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 female people in Literature,
#2651
Hwang Jini
1506 - 1544 (38 years)
Hwang Jini or Hwang Jin-yi , also known by her gisaeng name Myeongwol , was one of the most famous gisaeng of the Joseon Dynasty. She lived during the reign of King Jungjong. She was noted for her exceptional beauty, charming quick wit, extraordinary intellect, and her assertive and independent nature. She has become an almost myth-like figure in modern Korea, inspiring novels, operas, films, and television series.
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Zona Gale
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Zona Gale , also known by her married name, Zona Gale Breese, was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. The close relationship she had with her parents set the tone for her writing and her personal life. Her books based upon her home town were found to be charming and had an intimate sense of realism, in which she captures the underlying feelings and motivations of her characters. All of her works were written under her maiden name, Zona Gale.
Go to Profile#2653
Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Jean Stafford
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970. Biography She was born in Covina, California, to Mary Ethel and John Richard Stafford, a Western pulp writer. As a youth Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and, with friend James Robert Hightower, won a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936 to 1937.
Go to Profile#2655
Julia de Burgos
1914 - 1953 (39 years)
Julia de Burgos García was a Puerto Rican poet. As an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, she served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was also a civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers.
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Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and his only child with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt. Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican Party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Borah.
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Sally Benson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sally Benson was an American writer of short stories and screenwriter. She is best known for her humorous tales of modern youth collected in Junior Miss and her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis.
Go to Profile#2658
Mary Sidney
1561 - 1621 (60 years)
Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham's verse miscellany Belvidere. Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel's closet drama Cleopatra and of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra . She was also known for translating Petrarch's "Triumph of Death", for the ...
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Yevgenia Ginzburg
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia. Family and early career Born in Moscow, her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg. The family moved to Kazan in 1909. In 1920, she began to study social sciences at Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy. She worked as a rabfak teacher. In April 1934, Ginzburg was officially confirmed as a docent , specializing in the history of the All-Union Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, on May 25, she was named head of the new department of the history of Leninism.
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Marjorie Hope Nicolson
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Marjorie Hope Nicolson was an American literary scholar. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. Early life and education Nicolson was the daughter of Charles Butler Nicolson, editor-in-chief of the Detroit Free Press during World War I and later that paper's correspondent in Washington, DC, and Lissie Hope Morris.
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Babette Deutsch
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Babette Deutsch was an American poet, critic, translator, and novelist. Background Babette Deutsch was born on September 22, 1895, in New York City. Her parents were of Michael Deutsch and Melanie Fisher Deutsch. She matriculated from the Ethical Culture School and Barnard College, graduating in 1917 with a B.A. She published poems in magazines such as the North American Review and the New Republic while she was still a student at Barnard.
Go to Profile#2662
Enid Starkie
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Enid Mary Starkie CBE , was an Irish literary critic, known for her biographical works on French poets. She was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Lecturer and then Reader in the University.
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Christina Stead
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Christina Stead was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations. Christina Stead was a committed Marxist, although she was never a member of the Communist Party. She spent much of her life outside Australia, although she returned before her death.
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Mary Lascelles
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mary Madge Lascelles was a British literary scholar, specialising in Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and Walter Scott. She was vice-principal of Somerville College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1960, and a university lecturer then reader in English literature 1960 from to 1967 at the University of Oxford.
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Edith Birkhead
1889 - 1951 (62 years)
Edith Birkhead was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol and a Noble Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She wrote a pioneering work on Gothic literature: The Tale of Terror . This work described the fascination with supernatural fiction in English literature from the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 on to modern times. She included works from Europe as well as America, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
Go to Profile#2666
Lida Shaw King
1868 - 1932 (64 years)
Lida Shaw King was an American classical scholar and college dean. Biography Lida Shaw King was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Henry Melville King and Susan Ellen Fogg King. She graduated from Vassar College in 1890 and from Brown University in 1894 and continued her graduate studies at Vassar , Radcliffe , Bryn Mawr , and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens where she was awarded the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship. She taught the classics at Vassar and at the Packer Collegiate Institute , and at Brown was assistant professor of classical philology , dea...
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Blanche Colton Williams
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Blanche Colton Williams was an American author, editor, department head and professor of English literature, and pioneer in women’s higher education. She was known for her “groundbreaking work on structure and analysis of the short story” and is credited with having done more for the short story genre than anyone in her lifetime. An 1898 graduate of Industrial Institute and College in Columbus, Mississippi, the first public women’s university in the United States, Williams went on to a three-decade career at Hunter College, a women’s college in New York City.
