The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#7751
Charlaine Harris
#7761
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Charlaine Harris Schulz is an American author who specializes in mysteries. She is best known for her book series The Southern Vampire Mysteries, which was adapted as the TV series True Blood. The television show was a critical and financial success for HBO, running seven seasons, from 2008 through 2014.
Go to Profile#7752
Kevin O'Rourke
#7762
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke, is an Irish economist and historian, who specialises in economic history and international economics. Since 2019, he has been Professor of Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was Professor of Economics at Trinity College, Dublin from 2000 to 2011, and had previously taught at Columbia University and University College, Dublin. From 2011 to 2019, he was Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#7753
Emmylou Harris
#7763
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Emmylou Harris is an American singer, songwriter, musician, bandleader, and activist. A highly regarded figure in contemporary music, she is known for having a consistent artistic direction. Harris is considered one of the leading music artists behind the country rock genre in the 1970s and the Americana genre in the 1990s. Her music united both country and rock audiences in live performance settings. Her characteristic voice, musical style and songwriting have been acclaimed by critics and fellow recording artists.
Go to Profile#7754
Masao Abe
#7764
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Masao Abe was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher and religious studies scholar who was emeritus professor at Nara University. He is best known for his work in comparative religion, developing a Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue which later also included Judaism. His mature views were developed within the Kyoto School of philosophy. According to Christopher Ives: "Since the death of D. T. Suzuki in 1966, Masao Abe has served as the main representative of Zen Buddhism in Europe and North America."
Go to Profile#7755
Jamal Malik
#7765
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jamal Malik is a Pakistani-born German professor of Islamic Studies and the chair of Religious Studies — Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Malik was born in 1956 in Peshawar, Pakistan. After finishing his MA in Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn , Jamal Malik received his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg , and completed his post-doctoral work at the University of Bamberg . In 1998, he was appointed head of Religious Studies at the University of Derby. Since 1999 he has been the Chair of Religious Studies — Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany.
Go to Profile#7756
Doug Henning
#7766
Overall Influence
1947 - 2000 (53 years)
Douglas James Henning was a Canadian magician, illusionist, escape artist and politician. Early life Henning was born in the Fort Garry district of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and began practicing magic at Oakenwald School in Fort Garry, later moving to Oakville, Ontario.
Go to Profile#7757
Roberto Saviano
#7767
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Roberto Saviano is an Italian writer, essayist, journalist, and screenwriter. In his writings, including articles and his book Gomorrah, he uses literature and investigative reporting to tell of the economic reality of the territory and business of organized crime in Italy, in particular the Camorra crime syndicate, and of organized crime more generally.
Go to Profile#7758
Tim Maudlin
#7768
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Tim William Eric Maudlin is an American philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic. Education and career Maudlin graduated from Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C. Later he studied physics and philosophy at Yale University, and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in 1986. He taught for more than two decades at Rutgers University before joining the Department of Philosophy at New York University in 2010.
Go to Profile#7759
Frank R. Palmer
#7769
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Frank Robert Palmer was a British linguist who was instrumental in the development of the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading. Academic career As a child, Palmer lived with his parents in Kendleshire . Palmer took his first school lessons at the Hambrook School , enrolling there on 30 August 1926, as recorded in the Admission Register 1922–1946. On 2 September 1932, he went to Bristol Grammar School. Later, Palmer was educated at New College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#7760
Fadwa El Guindi
#7770
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Fadwa El Guindi is an Egyptian-American anthropologist and former professor of anthropology at Qatar University. She is the author of several ethnographies, including The Myth of Ritual: A Native's Ethnography of Zapotec Life-Crisis Rituals and By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam .
Go to Profile#7761
Brockway McMillan
#7771
Overall Influence
1915 - 2016 (101 years)
Brockway McMillan was an American government official and scientist, who served as the eighth Under Secretary of the Air Force and the second Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. McMillan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1915, the only child of Franklin Richardson McMillan, a civil engineer, and Luvena Lucille Brockway McMillan, a schoolteacher. He received his B.S. in 1936 and a Ph.D. 1939 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a thesis entitled The calculus of discrete homogenous chaos supervised by Norbert Wiener. He also served in the U.S. Navy at Dahlgren and Los Alamos during World War II.
