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
#2701
Tariq Ramadan
#2704
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss Muslim academic, philosopher, and writer. He was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony's College, Oxford and the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford, but since 2018 has been taking an agreed leave of absence due to being held in prison following two rape allegations. He is a senior research fellow at Doshisha University in Japan, and is also a visiting professor at the Université Mundiapolis in Morocco. He was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, and used to be the director of the Research Centre of Islamic Legislation and Ethics , based in Doha.
Go to Profile#2702
Ronald Searle
#2705
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Ronald William Fordham Searle, CBE, RDI was an English artist and satirical cartoonist, comics artist, sculptor, medal designer and illustrator. He is perhaps best remembered as the creator of St Trinian's School and for his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth series.
Go to Profile#2703
Paul Krassner
#2706
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Paul Krassner was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.
Go to Profile#2704
Herb Caen
#2707
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Herbert Eugene Caen was a San Francisco humorist and journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, and offbeat puns and anecdotes—"A continuous love letter to San Francisco"—appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for almost sixty years and made him a household name throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Go to Profile#2705
Jonathan Kozol
#2708
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Jonathan Kozol is an American writer, progressive activist, and educator, best known for his books on public education in the United States. Education and experience Born to Harry Kozol and Ruth Kozol, Jonathan graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954, and Harvard University summa cum laude in 1958 with an A.B. in English literature. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. He did not, however, complete his scholarship, deciding instead to go to Paris to learn to write fiction and nonfiction from experienced authors such as William Styron, Richard Wright, and others who were living in Paris at the time.
Go to Profile#2706
Ngô Bảo Châu
#2709
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Ngô Bảo Châu is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms . He is the first Vietnamese national to have received the Fields Medal.
Go to Profile#2707
Arnold Lazarus
#2710
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Arnold Allan Lazarus was a South African-born clinical psychologist and researcher who specialized in cognitive therapy and is best known for developing multimodal therapy . A 1955 graduate of South Africa's CHIPS University of the Witwatersrand, Lazarus' accomplishments include authoring the first text on cognitive behavioral therapy called Behaviour Therapy and Beyond and 17 other books, over 300 clinical articles, and presidencies of psychological associations; he received numerous awards including the Distinguished Psychologist Award of the Division of Psychotherapy from the American Psy...
Go to Profile#2708
Perry Link
#2711
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Eugene Perry Link, Jr. is Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. Link is a Harvard University alumnus who received his B.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1976. Link has been a Board Member of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong since 2021. CFHK is a US-based non-profit organisation, which presses for the pre...
Go to Profile#2709
Robert De Niro
#2712
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Anthony De Niro is an American actor. Known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, he is considered to be one of the most influential actors of his generation. De Niro is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. In 2009, De Niro received the Kennedy Center Honor, and earned a Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016.
Go to Profile#2710
Christine Korsgaard
#2713
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christine Marion Korsgaard, is an American philosopher who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University. Her main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general.
Go to Profile#2711
Julian Bigelow
#2714
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Julian Bigelow was a pioneering American computer engineer. Life Bigelow was born in 1913 in Nutley, New Jersey. He obtained a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying electrical engineering and mathematics. During World War II, he assisted Norbert Wiener in his research on automated fire control for anti-aircraft guns, leading to the development of the so-called Wiener filter.
Go to Profile#2712
La Malinche
#2715
Overall Influence
Marina or Malintzin , more popularly known as La Malinche , a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire , by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was one of 20 enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519 by the natives of Tabasco. Cortés chose her as a consort, and she later gave birth to his first son, Martín – one of the first Mestizos in New Spain.
Go to Profile#2713
Joycelyn Elders
#2716
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Minnie Joycelyn Elders is an American pediatrician and public health administrator who served as Surgeon General of the United States from 1993 to 1994. A vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, she was the second woman, second person of color, and first African American to serve as Surgeon General.
Go to Profile#2714
David Henry Hwang
#2717
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. He has won three Obie Awards for his plays FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face. Three of his works—M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power—have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Go to Profile#2715
George L. Kelling
#2718
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
George Lee Kelling was an American criminologist, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University–Newark, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He previously taught at Northeastern University.
Go to Profile#2716
David Gelernter
#2719
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is a professor of computer science at Yale University. Gelernter is known for contributions to parallel computation in the 1980s, and for books on topics such as computed worlds . Gelernter is also known for his belief, expressed in his book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture , that liberal academia has a destructive influence on American society. He is in addition known for his views against women in the workforce, and his rejection of the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic clim...
