Famous Academics a to z

Poet, writer, political thinker. Dante was a Medieval Italian poet and philosopher whose poetic trilogy, The Divine Comedy, made an indelible impression on both literature and theology.

Angela Davis is an activist, scholar and writer who advocates for the oppressed. She has authored several books, including Women, Culture & Politics.

French writer Simone de Beauvoir laid the foundation for the modern feminist movement. Also an existentialist philosopher, she had a romance with Sartre.

Miguel de la Madrid was president of Mexico from 1982 to 1988. He was a political conservative and his administration was characterized by an economic crisis.

Michel de Montaigne was a 16th century French author best known for his series of philosophical essays, which were published in 1575.

Maximilien de Robespierre was an official during the French Revolution and one of the principal architects of the Reign of Terror.

Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat and philosopher who became notorious for acts of sexual cruelty in his writings as well as in his own life.

Cosimo de' Medici was the "Elder" and start of the Medici dynasty that ruled Florence (Italy) from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and after.

Michael DeBakey was an American cardiovascular surgeon and surgical pioneer.

Jacques Derrida was an influential postmodern French philosopher who developed the analytic method known as Deconstruction.

Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes is regarded as the father of modern philosophy for defining a starting point for existence, “I think; therefore I am.”

Educator John Dewey originated the experimentalism philosophy. A proponent of social change and education reform, he founded The New School for Social Research.

Dorothea Dix was an educator and social reformer whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread international reforms.

Theodosius Dobzhansky was a 20th century scientist, professor and author who did pioneering work in genetics and evolution.

William Dodd was an American historian and diplomat who wrote about the antebellum South and the Civil War.

Austrian physicist Christian Doppler first described the Doppler effect, in reference to the observed frequency of light and sound waves, in the paper "Concerning the Coloured Light of Double Stars."

William O. Douglas was a government official who in 1939 became the second youngest Supreme Court justice in U.S. history.

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important African-American activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and supported Pan-Africanism.

Renato Dulbecco was an Italian virologist best known winning the Nobel Prize for pioneering the growing of viruses in culture in the 1950s.

Ann Dunham was the mother of Barack Obama, who became the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American to hold this office.

J. Presper Eckert Jr. was the award-winning co-inventor of the first general purpose digital computer.

Ralph Ellison was a 20th century African-American writer and scholar best known for his renowned, award-winning novel Invisible Man.

Daniel Ellsberg strengthened public opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher and essayist during the 19th century. One of his best-known essays is "Self-Reliance.”

Robert F. Engle is a co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, honored for developing methods to analyze unpredictable movements in the financial market.

Personality development, in Erik H. Erikson's view, occurs through a series of identity crises that occur in stages that must be overcome and internalized.

Jaime Escalante became famous for his work with troubled, "unteachable" high school math students. His story was told in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver.

Arthur Evans was a noted archaeologist and curator known for unearthing the remains of ancient Minoan civilization.

Abigail Fillmore was an American first lady from 1850 to 1853. She was the wife of Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States.

William Findley's long political career began after the Revolutionary War. He believed in limiting the power of government in order to protect people's rights.

John Ambrose Fleming was an English scientist who made groundbreaking innovations in electrical engineering.

Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier blazed a trail in the 1940s and 50s for African American academics who studied black culture.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist best known for developing the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.

A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, American Robert Frost depicted realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the common man.

Playwright Christopher Fry wrote a series of major plays in free verse, with undertones of religion and mysticism, including A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946).

J.F.C. Fuller was a 20th century British military officer, author, advocate of tank warfare and supporter of fascist movements.

Thomas Gallaudet was an education pioneer and established the American School for the Deaf in 1817.

Francis Galton was an English explorer and anthropologist best known for his research in eugenics and human intelligence. He was the first to study the effects of human selective mating.

Clifford Geertz was a leading proponent of a form of anthropology that stresses the importance of symbols and interpretation in human social life.

Jean-Leon Gerome was a French painter, sculptor, and teacher. His best-known works are scenes inspired by his travels in Egypt.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is best known for authoring biographies of American presidents, including Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, and the best-selling writer of popular science books.

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist Party leader. He was arrested for speaking out against fascism and wrote his Prison Notebooks before dying in jail.

Temple Grandin is a noted animal expert and advocate for autistic populations who has penned the books Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human.

American psychologist G. Stanley Hall was a trailblazer in his field. He established the concept of child psychology and founded Clark University.

Alice Hamilton was a physician and authority on lead poisoning and industrial disease. The NIOSH present an award in her name.

Andrew Hamilton was a lawyer who defended John Peter Zenger in a case that marked the first victory for freedom of the press in the American colonies.

In 1982, Jean Harris shot and killed author and cardiologist Herman Tarnower, who wrote the international best-seller The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

Economist F.A. Hayek was noted for his criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state and of totalitarian socialism. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Seamus Henry is a renowned Irish poet and professor who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was one of the creators of German Idealism. He explored how contradictions ultimately integrated.

Painter, Al Held was know for his painting complex cube-like structures in the 1960s, and his precise and brightly colored geometric forms in the 1980s.

Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl made a celebrated journey aboard a raft called Kon-Tiki in 1947, and later wrote an international best-seller about his amazing expedition.

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher in the 17th century, was best known for his book Leviathan (1651) and his political views on society.

German painter Hans Hofmann was an influential 20th century art teacher whose work paved the way for Abstract Expressionism.

Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author of memoirs and fiction. Her best known work is The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among the Ghosts.

Robert Hooke was an English philosopher, mathematician and architect who discovered the law of elasticity, now known as Hooke's law.

An influential teacher in the 19th century, theologian Mark Hopkins stressed moral values over intellectual achievement and self-education over dogmatic education.

A.E. Housman was an English scholar and poet whose poems were based on classical models and expressed a Romantic pessimism in a spare, simple style. He published two volumes of poetry: A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems.

Charles H. Houston was an attorney and vice-dean who worked in important civil rights cases, ultimately helping to end Jim Crow laws.

Psychologist Clark L. Hull performed a study and produced the dominant learning theory of the 1940s and 1950s, that learning was based on “habit strength."

Hubert H. Humphrey was an assistant majority leader of the Senate who became the 38th U.S. vice president under Lyndon B. Johnson.