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 Literature,
#7951
Paul Friedländer
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Paul Friedländer was a German philologist specializing in classical literature. He studied under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff at the University of Berlin. In 1911 he became a Privatdozent and from 1914 Associate Professor in Berlin, becoming a Professor at Marburg University , University of Halle . In 1935, the Nazi regime forced him to resign and in 1938 he was detained in a concentration camp. After his release, he came to the United States, where he taught first at and Johns Hopkins University , as a lecturer and at UCLA .
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Paddy Chayefsky
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for writing both adapted and original screenplays. He was one of the most renowned dramatists of the Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, dramatizing the lives of ordinary Americans. Martin Gottfried wrote in All His Jazz that Chayefsky was "the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism."
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Zhao Jingshen
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Zhao Jingshen was a popular Chinese novelist. Born in Lishui, Zhejiang, he was a member of the Seminar in literature. He also contributed to the field of translation and folk opera, and funded other writers.
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Archibald MacMechan
1862 - 1933 (71 years)
Archibald McKellar MacMechan was a Canadian academic at Dalhousie University and writer. His works deal mainly with Nova Scotia and its history. The Halifax Disaster was an official history of the Halifax Explosion.
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Johann Jakob Reiske
1716 - 1774 (58 years)
Johann Jakob Reiske was a German scholar and physician. He was a pioneer in the fields of Arabic and Byzantine philology as well as Islamic numismatics. Biography Reiske was born at Zörbig, in the Electorate of Saxony.
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Walther von der Vogelweide
1170 - 1230 (60 years)
Walther von der Vogelweide was a Minnesänger who composed and performed love-songs and political songs in Middle High German. Walther has been described as the greatest German lyrical poet before Goethe; his hundred or so love-songs are widely regarded as the pinnacle of Minnesang, the medieval German love lyric, and his innovations breathed new life into the tradition of courtly love. He was also the first political poet to write in German, with a considerable body of encomium, satire, invective, and moralising.
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Augusta Webster
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Augusta Webster born in Poole, Dorset as Julia Augusta Davies, was an English poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Biography Augusta was the daughter of Vice-admiral George Davies and Julia Hume, she spent her younger years on board the ship he was stationed, the Griper.
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Graham Hough
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Graham Goulden Hough was an English literary critic, poet, and Professor of English at Cambridge University from 1966 to 1975. Life Graham Hough was born in Great Crosby, Lancashire, the son of Joseph and Clara Hough. He was educated at Prescot Grammar School, the University of Liverpool, and Queens' College, Cambridge. He became a lecturer in English at Raffles College, Singapore, in 1930. In World War II he served as a volunteer with the Singapore Royal Artillery, until taken prisoner and interned in a Japanese prison-camp. After further travelling and teaching in the Far East, Hough returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Christ's College in 1950.
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Herman Grimm
1828 - 1901 (73 years)
Herman Grimm was a German academic and writer. Family and education Grimm's father was Wilhelm Grimm , and his uncle Jakob Grimm , the philologist compilers of indigenous folk tales . His other uncle was the painter engraver Ludwig Emil Grimm . Herman Grimm is believed to have had only one child at a young age, Martin Grimm. From 1841 Herman attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. He belonged to a clique associated with Bettina von Arnim , wife of the late poet Achim von Arnim , and started publishing drama and novels. He began legal and philological studies at the universitie...
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John Davies
1569 - 1626 (57 years)
Sir John Davies was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1597 and 1621. He became Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.
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Johann Friedrich Gronovius
1611 - 1671 (60 years)
Johann Friedrich Gronovius was a German classical scholar, librarian and critic. Born in Hamburg, he studied at several universities and travelled in England, France and Italy. In 1643, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and history at Deventer, and in 1658 to the Greek chair at Leiden, where he remained until his death. In 1665, Gronovius succeeded Antonius Thysius the Younger as the 6th Librarian of Leiden University .
