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,
#8601
Zvi Preigerzon
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Zvi-Gersh Preigerzon was a Ukrainian Jewish author who specialized in historical prose of a historically fictional nature. The author wrote his books in the Original Hebrew while in the Soviet Union – which caused his arrest. Preigerzon was also a scientist and inventor in the mineral processing field. Further recognized for his scientific works by being named Dean of the Moscow State Mining University.
Go to Profile#8602
Jonathan Martin
1782 - 1838 (56 years)
Jonathan Martin was an English arsonist, famous for setting fire to York Minster in 1829. Early life Martin was born at Highside House, near Hexham in Northumberland, one of the twelve children of William Fenwick Martin and Isabella, née Thompson. Among his siblings was the artist John Martin and the philosopher William Martin. Jonathan was tongue tied and spoke with an impediment. He was brought up by his aunt, Ann Thompson, a staunch Protestant with a vivid image of hell.
Go to Profile#8603
Francis Owen
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Francis Owen was a Canadian philologist and military officer. He was Professor of German and Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Alberta, and the author of the first complete scholarly work on the history and early culture of the Germanic peoples. His works on this subject are still cited in modern scholarship.
Go to Profile#8604
Italo Svevo
1861 - 1928 (67 years)
Aron Hector Schmitz , better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo , was an Italian and Austro-Hungarian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo was considered a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy and is best known for his modernist novel La coscienza di Zeno , which became a widely appreciated classic of Italian literature. He was also the cousin of the Italian academic Steno Tedeschi.
Go to Profile#8605
Johannes Messenius
1579 - 1636 (57 years)
Johannes Messenius was a Swedish historian, dramatist and university professor. He was born in the village of Freberga, in Stenby parish in Östergötland, and died in Oulu, in modern-day Finland. Childhood He was the son of a miller named Jöns Thordsson. At an early age his brilliance caught the attention of a monastery priest named Magnus Andreae, who gave him guidance and taught him. Unbeknownst to the boy's parents, the priest sent him to the Jesuit school in Braunsberg, which was specialized in educating boys for winning Scandinavia back from Protestantism.
Go to Profile#8606
Evert Taube
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Axel Evert Taube was a Swedish author, artist, composer and singer. He is widely regarded as one of Sweden's most respected musicians and the foremost troubadour of the Swedish ballad tradition in the 20th century.
Go to Profile#8607
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.
Go to Profile#8608
Richard Rudolf Walzer
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Richard Rudolf Walzer, FBA was a German-born British scholar of Greek philosophy and of Arabic philosophy. Education: Werner-Siemens-Realgymnasium, Berlin-Schöneberg; Frederick William University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#8609
Charles Knapp
1868 - 1936 (68 years)
Charles Knapp was an American classical scholar. Biography He was born in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University at age 19 and received a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1890 at 22 years of age, having been prize fellow 1887-1890. He became tutorial fellow in Latin and was appointed instructor in Latin and Greek , and adjunct professor of classical philology . In 1906, he became a noted professor of classical philology at Barnard College, a women's liberal arts college affiliated with Columbia University.
Go to Profile#8610
Najm al-Din Kubra
1145 - 1221 (76 years)
Najm ad-Din Kubra was a 13th-century Khwarezmian Sufi from Khwarezm and the founder of the Kubrawiya, influential in the Ilkhanate and Timurid dynasty. His method, exemplary of a "golden age" of Sufi metaphysics, was related to the Illuminationism of Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi as well as to Rumi's Shams Tabrizi. Kubra was born in 540/1145 and died in 618/1221.
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Wolfgang Lange
1915 - 1984 (69 years)
Wolfgang Friedrich-Karl Lange was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Wolfgang Lange was born in Kiel, Germany on 29 June 1915. After gaining his abitur in Wilhelmshaven in 1934, Lange did labor service in the Wehrmacht. Since 1935, Lange studied German, history, philosophy, anthropology, music and art at the University of Kiel. At Kiel, Lange came under the influence of Otto Höfler, who inspired himself to specialize in Germanic studies, particularly Old Norse studies. In 1939, Lange accompanied Höfler to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he gained his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#8612
William John Woodhouse
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
William John Woodhouse was a classical scholar and author, professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. Early life Woodhouse was born at Clifton, Westmorland, England, the son of Richard Woodhouse, a station master, and his wife Mary, née Titterington. Educated at Sedbergh School, Yorkshire, Woodhouse won an open exhibition to Queen's College, Oxford, . He graduated with a first class in classical and a first class in the final school of Literae Humaniores, was appointed a Newton student at the British School at Athens, and during 1890 travelled in Greece and directed the excavations at Megalopolis.
