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
#16551
Steve Levicoff
#16562
Overall Influence
Steve F. Levicoff is an American writer and former educator best known for his writings, in books and online, on adult higher education and distance learning, and his practical guides to law for evangelists and Christian counselors. He directed the Institute on Religion and Law, which gave counseling on state-religion issues to organizations and government bodies.
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Walter Halloran
#16563
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Walter H. Halloran was a Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus who, at the age of twenty-six, assisted in the exorcism of Roland Doe, a thirteen-year-old Lutheran boy in Cottage City, Maryland, who was allegedly possessed. The case inspired William Peter Blatty to write his novel The Exorcist.
Go to Profile#16553
Philip J. Ivanhoe
#16564
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#16554
Munesuke Mita
#16565
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Munesuke Mita was one of the most famous sociologists in Japan. Mita has studied about modern society at University of Tokyo and influenced many young sociologists such as Masachi Ohsawa, Shunya Yoshimi, Atsushi Miura and Shinji Miyadai.
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Howard Warren Buffett
#16566
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Howard Warren Buffett is an American philanthropist, political consultant, political scientist, and writer. A grandson of the American businessman and investor Warren Buffett, he is an adjunct professor in public policy and international affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and was previously the executive director of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation that funds initiatives aimed at improving the standard of living and quality of life for the world’s most impoverished and marginalized populations. He previously led agr...
Go to Profile#16556
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
#16567
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is a German philosopher and writer specializing in aesthetics and intercultural philosophy. He is professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait and director of the Global Studie Center.
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Robert Frank Borkenstein
#16568
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
Robert Frank Borkenstein was an American inventor, researcher, and professor. His inventions include the Breathalyzer. Early Years Robert F. Borkenstein was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on August 31, 1912. He graduated high school during the beginning of the Great Depression, and due to other financial issues and constraints he was unable to continue his education in college. He would find employment working in Fort Wayne as a photographic technician, where he developed an expertise in color film leading to his invention of the color camera. In 1936, because of his skills and creativity Borkenstein was hired by the Indiana State Police Criminology Laboratory.
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Adriel Johnson
#16569
Overall Influence
1957 - 2010 (53 years)
Adriel Duland Johnson Sr. was an American biologist and faculty member at the University of Alabama in Huntsville whose research focused on areas of cell biology and nutritional physiology. He was one of three faculty members who was killed in the shooting on the UAH campus on February 12, 2010.
Go to Profile#16559
Paul Campos
#16570
Overall Influence
Paul F. Campos is a law professor, author and blogger on the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder. Campos received his A.B. and M.A. in English from the University of Michigan and in 1989 his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School. Campos worked at the law firm Latham & Watkins in Chicago from 1989-1990 and became an associate professor at the University of Colorado in 1990, where he teaches classes on property, punishment theory, jurisprudence and legal interpretation.
Go to Profile#16560
Katharina Reiss
#16571
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Katharina Reiss was a German linguist and translation scholar. Her works are important in the field of translation studies. She is widely seen as a co-founder of the Skopos theory. Life Katharina Reiss was born in Rheinhausen, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine, and across the river from Duisburg into which, for administrative purposes, it has subsequently been subsumed. She passed her school finals exam in 1940 and went on to study between 1941 and 1944 at the Institute of Simultaneous Translation of Heidelberg University, where she received her first degree as a "professional translator".
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Jean-Pierre Azéma
#16572
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jean-Pierre Azéma is a French historian. Azéma is a member of the scientific counsel for the Institut François Mitterrand, an organisation founded by François Mitterrand with the goal of "contributing to the propagation of knowledge on the political and social history of modern France". He supported Ségolène Royal for the presidency.
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Joan Weiner
#16573
Overall Influence
Joan Weiner is an American philosopher and professor emerita of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, known for her books on Gottlob Frege. Education and career Weiner majored in mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating with high distinction and honors in 1975. She completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1982.
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Brian Nosek
#16574
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Brian Arthur Nosek is an American social-cognitive psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science. He also co-founded the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and Project Implicit. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 2002.
