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,
#3101
Richard Yarborough
#79067
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Richard A. Yarborough is Professor of English and African-American literature and a Faculty Research Associate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also an editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature.
Go to Profile#3102
Petre Stoica
#79371
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Petre Stoica was a Romanian poet and translator. A native of the Timișoara area, he studied at the University of Bucharest before launching a career as a writer. Making his debut in the late 1950s alongside several better-known generational colleagues, he published a number of books over the subsequent decades. His poetry dealt with quotidian subjects and studiously avoided glorification of the ruling communist regime. After the Romanian Revolution, he briefly engaged with the political scene before withdrawing to Jimbolia, not far from where he grew up. There, he worked to enrich the town's ...
Go to Profile#3103
Ilana Pardes
#81970
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ilana Pardes is a biblical scholar. She is Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Pardes attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied under Robert Alter. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1990, and taught at Princeton University from 1990 to 1992. She has been at the Hebrew University since then.
Go to Profile#3104
Christopher Shinn
#39992
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Christopher Shinn is an American playwright. His play Dying City was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Where Do We Live won the 2005 Obie Award, Playwriting. Early life Shinn was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975 and lives in New York. He earned a BFA, Dramatic Writing, from New York University.
Go to Profile#3105
Amira Nowaira
#40352
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Amira Nowaira is an Egyptian academic, translator, columnist and author. She gained her doctorate in English literature from Birmingham University. She has served as chair of the English department at Alexandria University, and is currently a professor there. She has published a number scholarly books and journal articles. More recently, she has contributed journalistic pieces to The Guardian. Apart from her own books, Nowaira has also done translations, both from Arabic to English and from English to Arabic .
Go to Profile#3106
Alex Gansa
#75412
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alex Gansa is a screenwriter and producer best known as the creator, executive producer and showrunner of the Showtime series Homeland, based on the original Israeli series Prisoners of War created by Gideon Raff.
Go to Profile#3107
Sesshu Foster
#67021
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sesshu Foster is an American poet and novelist. Sesshu Foster is a Japanese-American poet of white and Nisei descent. He grew up on Los Angeles’ East Side and came of age in the primarily Chicano neighborhood of City Terrace, where he was influenced by local community organizing and political artmaking. Foster credits moving to City Terrace the same year as the Watts Riots with helping to shape his writing voice and ongoing creative/personal concerns with social and racial justice and the impacts of gentrification.
Go to Profile#3108
Janez Vrečko
#87488
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Janez Vrečko is a Slovene literary historian and theorist. Life and work He is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana's Faculty of Arts. He received his PhD in 1986 for his dissertation entitled Slovenian Historical Avant-Garde and Zenitism. In 1978 he received an MA for his thesis on mimetic and non-mimetic poetics. In 1974 he received a Student Prešeren Award for his graduate thesis. He has been employed in the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory since 1978.
Go to Profile#3109
Robert Crawford
#41594
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robert Crawford is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. Early life Robert Crawford was born in Bellshill, Scotland, and grew up in Cambuslang. He was educated at the private Hutchesons' Grammar School and in the same city at Glasgow University, where he received his M.A. degree. He then went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he received his D. Phil.
Go to Profile#3110
Ania Loomba
#64093
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ania Loomba is an Indian literary scholar who works as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on colonialism and postcolonial studies, race and feminist theory, contemporary Indian literature and culture, and early modern literature. She studied at the University of Delhi, where she received her BA, MA and MPhil degrees, before moving to England to study at the University of Sussex, where she received her PhD.
Go to Profile#3111
Catherine Johnson
#44248
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Catherine Johnson is a British playwright, producing works for stage and television. She is best known for her book for the ABBA-inspired musical Mamma Mia! and screenplay for the musical's film adaptation. The film became the highest-grossing British picture of all time in the UK, and the biggest selling UK DVD of all time in January 2009. She also co-wrote the 2018 sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
Go to Profile#3112
Barbara Jane Reyes
#71081
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Barbara Jane Reyes is an American poet whose work "explores the translatable and untranslatable collisions of writing, self and culture." Early life Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate, Reyes "served as editor in chief for maganda magazine, and witnessed the emergence of Filipino American literary figures." Reyes received her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University.
Go to Profile#3113
Murray Roston
#56115
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Murray Roston is an Israeli Emeritus professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University. Biography Murray Roston was born in London in 1928. Roston married Faith Lehrman and, shortly afterwards, they immigrated to Israel, living for many years in Kiryat Ono and then moving to Nordiya, near Netanya. They have three daughters ‒ Yardenna , Nina, and Yonit.