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Karl Elze
1821 - 1889 (68 years)
Karl Friedrich Elze was a German scholar and Shakespearean critic. Life He was the son of Pastor Karl August Wilhelm Elze. He studied classical philology, and modern, but especially English, literature at the University of Leipzig where he obtained his PhD. He was a master for a time in the gymnasium at Dessau, and in 1875 was appointed extraordinary, and in 1876 ordinary, professor of English philology at the University of Halle. The course catalogue for the winter 1875/76 has a four-hour lecture on the history of English literature one hour each day on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
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Otto Friedrich Gruppe
1804 - 1876 (72 years)
Otto Friedrich Gruppe was a German philosopher, scholar-poet and philologist who served as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Poems by Gruppe were set to music by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Karl Löwe, Elise Schmezer, and Franz Schreker. He rediscovered the cycle of Latin elegies by the Augustan poet Sulpicia and demonstrated their poetic value.
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Theophil Spoerri
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Theophil Spoerri , was a Swiss writer and academic. Family Theophil Spoerri was the son of a Methodist Preacher called Jakob Gottlieb Spoerri and of his wife Maria Eugenie Thiele/Spoerri. He had a cousin, also named Theophil Spörri who was a prominent Swiss Methodist theologian and with whom he is sometimes confused.
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Tang Xianzu
1550 - 1616 (66 years)
Tang Xianzu , courtesy name Yireng , was a Chinese playwright of the Ming Dynasty. Biography Tang was a native of Linchuan, Jiangxi and his career as an official consisted principally of low-level positions. He successfully participated in the provincial examinations at the age of 21 and at the imperial examinations at the age of 34. He held official positions in Nanjing, Zhejiang province, Guangdong province etc.
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Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni
1692 - 1768 (76 years)
Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni was an Italian poet and librettist. As a poet Frugoni was one of the best of the school of the Arcadian Academy, and his lyrics and pastorals had great facility and elegance. His collected works were published at Parma in 10 volumes in 1799, and a more complete edition appeared at Lucca in the same year in 15 volumes.
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Victor Aimé Huber
1800 - 1869 (69 years)
Victor Aimé Huber was a German social reformer, travel writer and a literature historian. Huber was born in Stuttgart, Germany. His parents, Ludwig Ferdinand and Therese Huber, née Heyne, were both writers. After the early death of his father, Victor was sent to live with friends of his parents in Hofwil, Switzerland. Victor was just six years old at the time.
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Abdullah Goran
1904 - 1962 (58 years)
Abdulla Goran was a leading Kurdish poet and translator of the 20th century. Biography Abdulla was born in Halabja in 1904 and received his education in local schools and the pedagogical institute in Kirkuk. As a teacher in Kirkuk, he continued his self-education by learning new languages and studying Turkish and Western literature. He took part in radical political and social causes in the 1930s and was frequently arrested until the 14 July Revolution in 1958. He spent much effort on creating a single Kurdish literary language by merging the two Kurdish dialects Kurmanji and Sorani. He was m...
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Anton Dolin
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Sir Anton Dolin was an English ballet dancer and choreographer. Biography Dolin was born in Slinfold in Sussex as Sydney Francis Patrick Chippendall Healey-Kay . He was the second of three sons of Henry George Kay and his wife, Helen Maude Chippendall Healey , from Dublin. He trained at Serafina Astafieva's school at The Pheasantry in London's King's Road. He joined Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1921, was a principal there from 1924. It was Diaghilev who gave Patrick his stage name: at that time the most powerful impresario in world ballet, Diaghilev 'russified' names of his star dan...
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Bernhard Linde
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Bernhard Linde was an Estonian literary and theatre personnel, critic and essayist. In 1927 he graduated from Tartu University in Slavic philology. He was related to Young Estonia movement. 1912-1915 he was the chief of Young Estonia's publishing house. 1919-1924 he was the executive director of the publishing house Varrak. 1940-1941 and 1944-1949 he taught at Tallinn University of Technology.
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Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
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Henry Rago
1915 - 1969 (54 years)
Henry Rago was a poet, educator, and editor. Overview Rago was editor of Poetry Magazine for 14 years from 1955-1969. He was also a Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago jointly in the Divinity School and in the New Collegiate Division. His seminars and research explored the relations between poetry and religion, among other interdisciplinary concerns. He was co-chairman of the program in the History and Philosophy of Religion in the New Collegiate Division.
