Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#5201

Paloma Fernández

#144157

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Paloma Fernández Pérez , is Catedrática/Professor of economic and business history at the University of Barcelona. Licenciada en Geografia e Historia , Master of Arts in History , and PhD in history .

#5202

Tomás Straka

#120746

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Tomás Helmut Straka Medina , is a Venezuelan author and professor of history at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, Career Straka is the author of La Voz de los Vencidos , Hechos y gente, Historia contemporánea de Venezuela , Un Reino para este mundo , La épica del desencanto , La república fragmentada. Claves para entender a Venezuela , among other works and essays.

#5203

Stephen Alford

#154857

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Stephen Alford FRHistS is a British historian and academic. He has been professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds since 2012. Life Educated at the University of St Andrews, he was formerly a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and junior research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and, between 1999 and 2012, a fellow in history at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2000. He was taught by John Guy.

#5204

John Bell

#127504

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

John Bell is a Canadian comics historian and senior archivist at Library and Archives Canada . He specializes in the history of English Canadian comic books, and has curated a number of exhibitions and websites.

#5205

Werner Buchholz

#128614

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Werner Buchholz is a German historian, currently a professor for Pomeranian History at the University of Greifswald. Biography Buchholz was born in Berlin and studied History, Scandinavian and German studies at the Universities of Bochum, Marburg, Stockholm and at the Åbo Akademi in 1970–78.

#5206

Margarita Darbinyan

#130318

Overall Influence

1920 - 2021 (101 years)

Margarita Darbinyan-Melikyan was an Armenian historian and translator. Biography Margarita Darbinyan was born on March 18, 1920, in Batum, Georgian SSR. Her father was an Armenian Catholic, and her mother a Polish Catholic. Both of her parents knew Russian, but neither spoke each other's native languages of Armenian and Polish. Margarita was raised speaking Russian at home, learning Armenian through Classical Armenian. In 1941, Margarita Darbinyan graduated from the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. Returning to Armenia, she was appointed to work in Chibukhlu . In 1951, she began teaching at the ...

#5207

Thomas Worcester

#62954

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Thomas Worcester is an American academic and university administrator. He served on the faculty of College of the Holy Cross and is the 11th President of Regis College, Toronto. Biography Worcester was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1977 and received his master's degree from Harvard Divinity School and the Weston School of Theology. He also obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1983 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1991.

#5208

Dan Gawrecki

#125363

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Dan Gawrecki is a Czech historian focusing mostly on Silesian history. He is professor since 2006. Books Politické a národnostní poměry v Těšínském Slezsku 1918–1938. Český Těšín 1999Dějiny Českého Slezska I–II. Opava 2003 Historia Górnego Śląska. Gliwice 2011 Jazyk a národnost ve sčítáních lidu na Těšínsku v letech 1880–1930. Český Těšín: Muzeum Těšínska, 2017.

#5209

Philip Mead

#118270

Overall Influence

Dr. Philip C. Mead, an American historian specializing in the period of the American Revolution, is Chief Historian and Curator of the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Mead served as a project historian for exhibition development beginning in 2011, and joined the Museum staff as historian and curator in 2014. He co-curated the Museum's award-winning core exhibition, and helped to shape the media experiences and public programs. He then led the collections and exhibitions team through five special exhibitions, including most recently, When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary ...

#5210

Philip Sugden

#139663

Overall Influence

1947 - 2014 (67 years)

Philip Sugden was an English historian, best known for his comprehensive study of Jack the Ripper case, including the books The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, first published in 1994, and The Life and Times of Jack the Ripper . He was the first academic historian to work on the case.

#5211

Hans-Jürgen Mende

#131125

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

Hans-Jürgen Mende was a German historian. He was a lecturer in the history of philosophy at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. After the reunification of Germany he became founder and managing director of the social and cultural-historical association , whose main aim was the research and spreading of the history of Berlin and Brandenburg.

#5212

Ida E. Jones

#146763

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Ida E. Jones is an American historian and author who is the University Archivist at Morgan State University, the first archivist in the university's history. Previously she worked as Assistant Curator of Manuscripts at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University where as part of her work she created a Guide to Resources on Africa. Jones was the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians from 2011 through 2013.

