Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#2701

A. A. Long

#6910

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Anthony Arthur Long FBA is a British-American classical scholar who is the Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature Emeritus, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

#2702

Fedwa Malti-Douglas

#68257

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Fedwa Malti-Douglas is a Lebanese-American professor and writer. She is a professor emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington. Malti-Douglas has written several books, including The Star Report Disrobed . She received a National Humanities Medal in 2015.

#2703

Joep Leerssen

#54674

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Joseph Theodoor "Joep" Leerssen is a Dutch comparatist and cultural historian. He is professor of European studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he also holds a Royal Netherlands Academy Research Professorship. He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 2008.

#2704

George Singleton

#57418

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

George Singleton is a Southern author who has written eight collections of short stories, two novels, and an instructional book on writing fiction. He was born in Anaheim, California and raised in Greenwood, South Carolina. Singleton graduated from Furman University in 1980 with a degree in Philosophy and an inductee into Phi Beta Kappa. He also holds an MFA degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Singleton was the longstanding teacher of fiction writing and editing at the South Carolina Governor's School For The Arts & Humanities in Greenville, SC. In 2009, Singleton was a...

#2705

James Longenbach

#55788

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

James Longenbach was an American critic and poet. His early critical work focused on modernist poetry, namely that of Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, but came to include contemporary poetry as well. His book of criticism, The Resistance to Poetry, has been described as a "compact and exponentially provocative book." Longenbach published six volumes of poetry including Earthling , which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

#2706

Tom Barbash

#50193

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Tom Barbash is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction, as well as an educator and critic. Speaker, panelist, and interviewer Barbash has served as host for onstage events for The Commonwealth Club, Litquake, BookPassage, and the Lannan Foundation.

#2707

Vivian Liska

#66393

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Vivian Liska, born in New York City, United States is a professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013 she is also distinguished visiting professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

#2708

Susan Wheeler

#64072

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. She has also taught at University of Iowa, NYU, Rutgers, Columbia University and The New School.

#2709

Stanley Lombardo

#41142

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Stanley F. "Stan" Lombardo is an American Classicist, and former professor of Classics at the University of Kansas. He is best known for his translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid . The style of his translations is a more vernacular one, emphasizing conversational English rather than the formal tone of some older American English translations of classical verse. Lombardo designs his translations to be performed orally, as they were in ancient Greece. He also performs the poems, and has recorded them as audio books. In performance he also likes to play the drums, much like Ezra...

#2710

Jean Chevalier

#38768

Overall Influence

1906 - 1993 (87 years)

Jean Chevalier was a French writer, philosopher, and theologian, best known for his co-authorship of the Dictionnaire des symboles , first printed in 1969 by publisher Éditions Robert Laffont. Dictionary of Symbols is an encyclopedic work of cultural anthropology, co-written with the French poet and Amazonian explorer Alain Gheerbrant, devoted to the symbolism of myths, dreams, habits, gestures, shapes, figures, colors and numbers found in mythology and folklore. It contains over 1,600 articles and has seen nineteen reprints between 1982 and 1997. It has been republished on a worldwide basis ...

#2711

Mary Mackey

#37570

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Mary Lou Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, four sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. In 2012, her sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Another collection, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems ...

#2712

George Hitchcock

#48982

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

George Parks Hitchcock was an American actor, poet, playwright, teacher, labor activist, publisher, and painter. He is best known for creating Kayak, a poetry magazine that he published as a one-man operation from 1964 to 1984. Equally important, Hitchcock published writers under the "Kayak" imprint including the first two books by Charles Simic, second books by Philip Levine and Raymond Carver, translations by W.S. Merwin, and early books by Robert Bly and James Tate.

#2713

Otta Wenskus

#68805

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Otta Wenskus is a German Classical philologist currently residing in Austria. Wenskus, daughter of historian Reinhard Wenskus, studied Classical philology and linguistics at the Universities of Göttingen, Florence, and Lausanne. She acquired her Ph.D. in Göttingen in 1982. In 1985/86 she was maître de conférences at the University of Caen, and in 1987 Visiting Scholar at the Institute of the History of Mathematics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

#2714

Joan Elies Adell i Pitarch

#86600

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Joan Elies Adell i Pitarch is a Catalan-language poet and essayist. Biography Joan Elies Adell was born in Vinaròs, Baix Maestrat, Castellón Province, Valencian Community. A graduate in audiovisual communication with a doctorate in Catalan philology, he is a professor of philology at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and of literary theory at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona. At present, he is the Director of "Espai Llull", Office of the Government of Catalonia in the Sardinian city of Alghero.