Go to Profile#2717
David Bentley Hart
#2720
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian. Reviewers have commented on Hart's baroque prose and provocative rhetoric in over one thousand essays, reviews, and papers as well as nineteen books . From a predominantly Anglican family background, Hart became Eastern Orthodox when he was twenty-one. His academic works focus on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religion, Asian languages, classics, and literature as well as a New Testament translation. Books with wider audiences include The Doors of the Sea...
Go to Profile#2718
Seppo Linnainmaa
#2721
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Seppo Ilmari Linnainmaa is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist known for creating the modern version of backpropagation. Biography He was born in Pori. In 1974 he obtained the first doctorate ever awarded in computer science at the University of Helsinki. In 1976, he became Assistant Professor. From 1984 to 1985 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland, USA. From 1986 to 1989 he was Chairman of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society. From 1989 to 2007, he was Research Professor at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He retired in 2007.
Go to Profile#2719
Eugene Dynkin
#2722
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Eugene Borisovich Dynkin was a Soviet and American mathematician. He made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named after him.
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Tomas Lindahl
#2723
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS FMedSci is a Swedish-British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul L. Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
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James Van Allen
#2724
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
James Alfred Van Allen was an American space scientist at the University of Iowa. He was instrumental in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space. The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following his discovery using Geiger–Müller tube instruments on the 1958 satellites during the International Geophysical Year. Van Allen led the scientific community in putting scientific research instruments on space satellites.
Go to Profile#2722
John Lucas
#2725
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
John Randolph Lucas was a British philosopher. Biography Lucas was educated at Winchester College and then, as a pupil of R.M. Hare, among others, at Balliol College, Oxford. He studied first mathematics, then Greats , obtaining first class honours in both. He sat for Finals in 1951, and took his MA in 1954. He spent the 1957–58 academic year at Princeton University, studying mathematics and logic. For 36 years, until his 1996 retirement, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford, and he remained an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy. He was a Fellow of the Bri...
Go to Profile#2723
Helga Kuhse
#2726
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Helga Kuhse is an Australian utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist. Kuhse was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to Australia in 1962. From the 1970s, she was one of the first philosophers to address the ethical implications of the developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. With Peter Singer, she founded the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in 1980, one of the first research centres in the world devoted entirely to bioethics. She served as Director of the Centre until June 1999. Her ideas on the end of life, the right to die, and assisted death, have prompted controv...
Go to Profile#2724
Pervez Musharraf
#2727
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Pervez Musharraf was a Pakistani army general and politician who served as the tenth president of Pakistan from 2001 to 2008. He also served as the 10th Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1998 to 2001 and the 7th Chief of Army Staff from 1998 to 2007.
Go to Profile#2725
Arthur Wightman
#2728
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Arthur Strong Wightman was an American mathematical physicist. He was one of the founders of the axiomatic approach to quantum field theory, and originated the set of Wightman axioms. With his rigorous treatment of quantum field theories, he promoted research on various aspects of modern mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#2726
Robert Blust
#2729
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Robert A. Blust was an American linguist who worked in several areas, including historical linguistics, lexicography and ethnology. He was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Blust specialized in the Austronesian languages and made major contributions to the field of Austronesian linguistics.
Go to Profile#2727
Jesse Jackson
#2730
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jesse Louis Jackson is an American civil rights activist, politician, and ordained Baptist minister. Beginning as a young protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, Jackson maintained his status as a prominent civil rights leader throughout his political and theological career for over seven decades. He served in the United States Senate from 1991 to 1997 as a shadow delegate for the District of Columbia. Jackson is the father of former U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and current U.S. Representative Jonathan Jackson.
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Leon Kass
#2731
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Leon Richard Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual. Kass is best known as a proponent of liberal arts education via the "Great Books," as a critic of human cloning, life extension, euthanasia and embryo research, and for his tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."
Go to Profile#2729
Cahit Arf
#2732
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Cahit Arf was a Turkish mathematician. He is known for the Arf invariant of a quadratic form in characteristic 2 in topology, the Hasse–Arf theorem in ramification theory, Arf semigroups and Arf rings.
Go to Profile#2730
Ovadia Yosef
#2733
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Ovadia Yosef was an Iraqi-born Talmudic scholar, a posek, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, and a founder and long-time spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas party. Yosef's responsa were highly regarded within Haredi circles, particularly among Mizrahi communities, among whom he was regarded as "the most important living halakhic authority".
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Quincy Jones
#2734
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. is an American record producer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. His career spans 72 years, with 28 Grammy Awards won out of 80 nominations, and a Grammy Legend Award in 1992.
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Indro Montanelli
#2735
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
Indro Alessandro Raffaello Schizogene Montanelli was an Italian journalist, historian, and writer. He was one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes according to the International Press Institute. A volunteer for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and an admirer of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship, Montanelli had a change of heart in 1943, and joined the liberal resistance group Giustizia e Libertà but was discovered and arrested along with his wife by Nazi authorities in 1944. Sentenced to death, he was able to flee to Switzerland the day before his scheduled execution by firing squad thanks to...
