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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#6751
Christina Davis
#183916
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Christina Davis is an American poet most notably recognized for two collections of poetry that deal with philosophically questioning common ideas and emotions: An Ethic, published in 2013, and Forth A Raven, published in 2006. In An Ethic, Davis addresses the grief and darkness of a father's death, the challenges of conventional constructs of life on earth and an afterlife somewhere else. This seems to be a theme building on ideas she explored in Forth A Raven. She phases it simply as "There is no this or that world." As one reviewer wrote, "What follows is a rigorous meditation on this premis...
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Kiwan Sung
#184640
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Kiwan Sung is a Korean poet and musician. He is noted for his avant-garde, experimental poems in the literary world. He aims to write poetry that is completely different from any preexisting poems and has tried many experimental attempts, such as putting music and poetry together. Sung's major work is the poetry collection Rieul . He is currently working as a professor of sound art.
Go to Profile#6753
A. Langley Searles
#123002
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Arthur Langley Searles was an American chemist, a science fiction enthusiast and bibliographer and historian of the field, from Bronxville, New York. Searles is best known for the scholarly science fiction fanzine Fantasy Commentator, which he published and edited. Searles published twenty-eight issues of Fantasy Commentator between 1943 and 1953, then resumed publication in 1978 with number 29; the last issue appeared in 2004. It was nominated for the 1946 Hugo Award for Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. The Immortal Storm, 1954, Sam Moskowitz' pioneering history of science fiction fandom, was originally serialized in Fantasy Commentator between 1945 and 1952.
Go to Profile#6754
Roger Jones
#181576
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Roger Jones is an American poet. Life Roger Jones received his B.A. and M.A. at Sam Houston State University, before earning his Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University in 1986. He has had a wide publication record over the past thirty years that includes poetry in traditional western forms as well as haiku, tanka and haibun. Jones currently teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, for the Texas State University MFA. He lives in San Marcos, Texas with his wife and two children.
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Lawrence Richardson Jr.
#183628
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Lawrence Richardson Jr. was an American classicist and ancient historian educated at Yale University who was a member of the faculty of classics at Duke University from 1966 to 1991. He was married to the classical archaeologist Emeline Hill Richardson. Richardson received numerous fellowships, including a Fulbright and a Guggenheim, and support from the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and field director of the Academy's Cosa excavations . He was a resident of the American Academy in Rome and was the its Mellon professor-in-charge of the School of Classical Studies .
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Richard Lyons
#121449
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Richard Eugene Lyons was an American poet, and Professor of English at North Dakota State University from 1950 to 1982. Life He joined with the newly organized North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies in its investigation of the culture, history, and heritage of North Dakota.
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Dawn-Michelle Baude
#115181
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dawn-Michelle Baude is an American poet, journalist and educator. Biography Born in southern Illinois, Baude moved to San Diego, California, in 1977 with her first husband Angelo Kolokithas . Baude received her undergraduate degree from San Diego State University. While pursuing her graduate degree at New College of California, she was influenced by Robert Duncan and other Bay Area writers active in the 1980s. She received her MA from New College in 1986. She earned an MFA from Mills College shortly thereafter.
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Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon
#90147
Overall Influence
Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon is a published contributor to the field of Education. She is the Director of the Master of Science in Education Program at Northwestern University, where she is also a professor in the School of Education and Social Policy. She teaches with a focus in the philosophy of education, teacher education, interpretive discussion, and philosophy of psychology. Haroutunian-Gordon began teaching in the Glencoe area of Illinois - she taught sixth grade for five years. She left the faculty of the Department of Education at University of Chicago in 1991, and soon came to Northwestern University to direct the Master of Science in Education Program.
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Marla Gibbs
#136492
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Marla Gibbs is an American actress, singer, comedian, writer and television producer whose career spans seven decades. Gibbs is known for her role as George Jefferson's maid, Florence Johnston, in the CBS sitcom The Jeffersons , for which she received five nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
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Jessica Treadway
#173871
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jessica Treadway is an American short story writer. Life She was raised in Albany, New York. She graduated from the State University of New York at Albany, and from Boston University, with an MA. She worked as a reporter for United Press International. She held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and taught at Tufts University. She teaches at Emerson College.
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Mena Webb
#97605
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Wilhelmena Katherine Fuller "Mena" Webb was an American writer and editor. She taught writing classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Evening College, was a columnist and society editor at The Herald-Sun, a novelist, and the author of a biography on the industrialist Julian Carr.
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Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
#182723
Overall Influence
Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley is an Indigenous American writer and poet. Benjamin belongs to the Onondaga Nation. He is most recognized for his collections: Colonize Me and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot . He has also released another collection, Dēmos: An American Multitude .
