
Go to Profile#4456
Pierre Cabanes
#104432
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Pierre Cabanes was a French epigraphist and historian, professor emeritus of the history of antiquity at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, President of the University Clermont-Ferrand II , and head, from 1992, of the French Archaeological and Epigraphic Mission in Albania.
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Joy Pachuau
#152636
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Joy L. Pachuau is an author and professor from Mizoram who resides at Delhi. She is a professor at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interest includes the social history of Mizoram and Christianity in India; she has also worked on the Portuguese presence on the west coast of India in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Go to Profile#4458
Padma Anagol
#109024
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Padma Anagol is a historian known for her work on women's agency and subjectivities in colonial India. Her work broadly focuses on gender and women's history in colonial British India. Her research interests also include a wide spectrum of topics such as material culture, consumption and Indian middle classes, theory, historiography and periodization of Modern India and comparative histories of Victorian and Indian patriarchies over the issues of social legislation .
Go to Profile#4459
Griffith Baley Price
#82968
Overall Influence
1905 - 2006 (101 years)
G. Baley Price was an American mathematician and historian of American mathematics. He was a president of the Mathematical Association of America. Career After graduating with an A.B. from Mississippi College in 1925, G. B. Price went to Harvard University, where he received his M.A. in 1928 and his Ph.D. in 1932 under G. D. Birkhoff with thesis Double Pendulum and Similar Dynamical Systems. Apart from a period of service with the U.S. Army Air Force in England in World War II, Price was a mathematics professor at the University of Kansas from 1937 to 1975 and chair of the mathematics department from 1951 to 1970.
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John Richard Alden
#76317
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
John Richard Alden was an American historian and author of a number of books on the era of the American Revolutionary War. Biography Alden graduated from the University of Michigan with A.B. in 1929now called Eastern Michigan University
Go to Profile#4461
Sid Bradley
#55854
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Sid Bradley is an academic, author and specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature. In his best known publication, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Bradley has translated into modern English prose virtually the entire corpus of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry. Bradley studied Anglo-Saxon at University College, Oxford, and subsequently taught it at King's College London then in the University of York where he became a Professor of English and Related Literature. From 1990 he was seconded to the Centre for Grundtvig Studies in the Theology Faculty of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, as a Research and Teaching Associate, during which period he published articles on N.
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William S. Powell
#95867
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
William Stevens Powell was an American historian, writer, academic, and teacher. He authored over 600 articles and books about the history of North Carolina and was the editor of the six volume Dictionary of North Carolina Biography. He was professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, having retired in 1986.
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Hans-Joachim Hoppe
#106393
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hans-Joachim Hoppe is a German political scientist and an expert on Russia and East European affairs. Studies He has finished his studies of Russian and East European history, politics and languages with a doctor’s thesis on “German-Bulgarian Relations During the Second World War”. The book has been published in 1979 by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich Later he took part in projects of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, and Institute for Research of Antisemitism, director Wolfgang Benz, Berlin, about the Holocaust, especially the fate of Bulgarian Jews and the Jews in Bulgarian...
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Rex Pope
#40351
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Rex Pope is a British historian who was formerly head of the school of historical and critical studies at Lancashire Polytechnic. Pope is a specialist in the social and economic history of Britain in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has had two volumes published in the Seminar Studies in History series. Pope's other interests relate to the British hotel industry since 1850 and leisure hotels and tourism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Go to Profile#4465
Marisa Linton
#82323
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Marisa Linton is an author, historian, and member of the academic staff at Kingston University in London, where she is Professor Emerita in History. Having received her BA from Middlesex University in 1988 and PhD from University of Sussex in 1993, she specializes in the history of the French Revolution.
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J. M. Beattie
#115216
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
John Maurice Beattie was a British legal historian. He was born in Dunstan near Newcastle upon Tyne, England and studied history at the University of San Francisco. He was awarded a master's degree by the University of California and a PhD by King's College, Cambridge, where his supervisor was John H. Plumb. Beattie was appointed to the University of Toronto's Department of History in 1961, where he was a member for 35 years.