Go to Profile#2733
Daniel C. Tsui
#2736
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Daniel Chee Tsui is a Chinese-born American physicist. He is currently serves as the Professor of Electrical Engineering, emeritus, at Princeton University. Tsui's areas of research include electrical properties of thin films and microstructures of semiconductors and solid-state physics.
Go to Profile#2734
Alexander Cockburn
#2737
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Alexander Claud Cockburn was a Scottish-born Irish-American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland, but lived and worked in the United States from 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edited the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also wrote the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation, and another column for The Week in London, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Go to Profile#2735
Richard Lynn
#2738
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal. Lynn was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
Go to Profile#2736
Klaus von Klitzing
#2739
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Klaus von Klitzing is a German physicist, known for discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect, for which he was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics. Education In 1962, Klitzing passed the Abitur at the Artland-Gymnasium in Quakenbrück, Germany, before studying physics at the Braunschweig University of Technology, where he received his diploma in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Würzburg at the chair of Gottfried Landwehr, completing his PhD thesis entitled Galvanomagnetic Properties of Tellurium in Strong Magnetic Fields in 1972, and gaining habilitation in 1978.
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Verlyn Flieger
#2740
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Verlyn Flieger is an author, editor, and Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she taught courses in comparative mythology, medieval literature, and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. She is well known as a Tolkien scholar, especially for her books Splintered Light and A Question of Time. She has won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award four times for her work on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.
Go to Profile#2738
Paul Weiss
#2741
Overall Influence
1901 - 2002 (101 years)
Paul Weiss was an American philosopher. He was the founder of The Review of Metaphysics and the Metaphysical Society of America. Early life and education Paul Weiss grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City. His father, Samuel Weiss , was a Jewish emigrant who moved from Europe in the 1890s. He worked as a tinsmith, a coppersmith, and a boilermaker. Paul Weiss's mother, Emma Rothschild , was a Jewish emigrant who worked as a servant until she married Samuel. Born into a Jewish family, Paul lived among other Jewish families in a working-class neighborhood in the Yorkville section of Manhattan.
Go to Profile#2739
Gloria Allred
#2742
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Gloria Rachel Allred is an American attorney known for taking high-profile and often controversial cases, particularly those involving the protection of women's rights. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
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José Saramago
#2743
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
José de Sousa Saramago was a Portuguese writer. He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while J...
Go to Profile#2741
Johnny Rogan
#2744
Overall Influence
2000 - 2021 (21 years)
John Rogan was a British author of Irish descent best known for his books about music and popular culture. He wrote influential biographies of the Byrds, Neil Young, the Smiths, Van Morrison and Ray Davies. His writing was characterised by "an almost neurotic attention to detail", epic length and an ambivalent, sometimes positive and sometimes hostile response, from the subjects of his biographies.
Go to Profile#2742
Roberto Matta
#2745
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren , better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painterss and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art across the Americas and Europe.
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Michael Löwy
#2746
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales . Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, José Carlos Mariátegui, Lucien Goldmann and Franz Kafka, he received the CNRS Silver Medal in 1994.
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Juan Williams
#2747
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Juan Antonio Williams is an American journalist and political analyst for Fox News Channel. He writes for several newspapers, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and has been published in magazines such as The Atlantic and Time. Williams has worked as an editorial writer, an op-ed columnist, a White House correspondent, and a national correspondent. He is a registered Democrat.
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Aretha Franklin
#2748
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Aretha Louise Franklin was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Referred to as the "Queen of Soul", Rolling Stone twice named her as the greatest singer of all time. With global sales of over 75 million records, Franklin is one of the world's best-selling music artists.
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Ernst Fehr
#2749
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ernst Fehr is an Austrian-Swiss behavioral economist and neuroeconomist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the vice chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His research covers the areas of the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity and bounded rationality.
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Desmond Tutu
#2750
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Desmond Mpilo Tutu was a South African Anglican bishop and theologian, known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist. He was Bishop of Johannesburg from 1985 to 1986 and then Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996, in both cases being the first black African to hold the position. Theologically, he sought to fuse ideas from black theology with African theology.
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Margaret Drabble
#2751
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer. Drabble's books include The Millstone , which won the following year's John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden, which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick and plateglass universities . She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973.
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Alvin E. Roth
#2752
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alvin Eliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2017.
Go to Profile#2750
Mark Blyth
#2753
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Mark McGann Blyth is a Scottish-American political economist. He is currently the William R. Rhodes Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. At Brown, Blyth additionally directs the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
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