Go to Profile#3114
Klaus Vondung
#60119
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Klaus Vondung is a German scholar in the fields of cultural and German studies. The focus of his academic work lies in the interplay of literature, politics and religion during the German Empire, Nazi Germany and beyond.
Go to Profile#3116
Robert B. Stepto
#68064
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert B. Stepto is a literary theorist and professor of African American studies, English and American Studies at Yale University. He is best known for his 1979 book From Behind the Veil. He has also edited the anthology Harper American Literature since 1993.
Go to Profile#3117
Barbara Hamby
#85977
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Barbara Hamby is an American poet, fiction writer, editor, and critic. Life She was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii. Her poems have been printed in numerous publications and her first book of poetry, Delirium , received literary recognition. She lives with her husband and fellow poet David Kirby in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is a writer-in-residence in the Creative Writing Program, and he a professor, both with the English Department at Florida State University.
Go to Profile#3118
Nam Jin-woo
#95090
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Nam Jin-Woo is a South Korean poet, literary critic, and professor. Life Nam Jin-Woo was born in Jeonju, South Korea in 1960. He studied creative writing at Chung-Ang University, where he also received his master’s and doctoral degrees. His literary career began when he won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer's Contest for poetry in 1981 and the Chosun Ilbo New Writer’s Contest for literary criticism in 1983. He was an editor at the quarterly journal Munhakdongne and the monthly journal Hyeondaesihak. Since 2004, he has been teaching creative writing at Myongji University.
Go to Profile#3119
Anne Lill
#62184
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Anne Lill is an Estonian classical philologist and translator. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tartu. Education Anne Laansoo was born on 15 October 1946. She graduated from University of Tartu in 1970. From 1976 to 1978 she was a postgraduate student at Leningrad State University. In 1987 she defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Tartu with research entitled: "The foreign elements in terms of medical terminology in shaping Estonian 1869-1914". This work examined the issues around the transfer of the Latin and Ancient Greek prefix and suffix systems from classical to...
Go to Profile#3120
Aimee Phan
#37448
Overall Influence
Aimee Phan is a Vietnamese-American author. She was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. Her first novel, We Should Never Meet, was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA Today and The Oregonian among other publications. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center.
Go to Profile#3121
Justus Rosenberg
#26929
Overall Influence
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Justus Rosenberg was a literature professor who spent most of his life teaching in the United States, ending his career as a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College. Before that, as a teenager he began playing a role in saving many lives when the Nazis overran France, working first as part of a French-American network organized to help anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists escape from Vichy France to the United States, and later as a member of the French Resistance during World War II, providing assistance as well to the US Army.
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Elizabeth Wilson
#69637
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Elizabeth Wilson is a British independent researcher and writer best known for her commentaries on feminism and popular culture. She was a professor at London Metropolitan University and the London College of Fashion and is the author of several non-fiction books and fiction books. In particular, she writes on feminist politics and policy; the history of fashionable dress and dress as cultural practice; the cultures of urban life; and high culture and popular culture, especially architecture and film. Her novels The Twilight Hour, War Damage and The Girl in Berlin are published by Serpent’s Tail.
Go to Profile#3123
Adam Zachary Newton
#41812
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Adam Zachary Newton is an American academic. He has served as university professor, Stanton Chair in Literature and Humanities, and chair of the Department of English at Yeshiva University. His previous appointment was as Jane and Rowland Blumberg Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught in the English Department, the Committee on Comparative Literature, the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the Program in Jewish Studies. More recently, he has held appointments as distinguished visiting professor at Emory University and Agnes Scott College in Atlanta,...
Go to Profile#3124
John Poch
#85660
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
John Poch is an American poet, fiction writer, and critic. Biography John Poch holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas. He was the inaugural Colgate University Creative Writing Fellow, and from 2001 to 2023 he taught in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University. He serves as series editor for the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize at the University of North Texas Press, and for ten years edited 32 Poems with poet Deborah Ager.
Go to Profile#3125
Albert Hauf
#53227
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Albert Guillem Hauf i Valls is a Majorcan philologist, literature historian and literary critic. He is a specialist in Catalan and Occitan medieval literature. Life He graduated in romance Philology in the University of Barcelona, with a grant from the Joan March Foundation. His degree dissertation consisted of an edition of the Aragonese text of the Agriculture Treatise of Palladius Rutilius Emilianus. In the same university he obtained his PhD, which was supervised by professor Martí de Riquer, with a thesis on the Vita Christi, a work of the medieval Catalan writer Francesc Eiximenis, and the medieval tradition of the Vitae Christi.