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Günther Frei
#69211
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Günther Hans Frei is a Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Frei studied mathematics, physics and languages at the University of Zurich. There he received his doctoral degree in 1968 with advisor Bartel Leendert van der Waerden and dissertation on geometry . He became an instructor in 1968 at the University of Notre Dame and in 1970 at Quebec's Université Laval, where he became in 1971 a professor. He remained there until he retired as professor emeritus and returned to Switzerland to live in Hombrechtikon.
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R. W. (robert William) Davies
#163572
Overall Influence
#4469
Hans-Jürgen Puhle
#84120
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Hans-Jürgen Puhle is a German historian and political scientist. Further reading , Christian Lammert, Söhnke Schreyer : Staat, Nation, Demokratie. Traditionen und Perspektiven moderner Gesellschaften. Festschrift für Hans-Jürgen Puhle.Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, .Bettina Hitzer, Thomas Welskopp : Die Bielefelder Sozialgeschichte. Klassische Texte zu einem geschichtswissenschaftlichen Programm und seinen Kontroversen . Transcript, Bielefeld 2010, .: La Ciencia Política histórica. Historiador de Alemania y politólogo en el mundo: Conversación con Hans-Jürgen Puhle. In Historia del Presente.
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Monica Muñoz Martinez
#68173
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Monica Muñoz Martinez is a scholar of Mexican-American history current serving as an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Martinez was previously the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Texas State Historical Association. She has received praise for her work on several public history projects and her first book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas was published in 2018 and received numerous awards.
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Vera Mackie
#90742
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Vera Mackie is an Australian academic who has specialised in Japanese feminism and gender history. As of 2021 she is Emeritus Senior Professor of Asian and International Studies at the University of Wollongong.
Go to Profile#4472
Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins
#116438
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Sarah Van Voorhis Woolfolk Wiggins was a history professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She was the first woman in the university's history department and edited The Alabama Review for 20 years.
Go to Profile#4473
Delphine Gardey
#53476
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Delphine Gardey is a French historian and sociologist. She is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the journal Travail, Genre et Sociétés. She is also affiliated with "Groupement De Recherche Européen" and "Marché du travail et genre en Europe" . She is a member of the "Genre, Travail, Mobilités" Laboratory of "Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris" . Her work focuses mainly on the history of s...
Go to Profile#4474
Juan Vernet
#63959
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Juan Vernet Ginés or Joan Vernet i Ginés was a Spanish science historian, Arabist and professor at the University of Barcelona for over thirty years. He was the pupil and intellectual heir of orientalist Maria Millàs Vallicrosa. The rigor and scope of his scholarly work give him international authority in the field of the history of science and cultural transfers between East and West. Author of the book "What culture owes to the Arabs of Spain", he also translated the quran and One Thousand and One Nights into Castilian Spanish.
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Peter N. Miller
#60261
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Peter N. Miller is an American historian who is President of the American Academy in Rome. He was a 1998 MacArthur Fellow. Much of his scholarship has centered on the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, including the practices of antiquarianism within wider scholarly erudition; and he is a particular authority on the thought and influence of the French savant, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc .
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Edmund Abaka
#44617
Overall Influence
Edmund Abaka is a photographer and historian of Africa at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. He is a graduate of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana and received his master's from the University of Guelph in Canada. He received his PhD from York University in 1998.
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Jim Whittenburg
#130671
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
James Penn Whittenburg is a professor of history at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Whittenburg was born in 1946 to Mr. and Mrs. James Edgar Whittenburg, Jr. in Rome, Georgia. He received his B.A. from the University of Tennessee, his M.A. in history from Wake Forest University , and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Georgia, where he wrote his thesis on the War of the Regulation. He taught at the University of Missouri before moving to the William & Mary in 1977. He served one term as the chairman of the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History, following Dr. James McCord and succeeded by Dr.