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Ahmed Mohamed Al-Hofi
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Ahmed Mohamed Al-Hofi was an Egyptian writer and an expert in literary studies. Biography Al-Hofi earned a PhD and an MBA at the University of Cairo. He got the literature State Award
Go to Profile#8614
Nicolae Drăganu
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Nicolae Drăganu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian linguist, philologist, and literary historian. Biography Born in Zagra, Bistrița-Năsăud County, into a Greek-Catholic family, he attended primary school in his native village, followed by the Gymnasium in nearby Năsăud. Early on, he developed a reverence for local native George Coșbuc, on whose literary beginnings he later shed light. In 1902, he entered the literature faculty of Budapest University. There, he studied classical languages and Romanian language and literature. He soon earned a doctorate, in 1906, on the composition of Romanian words.
Go to Profile#8615
Laurence Senelick
#8616
Bob Russell
1914 - 1970 (56 years)
Bob Russell was an American songwriter born Sidney Keith Rosenthal in Passaic, New Jersey. Career Russell attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He worked as an advertising copywriter in New York; for a time, his roommate there was Sidney Sheldon, later a novelist. He turned to writing material for vaudeville acts, and then for film studios, ultimately writing complete scores for two movies: Jack and the Beanstalk and Reach for Glory. The latter film received the Locarno International Film Festival prize in 1962. A number of other movies featured compositions by Russell, incl...
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Dag Strömbäck
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Dag Alvar Strömbäck was a Swedish folklorist, historian of religion and philologist. He was a professor at Uppsala University and also headed the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore at Uppsala.
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Renzo Novatore
1890 - 1922 (32 years)
Abele Rizieri Ferrari , better known by the pen name Renzo Novatore, was an Italian individualist anarchist, illegalist and anti-fascist poet, philosopher and militant, now mostly known for his posthumously published book Toward the Creative Nothing and associated with ultra-modernist trends of futurism. His thought was influenced by Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Palante, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Baudelaire.
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René Fülöp-Miller
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
René Fülöp-Miller, born Philip René Maria Müller was an Austrian cultural historian and writer. He was born to an Alsatian immigrant and a Serbian mother in Karánsebes, Austria-Hungary and died in Hanover, New Hampshire.
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Jacques Becker
1906 - 1960 (54 years)
Jacques Becker was a French film director and screenwriter. His films, made during the 1940s and 1950s, encompassed a wide variety of genres, and they were admired by some of the filmmakers who led the French New Wave movement.
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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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Arthur Talmage Abernethy
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Arthur Talmage Abernethy was a writer, theologian, and poet. He pastored several churches, contributed articles and poems to newspapers around the United States, and was named by Governor R. Gregg Cherry as the first North Carolina Poet Laureate in 1948.
Go to Profile#8623
Pylyp Morachevskyi
1806 - 1879 (73 years)
Pylyp Semenovych Morachevskyi was a Ukrainian romantic poet, and translator of the New Testament into Ukrainian. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Khvylymon Haluzenko . He was born in the village of Shestovytsya in Chernihiv Oblast to a poor noble family, and studied at the local school in Chernihiv, then later at the University of Kharkiv. He began to work on Ukrainian language texts in the 1850s: In 1859 he retired with his wife, three sons and two daughters to the village of Shnakivtsi in Nizhynsky County. In the 1860s he began his Bible translations into Ukrainian starting with the Gospels, completed in November 1861, then Acts of the Apostles Revelation and Psalms.
Go to Profile#8624
Anton Birlinger
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Anton Birlinger was a German Catholic theologian and Germanist. Life and work Birlinger studied Catholic theology and German studies at the University of Tübingen from 1854 to 1858. He then went to the Rottenburg Seminary and was ordained there in 1859. In 1861 he went to Munich, in particular to continue his German studies with Alois Josef Vollmer . He immediately made a name for himself with a collection of idioms and sagas, but also through his own literary experiments, finally as the editor of folklore works and dialect dictionaries. In addition, in Munich he came even more under the infl...
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William Malone Baskervill
1850 - 1899 (49 years)
William Malone Baskervill was a writer and professor of the English language and literature at Vanderbilt University. Early life William Malone Baskerville was born in 1850 in Fayette County, Tennessee. He graduated from Randolph–Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. One of his teacher, Thomas Randoph Price, encouraged him to study in Germany. As a result, he attended the University of Leipzig in 1873–1874, where he became friends with Charles Forster Smith.