Go to Profile#7762
Charles Birch
#7772
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Louis Charles Birch was an Australian geneticist specialising in population ecology and was also well known as a theologian, writing widely on the topic of science and religion, winning the Templeton Prize in 1990. The prize recognised his work ascribing intrinsic value to all life.
Go to Profile#7763
Boris Weisfeiler
#7773
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Boris Weisfeiler was a Soviet-born mathematician and professor at Penn State University who lived in the United States before disappearing in Chile in 1985. Declassified US documents suggest a Chilean army patrol seized Weisfeiler and took him to Colonia Dignidad, a secretive Germanic agricultural commune set up in Chile in the 1960s. During the Chilean Pinochet military dictatorship Boris Weisfeiler allegedly drowned. He is known for the Weisfeiler filtration, Weisfeiler–Leman algorithm and Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures.
Go to Profile#7764
Peter T. Daniels
#7774
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Peter T. Daniels is a scholar of writing systems, specializing in typology. He was co-editor of the book The World's Writing Systems . He was a lecturer at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Chicago State University.
Go to Profile#7765
Federico Fellini
#7775
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Federico Fellini was an Italian filmmaker. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film as the 10th-greatest film.
Go to Profile#7766
Jane Loevinger
#7776
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Jane Loevinger Weissman was an American developmental psychologist who developed a theory of personality which emphasized the gradual internalization of social rules and the maturing conscience for the origin of personal decisions. She also contributed to the theory of measurements by introducing the coefficient of test homogeneity. In the tradition of developmental stage models, Loevinger integrated several "frameworks of meaning-making" into a model of humans' constructive potentials that she called ego development . The essence of the ego is the striving to master, to integrate, and make sense of experience.
Go to Profile#7767
Norman Packard
#7777
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Norman Harry Packard is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known for his contributions to chaos theory, complex systems, and artificial life. He coined the phrase "the edge of chaos".
Go to Profile#7768
Mona Simpson
#7778
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mona Simpson is an American novelist. She has written six novels and studied English at University of California, Berkeley, and languages and literature at Columbia University. She won a Whiting Award for her first novel, Anywhere but Here . It was a popular success and adapted as a film by the same name, released in 1999. She wrote a sequel, The Lost Father . Critical recognition has included the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and making the shortlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Off Keck Road .
Go to Profile#7769
Bill Murray
#7779
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
William James Murray is an American actor and comedian, known for his deadpan delivery in roles ranging from studio comedies to independent dramas. He has frequently collaborated with directors Ivan Reitman, Harold Ramis, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola Jim Jarmusch and the Farrelly brothers. He has earned numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and two Independent Spirit Awards, as well as a nomination for an Academy Award. In 2016, Murray was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Go to Profile#7770
Susanne Bødker
#7780
Overall Influence
Susanne Bødker is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to human–computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and participatory design, including the introduction of activity theory to human–computer interaction. She is a professor of computer science at Aarhus University, and a member of the CHI Academy.
Go to Profile#7771
James H. Morris
#7781
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
James Hiram Morris is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He was previously dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and Dean of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. Biography A native of Pittsburgh, Morris received a Bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University, an S.M. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.
Go to Profile#7772
Koji Nakanishi
#7782
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
was a Japanese chemist who studied bioorganic chemistry and natural products. He served as Centennial Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Chemistry Department at Columbia University. Early life Nakanishi was born in Hong Kong on May 11, 1925. He first attended the British Boys' School in Alexandria, Egypt. Once he turned 10 his family and he moved back to Japan, where he would attend Yamate primary for a year before transferring over to the junior division of Konan High school. He first applied to Tokyo University only to be rejected, after which he applied and was accepted to Nagoya University.
Go to Profile#7773
Hershel Parker
#7783
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature, noted for his research into the works of Herman Melville. Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick , and the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, which, with the publication of volume 13, "Billy Budd, Sailor" and Other Uncompleted Writings, is now complete in fifteen volumes. Parker is the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press .
Go to Profile#7774
Scott J. Shapiro
#7784
Overall Influence
Scott Jonathan Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Philosophy at Yale Law School and the Director of Yale's Center for Law and Philosophy and of the Yale CyberSecurity Lab. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Columbia College, his J.D. from Yale Law School, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. He also studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel. After law school, Shapiro served as a clerk for Judge Pierre Leval on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. At Yale, he teaches in Jurisprudence, Constitutional Law, Cyberlaw, and Cybersec...