#5213

Mykola Shytyuk

#89965

Overall Influence

1953 - 2018 (65 years)

Mykola Shytyuk was a Ukrainian academician, historian, doctor of historical sciences. Since 2008 he was a director of the Institute of history and law of the Mykolaiv University. Shytnyuk was born on 30 November 1953 in the village Lysa Hora, Lysa Hora Raion in a family of construction engineer and teacher of geography. After graduating a rural school in Lysa Hora, Shytyuk enrolled in pedagogic uchilishche in Novyi Buh, where he graduated in 1972 with a diploma of teacher of early grades. After that throughout most of the 1970s he worked in several schools of Mykolaiv Oblast with a small br...

#5214

Marisa J. Fuentes

#102121

Overall Influence

Marisa J. Fuentes is a writer, historian, and academic from the United States. She is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and History and the Presidential Term Chair in African American History at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2009.

#5215

Dale Baum

#123804

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Dale Baum is an American historian and long time professor at Texas A&M University. He researches the political history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, Texas history, and quantitative research of historiography. Baum has authored three books, The Civil War Party System , The Shattering of Texas Unionism , and Counterfeit Justice .

#5216

Herbert Ratner

#59271

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Herbert Spencer Ratner , was an American physician. He taught and wrote on the philosophy and history of medicine and was a popular lecturer on marriage and the family. Ratner was the director of public health for the community of Oak Park, Illinois, for twenty-five years. An advocate of preventive family medicine based on natural norms, he was also a long-time proponent of informed medical consent, and played a pivotal role in the polio vaccine controversy beginning in 1955. For more than twenty-nine years Ratner was editor of Child and Family Quarterly, a paramedical journal which ran artic...

#5217

Heinrich Appelt

#125036

Overall Influence

1910 - 1998 (88 years)

Heinrich Appelt was an Austrian historian. Works Die Urkundenfälschungen des Klosters Trebnitz. Studien zur Verfassungsentwicklung der deutschrechtlichen Klosterdörfer und zur Entstehung des Dominiums. Breslau 1940 .Das Diplom Kaiser Heinrichs II. für Göss vom 1. Mai 1020. Eine diplomatisch-verfassungsgeschtliche Untersuchung. Mit einem Faksimile der Urkunde. Graz u.a. 1953.Die Kaiseridee Friedrich Barbarossas. Wien 1967 .Privilegium minus. Das staufische Kaisertum und die Babenberger in Österreich. Wien, Köln u. Graz 1973 , 2. Aufl. 1976.Kaisertum, Königtum, Landesherrschaft. Wien, Köln u. Graz 1988 .Regesta imperii, Neubearbeitung.

#5218

Peter Raedts

#120539

Overall Influence

1948 - 2021 (73 years)

P.G.J.M. "Peter" Raedts was a leading Dutch medievalist, best known for the book De ontdekking van de middeleeuwen , which took him eight years to write. Biography Peter Raedts was born and grew up in Heerlen in a Catholic family. At the age of eighteen he became a member of the Society of Jesus. He studied theology in Amsterdam and history at Utrecht University. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Richard Southern with a thesis on Richard Rufus of Cornwall. In 1984 Raedts started lecturing on Church history at the Catholic University of Utrecht. He ...

#5219

William N. Still Jr.

#127820

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

William Norwood Still Jr. was an American maritime historian. He was the first director of the program in maritime history at East Carolina University and a noted author of works on U.S. Civil War history and U.S. naval history.

#5220

Yves Durand

#172278

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Yves Durand was a French historian, professor of modern history at the Sorbonne. He was a member of the Club de l'horloge.

#5221

Vasilijus Safronovas

#169849

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Vasilijus Safronovas is a Lithuanian historian. Throughout his writings he explores modern cultural and intellectual history of Lithuania and former region of East Prussia, with particular interest to former Territory of Memel/ Klaipėda .