Go to Profile#6763
Robert Latham
#109259
Overall Influence
1912 - 1995 (83 years)
Robert Clifford Latham CBE, MA, FBA was Fellow and Pepys Librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and joint editor of The Diary of Samuel Pepys . Early life and education Latham was born on 11 March 1912 in Audley, Staffordshire. He was educated at Wolstanton Grammar School, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a double First Class Honours Degree in history.
Go to Profile#6764
Olga Lepeshinskaya
#46931
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Olga Vasilyevna Lepeshinskaya was a Soviet ballerina. She was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1951. Childhood Lepeshinskaya was born to an old Polish noble family in Kyiv, Russian Empire . Her grandfather, Vasily Pavlovich Lepeshinsky, was arrested as a member of the revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya. Her father, Vasily Vasilyevich Lepeshinsky, was a railway engineer, one of the builders of the Chinese Eastern Railway.
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Maren Linett
#178035
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Maren Tova Linett is a literary critic and Professor of English at Purdue University. Her research focuses on modernist literature and Jewish studies, disability studies, and bioethics, and her major works include Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness , Bodies of Modernism , and Literary Bioethics . She has also published work in academic journals such as the Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Medical Humanities.
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Peter Young
#123985
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Ford Young is an American painter. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings that have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe since the 1960s. His work is associated with Minimal Art, Post-minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Young has participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions and he has had more than forty solo exhibitions in important contemporary art galleries throughout his career. He currently lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
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Dhwanil Parekh
#154792
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Dhwanil Ravindrabhai Parekh is a Gujarati language poet, critic and playwright from Gujarat, India. His significant works include Dariyo Bhalene Maane , Antim Yuddha and Sanket . He won Yuva Puraskar of Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi for his work Antim Yuddha in 2011. He is also a recipient of Yuva Gaurav Puraskar of 2008 instituted by Gujarat Sahitya Akademi.
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Beth Holmgren
#177210
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Beth Holmgren is an American literary critic and a cultural historian in Polish and Russian studies. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University. Recognised for her scholarship in Russian women's studies and Polish cultural history , she is working on a multicultural history of fin-de-siecle Warsaw. Before coming to Duke, she taught at the University of California-San Diego and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . She earned her B.A at Grinnell College, and two master's degrees and and her doctoral doctorate at Harvard Univer...
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Daniel Gutstein
#173185
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Dan Gutstein is an American writer and vocalist. His writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, Best American Poetry, storySouth, PANK, DIAGRAM, Fiction, and elsewhere. He has received grants and awards from the Maryland State Arts Council. While he was teaching at George Washington University the web site Rate My Professors named him the 2010–2011 "hottest" professor in America.
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Augustin Deac
#107311
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Augustin Deac was a Romanian author and history professor. Biography Augustin Deac was born in Giurtelecu Şimleului, Transylvania, into a Greek Catholic family. His early school years were at Şimleul Silvaniei and Zalău. He graduated from the Faculty of History and Archaeology, University of Cluj, as assistant to the academician Constantin Daicoviciu. He was awarded his doctorate at the University of Bucharest, where he was a lead researcher in the Institute of History and Political Studies.
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Gary Young
#178824
Overall Influence
Gary Young is a British screenwriter who is perhaps best known for writing the film Harry Brown starring Michael Caine. He has also written Madam Samurai a graphic novel series with Eagle Award-winning artist David Hitchcock.
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Larry McMurtry
#178243
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Larry Jeff McMurtry was a prolific American novelist, essayist, prominent book collector, bookseller and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By , The Last Picture Show , and Terms of Endearment , which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations .
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Norman Kelvin
#139775
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Norman Kelvin was an American scholar of English. He was Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY. Kelvin was a recipient of a 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Carol Bergé
#178361
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Carol Bergé was an American poet, highly active in the literary, performing and visual arts renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. In the 1980s a scandal in academia and her choice to fictionalize it cost her teaching jobs as well as support from the publishing industry. From there she championed antiquing as a profession, taking an extended sabbatical from writing until the last few years of her life, when she completed two books, both published posthumously.
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Enid Dame
#124587
Overall Influence
1943 - 2003 (60 years)
Enid Dame was an American poet, fiction writer, teacher, editor, and publisher. For many years, she and her husband, poet Donald Lev, lived in Brooklyn and in High Falls, New York, where they edited and published the literary tabloid Home Planet News. She was on the faculty of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where she served as Associate Director of the Writing Program.
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Katsumoto Saotome
#158257
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Katsumoto Saotome was a Japanese writer and children's book author.
Go to Profile#6777
Mark Beyer
#184907
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mark Beyer is an American novelist, journalist and educator. He is originally from Franklin Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He is noted for his novel The Village Wit, a story of "deception, betrayal, and dark passion."