Go to Profile#7775
Raphael Patai
#7785
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Raphael Patai , born Ervin György Patai, was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer, historian, Orientalist and anthropologist. Family background Patai was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary in 1910 to Edith Patai, née Ehrenfeld, and . Patai's mother was born in Nagyvárad to German-speaking, Jewish parents who expressed their commitment to Magyar nationalism by sending their daughter to Hungarian-language schools. Both parents spoke Hungarian and German fluently and educated their children to be perfectly fluent in both languages. His father was a prominent literary figure, author of numerous Zionist and other writings, including a biography of Theodor Herzl.
Go to Profile#7776
Toby Huff
#7786
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Toby E. Huff is an American academic and emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was born in Portland, Maine. He was trained as a sociologist but has research interests in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He has published Weber-inspired studies of the Arab and Muslim world, as well as China, including field work in Malaysia. He is best known for his book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, which has been translated into multiple languages.
Go to Profile#7777
Andrew Pickering
#7787
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Andrew Pickering is a British sociologist, philosopher and historian of science at the University of Exeter. He was a professor of sociology and a director of science and technology studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2007. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of London, and a doctorate in Science Studies from the University of Edinburgh. His book Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics is a classic in the field of the sociology of science.
Go to Profile#7778
Allan Sandage
#7788
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Allan Rex Sandage was an American astronomer. He was Staff Member Emeritus with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. He determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.
Go to Profile#7779
Gottfried Ungerboeck
#7789
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Gottfried Ungerboeck is an Austrian communications engineer. Ungerboeck received an electrical engineering degree from Vienna University of Technology in 1964, and a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, in 1970. He joined IBM Austria as a systems engineer in 1965, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 1967.
Go to Profile#7780
Christopher Ehret
#7790
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Christopher Ehret , who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He has published ten books, most recently History and the Testimony of Language and A Dictionary of Sandawe , the latter co-edited with his wife, Patricia Ehret. He has written around seventy scholarly articles on a wide range of historical, linguistic, and anthropological subjects. These works include ...
Go to Profile#7781
Pavel Litvinov
#7791
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov is a Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. Biography The grandson of Ivy Low and Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, Pavel Litvinov was raised amongst the Soviet elite. As a schoolboy, he was devoted to the cult of Stalin, and was tapped, unsuccessfully, by the KGB to report on his parents Flora and Misha Litvinov .
Go to Profile#7782
Daniel Boulud
#7792
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Daniel Boulud is a French chef and restaurateur with restaurants in New York City, Palm Beach, Miami, Toronto, Montréal, Singapore, the Bahamas, and Dubai. He is best known for his eponymous restaurant Daniel, opened in New York City in 1993, which currently holds two Michelin stars.
Go to Profile#7783
Judy Blume
#7793
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Judith Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult, and adult fiction. Blume began writing in 1959 and has published more than 25 novels. Among her best-known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. , Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing , Deenie , and Blubber . Blume's books have significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
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Martin Bernal
#7794
Overall Influence
1937 - 2013 (76 years)
Martin Gardiner Bernal was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine.
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Julian Barbour
#7795
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Julian Barbour is a British physicist with research interests in quantum gravity and the history of science. Since receiving his PhD degree on the foundations of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity at the University of Cologne in 1968, Barbour has supported himself and his family without an academic position, working part-time as a translator . He resides near Banbury, England.
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Stuart Feldman
#7796
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Stuart Feldman is an American computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program make. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operating system, and participated in development of the ALTRAN and EFL programming languages.
Go to Profile#7787
David E. Van Zandt
#7797
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David Van Zandt is an American attorney, legal scholar, and academic administrator. He served as president of The New School from Jan. 2011 to Apr. 15, 2020. Earlier he served as Dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, from 1995 to 2011. He has taught courses in international financial markets, business associations, property, practical issues in business law, and legal realism. He is an expert in business associations, international business transactions, property law, jurisprudence, law and social science, and legal education.
Go to Profile#7788
Phyllis Chesler
#7798
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Phyllis Chesler is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island . She is a renowned second-wave feminist psychologist and the author of 18 books, including the best-sellers Women and Madness , With Child: A Diary of Motherhood , and An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir . Chesler has written extensively about topics such as gender, mental illness, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence against women.
