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
#12451
Maria Konnikova
#12462
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Maria Konnikova is a Russiann-Americann writer. Konnikova has also worked as a television producer, poker player, and podcaster. She has written three New York Times bestseller list books, including Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.
Go to Profile#12452
Woody Harrelson
#12463
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Woodrow Tracy Harrelson is an American actor. He is the recipient of various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#12453
Brian Lara
#12464
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Brian Charles Lara, is a Trinidadian former international cricketer, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest batsmen of all time. He topped the Test batting rankings on several occasions and holds several cricketing records, including the record for the highest individual score in first-class cricket, with 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham at Edgbaston in 1994, which is the only quintuple-hundred in first-class cricket history. As captain, Lara led the West Indies team to win the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy, the first time the team won any major ICC trophy since winning the 1979 C...
Go to Profile#12454
R. F. Foster
#12465
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Fitzroy 'Roy' Foster , publishing as R. F. Foster, is an Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford. Early life Foster was born on 16 January 1949 in Waterford, to two teachers: Betty Foster , a primary teacher, and 'Fef' Foster, a teacher of Irish. His father, Fef, was a native of Drung, a tiny hamlet and parish located between Cavan Town and Cootehill in County Cavan. Roy attended Newtown School in Waterford, a multi-denominational school that was founded as a Quaker school in the late 18th century. He won a scholarship to attend St.
Go to Profile#12455
Bernard Roy
#12466
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Bernard Roy was an emeritus professor at the Université Paris-Dauphine. In 1974 he founded the "Laboratoire d'Analyse et de Modélisation des Systèmes pour l'Aide à la Décision" . He was President of Association of European Operational Research Societies from 1985 to 1986. In 1992 he was awarded the EURO Gold Medal, the highest distinction within Operations Research in Europe. In 2015 he received the EURO Distinguished Service Award.
Go to Profile#12456
Cesc Fàbregas
#12467
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Francesc "Cesc" Fàbregas Soler is a Spanish football manager and former professional footballer who played as a central midfielder. He is the current caretaker coach of Como in the Italian Serie B.
Go to Profile#12457
Ko Un
#12468
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Ko Un is a South Korean poet whose works have been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. He had been imprisoned many times due to his role in the campaign for Korean democracy and was later mentioned in Korea as one of the front runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Go to Profile#12458
Henri Bal
#12469
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Henri Elle Bal is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is a well-known researcher in computer systems with a specialization in parallel computer systems, languages, and applications.
Go to Profile#12459
Carrie Underwood
#12470
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Carrie Marie Underwood is an American country singer. She rose to prominence after winning the fourth season of American Idol in 2005. Underwood's single "Inside Your Heaven" made her the first country artist to debut atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the only solo country artist in the 2000s to have a number-one song on the Hot 100. Her debut album, Some Hearts , was bolstered by the successful crossover singles "Jesus, Take the Wheel" and "Before He Cheats", becoming the best-selling solo female debut album in country music history. She won three Grammy Awards for the album, including Best New Artist.
Go to Profile#12460
Sam Kinison
#12471
Overall Influence
1953 - 1992 (39 years)
Samuel Burl Kinison was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream, similar to charismatic preachers. Initially performing for free, Kinison became a regular fixture at The Comedy Store where he met and eventually befriended such comics as Robin Williams and Jim Carrey. Kinison's comedy was crass observational humor, especially towards women and dating, and his popularity grew quickly, earning him appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live.
Go to Profile#12461
Babyface
#12472
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Kenneth Brian Edmonds , better known by his stage name Babyface, is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. He has written and produced over 26 number-one R&B hits throughout his career and has won 12 Grammy Awards. He was ranked number 20 on NME 50 of The Greatest Producers Ever list.