Go to Profile#8626
Paul Allen
1775 - 1826 (51 years)
Paul Allen was an American poet, historian, and editor. Biography Born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 15, 1775, Allen studied at Brown University, graduating in 1793. He later relocated to Philadelphia, where he served as editor of The Port Folio, the Gazette of the United States, and the Federal Republican.
Go to Profile#8627
Stefan Themerson
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Stefan Themerson was a Polish writer of children's literature, poet and inventor of Semantic Poetry, novelist, script writer filmmaker, composer and philosopher. He wrote in at least three languages. With his wife, Franciszka Themerson, they are regarded as leading husband-and-wife exponents of European Surrealism and publishers.
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William Ogilvie of Pittensear
1736 - 1819 (83 years)
William Ogilvie of Pittensear FRSE FSA , known as the Rebel Professor, was a Scottish classicist, numismatist and author of an influential historic land reform treatise. Published in London in 1781, An Essay on the Right of Property in Land was issued anonymously, necessarily it seems in a revolutionary age.
Go to Profile#8629
Jorge Guillermo Borges
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam was an Argentine lawyer, teacher, writer, philosopher and translator. He was also an anarchist and a follower of Herbert Spencer's philosophy of philosophical anarchism. He was Jorge Luis Borges's father.
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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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Heinrich Körting
1859 - 1890 (31 years)
Heinrich Körting was a German philologist and a brother of Gustav Körting. Like his brother he was a Romance scholar. He was born in Leipzig, became Privatdozent in 1885, and in 1889 an associate professor at the University of Leipzig. He was co-editor of the journal Zeitschrift für neufranzösische Sprache und Literatur.
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Victor Chauvin
1844 - 1913 (69 years)
Victor Chauvin , an Arabic and Hebrew professor at the University of Liège, wrote a number of notable books on Middle Eastern literature and folklore, orientalism, biblical history, and Sharia, including L`histoire de l`Islamisme and Bibliographie des Ouvrages Arabes Ou Relatifs Aux Arabes Publies Dans L'Europe Chretienne De 1810 a 1885.
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C. P. Taylor
1929 - 1981 (52 years)
Cecil Philip Taylor usually credited as C. P. Taylor, was a Scottish playwright. He wrote almost 80 plays during his 16 years as a professional playwright, including several for radio and television. He also made a number of documentary programmes for the BBC. His plays tended to draw on his Jewish background and his Socialist Marxist viewpoint, and to be written in dialect.
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Sidney Toler
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Sidney Toler was an American actor, playwright, and theatre director. The second European-American actor to play the role of Charlie Chan on screen, he is best remembered for his portrayal of the Chinese-American detective in 22 films made between 1938 and 1946. Before becoming Chan, Toler played supporting roles in 50 motion pictures, and was a highly regarded comic actor on the Broadway stage.
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Ferdinand Dümmler
1859 - 1896 (37 years)
Georg Ferdinand Dümmler was a German classical philologist and archaeologist born in Halle an der Saale. He was the son of historian Ernst Ludwig Dümmler . He was a student at the Universities of Halle, Strassburg and Bonn. At Strassburg, he studied under Adolf Michaelis , and in Bonn, he had as instructors Franz Bücheler , Hermann Usener and Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz . In 1882 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the philosopher Antisthenes.
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Johann Gottfried Stallbaum
1793 - 1861 (68 years)
Johann Gottfried Stallbaum , German classical scholar, was born at Zaasch, near Delitzsch in Saxony. From 1820 until his death Stallbaum was connected with Thomasschule zu Leipzig, from 1835 as rector. In 1840 he was also appointed extraordinary professor in the university.
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Claudio Tolomei
1492 - 1556 (64 years)
Claudio Tolomei was an Italian philologist. His name in Italian is identical to that of Claudius Ptolemaeus, the 2nd-century Greek astronomer. He belonged to the prominent Tolomei family of Siena, and became a bishop attached to the court of Pope Paul III.
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Joseph Hiam Levy
1838 - 1913 (75 years)
Joseph Hiam Levy was an English author and economist. He was educated at the City of London School and joined the Civil Service. He later became a lecturer in economics at Birkbeck College and an important figure in the Personal Rights Association.
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Victor Henry
1850 - 1907 (57 years)
Victor Henry was a French philologist, specializing in Indian languages. Biography Having held appointments at the University of Douai and the University of Lille, Henry was appointed professor of Sanskrit and comparative grammar at the University of Paris. A prolific and versatile writer, he is probably best known by the English translations of his Précis de Grammaire comparée de l'anglais et de l'allemand and Précis de Grammaire comparée du Grec et du Latin.
