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,

#4501

Mary del Priore

Mary del Priore
#164803
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Mary Lucy Murray Del Priore is a Brazilian historian and teacher. She wrote several books on the history of everyday Brazilian people during the colonial, imperial and Republican periods. Career Mary Del Priore completed her doctorate in Social History at the University of São Paulo and her postdoctoral degree at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France. She taught History in several Brazilian universities, such as the University of São Paulo, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and Universidade Salgado de Oliveira. She collaborates with national and internat...
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#4502

Julián Casanova

Julián Casanova
#97260
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Julián Casanova Ruiz is a Spanish historian. He teaches contemporary history at University of Zaragoza, and has been a visiting professor in US, UK and Latin America universities as well as a recurring visiting professor at Hungary's Central European University. He is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, University of Michigan. He's a columnist for and frequent talk show guest at radio station Onda Cero.
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#4503

S. Ilan Troen

#93420
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Ilan Troen is an Israeli scholar. He is the Karl, Harry and Helen Stoll Professor of Israel Studies at Brandeis University. Biography Selwyn Ilan Troen grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts area. He is a graduate of Brandeis, with an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
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#4504

Joaquín Yarza Luaces

Joaquín Yarza Luaces
#136864
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Joaquín Yarza Luaces was a Spanish art historian. Professor Yarza began his professional career in Madrid. He began his work as a teacher in Barcelona in 1974, where he later died. Since then, he has been a guide to medieval studies with special prominence in Renaissance subjects.
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#4505

Grace Karskens

#122092
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Grace Elizabeth Karskens, is an Australian historian who is professor of history at the University of New South Wales. Career Grace Elizabeth Karskens, born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1958, graduated from the University of Sydney with degrees in both history and historical archaeology. She was awarded a Master of Arts in 1986, and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Sydney in 1995.
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#4506

Jürgen Kocka

#165006
Overall Influence
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#4507

Mark Mersiowsky

#140864
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Mark Mersiowsky is a German historian and diplomatist. He is professor of History of the Middle Ages at the University of Stuttgart. Life Mark Mersiowsky attended primary school in Kabul from 1969 to 1973 and from 1973 to 1982. In 1982 he began his studies of Middle and Modern History, Historical Auxiliary Sciences and Art History at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, the Universität Wien and the Philipps-Universität Marburg, which he completed in 1988 with the Magister Artium at the WWU Münster. From 1988 he worked as a research assistant at the University of Münster. In 1992, h...
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#4508

Slava Gerovitch

Slava Gerovitch
#40730
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Vyacheslav Alexandrovich Gerovitch is an American historian of science of Russian origin, considered a leading scholar on Soviet space program history in the US and Cybernetics in the Soviet Union.
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#4509

Clare Griffiths

#101006
Overall Influence
Clare Victoria Joanne Griffiths, FRHistS, is a historian and academic. Since 2016, she has held the Chair in Modern History at Cardiff University. Career Clare Victoria Joanne Griffiths read modern history at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She carried on there to complete her doctoral studies under Ross McKibbin's supervision; her DPhil was awarded in 1996 for her thesis "Labour and the countryside: rural strands in the British Labour movement, 1900–1939". Alongside lecturing at the University of Reading, Griffiths then spent four years at Wadham College, Oxford, as Pat Thompson Junior Research Fellow.
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#4510

José-Augusto França

José-Augusto França
#74955
Overall Influence
1922 - 2021 (99 years)
José Augusto Rodrigues França was a Portuguese historian, art critic, and professor. Awards and honors Medal of Honor of the City of Lisbon, 1992.Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry .Grand Cross of the Order of Public Instruction .Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry .Medal of Cultural Merit
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#4511

Havi Dreifuss

Havi Dreifuss
#102559
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Havi Dreifuss is a professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv and head of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at Yad Vashem. She specializes in the history of the Holocaust in Poland and Polish-Jewish relations during World War II.
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#4512