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Jay Williams
1914 - 1978 (64 years)
Jay Williams was an American author of science fiction , fantasy, historical fiction, non-fiction, and radical theatre. Early life Williams was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of Max and Lillian Jacobson. He cited the experience of growing up as the son of a vaudeville show producer as leading him to pursue his acting career as early as college.
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Ivan von Müller
1830 - 1917 (87 years)
Ivan von Müller was a German classical philologist. Biography He studied philology at the University of Erlangen as a pupil of Ludwig Döderlein and Carl Friedrich Nagelsbach. Following graduation , he worked as a secondary schoolteacher in Ansbach, Zweibrücken and Erlangen. In 1864 he succeeded Döderlein as chair of classical philology and pedagogy at the University of Erlangen, where as he also served as dean and vice-rector . In 1893 he succeeded Rudolf Schöll as professor of classical philology at the University of Munich.
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Angelo Anelli
1761 - 1820 (59 years)
Angelo Anelli was an Italian poet and librettist who also wrote under the pseudonyms Marco Landi and Niccolò Liprandi. He was born in Desenzano del Garda and studied literature and poetry at a seminary in Verona. In 1793 he enrolled in the University of Padua, receiving a degree in Canon and Civil Law two years later. Active in the politics of the Cisalpine Republic in his youth, he was imprisoned twice. His 1789 sonnet on the vicissitudes of Italy under Austrian domination, "La calamità d'Italia" , was for a long time incorrectly attributed to Ugo Foscolo.
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Marcel Pagnol
1895 - 1974 (79 years)
Marcel Paul Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Regarded as an auteur, in 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the . Although his work is less fashionable than it once was, Pagnol is still generally regarded as one of France's greatest 20th-century writers and is notable for the fact that he excelled in almost every medium—memoir, novel, drama and film.
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Hermann Breymann
1842 - 1910 (68 years)
Hermann Wilhelm Breymann was a German philologist and pedagogue. Biography Breymann was born in Oker, the son of a senior metal worker. He studied at University in Paris, Marburg and Bonn. He received a doctorate in 1868 from the University of Göttingen, where he had studied under Romanist Theodor Müller. Breymann next lived in Manchester and London, first as a private tutor in Manchester, before taking the position of associate professor at Owens College.
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Alexey Veselovsky
1843 - 1918 (75 years)
Alexey Nikolayevich Veselovsky was a Russian literary historian and theorist, critic, biographer and translator. Best known for his in-depth researches on Moliere, Lord Byron and European theatre, he also authored the biographies of Alexander Griboyedov, Alexander Hertzen, Jonathan Swift, Denis Diderot and Pierre Beaumarchais, among others, contributing to Russky Vestnik, The Artist, Kievskaya Starina, Russkiye Vedomosti. In early 1870s he was closely associated with the Sergey Yuriev's Beseda, then Sankt-Peterburgskiye Vedomosti and later Nedelya, where for five years he edited the Foreign ...
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Charles Brackett
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Charles William Brackett was an American screenwriter and film producer. He collaborated with Billy Wilder on sixteen films. Life and career Brackett was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, the son of Mary Emma Corliss and New York State Senator, lawyer, and banker Edgar Truman Brackett. The family's roots traced back to the arrival of Richard Brackett in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, near present-day Springfield, Massachusetts. His mother's uncle, George Henry Corliss, built the Centennial Engine that powered the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. A 1915 graduate of Williams College, he earned his law degree from Harvard University.
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Dadasaheb Phalke
1870 - 1944 (74 years)
Dhundiraj Govind Phalke , popularly known as Dadasaheb Phalke , was an Indian producer-director-screenwriter, known as "the Father of Indian cinema". His debut film, Raja Harishchandra, was the first Indian movie released in 1913, and is now known as India's first full-length feature film. He made 95 feature-length films and 27 short films in his career, spanning 19 years, until 1937, including his most noted works: Mohini Bhasmasur , Satyavan Savitri , Lanka Dahan , Shri Krishna Janma and Kaliya Mardan .
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John Dewar Denniston
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
John Dewar Denniston was a British classical scholar. His parents were James Lawson Denniston, of the Indian Civil Service, and Agnes Guthrie. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He took a First in Classical Moderations in 1908 and a Second in Literae Humaniores in 1910. He was Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, from 1913 until his death.