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Diana Buitron-Oliver
#186874
Overall Influence
1946 - 2002 (56 years)
Diana Buitron-Oliver was an American classical archaeologist and curator, specializing in Greek vase painting. Life Buitron-Oliver began her university studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts under German-American art historian Dietrich von Bothmer at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She completed her doctoral thesis in 1976 on the vase paintings of the Greek painter Douris .
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Phillip Brian Harper
#181432
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Phillip Brian Harper is a literary scholar and cultural critic. He currently serves as Program Director for Higher Learning at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was previously Dean for the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Harper is best known for his work in modern and contemporary literature, African American literature and culture, and gender and sexuality studies.
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Åse Hiorth Lervik
#182626
Overall Influence
1933 - 1997 (64 years)
Åse Hiorth Lervik was a Norwegian literary researcher. Biography Lervik was born in Oslo on 2 June 1933. Her doctorate thesis from 1971 was a study on Henrik Ibsen's play Brand. She was professor at the University of Tromsø from 1972. She was secretary for Edda. Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research from 1962, and editor of the journal from 1972 to 1985.
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G. Ross Roy
#175768
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
George Ross Roy was a Canadian scholar who specialized in Scottish literature, best known as editor of the long-standard edition of The Letters of Robert Burns, 2 vols. , as a collector of Burns books and manuscripts, and as founder and for nearly 50 years sole editor of the journal Studies in Scottish Literature, the first refereed academic journal in the field.
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Rose Leiman Goldemberg
#178359
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Rose Leiman Goldemberg is an American playwright, screenwriter, poet, and author of fiction and non-fiction books and stories. Goldemberg's Letters Home, about the life of Sylvia Plath and her mother, has been translated into numerous languages and been honored all over the world. Like Letters Home, Goldemberg's plays frequently incorporate biographical material, as with Sophie , about entertainer Sophie Tucker; and Picon Pie , about Yiddish theater actress Molly Picon. Her plays have been produced widely Off-Broadway, in venues throughout the United States, and internationally.
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Michael Penn
#116363
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Michael Penn is the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, and formerly taught at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. His writings include the book Kissing Christians: Ritual, Community, and the Late Ancient Church . He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and other grants for studies of the Syriac Christians and their relationship to Islam. He was quoted in USA Today regarding the veracity of the Gospel of Judas.
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Myra L. Uhlfelder
#168460
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Myra L. Uhlfelder was a professor of classics at Bryn Mawr. She is known for her work on classical and Medieval Latin. Career Uhlfelder studied at the University of Cincinnati , and completed a PhD at Bryn Mawr in 1952 under the supervision of Berthe Marie Marti. Her dissertation was published as 'De proprietate sermonum uel rerum. A Study and Critical Edition of a Set of Verbal Distinctions in the series Papers and monographs of the American Academy in Rome. She taught at Sweet Briar College for 1950-2 and at the State University of Iowa, 1952–63, where she became assistant professor. In 196...
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Gabriel Jackson
#71579
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Gabriel Jackson was an American Hispanist, historian and journalist. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York in 1921. After his retirement he lived in Barcelona, Spain. A victim of McCarthyism, he studied at Harvard and Stanford before attaining his doctorate at Université de Toulouse. A Fulbright scholar , he obtained his professorship in 1965 and was Professor Emeritus at University of California, San Diego.
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Ann Catrin Apstein-Müller
#185111
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ann Catrin Apstein-Müller was born on 13 April 1973 in Gräfelfing, near Munich, Bavaria, and is a German poet and translator. She lives and works in Augsburg. Life and work Ann grew up in a Munich suburb, where she finished school with the Abitur in 1992. After that she studied German literature and American literature and Media law at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and trained as a Bookseller. After ten years of part-time work in a bookshop, which she used to build up her freelance business, she now works as a freelance translator and editor for literary and specialized texts. She st...
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Derek P. Scales
#186481
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Derek Percival Scales was an Australian literary scholar and former Professor of French and Dean of Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University. He was known for his works on Aldous Huxley and Alphonse Karr.
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Martha Rhodes
#133427
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Martha Rhodes is an American poet, teacher, and publisher. Biography Martha Rhodes was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her B.A. from The New School for Social Research and her M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She has taught at The New School University, Emerson College, and at the University of California, Irvine's MFA Program. She teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers A founding editor of Four Way Books, she serves as Publisher and Executive Editor for the award-winning literary press. She has been interviewed in The New York T...