#5222

Judith Green

#84601

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Judith Green is an English medieval historian, who is Emerita Professor of Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh. A graduate of King's College, London and Somerville College, Oxford, she held a research fellowship and then a lectureship at the University of St Andrews before transferring to a lectureship at Queen's University, Belfast. There she became a Reader and, eventually, Professor. In 2005, she took the professorship at Edinburgh, retiring in 2011.

#5223

Lendrush Khurshudyan

Lendrush Khurshudyan

#73180

Overall Influence

1927 - 1999 (72 years)

Lendrush Arshaki Khurshudyan was an Armenian historian. He was a Doctor of History, Professor, an academician of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. He was born in the village of Shinuhayr, Goris region, Armenian SSR. From 1946 to 1951 he studied at Yerevan State University.

#5224

Belinda Davis

#137305

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Belinda Joy Davis is an American historian of modern Germany and Europe at Rutgers University. Biography She holds a BA from Wesleyan University, and earned her PhD from the University of Michigan. Davis writes on popular politics and social change. She is currently Professor of History at Rutgers University.

#5225

Susan Kingsley Kent

#52597

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Susan Kingsley Kent is a Professor Emerita in Arts & Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. Her specialty is British History, with a focus on gender, culture, imperialism, and politics. Kent has authored Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, as well as Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 and Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 in addition to other books. She has also co-authored books, including The Women's War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria with Misty Bastian and Marc Matera.

#5226

Ruth Henig, Baroness Henig

#107723

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Ruth Beatrice Henig, Baroness Henig CBE, DL is a British academic historian and Labour Party politician. Family Her parents were Kurt and Elfrieda Munzer, Jewish refugees who came to the United Kingdom from the Netherlands in 1940. Henig was married in 1966 to fellow academic Stanley Henig, who shortly afterward became a Labour Member of Parliament . They have two children and divorced in 1993. Their son, Simon Henig, is the former leader of the Durham County Council, former chair of the North East Combined Authority, and a lecturer in politics at Sunderland University. She remarried in 199...

#5227

Pierre Anctil

#79761

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Pierre Anctil is a Canadian historian. He is specialist of the Jewish community of Montreal, of Yiddish literature and of the poetic work of Jacob-Isaac Segal. He also published on the history of immigration to Canada. He translated a dozen Yiddish books into French.

#5228

David M. Palliser

#173422

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

David Michael Palliser FSA is emeritus professor of medieval history at the University of Leeds. He is the former editor of the Royal Historical Society's Bibliography of British and Irish History. He is a director of the Marc Fitch Fund.

#5229

Nils Jacobsen

#168435

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Nils Peter Jacobsen is an American historian specializing in the history of Peru. He is an associate professor of History and Global Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jacobsen's work has focused on the area of comparative rural history, the general history of the Andes region, as well as the social and economic history of Peru. He also served as a Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780-1930 and Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950.

#5230

Vladimír Goněc

#176667

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Vladimír Goněc, PhDr., Dr.Sc. Jean Monnet Chair is a Czech and Slovak historian and political scientist. He worked at the Institute of Political Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovak Republic , and at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

#5231

Jim Sherow

#117939

Overall Influence

James Sherow is an author and emeritus Distinguished Professor of environmental and the American West at Kansas State University and was a regional Democratic politician in Kansas. He is most notable for serving as a city commissioner and mayor of the city of Manhattan, Kansas. He was the Democratic nominee for the First District in the United States House of Representatives elections in Kansas, 2014, running against incumbent Tim Huelskamp.

#5232

Regina Morantz-Sanchez

#87047

Overall Influence

Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez is an American historian, and professor at University of Michigan. Early life and education She graduated from Barnard College in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971.

#5233

Carol Symes

#105305

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Carol Symes is an American medieval historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Symes founded the Education Justice Project's Theatre Initiative and directed a full-length production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest at Danville Correctional Center in 2013. She is also the executive editor of the academic journal The Medieval Globe."

#5234

Jane Rowlandson

#157893

Overall Influence

1953 - 2018 (65 years)

Jane Rowlandson was a British historian who specialised in the economic and social history of Egypt during the Greek and Roman periods. She was a lecturer in Ancient History at King's College, London for 16 years, retiring in 2005. In 1996 she published the influential book Landowners and Tenants in Roman Egypt. She died in 2018.