#2715

Philip Gambone

#60464

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Philip Gambone is an American writer who has published both fiction and non-fiction. Biography Philip Gambone was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, on July 21, 1948. He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MA from the Episcopal Divinity School. His writing has covered many genres, including novels and short stories, personal reminiscence, non-fiction, and scholarly essays, as well as book reviews and interviews.

#2716

Ivonne Bordelois

Ivonne Bordelois

#55283

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Ivonne Aline Bordelois , is an Argentine poet, essayist, and linguist. Career Ivonne Bordelois graduated from the at the University of Buenos Aires, later studying literature and linguistics at the Sorbonne. She worked at the magazine Sur and conducted interviews and publications with Alejandra Pizarnik for various national and international publications.

#2717

Maurice Manning

Maurice Manning

#27951

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Maurice Manning is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry . He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and is a member of the poetry faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

#2718

Emily Greenwood

Emily Greenwood

#66684

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Emily Greenwood is Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She was formerly professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and John M. Musser Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline, and local and transnational black traditions of interpreting Greek and Roman classics. Her work explores the appropriation and rei...

#2719

Abdel Rahman Badawi

#17113

Overall Influence

1917 - 2002 (85 years)

Abdel Rahman Badawi was an Egyptian existentialist philosopher, professor of philosophy and poet. He has been called the "foremost master of Arab existentialism." He published more than 150 works, mostly rendering of Arabic philosophical manuscripts.

#2720

Régine Robin

#22074

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Régine Robin was a historian, novelist, translator and professor of sociology. Her prolific fiction and non-fiction, primarily on the themes of identity and culture and on the sociological practice of literature, earned a number of awards, including the Governor-General's Award in 1986. She was described by Robert Saletti as "Montreal's grande dame of postmodernism".

#2721

King-Kok Cheung

#80623

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

King-Kok Cheung is an American literary critic specializing in Asian American literature and is a professor in the department of English at UCLA. Cheung grew up on Hong Kong Island. Cheung received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.

#2722

A. B. Spellman

#47139

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Alfred Bennett Spellman is a poet, music critic, and arts administrator. Considered a part of the Black Arts Movement, he first received attention for his book of poems entitled The Beautiful Days . In 1966, he published a book on the then recent history of jazz entitled Four Lives in the Bebop Business . From 1975 to 2005, he worked as an arts administrator for the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been instrumental in supporting jazz in the United States.

#2723

Mikita Brottman

Mikita Brottman

#52436

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Mikita Brottman, née Mikita Hoy, is a British American non-fiction author, scholar, and psychologist known for her interest in true crime. Her writing blends a number of genres, often incorporating elements of autobiography, psychoanalysis, forensic psychology, and literary history.

#2724

Rob Magnuson Smith

Rob Magnuson Smith

#37485

Overall Influence

Rob Magnuson Smith is a novelist, short story writer, journalist, and university lecturer. A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, Smith currently resides in Cornwall. He has a BA in philosophy and a BA in psychology from Pitzer College, an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where he won the David Higham Award, and a PhD in creative writing from Bath Spa University. Since September 2013, he has taught English and Creative Writing for the University of Exeter.

#2725

Alex Haley

#37550

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. In the United States, the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of black American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

#2726

Carolyn Chute

#44260

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Carolyn Chute is an American writer and populist political activist who is strongly identified with the culture of poor, rural western Maine. Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, has referred to Chute as "a Maine novelist and gun enthusiast who, along with her husband, lives an aggressively unorthodox life in the Yankee backwoods." She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.

#2727

Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea

#49081

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Luis Alberto Urrea is a Mexican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. Life Luis Urrea is the son of Alberto Urrea Murray, of Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico and Phyllis Dashiell, born in Staten Island, New York. He was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and listed as an American born abroad. Both his parents worked in San Diego. The family moved to Logan Heights in South San Diego, because he had tuberculosis and they felt he would recover in the US. The family moved again in 1965 to Clairemont, a newer subdivision in the city of San Diego. His mother encouraged him to write and encouraged him to attend college and to apply for grants that would help pay for his college education.

#2728

Andrew Pyper

#69077

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Andrew Pyper is a Canadian author. Early life: childhood and education Pyper's parents emigrated from Northern Ireland to Stratford, Ontario. His father was an ophthalmologist and his mother trained as a nurse. Pyper was the youngest of five children. As a child, he read a lot of books and aspired to be a writer. "I was a de facto only child because there were eight years between me and the next brother. Like a lot of only children, I turned to the nerdier pursuits of books and writing and ... making things up." He studied at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and obtained an honours B.A. and M.A.