Go to Profile#16564
Paul Thomas Anderson
#16575
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Paul Thomas Anderson , also known by his initials PTA, is an American filmmaker. His films are often psychological dramas, characterized by depictions of flawed and desperate characters, explorations of dysfunctional families, alienation, loneliness and redemption, and a bold visual style that uses moving camera and long takes. His films have garnered critical acclaim. He has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and eight BAFTA Awards , and received Best Director awards from the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin film festivals, also winning the Golden Bear at the latte...
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Michel Wieviorka
#16576
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michel Wieviorka is a French sociologist, noted for his work on violence, terrorism, racism, social movements and the theory of social change. He was the 16th president of International Sociological Association .
Go to Profile#16566
Simon Hix
#16577
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Simon Hix is a British political scientist, holder of the Stein Rokkan chair in comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence. He was also Harold Laski Professor of Political Science and pro-director for research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Hix is an expert in European Union politics, and the author of several books, including What's Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament with Abdul Noury and Gérard Roland, and The Political System of the European Union. He is also associate editor of ...
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Alfred Caldwell
#16578
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Alfred Caldwell was an American architect best known for his landscape architecture in and around Chicago, Illinois. Family and education Caldwell and his wife Virginia had a daughter, Carol Caldwell Dooley, born on January 25, 1931, and a son, James Allen Caldwell, born on December 12, 1933. He received a Master of Science in city planning from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1948.
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Harald Hammarström
#16579
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Harald Hammarström is a Swedish linguist. He is currently an Associate Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University. Hammarström is especially known for his extensive work on curating Glottolog, a bibliographic database of the world's languages.
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Werner Sobek
#16580
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Werner Sobek is a German architect and structural engineer. Life Werner Sobek was born 1953 in Aalen, Germany. From 1974 to 1980, he studied structural engineering and architecture at the University of Stuttgart. From 1980 to 1986, he was a post-graduate fellow in the research project 'Wide-Span Lightweight Structures' at the University of Stuttgart and finished his PhD 1987 in structural engineering. In 1983, Sobek won the Fazlur Khan International Fellowship from the SOM Foundation.
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George S. Tolley
#16581
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
George Stanford Tolley was an agricultural economist at the University of Chicago. Along with the faculty at the University of Chicago, he has worked on the faculty of North Carolina State University. In 1965–1966, he was Director of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture, and in 1974–1975 he was Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of Treasury.
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John Henry Coatsworth
#16582
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Henry Coatsworth is an American historian of Latin America and the former provost of Columbia University. From 2012 until June 30, 2019, Coatsworth served as Columbia provost. From 2007 until February 2012 Coatsworth was the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs , and served concurrently as interim provost beginning in 2011. Coatsworth is a scholar of Latin American economic, social and international history, with an emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
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David Greig
#16583
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
David Greig is a Scottish playwright and theatre director. His work has been performed at many of the major theatres in Britain, including the Traverse Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and been produced around the world.
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Anton Kapustin
#16584
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Anton Nikolayevich Kapustin is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and the Earle C. Anthony Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. His interests lie in quantum field theory and string theory, and their applications to particle physics and condensed matter theory. He is the son of the pianist-composer Nikolai Kapustin.
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Anton Amann
#16585
Overall Influence
1956 - 2015 (59 years)
Anton Amann was an Austrian chemist and Professor of chemistry at the Innsbruck Medical University. He worked in the area of physical chemistry, ECG analysis, and exhaled breath analysis. Amann was the head of the Breath Research Institute of the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck and editor in chief of the Journal of Breath Research.
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William Kennedy Smith
#16586
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
William Kennedy Smith is an American physician and a member of the Kennedy family who founded an organization focused on land mines and the rehabilitation of landmine victims. He is known for being charged with rape in a nationally publicized 1991 trial that ended with his acquittal.