Go to Profile#3126
Helga Königsdorf
#60407
Overall Influence
1938 - 2014 (76 years)
Helga Königsdorf was an East German author and physicist. Life She was born in Gera, a farmer's daughter. She went into academia and was appointed to the East Berlin Academy of Sciences of the GDR from 1961 to 1990. Since 1974, she headed the Department of Probability and Mathematical Statistics. At age 40, she published her first short-story collection Meine ungehörigen Träume .
Go to Profile#3127
Shukri Mabkhout
#75587
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Shukri Mabkhout, also transcribed Choukri Mabkhout, is a Tunisian academic, critic and novelist. His 2014 debut novel, al-Talyānī , won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and has been translated into English and Italian.
Go to Profile#3128
Tarō Naka
#83661
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Tarō Naka was a prize-winning Japanese poet. He was born Shōjirō Fukuda in Hakata, now Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu in western Japan. At school he read, among others, Sakutarō Hagiwara, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Baudelaire, and the Kyoto School philosopher Kitarō Nishida. In April 1941, he entered Tokyo Imperial University to study Japanese Literature. Some of his earliest poems dealing with the war and its immediate aftermath appeared in his debut collection, Etudes, in 1950, published by his high-school classmate Tokuo Date's Eureka Press.
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John Haines
#65275
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska. Early life John Mead Haines was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He was the son of a career Navy officer and moved from state to state, living in California, Hawaii, Washington, and New England. He later moved to Washington, D.C where he attended St. John's College High School. He served in the Navy as Sonar Man Third Class from 1943 to 1946. Haines was sent to San Diego Naval Training Station. Once his training was finished, he was sent to San Pedro to crew a Battleship for a few months and later sent to Norfolk, Virginia.
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Perry Meisel
#56123
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Perry Meisel, Professor of English at New York University for over forty years until his retirement in 2016, has written on literature, music, psychoanalysis, theory, and culture since the 1970s. His articles have appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, October, The Nation, The Atlantic, and many other publications. His books include The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan, The Literary Freud, The Cowboy and the Dandy, The Myth of the Modern, The Absent Father, and Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. He is co-editor, with Haun Saussy, of F...
Go to Profile#3131
J. R. Morgan
#69823
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Robert Morgan FLSW is a British academic working at Swansea University in Wales. He is primarily known for writing books on Classics, and for contributing to a number of journals, often with colourful views.
Go to Profile#3132
J. M. DeMatteis
#54652
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Marc DeMatteis is an American writer of comic books, television and novels. Biography Early career J. M. DeMatteis's earliest aspirations were to be a rock musician and comic book artist. He began playing in bands starting in the sixth grade, generally in the role of lead singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist, and also wrote music reviews for a number of publications. He began drawing at a young age, and was accepted into the School of the Visual Arts. DeMatteis recalled, "...for some reason, I think it was financial, I ended up not going. Somewhere after that what little drawing skil...
Go to Profile#3133
Harold Jaffe
#63792
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Harold Jaffe is an American writer of novels, short fiction, drama, and essays. He is the author of 30 books, including 14 collections of fiction, four novels, and two volumes of essays. He is also the editor of the literary-cultural journal Fiction International. He has won two NEA grants in fiction and two Fulbright fellowships. His works have been translated into 15 languages, including German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian. Jaffe is also a Professor of Creative Writing, English, and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.
Go to Profile#3134
Fiona Kelleghan
#52364
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Fiona Kelleghan is an American academic and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy. She was a metadata librarian and a cataloguer at the University of Miami's Otto G. Richter Library. She left the university in 2011.
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Xu Huaizhong
#73201
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Xu Huaizhong was a Chinese novelist. He is best known for his novel Qianfengji which won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Prize , one of the most prestigious literature prizes in China. Biography Xu was born Xu Huaizhong in Handan, Hebei, on September 29, 1929. At the age of 12, he went to school in the counter-Japanese base area of Taihang Mountains. After high school in 1945, he joined the People's Liberation Army, where he was in charge of art and propaganda. He joined the Communist Party of China in the following year. In 1950 he was researcher at the Cultural Work Corps of Political Department of Southwest Military Region.