#2729

John Cloudsley-Thompson

John Cloudsley-Thompson

#65237

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

John Leonard Cloudsley-Thompson DSc CBiol FSB FRES FZS was a British naturalist renowned for his work on desert fauna. He was a tank commander during the Second World War. Biography Early life Thompson was born in Murree, in pre-partition India , where his father worked in public health. He returned to the UK to be educated at Marlborough College and then learn about natural sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

#2730

Behrouz Servatian

Behrouz Servatian

#64897

Overall Influence

1937 - 2012 (75 years)

Behrouz Servatian was an Iranian literary scholar, professor, and authority on the great Iranian lyric poet, Nizami Ganjavi. Biography Behrouz Servatian was born in Miandoab, a southern town in West Azerbaijan, northwest Iran. He lived in his home town until he was 24. Having the fifth grade degree in sciences, he served as a mathematics teacher. In 1960 he gained the sixth grade degree in sciences with an average grade of 19.91. In 1963 he sat for the nationwide university entrance exam and, gaining the first place both in Persian language and literature and philosophy at once, he chose the former.

#2731

Anne Duden

#84746

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Anne Duden is a German writer who moved with her family to West Germany in 1954. Her poetry and prose cover experiences involving violence, pain and despair. A member of the German Academy for Language and Literature, she has been a guest professor at the University of Hamburg and has lectured on poetry in Paderborn and Zurich. Her many awards include the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 2003.

#2732

Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin

Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin

#34271

Overall Influence

1936 - 2006 (70 years)

Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin was an Ethiopian poet and novelist. His novels and poems evoke retrospective narratives, fanciful epics, and nationalistic connotations. Gabre-Medhin is considered to be one of the most important Ethiopian novelists, along with Baalu Girma and Haddis Alemayehu. His books have been successful in commercial sales and in even academic theses. His works are solely based in Amharic and English.

#2733

Andrew Hudgins

#74774

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Andrew Hudgins is an American poet. Biography Hudgins was raised in Alabama. He earned a B.A. at Huntingdon College, an M.A. at the University of Alabama, and an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry and essays, many of which have received high critical praise, such as The Never-Ending: New Poems , which was a finalist for the National Book Awards; After the Lost War: A Narrative , which received the Poets' Prize; and Saints and Strangers , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hudgins is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a frequent Sewanee Writers' Conference faculty member.

#2734

David Trinidad

#68047

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Trinidad is an American poet. David Trinidad was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in the San Fernando Valley. He attended California State University, Northridge, where he studied poetry with Ann Stanford and edited the literary journal Angel’s Flight. While at Northridge, he became friends with the poet Rachel Sherwood, a fellow student. On July 5, 1979, Sherwood and Trinidad were involved in an automobile accident in which Sherwood was killed and Trinidad severely injured. Later, Trinidad published a book of Rachel Sherwood's poems and established Sherwood Press in her hono...

#2735

Anne Bernays

#59695

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Anne Fleischman Bernays is an American novelist, editor, and teacher. Life Bernays attended the Brearley School on New York City's Upper East Side, graduating in 1948. A 1952 graduate of Barnard College, she was managing editor of discovery, a literary magazine, before moving from New York City to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959 when she began her career as a novelist.

#2736

Hana Wirth-Nesher

#49530

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Hana Wirth-Nesher is an American-Israeli literary scholar and university professor. She is Professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is also the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, and director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.

#2737

Eleni Sikelianos

Eleni Sikelianos

#52713

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Eleni Sikelianos is an American experimental poet with a particular interest in scientific idiom. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Early life Sikelianos is the great-granddaughter of the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, a former candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Eva Palmer-Sikelianos. She was raised in California. A high school dropout, she grew up on food stamps in California with a single mom, and graduated from the Naropa Institute with an MFA in Writing & Poetics.

#2738

Rochelle Owens

#51027

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Rochelle Bass Owens is an American poet and playwright. Life and career Owens is the daughter of Maxwell and Molly Bass. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, then studied at the New School for Social Research and the University of Montreal.

#2739

Ma Bo

#26737

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Ma Bo is a Chinese non-fiction writer who currently resides in Beijing, China. After graduating from Beijing University with a degree in journalism, he wrote and published the book Blood Red Sunset in 1988 which sold over 400,000 copies in China.