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Gideon Koren
#16587
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gideon Koren, FACMT, FRCP is an Israeli-Canadian pediatrician, clinical pharmacologist, toxicologist, and a composer of Israeli folk music. He was a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor at the University of Toronto. In 1985, Koren founded the Motherisk Program in Toronto, which was later shut down amid controversy. Furthermore, multiple scientific papers authored by Koren have been subject to concerns regarding academic and research misconduct, leading to the retraction of six research articles and editorial expression of concerns on multiple others. Koren currently has re...
Go to Profile#16577
David Goffin
#16588
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
David Goffin is a Belgian professional tennis player. His career-high singles ranking is world No. 7. He is currently the Belgian No. 1, and the first Belgian man to be ranked in the top 10. Goffin has won six ATP titles and reached nine other finals, most notably at the 2017 ATP Finals.
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Marek Jędraszewski
#16589
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Marek Jędraszewski is a Polish Roman Catholic prelate who has been Metropolitan Archbishop of Kraków since 8 December 2016. He served as the Metropolitan Archbishop of Łódź from 2012 to 2017. He has also been Vice-President of the Polish Episcopal Conference since 2014.
Go to Profile#16579
Bruce Charlton
#16590
Overall Influence
Bruce Graham Charlton is a retired British medical doctor who was Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham. Until April 2019, he was Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University. Charlton was editor of the controversial and not-conventionally-peer reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses from 2003 to 2010.
Go to Profile#16580
Carla Suárez Navarro
#16591
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Carla Suárez Navarro is a Spanish former professional tennis player. A former top 10 singles player, she reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 6 on 29 February 2016, and a best WTA doubles ranking of 11, on 27 April 2015, and won two singles and three doubles titles on the WTA Tour.
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Linsey Marr
#16592
Overall Influence
Linsey Chen Marr is an American scientist who is the Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research considers the interaction of nanomaterials and viruses with the atmosphere. During the COVID-19 pandemic Marr studied how SARS-CoV-2 and other airborne pathogens could be transported in air. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and named a MacArthur Fellow.
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Somak Raychaudhury
#16593
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Somak Raychaudhury is an Indian astrophysicist. He is the Vice-Chancellor at Ashoka University and was the Director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics , Pune. He is on leave from Presidency University, Kolkata, India, where he is a Professor of Physics, and is also affiliated to the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is known for his work on stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes. His significant contributions include those in the fields of gravitational lensing, galaxy dynamics and large-scale motions in the Universe, including the Great A...
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Daniel Stern
#16594
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Daniel N. Stern was a prominent American developmental psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books — most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant .
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Jerry Saltz
#16595
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jerry Saltz is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018 and was nominated for the award in 2001 and 2006. Saltz served as a visiting critic at School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Yale University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio Residency Program, and was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial.
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John C. Coffee
#16596
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
John C. Coffee Jr. is the Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School. Education Coffee grew up in Manhasset, New York. He is of Irish descent. He attended Manhasset High School where he was in the National Honor Society. After graduation, he attended Amherst College with his high school friend and classmate, actor Ken Howard. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1966, his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1969 and later an LL.M. from New York University School of Law.
Go to Profile#16586
Alain Corbin
#16597
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Alain Corbin Trained in the Annales School, Corbin's work has moved away from the large-scale collective structures studied by Fernand Braudel towards a history of sensibilities which is closer to Lucien Febvre's history of mentalités. His books have explored the histories of such subjects as male desire and prostitution, sensory experience of smell and sound, and the 1870 burning of a young nobleman in a Dordogne village.
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Bernard Cerquiglini
#16598
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bernard Cerquiglini , is a French linguist. A Graduate of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, having received an agrégé and a doctorate in letters, he was a teacher of linguistics in University of Paris VII, former director of the National Institute for the French language, former vice-president of the Conseil supérieur de la langue française and president of the French National Reading Observatory. In 1995 Bernard Cerquiglini joined the Oulipo. He was in charge of a governmental studies on a French orthography reform and about national languages in France. He received the title Docto...