Go to Profile#12462
Terje Lømo
#12473
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Terje Lømo is a Norwegian physiologist who specialized in neuroscience. He was born in Ålesund to dentist Leif Lømo and Ingeborg Rebekka Helseth. Lømo in 1966, while beginning his PhD, worked in Per Oskar Andersen's lab in the Department of Physiology in Oslo. This was part of an apprenticeship dealing with hippocampal studies. By 1968, Timothy Bliss had joined Læmo in Andersen's laboratory for studies in memory mechanisms within the hippocampus. Lømo is known for his studies on synapses, in particular the synaptic plasticity. His discovery of the long-term potentiation, along with fellow researcher Tim Bliss, is regarded as a fundamental work in neurophysiology.
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Mark Shields
#12474
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Mark Stephen Shields was an American political columnist, advisor, and commentator. He worked in leadership positions for many Democratic candidates' electoral campaigns. Shields provided weekly political analysis and commentary for the PBS NewsHour from 1988 to 2020. His on-screen counterpart from 2001 to 2020 was David Brooks of The New York Times. Previous counterparts were the late William Safire, Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal, and David Gergen. Shields was also a regular panelist on Inside Washington, a weekly public affairs show that was seen on both PBS and ABC until it ceased production in December 2013.
Go to Profile#12464
Ashley Cole
#12475
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Ashley Cole is an English football coach and former player. As a player, he played as a left-back, most notably for Arsenal and Chelsea. Cole is considered by many critics and fellow professional players as one of the best defenders of his generation, one of the greatest English players of all time as well as one of the greatest left-backs in the history of the sport. Born in Stepney, London, Cole began his youth career at Arsenal and made his full debut for the club in November 1999, going on to make 228 appearances and scoring nine goals for the North London club. With Arsenal he won two Pr...
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James Petras
#12476
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published on political issues with particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East, imperialism, globalization, and leftist social movements.
Go to Profile#12466
Seymour Melman
#12477
Overall Influence
1917 - 2004 (87 years)
Seymour Melman was an American professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He wrote extensively for fifty years on "economic conversion", the ordered transition from military to civilian production by military industries and facilities. Author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism, he was an economist, writer, and gadfly of the military-industrial complex.
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Roy Rappaport
#12478
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Roy Abraham Rappaport was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology. Biography Rappaport was born in New York City on 25 March 1926. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University and held a tenured position at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#12468
Alejandro Toledo
#12479
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alejandro Celestino Toledo Manrique is a Peruvian former politician who served as President of Peru, from 2001 to 2006. He gained international prominence after leading the opposition against president Alberto Fujimori, who held the presidency from 1990 to 2000.
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Femi Osofisan
#12481
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Babafemi Adeyemi Osofisan , known as Femi Osofisan or F.O., is a Nigerian writer noted for his critique of societal problems and his use of African traditional performances and surrealism in some of his plays. A frequent theme that his drama explore is the conflict between good and evil. He is a didactic writer whose works seek to correct his decadent society. He has written poetry under the pseudonym Okinba Launko.
Go to Profile#12471
Paul Engle
#12482
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Paul Engle , was an American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as co-founder of the International Writing Program , both at the University of Iowa.
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Jean La Fontaine
#12483
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Jean Sybil La Fontaine FRAI is a British anthropologist and emeritus professor of the London School of Economics. She has done research in Africa and the UK, on topics including ritual, gender, child abuse, witchcraft and satanism. In 1994 she wrote a government report: The Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Abuse.
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John Paul Scott
#12484
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
John Paul Scott was an American behavior geneticist and comparative psychologist known for his research into the development of social behavior , which he pursued through studies in animal models including the dog. Scott & his collaborator John L. Fuller are memorialised in the Fuller-Scott prize, offered annually by the Behavior Genetics Association.
Go to Profile#12474
Al Williamson
#12485
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Alfonso Williamson was an American cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator specializing in adventure, Western, science fiction and fantasy. Born in New York City, he spent much of his early childhood in Bogotá, Colombia before moving back to the United States at the age of 12. In his youth, Williamson developed an interest in comic strips, particularly Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon. He took art classes at Burne Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School, there befriending future cartoonists Wally Wood and Roy Krenkel, who introduced him to the work of illustrators who had influenced adventure strips.