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Wilmer Cave Wright
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Emily Wilmer Cave Wright was a British-born American classical philologist, and a contributor to the culture and history of medicine. She was a professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she taught Greek. Wright's works include, The Emperor Julian’s relation to the new sophistic and neo-Platonism , A Short History of Greek Literature, from Homer to Julian , Julian , Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists , Against the Galilaeans , Hieronymi Fracastorii de contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri III , and De morbis artificum Bernardini Ramazini diatriba . Giovanni Ma...
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Leigh Brackett
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American science fiction writer known as "the Queen of Space Opera." She was also a screenwriter, known for The Big Sleep , Rio Bravo , and The Long Goodbye . She worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back , elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production. In 1956, her book The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and, along with C. L. Moore, one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2020, she posthumously won a Retro Hugo for her novel The Nemesis...
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Elisabeth Jastrow
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Elisabeth Jastrow was a German-born American classical archaeologist. Her research focus included arulae . Early life and education Elisabeth Anna Marie Jastrow was born October 7, 1890, in Berlin. She came from a family of assimilated German Jews. Her father was the historian and social scientist, Ignaz Jastrow. Through her father, she grew up in a world full of scholars and artists, the sister Lotte Beate Jastrow Hahn later combined education and horticulture.
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Elinor Glyn
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Elinor Glyn was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern standards. She popularized the concept of the it-girl, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and, possibly, on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and, especially, Clara Bow.
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Choe Jeong-hui
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Choe Jeong-hui was one of the most successful early women writers in South Korea. Life She was born in Dancheon, South Hamgyong Province and was educated in Seoul. She worked at a kindergarten in Tokyo and as a journalist in Seoul before starting her writing career in 1931; she worked for the magazine Samcheolli and the newspaper The Chosun Ilbo . She was associated with the Korean Artists' Proletarian Federation, and was jailed in 1934 as a result.
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Emma Roberts
1794 - 1840 (46 years)
Emma Roberts , often referred to as "Miss Emma Roberts", was an English travel writer and poet known for her memoirs about India. In her own time, she was well regarded, and William Jerdan considered her "a very successful cultivator of the belles lettres".
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Alice Werner
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Alice Werner CBE was a writer, poet and teacher of the Bantu languages. Life Alice Werner was one of seven children in the family of Reinhardt Joseph Werner of Mainz, teacher of languages, and his wife, Harriett. Her father travelled extensively during the first fifteen years of her life, and she lived in New Zealand, Mexico, United States and throughout Europe, until the family settled in Tonbridge, England, in 1874.
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Rachel Hunter
1754 - 1813 (59 years)
Rachel Hunter was an English woman novelist of the early 19th century who lived and worked in Norwich. She was a contemporary of Jane Austen. Literary setting Rachel Hunter wrote for the same circulating library readership as Jane Austen, and like the latter she might belittle standard novel conventions in writings like Letitia. Her writings were well known in the Austen circle, one acquaintance describing a state of well-being as "quite Palmerstone", after Hunter's Letters from Mrs Palmerstone.
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Saralabala Sarkar
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Saralabala Sarkar was an Indian Bengali writer. Early life Saralabala Sarkar was born on 10 December 1875 in Katalpora, Nadia District, Bengal Presidency, British Raj. Her ancestral house was in Bhar Ramdia, Faridpur District, Bengal Presidency. She was home schooled. She was married to Sarat Chandra Sarkar when she was twelve years old. Her husband died when she was twenty-three. Her grandmother was Shreemati Rasasundari, a writer herself, notable for her autobiography that provided a keen insight into the life of a 19th-century Bengali housewife.
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Evelyn Eaton
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton was a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, poet and academic known for her early novels set in New France, and later writings which explored spirituality. Life account Born in Montreux, Switzerland, Eaton was the daughter of Canadians Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Isaac Vernon Eaton, an army officer from Nova Scotia, and Myra Fitzrandolph of New Brunswick. Eaton was the younger of two daughters. Lt.-Col. Eaton was killed in 1917, while directing the artillery assault at the battle of Vimy Ridge in France, when Evelyn Eaton was just 14. Evelyn's older sister, Helen Moira...
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Abby Leach
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Abby Leach was as an American educator and professor of Greek and Latin at Vassar College. She was appointed as the first female president of the American Philological Association in 1899. Formative years and family Born in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 28, 1855, Abby Leach was one of five children of Marcus and Eliza Paris Bourne Leach. Her father was an owner of a shoemaking business.
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Antonina Riasanovsky
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Antonina Riasanovsky was a Russian Empire-born writer who, under the pen name Nina Fedorova, wrote The Family, the tenth highest selling fiction book in the United States 1940. The book won the 1940 $10,000 fiction novel prize from the Atlantic Monthly. The Family tells the story of an exiled White Russian family in Tianjin, China.