Katharine Park

#121173
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Katharine Park is a Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. She specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, and the female body in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as well as categories and practices of experience and observation in the Middle Ages. Park was awarded a Marshall Scholarship in 1974. She received her M.Phil in the Combined Historical Studies of the Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and earned a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard in 1981.
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#4513

Brian Abel-smith

#165306
Overall Influence
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#4514

Albert Goodwin

#104062
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Albert Goodwin was a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and later Professor of Modern History in the University of Manchester. In his book of the same name, he presented his liberal interpretation of the French Revolution as 'a merciless conflict between aristocracy and democracy' caused by the refusal of Louis XVI to accept the role of a constitutional monarch.
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#4515

Murray Murphey

#20436
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Murray Griffin Murphey was an American historian and philosopher. A native of Colorado Springs, Colorado born to Bradford and Margaret Murphey on February 22, 1928, Murray Murphey graduated from Harvard University and earned a doctorate from Yale University. He began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania as a Rockefeller Fellow shortly after completing his studies in 1954. Murphey joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1956, and became a full professor in 1966. He retired in 2000. Over the course of his career, Murphy earned awards from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the American Studies Association.
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#4516

Per Fuglum

#165160
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Per Fuglum was a Norwegian historian and professor. He was born in Oslo. In 1957 he received his doctorate. Fuglum was assistant professor of history at the University of Oslo from 1961 to 1973, and professor of history at the University of Trondheimfrom 1973 to 1993. Fuglum was co-editor of Historisk tidsskrift from 1965 to 1971. Among his works are biographies of the Norwegian prime ministers Ole Richter and Gunnar Knudsen . He has also written books on the history of temperance in Norway.
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#4517

Laura Engelstein

#129066
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Laura Engelstein is an American historian who specializes in Russian and European history. She serves as Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University. Her numerous publications have included Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict ; The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia ; Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale ; Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path ; and Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 . In 2000, she co-edited an essay collection with Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History.
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#4518

Janet M. Hartley

#117889
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Janet Margaret Hartley FRHS is an emeritus professor of international history at the London School of Economics. Early life Janet Hartley was born in 1954. She studied history at University College, London, before completing her doctorate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London.
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#4519

Grigoriy Lvovitch Bondarevsky

#112712
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Grigoriy Lvovitch Bondarevsky was a Russian academician, writer, historian, Indologist and a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the erstwhile Soviet Union. He was the author of 27 books and over 300 articles, majority of them covering Asian topics. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian award of the Padma Shri in 2000.
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#4520

Paul M. Cobb

#113226
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Paul M. Cobb is an American historian of the medieval Islamic world. He is currently Professor of Islamic History at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of interest include Islamic relations with the West, historiography, and the history of travel and exploration. He is, in particular, a recognized authority on the history of the Crusades in their Islamic context.
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#4521

Grzegorz Berendt

Grzegorz Berendt
#86289
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Grzegorz Berendt is a Polish historian. He is a professor at the University of Gdańsk and affiliated with the Institute of National Remembrance. Berendt is the director of the Museum of the Second World War.
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#4522

Elaine Treharne

Elaine Treharne
#97701
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Elaine Treharne MArAd FSA FRHistS FEA FLSW was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1964. She is a Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, Courtesy Professor of German Studies and of Comparative Literature, and a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She was at the University of Leicester for eighteen years as a lecturer, then professor, head of department, and dean, before emigrating to the USA. She is a Welsh medievalist, focusing on Manuscript Studies, Early English literature, and the History of Text Technologies, particularly of the handmade book.
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#4523

Jerzy Strzelczyk

#91621
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Prof. Dr. Hab. Jerzy Strzelczyk is Polish historian, professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University. External links Biography
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#4524

Ralph Houlbrooke

#157558
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Ralph Houlbrooke is emeritus professor of early modern history at the University of Reading. He is chairman of the Berkshire Record Society. Selected publications Publications include:. The Letter Book of John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, compiled during the years 1571-5 Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520-1570 The English Family 1450-1700 with George Parfitt , The Courtship Narrative of Leonard Wheatcroft, Derbyshire Yeoman English Family Life, 1576-1716: an Anthology from Diaries , Death, Ritual and Bereavement Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-17...
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#4525