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Valentí Fàbrega
#180139
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Valentí Fàbrega i Escatllar is a Catalan Philologist and Theologian, who lives since 1971 in Cologne. Life Valentí Fàbrega i Escatllar was born in 1931 in Barcelona. He belonged until 1971 to the Jesuit Order. During this time he got several university degrees . He became Doctor of Theology in the University of Innsbruck. He studied for two years in the Protestant Faculty of Theology of the Heidelberg University. He was also temporary teacher in the Theology College of the Jesuits in Sant Cugat del Vallès and in the Comillas Pontifical University . Because of a two-year grant for research th...
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Martha Reeves
#102926
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Martha Reeves is a vowed Anglican solitary , with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, as bishop-protector. A graduate of the Madeira School , she is also a Stanford-educated professor of theology who has written numerous articles and books under the name "Maggie Ross" as well as translated a number of Carthusian Novice Conferences. Reeves, at one time Desmond Tutu's spiritual director, was Bell Distinguished Professor in Anglican and Ecumenical Studies appointed to the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Kendall College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tulsa. In 199...
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Kathy Eden
#180449
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Kathy Eden is an American professor of literature. She is the Chavkin Family Professor of English and Professor of Classics at Columbia University. Biography Eden grew up on Long Island, the daughter of a surgeon and a homemaker. She obtained her BA from Smith College, where she studied under Karl Paul Donfried, and PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Her research has included Renaissance humanism and the history of rhetorical and poetic theory in antiquity. She also teaches the Core Curriculum for Columbia undergraduates. Her students in academia included former Modern Lan...
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Alessandro Agostinelli
#180150
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Alessandro Agostinelli is an Italian writer, journalist and poet. Alessandro Agostinelli is an Italian writer, journalist and poet. Early life Born in Follonica, he obtained a Ph.D. in "history of visual arts and show business".
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David Walton
#100763
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Walton is an American short story writer, novelist and critic. Life He is semi-retired from University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in Oakland, now teaching mainly in the university's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Susan Yuzna
#181613
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Susan Yuzna, a native of Minnesota, is an American poet and professor. Life She has a B.A. in English from the University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana. She has been resident at several artist colonies, including Yaddo, and MacDowell. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Darío Botero
#38420
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Darío Botero Uribe was a Colombian writer, thinker, professor emeritus and teacher at the National University of Colombia; he received a Doctorate degree from the National University with the title of Master. He studied law, political science and philosophy at the same university, where he held the position of Dean of the Faculty of Law, Political and Social Sciences . He developed an original philosophical project that he called Cosmic Vitalism. He was vitalist and utopian. He contributed to Colombian and Latin American thought.
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Leon Weinmann
#185153
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Leon Weinmann is an American poet and scholar. He has taught at various universities such as Southern Connecticut State University, the University of New Haven, and Quinnipiac University. Life Weinmann studied English and Classics at the University of Massachusetts and earned his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, where he concentrated on the influence of ancient Greek and Roman lyric on British poetry.
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Blaine Yorgason
#140101
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Blaine M. Yorgason is a Latter-day Saint novelist who has also written biographies. Yorgason was born in Sanpete County, Utah. He graduated from Brigham Young High School and then served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, primarily in Chicago. Yorgason has bachelor's and master's degrees from Brigham Young University . He was a seminary teacher in the Church Educational System from 1970 to 1977 and taught at BYU from 1977 to 1980.
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Nikolai Figurovsky
#183031
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Nikolai Nikolaevich Figurovsky was a Soviet film director, screenwriter, writer and professor at VGIK. Honored Artist of the Byelorussian SSR . Biography Nikolai Figurovsky was born in Chukhloma into a family of a village schoolteacher Nikolai Mikhailovich Figurovsky who came from a long generation of Russian Orthodox priests. His grandfather Mikhail Ivanovich Figurovsky, a village priest, was arrested and sentenced to death in 1937 during the Great Purge. His brother Yuri Figurovsky , a constructor of radiolocation equipment, served as the head of the Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institut...
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Keith Taylor
#168907
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Keith Taylor is a Canadian poet, translator and professor. Life and work Born in British Columbia, Taylor spent his childhood in Alberta and Indiana. After earning an M.A. in English from Central Michigan University, he worked a variety of odd jobs: the co-host of a radio talk show, a house painter, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer. He also worked at Shaman Drum, a leading independent bookstore, for twenty years. He currently lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and daughter and is a professor in the creative writing program at University of Michigan.
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Julian Pölsler
#142826
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Julian Roman Pölsler is an Austrian film director, theatre director, and screenwriter. Pölsler was born on the Kreuzberg mountain above the village of Sankt Lorenzen im Paltental in Styria, Austria. He studied film directing and production at the University of Music and Performing in Vienna. He also studied directing and dramaturgy at the Institute for Cultural Management in the Max Reinhardt Seminar, after which he worked as an assistant director to Axel Corti.
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