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Adi Utarini
#16599
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Adi Utarini is an Indonesian public health researcher who works on disease control of dengue fever. She serves as Professor of Public Health in the Department of Health and Policy Management at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. In 2020, she was selected as one of Nature 10 for pioneering the randomized controlled trial of a dengue prevention technique using mosquitoes carrying the Wolbachia bacteria. In 2021, she was selected as one of TIME's 100 most Influential People of 2021
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Werner E. Reichardt
#16600
Overall Influence
1924 - 1992 (68 years)
Werner E. Reichardt was a German physicist and biologist who helped to establish the field of biological cybernetics. He co-founded the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, and the Journal of Biological Cybernetics.
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Harvey Goldstein
#16601
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Harvey Goldstein was a British statistician known for his contributions to multilevel modelling methodology, statistical software, social statistics, and for applying this to educational assessment and league tables.
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Robert Boyd
#16602
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Sir Robert Lewis Fullarton Boyd was a pioneer of British space science and founding director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory . Robert Boyd was born in Saltcoats, Ayrshire as one of two twin boys. He was a pupil at Whitgift School and studied at Imperial College and University College London .
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Rick Roderick
#16603
Overall Influence
1949 - 2002 (53 years)
Rick Roderick was an American professor of philosophy, best known for his lectures for The Teaching Company. Life Roderick was born in Abilene, Texas, on June 16, 1949, son of a "con-man" and a "beautician". He was a teacher of philosophy at several universities, where he was much revered by many students for a Socratic style of teaching combined with a brash and often humorous approach. His breakthrough into wider circles came with his engagement with The Teaching Company where he recorded several lecture series. Rick Roderick died on January 18, 2002, from a congestive heart condition.
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Thomas Shapiro
#16604
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Thomas M. Shapiro is a professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Brandeis University and is the author of The Hidden Cost of Being African American and the co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth. Shapiro's current professional titles include the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy and the Director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The primary areas of focus for Shapiro's research and publications are racial inequality and public policy.
Go to Profile#16594
Peter Palese
#16605
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Peter Palese is a United States microbiologist, researcher, inventor and the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and an expert in the field of RNA viruses.
Go to Profile#16595
Candida Moss
#16606
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Candida R. Moss is an English public intellectual, journalist, New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity, and as of 2017, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. A graduate of Oxford and Yale universities, Moss specialises in the study of the New Testament, with a focus on the subject of martyrdom in early Christianity, as well as other topics from the New Testament and early Church History. She is the winner of a number of awards relating to her research and writing.
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Nathaniel Philbrick
#16607
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Nathaniel Philbrick is an American author of history, winner of the National Book Award, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His maritime history, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which tells the true story that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick, won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was adapted as a film in 2015.
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Elizabeth Wilmshurst
#16608
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Elizabeth Susan Wilmshurst , Distinguished Fellow of the International Law Programme at Chatham House , and Professor of International Law at University College London, is best known for her role as Deputy Legal Adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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Samuel P. Hays
#16609
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Samuel Pfrimmer Hays was a pioneering environmental, social and political historian. Born in Corydon, Indiana and raised on a local dairy farm. He earned a graduates degree from Swarthmore College in 1948, and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. He authored multiple works including "The Response to Industrialism 1885-1914" in 1957, "Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency," "Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985” and "A History of Environmental Politics since 1945". He established the Archives of Industrial Society at The University of Pittsburgh...
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Jennifer Wiseman
#16610
Overall Influence
Jennifer J. Wiseman is Senior Project Scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope, and an American astronomer, born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University in 1995. Wiseman discovered periodic comet 114P/Wiseman-Skiff while working as an undergraduate search assistant in 1987. Wiseman is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she serves as the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. She previously headed the Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics. ...
Go to Profile#16600
Bernard McGinn
#16611
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Bernard McGinn is an American Roman Catholic theologian, religious historian, and scholar of spirituality. A specialist in Medieval mysticism, McGinn is widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of mysticism in the Western Christian tradition. He is best known for his comprehensive series on mysticism, The Presence of God.
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