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Marion Cummings
1876 - 1926 (50 years)
Alice Marion Cummings was a California-born poet, philosopher, and academic. She taught philosophy, psychology, and the history of education for most of her career at University of Arizona. Cummings edited two poetry anthologies and her own poetry was published in popular periodicals such as Smart Set, Harper's, Commonwealth, Lippincott's, and The Forum. Cummings had a short-lived but intense friendship with poet Sara Teasdale, who wrote several poems about Cummings. The two continued their friendship through correspondence.
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Mary Nourse
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Mary Augusta Nourse was an American educator and writer on China and the Far East, and a co-founder of Jinling College in Nanjing. The best-known of her several books was her first, a popular history of China titled The Four Hundred Million.
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Gertrud Herzog-Hauser
1894 - 1953 (59 years)
Gertrud Herzog-Hauser was an Austrian classical philologist. She was specialised in ancient mythology and religion as well as Latin literature and published Latin school textbooks. She campaigned for equal rights for women in education.
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Clara Beranger
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Clara Beranger was an American screenwriter of the silent film era and a member of the original faculty of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Biography Beranger was born Clara Strouse in Baltimore, Maryland, to Benjamin and Fannie Strouse. Her family was of German Jewish descent. Benjamin and his brothers had emigrated and opened a dry-goods store in Indiana.
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Jennifer Clarvoe
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jennifer S. Clarvoe is an American poet and English professor at Kenyon College. She has published two books of poetry, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2001.
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Ruth Bellamy
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Ruth Bellamy , also known as Ruth Bellamy Brownwood, was an American writer, a journalist, dramatist, songwriter, actress, and poet, based in North Carolina and Japan. Early life and education Ruth Elizabeth Bellamy was born in Enfield, North Carolina, the daughter of Phesington Sugg Bellamy and Lula Spruill Bellamy. Her father was a businessman. Her mother, known as "Mamee", was a well-known social figure in Rocky Mount in her later years.
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Fanny Brice
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Fania Borach , known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedian, illustrated song model, singer, and actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.
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Viola Brothers Shore
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Viola Brothers Shore was an American author who worked in a variety of mediums from the 1910s through the 1930s. Married three times, she began her writing career as a poet and a writer of short stories and articles or magazines. Toward the end of the silent film era, she began writing screenplays, and eventually expanded into theatrical plays and novels. Her daughter, Wilma Shore, was also a successful writer.
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H. B. Goodwin
1827 - 1893 (66 years)
Hannah Elizabeth Bradbury Goodwin Talcott was an American novelist, poet and educator from Maine who resided in Boston for many years. She wrote under various pen names, including H. B., H. E. B., H. B. G., Mrs. H. B. Goodwin, and Mrs. Goodwin-Talcott.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Margaret Schlauch
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Margaret Schlauch was a scholar of medieval studies at New York University and later, after she left the United States for political reasons in 1951, at the University of Warsaw, where she headed the departments of English and General Linguistics. Her work covered many topics but included focuses on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse literature.
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Barbara P. McCarthy
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire. Education McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A.
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Pearl S. Buck
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
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Gertrude Smith
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Smith was the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on Greek law and her longstanding involvement in and support of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was the first woman to be president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and is currently the only woman to have been president of CAMWS and the American Philological Association.
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Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
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Elizabeth Hazelton Haight
1872 - 1964 (92 years)
Elizabeth Hazelton "Hazel" Haight was an American classical scholar and academic who specialised in Latin teaching. She spent most of her career working for Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Haight was the second female president of the American Philological Association, and first woman to chair the Advisory Council of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. She published eleven books in the field of Classics, as well as histories of Vassar and James Monroe Taylor. Her works focused on Latin Literature and the Greek novel, before she began the study of symbolism in Latin literature in her final publications.
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Eleanor Duckett
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College . Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Ma...
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Silva Tipple New Lake
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Silva Tipple New Lake was an American classics professor, archaeologist, and scholar of the New Testament. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, for work on Greek, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts.
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Concha Meléndez
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dr. Concha Meléndez was an educator, poet, and writer. She was the first woman to belong to the Puerto Rican Academy of Languages. Early years Meléndez was born and raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she received her primary and secondary education. After graduating from high school she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico where she earned her teacher's certificate.
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Flora Belle Ludington
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964. Life Born in Huron County, Michigan, Ludington moved to Wenatchee, Washington, as a young girl. At fourteen, she began her library career as a volunteer in the Carnegie public library in Wanatchee. She worked as an assistant in the University of Washington library, where she received a bachelor's degree in librarianship in 1920. She left Washington to be a reference librarian at Mills College, where she went on to study and receive a master's degree in history fin 1925.
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Caroline Brady
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Caroline Agnes Brady was an American philologist who specialised in Old English and Old Norse works. Her works included the 1943 book The Legends of Ermanaric, based on her doctoral dissertation, and three influential papers on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University, among other places.
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