Go to Profile#12475
Douglas Bernheim
#12486
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
B. Douglas Bernheim is an American professor of Economics, currently the Edward Ames Edmunds Professor of Economics at Stanford University; his previous academic appointments have included an endowed chair in Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University and an endowed chair in Insurance and Risk Management at Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Department of Finance. He has published many articles in academic journals, and has received a number of awards recognizing his contributions to the field of economics. He is a partner with Bates White, LLC...
Go to Profile#12476
René Dumont
#12487
Overall Influence
1904 - 2001 (97 years)
René Dumont was a French engineer in agronomy, a sociologist, and an environmental politician. Biography Dumont was born in Cambrai, Nord, in the north of France. His father was a professor in agriculture and his grandfather was a farmer. He graduated from the INA P-G, as an engineer in agronomy. First sent to Vietnam at the end of his studies, he was disgusted by colonialism and returned to Paris to spend most of his career as a professor of agricultural sciences . René Dumont started his career as a promoter of the use of chemical fertilizers and mechanisation. He wrote articles in La Terre Française , favoring agricultural corporatism.
Go to Profile#12477
Churchill Eisenhart
#12488
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Churchill Eisenhart was a United States mathematician. He was Chief of the Statistical Engineering Laboratory , Applied Mathematics Division of the National Bureau of Standards . Biography Eisenhart was the son of Luther Eisenhart, a prominent mathematician in his own right.
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Kristine Stiles
#12489
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kristine Stiles is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University.
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Wolfgang Wahlster
#12490
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Wolfgang Wahlster is a German artificial intelligence researcher. He was CEO and Scientific Director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and full professor of computer science at Saarland University, Saarbrücken. Wahlster remains Chief Executive Advisor of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. In May 2019, he was honored by the Gesellschaft für Informatik as one of 10 most important heads of German artificial intelligence history. He is sometimes called the inventor of the "Industry 4.0" term.
Go to Profile#12480
Eugene V. Gallagher
#12491
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Eugene V. Gallagher is an American professor of religious studies at Connecticut College. His department lists his specializations as: History of religion, New religious movements, New Testament and early Christianity, Western scriptures and traditions. He is the author of several books, mainly on the topic of new religious movements. Gallagher is the Rosemary Park Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Connecticut College, where he worked from 1978 to 2015, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston.
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Willem van der Poel
#12492
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Willem Louis van der Poel is a Dutch computer scientist, who is known for designing one of the first computers to be designed in the Netherlands, the Zeer Eenvoudige Binaire Reken Automaat , translated as Very Simple Binary Automatic Calculator.
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Jacques Bertin
#12493
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Jacques Bertin was a French cartographer and theorist, known from his book Sémiologie Graphique , published in 1967. This monumental work, based on his experience as a cartographer and geographer, represents the first and widest intent to provide a theoretical foundation to Information Visualization, with his most lasting contribution being his set of visual variables that can be used to construct map symbols and other graphical techniques one of then being the Bertin Projection, an innovative map projection type.
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Michael Omi
#12494
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Omi is an American sociologist, writer, scholar, and educator. Omi has served on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Associate Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Omi is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Howard Winant. Omi's work includes race theory, Asian American studies, and antiracist scholarship.
Go to Profile#12484
Tara Westover
#12495
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Tara Westover is an American memoirist, essayist and historian. Her memoir Educated debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times ranked Educated as one of the 10 Best Books of 2018. Westover was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019.
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Ingram Olkin
#12496
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Ingram Olkin was a professor emeritus and chair of statistics and education at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is known for developing statistical analysis for evaluating policies, particularly in education, and for his contributions to meta-analysis, statistics education, multivariate analysis, and majorization theory.
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Ollie Johnston
#12497
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
Oliver Martin Johnston Jr. was an American motion picture animator. He was one of Disney's Nine Old Men, and the last surviving at the time of his death from natural causes. He was recognized by The Walt Disney Company with its Disney Legend Award in 1989. His work was recognized with the National Medal of Arts in 2005.