Go to Profile#3136
Claudio Rodríguez Fer
#97156
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Claudio Rodríguez Fernández , better known as Claudio Rodríguez Fer, is a Galician writer. He is the author of numerous literary works in the Galician language and of works of modern literary studies in Spanish. He was a Visiting Professor at the City University of New York, University Paris Est Marne-La Vallèe at the University of Southern Brittany and at the Université Haute Bretagne at Rennes, where he was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa. He is Director of the Chair José Ángel Valente of Poetry and Aesthetic at Universidade of Santiago de Compostela, where he also directs the Moenia magazine.
Go to Profile#3137
John Cooper Clarke
#40235
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Cooper Clarke is an English performance poet and comedian who styled himself as a "punk poet" in the late 1970s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he released several albums. Around this time, he performed on stage with several punk and post-punk bands and continues to perform regularly.
Go to Profile#3138
Kenneth Muir
#65081
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Kenneth Arthur Muir was a literary scholar and writer, prominent in the fields of Shakespeare studies and English Renaissance theatre. He served as King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University from 1951 to 1974.
Go to Profile#3139
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit
#20637
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is a German Japanologist and translator. In 1992 she was awarded Germany's most prestigious prize for distinction in research, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. Life From 1967 to 1969 she studied Japanology, Sinology, Philosophy and Sociology at Hamburg University. She then studied at the Ruhr University in Bochum , and in the same year took up a scholarship to study at Waseda University and Tokyo University. On her return, she completed her doctorate summa cum laude at the Department of Oriental Studies of the Ruhr University in Bochum, combining Japanology, German Studies and the Communication Science.
Go to Profile#3140
Wang Hui
#20358
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Wang Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor of the influential magazine Dushu from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. Wang Hui has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna , Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, among others. In March 2010, he appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual...
Go to Profile#3141
Robert McLiam Wilson
#58304
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert McLiam Wilson is a Northern Irish novelist. Biography He was born in the New Lodge district of Belfast and then moved to Turf Lodge and other places in the city. He attended St Malachy's College and studied English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge; however, he dropped out and, for a short time, was homeless. This period of his life profoundly affected his later life and influenced his works.
Go to Profile#3142
Shara McCallum
#84386
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#3143
Jules Feiffer
#46966
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American cartoonist and author, who was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.
Go to Profile#3144
Stephen Yenser
#77907
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Yenser is an American poet and literary critic who has published three acclaimed volumes of verse, as well as books on James Merrill, Robert Lowell, and an assortment of contemporary poets. With J.D. McClatchy, he is co-literary executor of the James Merrill estate and co-editor of six volumes of Merrill's work.
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Larry Levis
#70510
Overall Influence
1946 - 1996 (50 years)
Larry Patrick Levis was an award-winning American poet and teacher who published five books of poetry during his lifetime. Two more volumes of previously unpublished poems have appeared posthumously, and received general acclaim.
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Eiichiro Oda
#37837
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Eiichiro Oda is a Japanese manga artist and the creator of the series One Piece. With more than 516.6 million tankōbon copies in circulation worldwide, One Piece is both the best-selling manga in history and the best-selling comic series printed in volume, in turn making Oda one of the best-selling fiction authors. The series' popularity resulted in Oda being named one of the manga artists that changed the history of manga.
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Teresa Präauer
#95742
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Teresa Präauer is an Austrian writer and visual artist. Life Teresa Präauer was born in Linz and grew up in Graz and St. Johann im Pongau District. From 1997 to 2003 she studied German studies at the University of Salzburg and the Humboldt University of Berlin as well as painting at the Mozarteum Salzburg. From 2003 she lived and worked in Vienna, where she studied as a postgraduate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 2004 to 2005. [4] For her first novel titled, For the Ruler from Overseas, Präauer was awarded the aspects literature prize of ZDF for the best German-language prose debut. ...
Go to Profile#3148
Tina Howe
#24408
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Mabel Davis "Tina" Howe was an American playwright. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Howe's best-known works include Museum, The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, and Pride's Crossing.
Go to Profile#3149
Shunpei Mizuno
#83638
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Shunpei Mizuno is a Japanese academic who primarily writes on Korean culture. He has also published instructional books for Korean learners of Japanese. He used to write under the pen name Shunsui Nohira.
Go to Profile#3150
Sherod Santos
#50490
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sherod Santos is an American poet, essayist, translator and playwright. His newest poetry collection, Square Inch Hours was published in 2017. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, The Royal Court Theatre, Proscenium Theatre Journal, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times Book Review. The Algonquin Theatre in New York City, The Side Project in Chicago, the Brooklyn International Theatre Festival, and the Flint Michigan Play Festival have all staged productions of his plays. He wrote the settings for the Sappho poems in the CD Magus Insipiens,...
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