Minna Rozen

Minna Rozen
#82725
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Minna Rozen is a professor emeritus at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. Rozen served as head of the Diaspora Research Center at Tel Aviv University, and specializes in the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan states.
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#4526

Stephen Randolph

#82787
Overall Influence
Stephen P. Randolph is an American historian who served as Director of the Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State from 2012 to 2017. Education Randolph graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1974 and then earned a MA in History of Science from the Johns Hopkins University in 1975 and a Ph.D. from George Washington University in 2005.
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#4527

Nkechi Agwu

#34003
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Nkechi Madonna Adeleine Agwu is a mathematics teacher. Agwu is a naturalized American citizen, tenured faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York, and was a director of the college's Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.
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#4528

Beryl Satter

#64672
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Beryl Satter is an American historian and a professor of history at Rutgers University. Life Satter was born on 14 January 1959 as the daughter of civil rights lawyer Mark J. Satter, who fought for black families suffering under the ruthless and oftentimes racist conditions that pervaded Chicago's real estate market. In 1965, her father died of heart failure when she was just six years old.
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#4529

James Raven

#89669
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
James Russell Raven LittD FBA FSA is a British scholar specializing in the history of the book. His published works include The English Novel 1770-1829 , The Business of Books , and What is the History of the Book? . As of 2019, he was Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Essex.
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#4530

Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff

#39069
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff is an Israeli-American professor of rabbinic literature at Yeshiva University's Caroline & Joseph Gruss Institute in Jerusalem. Biography Rabbi Rakeffet attended Bnei Akiva as a youth. Meir Kahane was one of his madrichim . Rabbi Rakeffet met his future wife Malkah while giving a shiur at Bnei Akiva.
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#4531

Fernand Braudel

#166181
Overall Influence
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#4532

Owen Harries

#73221
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Owen Harries was a leading Australian foreign-policy intellectual and founding editor of The National Interest magazine in Washington, DC. Early life and education Harries was born in Wales in 1930 and educated at Oxford University, where his tutor was political theorist John Plamenatz and his lecturers included philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin.
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#4533

Charles Powell

#115790
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Charles Tito Powell CMG is a Spanish-British historian who studied History and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. His D. Phil. thesis was on Spain's transition to democracy. He was a Junior Research Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, a lecturer in History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and an J. A. Pye Research Fellow at University College, Oxford.
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#4534

John Davies

John Davies
#78578
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
John Davies, FLSW was a Welsh historian, and a television and radio broadcaster. He attended university at Cardiff and Cambridge and taught Welsh at Aberystwyth. He wrote a number of books on Welsh history, including A History of Wales .
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#4535

Kenneth O'Reilly

#97142
Overall Influence
Kenneth O'Reilly is an American professor emeritus of 20th-century U.S. history who has written several books on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its impact on the Federal government of the United States of America.
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#4536

Geoffrey Holmes

#119653
Overall Influence
1928 - 1993 (65 years)
Geoffrey Shorter Holmes, was an English historian of early eighteenth century English politics. Academic career Holmes was born in Sheffield, England and educated at Woodhouse Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating with a BA in 1948. He served in the British Army in India before returning to Oxford in 1950 as a research assistant to David Ogg. In 1952 he graduated with a B.Litt.
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#4537

Christina Twomey

#74236
Overall Influence
Christina Louise Twomey, is an Australian historian and academic. Education and career Twomey was born in Queensland and attended Mac.Robertson Girls' High School in Melbourne. She graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours. She returned to the university in 1992 to complete her Doctor of Philosophy, graduating in 1996. She is the head of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. Her area of study focuses on the cultural history of war.
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#4538