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George Ivașcu
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
George Ivașcu was a Romanian journalist, literary critic, and communist militant. From beginnings as a University of Iași philologist and librarian, he was drawn into left-wing antifascist politics, while earning accolades as a newspaper editor and foreign-affairs journalist. As editor of Manifest magazine, he openly confronted the Iron Guard and fascism in general. In the mid-1930s, he became a member of the Romanian Communist Party , though he maintained private doubts about its embrace of Stalinism. Despite enjoying protection from the more senior scholar George Călinescu, Ivașcu was persecuted, and went into hiding, during the first two years of World War II.
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Hasan Askari
1919 - 1978 (59 years)
Muhammad Hasan Askari was a Pakistani scholar, literary critic, writer and linguist of modern Urdu language. Initially "Westernized", he translated western literary, philosophical and metaphysical work into Urdu, notably classics of American, English, French and Russian literature. But in his later years, through personal experiences, geopolitical changes and the influence of authors like René Guénon, and traditional scholars of India towards more latter part of his life, like Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi, he became a notable critic of the West and proponent of Islamic culture and ideology.
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Johann Arnold Kanne
1773 - 1824 (51 years)
Johann Arnold Kanne was a German philologist and linguist. In his writings, he used the pseudonyms Johannes Author, Walther Bergius and Anton von Preußen. Beginning in 1790, he studied theology and classical philology at the University of Göttingen, where he was a pupil of Christian Gottlob Heyne. Later on, he worked as schoolteacher in Halle an der Saale, Hersbruck and Leutenberg, and served as a soldier in both the Austrian and Prussian armies. In 1809, through mediation from author Jean Paul, he became an instructor of archaeology and history at the newly founded "Real Institute" in Nuremberg.
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Karl Deichgräber
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Karl Marienus Deichgräber was a German classical philologist. Deichgräber was a member of the Nazi Party. Biography Karl Deichgräber studied at the Gymnasium Ulricianum in Aurich until 1922. From that date, he studied classical philology, as well as other subjects, at the University of Göttingen, and then at Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Münster, where the philologist Hermann Schöne encouraged Deichgräber to concentrate on the history of medicine. In 1928, Deichgräber earned his doctorate at Münster with a thesis on medical schools during the time of Ancient Greece. Upon...
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Fred Thompson
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Frederick A. Thompson, usually credited as Fred Thompson was an English writer, best known as a librettist for about fifty British and American musical comedies in the first half of the 20th century. Among the writers with whom he collaborated were George Grossmith Jr., P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Ira Gershwin. Composers with whom he worked included Lionel Monckton, Ivor Novello and George Gershwin.
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Cheng Shewo
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Cheng Shewo was a journalist, publisher, and educator of the Republic of China. He was the founder of Shih Hsin University in Taiwan. Biography Cheng was born in Nanjing in 1898, with his ancestral home in Xiangxiang, Hunan. His father, Cheng Bi , was an officer.
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John Henry Wright
1852 - 1908 (56 years)
John Henry Wright was an American classical scholar born at Urumiah , Persia. He earned his Bachelors and Masters at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. After junior appointments in 1886 he joined Johns Hopkins as a professor of classical philology. In 1887, he became a professor of Greek at Harvard, where, from 1895 to 1908, he was also Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
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Cesare Zavattini
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Cesare Zavattini was an Italian screenwriter and one of the first theorists and proponents of the Neorealist movement in Italian cinema. Biography Born in Luzzara near Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, on 20 September 1902, Zavattini studied law at the University of Parma, but devoted himself to writing. He started his career in Gazzetta di Parma. In 1930 he relocated to Milan, and worked for the book and magazine publisher Angelo Rizzoli. After Rizzoli began producing films in 1934, Zavattini received his first screenplay and story credits in 1936. At the same time he was writing the plot fo...
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Alla Nazimova
1879 - 1945 (66 years)
Alla Nazimova was a Russian-American actress, director, producer and screenwriter. On Broadway, she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. She later moved on to film, where she served many production roles, both writing and directing films under pseudonyms. Her film Salome is regarded as a cultural landmark.