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Jeannine Baker
#93964
Overall Influence
Jeannine Baker is an Australian historian. She specialises in women's, labour and media history and is a research fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. Life Baker completed a BA in Mass Communications from Macquarie University and an MA in Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She completed a PhD in Australian history at the University of Melbourne in 2014. Her thesis, on Australian women war reporters during World War II, was later published as Australian Women War Reporters: Boer War to Vietnam.
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Roland Steinacher
#101840
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Roland Steinacher is an Austrian historian who is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Innsbruck. Biography Roland Steinacher was born in Innsbruck, Austria, on 22 September 1972. He received his PhD in history at the University of Vienna in 2002 under the supervision of Herwig Wolfram. Steinacher subsequently worked as a researcher at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. During this time, Steinacher was a research assistant for Walter Pohl at projects financed by the European Research Council. Steinacher received his habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2012.
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Lynette Mitchell
#84071
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Professor Lynette Gail Mitchell is Professor in Greek History and Politics at the University of Exeter. Mitchell is known for her work on ancient Greek politics and kingship. Career Mitchell obtained her BA at the University of New England and then moved to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship in 1991. Mitchell completed her PhD at the University of Durham in 1994 and published her thesis as Greeks Bearing Gifts: the public use of private relationships 435-323 BC in 1997. Mitchell held a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford.
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James A. Gross
#72220
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
James A. Gross is an American educator and historian who teaches United States labor law and labor history at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is the author of a highly regarded three-volume history of the National Labor Relations Board and is considered the leading historian of the NLRB.
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Dorothy Sue Cobble
#124409
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dorothy Sue Cobble is an American historian, and a specialist in the historical study of work, social movements, and feminism in the United States and worldwide. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, holding dual appointments in the Departments of Labor Studies and History since 1986.
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Caroline Goodson
#135156
Overall Influence
Caroline Jane Goodson is an archaeologist and historian at the University of Cambridge, previously at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2003 she won the Rome Prize for medieval studies of the American Academy in Rome. In archaeological work, Goodson is most closely associated with the Villa Magna site in Italy where she has been field director since 2006.
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Gloria Ricci Lothrop
#105966
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Gloria Ricci Lothrop was a California historian who taught at Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Northridge, Marymount College, and Loyola University. She specialized in American Women’s history, American Indian history, and the history of European minorities in the United States. A long-time resident of Pasadena, California, she became the first woman to join the history department at Cal Poly, and the first W.P. Whitsett Professor of California History at Cal State Northridge.
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Ann J. Lane
#78440
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Ann J. Lane was an American educator, historian, and author that was considered to be a pioneer in the fields of women’s history and women’s studies. Before retiring in 2009 she worked at the University of Virginia as a professor of History and director of Women’s Studies.
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Elaine Bernard
#89059
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Elaine Bernard is the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is also a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society which she describes as offering "an opportunity to reach across borders, time zones, organizations, communities, and individual interests and grow solidarity".
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Manuel Barcia
#83470
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Manuel Barcia is Chair of Global History at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom. Barcia is a scholar on the field of Atlantic and Slavery Studies. He has published extensively on the subjects of slave resistance, slave rebellion and on the transfers of West African warfare knowledge to the Americas, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Brazil, and Cuba. He has written op-ed articles for Al Jazeera English, The Independent, The Washington Spectator, The Washington Post. and The Huffington Post. He is also an editor of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents , a journal of Atlantic history and cultural studies.
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Arthur Alphin
#85112
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Lieutenant Colonel Arthur B. Alphin is a retired United States Army officer and military historian. He is the founder and owner of A-Square, manufacturer of American hunting rifles. He taught military history at West Point. Since retiring he has co-authored several books with his wife and children's author Elaine Marie Alphin.
Go to Profile#4489
Mar Hicks
#116038
Overall Influence
Mar Hicks is a historian of technology, gender and modern Europe, notable for their work on the history of women in computing. Hicks is a professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science. Hicks wrote the 2017 book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing.