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Max Bennett
#12498
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Maxwell Richard Bennett is an Australian neuroscientist specializing in the function of synapses. Life Max Bennett was a student at Christian Brothers College, St Kilda and did his undergraduate work in electrical engineering and physics at University of Melbourne in 1959, where he founded the Athenian Society dedicated to understanding Plato, Aristotle and Wittgenstein. His interest in brain and mind led to postgraduate research in biology on synapses . In 1968 he took up a position as lecturer in physiology at Sydney University, where he was later awarded in 1980 the first and largest Centr...
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Ronald M. Evans
#12499
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ronald Mark Evans is an American Biologist, Professor and Head of the Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory, and the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Dr. Ronald M. Evans is known for his original discoveries of nuclear hormone receptors , a special class of transcriptional factor, and the elucidation of their universal mechanism of action, a process that governs how lipophilic hormones and drugs regulate virtually every developmental and metabolic pathway in animals and humans.
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Francis Birch
#12500
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Albert Francis Birch was an American geophysicist. He is considered one of the founders of solid Earth geophysics. He is also known for his part in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During World War II, Birch participated in the Manhattan Project, working on the design and development of the gun-type nuclear weapon known as Little Boy. He oversaw its manufacture, and went to Tinian to supervise its assembly and loading into Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress tasked with dropping the bomb.
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Nathan Schneider
#12501
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Nathan Schneider is a scholar, activist, and journalist. Since 2015, he has been a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Writing on religion Much of Schneider's early work concerned the interrelation of religion, science, and politics, which grew out of his academic work in religious studies. He has written investigative articles on the John Templeton Foundation for The Nation and The Chronicle of Higher Education. With the support of a Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life through USC's Annenberg School, he did extensive reporting on the ...
Go to Profile#12491
Greg Kurstin
#12502
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Gregory Allen Kurstin is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter. He has won nine Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year, Non-Classical in 2017 and 2018, and written and produced four songs that hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Go to Profile#12492
Julián Marías
#12503
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Julián Marías Aguilera was a Spanish philosopher associated with the Generation of '36 movement. He was a pupil of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and member of the Madrid School. Life and work Marías was born in the city of Valladolid, and moved to Madrid at the age of five. He went on to study philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, graduating in 1936. Within months of his graduation the Spanish Civil War broke out. During the conflict Marías sided with the Republicans, although his actual contributions were limited to propaganda articles and broadcasts.
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Ann Graybiel
#12504
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.
Go to Profile#12494
Didier Dubois
#12505
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Didier Dubois is a French mathematician. Since 1999, he is a co-editor-in-chief of the journal Fuzzy Sets and Systems. In 1993–1997 he was vice-president and president of the International Fuzzy Systems Association. His research interests include fuzzy set theory, possibility theory, and knowledge representation. Most of his works are co-authored by Henri Prade.
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Suhas Patankar
#12506
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Suhas V. Patankar is an Indian mechanical engineer. He is a pioneer in the field of computational fluid dynamics and Finite volume method. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He is also president of Innovative Research, Inc. Patankar was born in Pune, Maharashtra, India.
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Horst Korsching
#12507
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Horst Korsching was a German physicist. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon. Education Born in Danzig, Korsching began his studies of physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1932. In 1937, he joined the scientific staff at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik , an institute under the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and located in Dahlem-Berlin. He received his doctorate under Hermann Schüler.
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Alan Chalmers
#12508
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Alan Francis Chalmers is a British-Australian philosopher of science and associate professor at the University of Sydney. His son, David Chalmers, is also a noted philosopher, working in philosophy of mind at NYU.
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John Lasseter
#12509
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Alan Lasseter is an American filmmaker and animator. He is the head of animation at Skydance Animation. He was also previously the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios, as well as the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.
Go to Profile#12499
Jennifer Tour Chayes
#12510
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jennifer Tour Chayes is dean of the college of computing, data science, and society at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley, she was a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she founded in 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she founded in 2012.
Go to Profile#12500
Cheryl Harris
#12511
Overall Influence
Cheryl I. Harris is a critical race theorist and professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the UCLA School of Law. Harris is widely known for "Whiteness as Property", published in the June 1993 edition of the Harvard Law Review. In the paper, Harris describes the white racial identity and the value it confers in a slave society.
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