Go to Profile#7789
Dietmar Saupe
#7799
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dietmar Saupe is a fractal researcher and professor of computer science, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Germany. Saupe's book, Chaos and Fractals, won the Association of American Publishers award for Best Mathematics Book of the Year in 1992. His current research interests include computer graphics, scientific visualization, and image processing.
Go to Profile#7790
Simson Garfinkel
#7800
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Simson L. Garfinkel is the Chief Scientist of BasisTech, LLC in Somerville, Ma . He was previously a Program Scientist at AI2050, part of Schmidt Futures He has held several roles across government, including a Senior Data Scientist at the Department of Homeland Security , the US Census Bureau's Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access. and a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology . Prior to that, he was an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California . In addition to his research, Garfinkel is a journalist...
Go to Profile#7791
Paul Horowitz
#7801
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Paul Horowitz is an American physicist and electrical engineer, known primarily for his work in electronics design, as well as for his role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . Biography At age 8, Horowitz achieved distinction as the world's youngest amateur radio operator. He went on to study physics at Harvard University , where he has also spent all of his subsequent career. His early work was on scanning microscopy . Horowitz has also conducted astrophysical research on pulsars and investigations in biophysics. His interest in practical electronics has led to a handful of...
Go to Profile#7792
Ben Okri
#7802
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road. He received a knighthood in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
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Simona Halep
#7803
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Simona Halep is an inactive Romanian professional tennis player. She has been ranked world number one in singles twice between 2017 and 2019, for a total of 64 weeks, which ranks twelfth in the history of the Women's Tennis Association rankings. Halep was the year-end No. 1 in 2017 and 2018. She has won two Grand Slam singles titles: the 2018 French Open and the 2019 Wimbledon Championships.
Go to Profile#7794
Yoji Totsuka
#7804
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Yoji Totsuka was a Japanese physicist and Special University Professor, Emeritus, University of Tokyo. A leader in the study of solar and atmospheric neutrinos, he was a scientist and director at Kamioka Observatory, Super-Kamiokande and the High Energy Physics Laboratory in Japan.
Go to Profile#7795
Faye Glenn Abdellah
#7805
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Faye Glenn Abdellah was an American pioneer in nursing research. Abdellah was the first nurse and woman to serve as the Deputy Surgeon General of the United States. Preceding her appointment, she served in active duty during the Korean War, where she earned a distinguished ranking equivalent to a Navy Rear Admiral, making her the highest-ranked woman and nurse in the Federal Nursing Services at the time. In addition to these achievements, Abdellah led the formation of the National Institute of Nursing Research at the NIH, and was the founder and first dean of the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences .
Go to Profile#7796
Isabel Schnabel
#7806
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Isabel Schnabel is a German economist who has been serving as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank since 2020. She became professor of financial economics at the University of Bonn in 2015 and a member of the German Council of Economic Experts in 2014. She worked previously at the University of Mainz from 2007 to 2015.
Go to Profile#7797
Thomas Risse
#7807
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Thomas Risse is a Berlin-based international relations scholar. He currently acts as chair of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science of Freie Universität Berlin. Furthermore, he has several engagements in German and international research networks, and heads the PhD program of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.
Go to Profile#7798
Matt Parker
#7808
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Matthew Thomas Parker is an Australian recreational mathematician, author, comedian, YouTube personality and science communicator based in the United Kingdom. His book Humble Pi was the first maths book in the UK to be a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller. Parker was the Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He is a former maths teacher and has helped popularise maths via his tours and videos.
Go to Profile#7799
Félix Candela
#7809
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Félix Candela Outeriño was a Spanish and Mexican architect who was born in Madrid and at the age of 26, emigrated to Mexico, acquiring double nationality. He is known for his significant role in the development of Mexican architecture and structural engineering. Candela's major contribution to architecture was the development of thin shells made out of reinforced concrete, popularly known as cascarones.
Go to Profile#7800
Franco Moretti
#7810
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Franco Moretti is an Italian literary historian and theorist. He graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972. He has taught at the universities of Salerno and Verona ; in the US, at Columbia and Stanford , where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel, and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab. Moretti has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton, the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, and has been a lecturer and visiting professor in many countries, including, until the end of 2019, the...
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