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Judith Jesch
#65005
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Judith Jesch is professor of Viking Age studies at the University of Nottingham. Jesch is chair of the international Runic Advisory Group and president of the English Place-Name Society. Biography Jesch received her advanced education at Durham University and University College London. As a student at Durham in 1973 she co-wrote an article for Palatinate that accused the university of failing to attract candidates from a wide variety of backgrounds, and suggested that Durham was by now seen as a 'finishing school' for the socially privileged.
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Menso Folkerts
#97508
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Menso Folkerts is a German mathematician and writer of popular science books. Early life Career From 1980 to 2008 he was a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was as a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Go to Profile#4492
Rüdiger Thiele
#30360
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Rolf-Rüdiger Thiele is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics, known for his historical research on Hilbert's twenty-fourth problem. Education and career Thiele studied mathematics, physics, and psychology at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and received his promotion there in 1973. He then worked in the publishing business in Leipzig for B. G. Teubner Verlag and Salomon Hirzel Verlag. From 1986 to 2008 he worked at the Karl-Sudhoff-Institut für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften at the University of Leipzig. He has held visiting positions at the...
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Adam McKeown
#158412
Overall Influence
1965 - 2017 (52 years)
Adam M. McKeown was a historian of transnational migration. Biography Born in San Francisco, McKeown earned his PhD in history at the University of Chicago in 1997. His dissertation, later published as Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change, studied Chinese migrants in Chicago, Peru, and Hawaii, and highlighted the transnational networks developed by migrant flow. In his view, the relevant points of reference were not “China” or “the United States", for instance, but particular villages and district, “nodes” of transit in Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Singapore, and the sophisticated "credit system”.
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Thomas J. Cutler
#100097
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Thomas Joshua Cutler is a retired United States naval officer, naval historian, author, and editor. He is "one of the most prolific authors in the history of the Naval Institute Press in terms of sold books."
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Tanja Bueltmann
#56914
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Tanja Bueltmann, is a German-British historian and academic, who holds the chair in International History at the University of Strathclyde. She specialises in the history of migration and diaspora. She is also a citizens' rights campaigner and founder of the EU Citizens' Champion campaign.
Go to Profile#4496
Pravina Shukla
#59972
Overall Influence
Pravina Shukla is an American folklorist who is Provost Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, Department of American Studies, the Dhar India Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is also a consulting curator at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.
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Adrian Del Caro
#28055
Overall Influence
Adrián del Caro is an American historian of German and Austrian literature, currently a Distinguished Humanities Professor at University of Tennessee. He has written several monographs on Friedrich Nietzsche and translated several books by Nietzsche into English. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
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Evelyn O'Callaghan
#37714
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Evelyn O'Callaghan is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies. She was the first Jamaican woman to win a Rhodes Scholarship. Biography O'Callaghan was born in Nigeria to parents of Irish descent. She moved to Jamaica as a small child, and attended Mount Alvernia High School in Montego Bay. O'Callaghan completed her undergraduate education at Ireland's University College Cork, which her father had attended. She was Jamaica's Rhodes Scholar for 1978, the first woman to be selected for the honour, and subsequently completed a Master of Letters degree at Wolfson College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#4499
Park Byeongseon
#85529
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Park Byeongseon was a librarian and historian of the Republic of Korea. Park studied history education at Seoul National University, graduating in 1950. In 1955 she moved to France, to study Korean antiquities. Park pursued her doctorate at Paris Diderot University and became a lecturer at the Paris University. In 1967 she was employed as a special researcher at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where she discovered in 1972 the second volume of JikjiSimcheYojeol, the world’s oldest extant book, printed with movable metal type, while sorting out Korean-related materials at the library.
Go to Profile#4500
Thomas Gallant
#59079
Overall Influence
Thomas W. Gallant is a historian who specializes in modern Greek history and archaeology. He is holder of the Nicholas Family Endowed Chair in Modern Greek History at the University of California, San Diego. From 2002 to 2007 he held the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair of Modern Greek History at York University in Toronto. Before that he was professor of Greek history and anthropology as well as a member of the Center for Greek Studies at the University of Florida.
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