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Leo Vaz
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Leo Vaz , writer, teacher and journalist in Brazil. He was the author of novels and short stories in a satirical style Biography Leonel Vaz de Barros was born in Capivari. He graduated from the Normal School as a teacher in 1911 and taught in the cities of Sao Paulo and Recife until 1918.
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Ronald Burrows
1867 - 1920 (53 years)
Ronald Montagu Burrows was a British archaeologist and academic, who served as Principal of King's College London from 1913 to 1920. Biography He was born on 16 August 1867 in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, the son of the Rev. Leonard Francis Burrows, a master at Rugby School, and his wife Mary Vicars. He was educated at Charterhouse School. and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1886, graduating in Greats in 1890.
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Robert Montgomery
1807 - 1855 (48 years)
Robert Montgomery was an English poet and minister, the natural son of Robert Gomery , an actor and clown, and Elizabeth Medows Boyce, a schoolteacher. Born in Bath, Somerset, it is unknown why Robert Jnr. was baptised with the surname Montgomery. He was educated at a private school in the city. Later, he founded an unsuccessful weekly paper in that city. In 1828 he published The Omni-presence of the Deity, which hit popular religious sentiment so exactly that it ran through eight editions in as many months. In 1830 he followed it with The Puffiad , and Satan, or Intellect without God. An exh...
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Campbell Bonner
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Campbell Bonner was an American classicist notable for his research of amulets and ancient popular religion and superstitions of the late Graeco-Roman pagan and early Christian world. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1933 and the American Philosophical Society in 1938.
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Wisse Alfred Pierre Smit
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Wisse Alfred Pierre Smit was a poet and an influential Dutch literary historian. He was a specialist in Dutch literature of the Golden Age . W.A.P. Smit worked as a teacher for 17 years, before he accepted a professorship in Dutch literature at the University of Utrecht in 1945. He published various works of poetry and editions of a number of 16th and 17th century Dutch poets. He gained academic renown with a number of studies on various aspects of 17th century Dutch literature. Through his publications and his guidance to doctoral students, he had a considerable influence on the development...
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Herman Clarence Nixon
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Herman Clarence Nixon was an American political scientist and a member of the Southern Agrarians. Early life Herman Clarence Nixon was born in 1886 in Possum Trot, Alabama. He was educated in the public schools of Jacksonville, Alabama and attended the Jacksonville State normal school, graduating in 1907. He graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University. He went to graduate school at University of Chicago. During World War I, he served in the United States Army in Europe.
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Denis Dodart
1634 - 1707 (73 years)
Denis Dodart was a French physician, naturalist, and botanist who was born in 1634 in Paris and died on November 5, 1707, in the same city. Biography Childhood and humanist education Denis Dodart was born in 1634 in a Parisian middle class family that belonged to the bourgeoisie. He was a son of Jean Dodart, notary public with a passion for literature, and Marie Dubois, daughter of a lawyer at the Parlement of Paris. He was interested in art and science since young age. He was taught Latin, Greek, music, and drawing. Fontenelle mentioned in his Éloge of Monsieur Dodart the library of the Doda...
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William Alexander Robb Kerr
1875 - 1945 (70 years)
William Alexander Robb Kerr, was a Canadian academic and the third president of the University of Alberta. Born in Toronto, Ontario, to Thomas and Maria Jane Kerr, Kerr received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1899 and a Master of Arts degree in 1901 from the University of Toronto. Continuing his education, he received an AM degree from Harvard University in 1902, an ET from the University of Paris in 1903, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1904. In 1904, he was appointed a professor of Romance languages and literature at Adelphi College in Brooklyn, New York. In 1909, he joined the University of Alberta as a professor of modern languages.
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William Ireland Knapp
1835 - 1908 (73 years)
William Ireland Knapp , was an American Spanish scholar. Biography Knapp received his Bachelor of Arts in 1860, and taught at Colgate University. He was Professor of Ancient and Modern Languages at Vassar College from 1865 to 1867. After which time he travelled through England, France and Spain. In 1877 he was appointed Knight of the Order of Isabella the Catholic. That year he returned to America to teach at Yale University. While at Yale he taught at the renowned Spanish scholar Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Spanis...
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Jean-Louis Burnouf
1775 - 1844 (69 years)
Jean-Louis Burnouf was a French philologist and translator. The son of a poor weaver who died early in Burnouf's life, leaving him an orphan, he was admitted to the collège d'Harcourt in Paris on a scholarship and in 1792 won its Université prix d'honneur. During the French Revolution, he made his living as a merchant. Entering the Université in 1808, he was the professor of rhetoric at the lycée Charlemagne, and professor of Latin eloquence at the Collège de France, from 1817 to 1844, then inspector of the Université. He was elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lett...
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