#2740

Tom Sleigh

#50714

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Tom Sleigh is an American poet, dramatist, essayist and academic, who lives in New York City. He has published nine books of original poetry, one full-length translation of Euripides' Herakles and two books of essays. His most recent books are House of Fact, House of Ruin: Poems and The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees . At least five of his plays have been produced. He has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, worth $100,000, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant.

#2741

Pierre Boutang

#14113

Overall Influence

1916 - 1998 (82 years)

Pierre Boutang was a French philosopher, poet and translator. He was also a political journalist, associated with the currents of Maurrasianism and Royalism. Biography Boutang was an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and "agrégé de philosophie" in 1936, he participated that year in editing Action Française and showed fervent support for the ideas of Charles Maurras. He was a member of Giraud's government in North Africa in 1943, and enlisted in the French colonial army, serving in Tunisia and Morocco. He was discharged without pension and prohibited from teaching. Thereafter he took up...

#2742

Howard Chaykin

#43270

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Howard Victor Chaykin is an American comic book artist and writer. Chaykin's influences include his one-time employer and mentor, Gil Kane, and the mid-20th century illustrators Robert Fawcett and Al Parker.

#2743

Tadashi Iijima

#53052

Overall Influence

1902 - 1996 (94 years)

Tadashi Iijima was a Japanese film critic and screenwriter. He has been called "a leader who established film criticism and film research in Japan". Career After graduating from the Tokyo Prefectural First Middle School , he attended the Third High School , where he shared a room with Motojiro Kajii. Iijima had already begun publishing film criticism even before he graduated from the Department of French Literature at the University of Tokyo in 1929., joining the editorial board of Kinema Junpo in 1922. He published his first book, Shinema no ABC, in 1928, which included both his own theoretical writings and criticism as well as translations of French film theory.

#2744

Ilma Rakusa

#77408

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Ilma Rakusa is a Swiss writer and translator. She translates French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian into German. Biography Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia to a Slovenian father and a Hungarian mother. She spent her early childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. In 1951, her family moved to Zürich, Switzerland. Ilma Rakusa attended the Volksschule and the Gymnasium in Zürich. After the Matura, she studied Slavic and Romance Languages and Literature in Zürich, Paris and Leningrad between 1965 and 1971.

#2745

Jaquira Díaz

#68852

Overall Influence

Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time , The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at the Kenyon Review and a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg ...

#2746

José Carlos Mainer

José Carlos Mainer

#57628

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

José Carlos Mainer Baqué is a Spanish historian of literature and literary critic, Professor Emeritus of the University of Zaragoza . He is credited for his interdisciplinary scholar work intermingling studies on cultural and literary history.

#2747

Matthew Pearl

#39512

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Matthew Pearl is an American novelist and educator. His novels include The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, The Technologists, and The Last Bookaneer. Biography Pearl was born in New York City and grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he graduated from the University School of Nova Southeastern University , a K-12 school. He earned degrees from Harvard College and Yale Law School. He currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1998, Pearl won the Dante Award from the Dante Society of America for his undergraduate essay, Dante in Transit: Emerson’s Lost Role as Dantean.

#2748

F. T. Prince

#46171

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Frank Templeton Prince was a British poet and academic, known generally for his best-known poem Soldiers Bathing, written during the Second World War in 1942, which has been frequently included in anthologies. He was born in Kimberley, South Africa. His father Henry Prince was from the East End of London, of Dutch-Jewish descent, while his mother was Scottish. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College in Kimberley, then Balliol College, Oxford. He had a visiting position at Princeton University. In World War II he was involved in intelligence work at Bletchley Park.

#2749

Don Paul Fowler

#79835

Overall Influence

1953 - 1999 (46 years)

Don Paul Fowler was an English classicist. Life Fowler was from a Birmingham working-class background and went to King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys there. After completing his studies at Christ Church, Oxford, Fowler was first appointed Lecturer in Classics at Magdalen College , subsequently Dyson Junior Research Fellow in Greek Culture at Balliol College , then, at the early age of 28 years, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, holding simultaneously a University Lecturership in Greek and Latin Literature at Oxford University . Endowed with an outgoing temperament, Fowler was connected to numerous classicists in North America and Europe.

#2750

Carlo Dionisotti

#86814

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Carlo Dionisotti was an Italian literary critic, philologist and essayist. An alumnus of Turin University and a lifelong friend of Arnaldo Momigliano, he shortly lectured at Oxford before moving to Bedford College, London, where he held the post of Professor of Italian from 1949 to 1970.

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