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Hans von Arnim
1859 - 1931 (72 years)
Hans von Arnim was a German-Austrian classical philologist, who specialized in studies of Plato and Aristotle. He studied classical philology at the University of Greifswald as a pupil of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. From 1881 to 1888 he worked as a schoolteacher in Elberfeld and Bonn, then obtained his habilitation in 1888 from the University of Halle. In 1893 he became a full professor at Rostock, then in 1900 was appointed chair of Greek philology at the University of Vienna as a successor to Theodor Gomperz. In 1914 he relocated as a professor to the newly founded University of Fran...
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Jacques Claude Demogeot
1808 - 1894 (86 years)
Jacques Claude Demogeot was a French man of letters. Biography Demogeot was born in Paris. He was professor of rhetoric at the Lycée Saint-Louis, and subsequently assistant professor at the Sorbonne. He wrote many detached papers on various literary subjects, and two reports on secondary education in England and Scotland in collaboration with Henry Montucci. His reputation rests on his , which has passed through many subsequent editions. He was the author of a , and of a work on the influence of foreign literatures on the development of French literature. He died in Paris in 1894.
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Josefina Passadori
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Josefina Passadori was an Italian-Argentine academic, educator, and writer. She published several textbooks as well as poetry under the pen name Fröken Thelma. Biography Passadori was born in Mezzanino, Pavia, Italy. In 1922, she graduated from La Unidad Académica Escuela Normal Superior N° 1 Mary O. Graham in La Plata, where she taught for almost forty years .
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John Macmillan Brown
1845 - 1935 (90 years)
John Macmillan Brown was a Scottish-New Zealand academic, administrator and promoter of education for women. Brown was born in Irvine, the sixth child of Ann Brown and her husband, James Brown, a sea captain. John was raised in a family that placed high value on education—for both sexes. He attended Irvine Academy, then University of Edinburgh and University of Glasgow. He declined a Balliol scholarship in mathematics instead taking a Snell exhibition for Classics and philosophy.
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Pavel Medvedev
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev was a Russian literary scholar. He was a professor, social activist, and friend of Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as of Boris Pasternak and Fyodor Sologub. Medvedev held several government posts in education and publishing after the 1917 revolution, publishing a great deal of his own writing on literary, sociological, and linguistic issues. Medvedev was arrested during the 1930s period of purges under the rule of Joseph Stalin, and "disappeared" shortly after his arrest. He was shot on 17 July 1938.
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William Herbert Carruth
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
William Herbert Carruth was an American educator and poet. He taught at the University of Kansas and Stanford University. Life William Herbert Carruth was born in Osawatomie, Kansas on April 5, 1859. He earned AB and MA degrees in modern languages from the University of Kansas and later two more advanced languages degrees, another MA and a PhD, from Harvard. Carruth taught languages and literature at KU from 1880 until 1913, and was Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University from 1913 to 1924. Carruth was president of the Pacific Coast Conference of the Unitarian Church.
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Eliza Haywood
1693 - 1756 (63 years)
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
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Ephrem Mtsire
1001 - 1101 (100 years)
Ephrem Mtsire or Ephraim the Lesser was a Georgian monk at Antioch, theologian and translator of patristic literature from Greek. Information as to Ephrem’s life is scarce. Early in life he received a thorough Hellenic education presumably in Constantinople, where his purported father Vache Karich'isdze, a Georgian nobleman from Tao, had removed in 1027. Ephrem then became a monk at the Black Mountain near Antioch, which was populated by a vibrant Georgian monastic community of around 70 monks. Later in his life, c. 1091, Ephrem became a hegumen of the Kastana monastery, probably at the Cast...
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Fritz Schöll
1850 - 1919 (69 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" Schöll was a German classical philologist, known for his editions of Plautus, Varro and Cicero. He was the son of archaeologist Gustav Adolf Schöll and the brother of philologist Rudolf Schöll .
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Ludwig Lemcke
1816 - 1884 (68 years)
Ludwig Lemcke was a German Romance philologist and literary historian. He studied history, philology and languages at the University of Berlin, and from 1841 worked as a private scholar, and later as a schoolteacher, in Braunschweig. In 1862 he succeeded Adolf Ebert as an associate professor of modern languages and Western literature at the University of Marburg. In 1865 he attained a full professorship, and two years later, relocated as a professor to the University of Giessen. In 1873/74 he served as university rector.
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