Rafał Syska

#126812
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Rafał Syska is a Polish film historian and associate professor in the Audiovisual Arts Department of Jagiellonian University in Cracow. First he was specialized in the phenomenon of violence in cinema , then he focused on strategies of authorship in American cinema and contemporary minimalistic slow-cinema, especially its neomodernism tendencies
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#4539

Burghart Schmidt

#115083
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Burghart Schmidt is a German historian. Vice-President of the University of Montpellier III. Education Burghart Schmidt went to school in Bremen. From 1982 to 1987, he completed studies of History, Geography and Philosophy at the University of Bordeaux .
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#4540

Laura Otis

#27065
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Laura Otis is an American historian of science, and Professor of English, at Emory University. She graduated from Yale University with a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry in 1983, and from the University of California, San Francisco with an M.A. in Neuroscience in 1988, and from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1991.
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#4541

Lois Horton

#142335
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Lois E. Horton was an American historian, specializing in African American history. She co-authored numerous foundational studies of nineteenth-century African American history and abolitionism. Career She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1977. A highly respected, interdisciplinary scholar, she was especially well known for groundbreaking work on antebellum Black history and abolitionism. Much of her work was co-authored with the eminent historian James Oliver Horton, who also was her husband. Together, the Hortons published some of the foundational work on nineteenth-century African American history, greatly contributing to historians' understanding of U.S.
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#4542

Øystein Rottem

#77335
Overall Influence
1946 - 2004 (58 years)
Øystein Rottem was a Norwegian philologist, literary historian and literary critic. Personal life Rottem was born on the island of Hemnskjela in what was then the municipality of Heim. His parents were Sverre Bernhardsen Rottem and Solveig Terese Hassel. He was married to Gerd Synnøve Vigeland from 1969 to 1989, and to Bente Findling-Nielsen from 1991. He died from cancer in Copenhagen on 5 December 2004.
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#4543

Grover Furr

#93552
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Grover Carr Furr III is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist fringe views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 government-created famine in Soviet Ukraine, was not deliberate, describing it as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists, that the Katyn massacre was committed by the Nazi Schutzstaffel and not the Soviet NKVD, that all defendants i...
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#4544

Mihnea Berindei

#105909
Overall Influence
1948 - 2016 (68 years)
Mihnea Berindei was a Romanian-born French historian. He was born in Bucharest, the son of historian Dan Berindei, and studied at the Faculty of History of the University of Bucharest from 1966 to 1970. Under the guidance of , he learned old Turkic and became interested in the study of the Ottoman Empire. He went to Turkey to find documentation, and then went to Paris, where he studied at the École pratique des hautes études, graduating in 1972.
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#4545

John Fauvel

#64556
Overall Influence
1947 - 2001 (54 years)
John Fauvel was a British mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education Fauvel was from Scotland, where his father was a principal. Ian Blair was a cousin. John attended Trinity College, Glenalmond. He then studied mathematics at the University of Essex, where he graduated in 1970, and at the University of Warwick, where he obtained his master's degree in 1973. In 1977, he obtained his MPhil from the University of Warwick under the supervision of David Orme Tall, with a thesis entitled Fuzzy Theory.
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#4546

Jean Bérenger

#58478
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Jean Bérenger is a French historian, director of research at the CNRS, professor at the Faculty of History of the University of Strasbourg and, starting from 1990, at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
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#4547

Oscar Nuccio

#52199
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Oscar Nuccio was an Italian historian of economic thought. He taught the history of economic thought in the departments of political science at the University of Pisa, the University of Teramo, and Sapienza University of Rome, always as an associate professor, as he was never awarded tenure.
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#4548

Anthony H. M. Kirk-greene

#167055
Overall Influence
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#4549

Robert Perkinson

#74866
Overall Influence
Robert Perkinson is an American historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is the author of Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire which received the 2011 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.
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#4550

Eric Halladay

#114261
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Eric Halladay was a British historian, academic, and rowing coach. He was Master of Grey College, Durham from 1980 to 1989, Rector of St Aidan's College, Durham from 1990 to 1991, and Principal of St Chad's College, Durham from 1991 to 1994.
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