#5235

Maurice Larkin

#135685

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Maurice J. M. Larkin was an English historian specialising in the history of modern France. Between 1976 and 1999 he held the Richard Pares Chair of History at Edinburgh University. Larkin was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

#5236

Cécile Révauger

Cécile Révauger

#114891

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Cécile Révauger is a French historian and historiographer in the fields of freemasonry and the Lumières. A freemason, she was initiated in 1982 at the Grande Loge féminine de France. She left this grand lodge to join the Grand Orient de France in 2013. She was born in Bordeaux.

#5237

Sylvie Granger

#76309

Overall Influence

1955 - 2022 (67 years)

Sylvie Granger was a French modernist historian. She gained notoriety for her works on music and dance of the 18th century. Biography Granger studied under historian and defended her thesis on 15 February 1997. She became a research assistant at Le Mans University and taught a course titled "Dance and Society from the 16th to the 19th century". She continued her position as a research assistant until her retirement from teaching in 2016, although continued her activities in research. She was a member of the Temos laboratory.

#5238

Lilica Boal

#109377

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Maria da Luz Freire de Andrade , better known as Lilica Boal, is a historian, philosopher, educator, and anti-fascist activist in Cape Verde. She fought for the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and against the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship.

#5239

Olaf Mertelsmann

#165732

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Olaf Mertelsmann is a German historian and a professor at the University of Tartu. Dr. Mertelsmann's primary interest is the history of the Soviet Union, with concentration on post-war period. He has been living in Estonia since 1994.

#5240

Gilbert Joseph

#176642

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Gilbert M. Joseph is an American scholar and writer. He received his doctorate from Yale University in Latin American history in 1978, where he is presently a Farnam Professor Emeritus of History and International Studies. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sturgis Leavitt Best Article Prize , the Tanner Award for Inspirational Teaching of Undergraduates at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill , and the Harwood F.Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale University . Joseph presided over the Latin American Studies Association from 2015 to...

#5241

Sandra Herbert

#147448

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Sandra Herbert née Swanson is an American historian of science with an international reputation as an expert on Charles Darwin. The Geological Society of London awarded her the 2020 Sue Tyler Friedman Medal.

#5242

Horacio Roque Ramírez

#114456

Overall Influence

1969 - 2015 (46 years)

Horacio N. Roque Ramírez was a Salvadoran American oral historian, writer and advocate whose work focused on LGBT Latino communities and the Central American experience in the United States. He was a faculty member in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

#5243

Joy Parr

#170152

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Joy Parr is a Canadian historian. Parr is a professor at the University of Western Ontario and holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Risk. She is known for her work in the fields of labour and gender history as well as the history of technology.

#5244

Kathleen Major

#115010

Overall Influence

1906 - 2000 (94 years)

Kathleen Major was a British historian, and principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, from 1955 to 1965. The Daily Telegraph called her "the foremost historian of the medieval cathedral and diocese of Lincoln".

#5245

Xiao Gongqin

#119161

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Xiao Gongqin is a Chinese historian and leading exponent of neoauthoritarianism. A professor at Shanghai Normal University, Xiao's historical research has focused on the period between the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China. From 1989 onwards, Xiao became involved in the debate over China's reform process, arguing for incremental reform based on China's particular national character and the replacement of Marxism by Chinese nationalism.

#5246

Agostino Paravicini Bagliani

Agostino Paravicini Bagliani

#104769

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Agostino Paravicini Bagliani is an Italian historian, specializing in the history of the papacy, cultural anthropology, and in the history of the body and the relationship between nature and society during the Middle Ages.

#5247

Fan Kang

#158492

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Fan Kang was a Chinese economic historian. Considered a founder of world economic history in China, she was elected an honorary member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Biography Fan Kang was born in Weihui, Henan, Republic of China in May 1924. She graduated from the Department of English of Northwest University in 1946, and joined the Communist Party of China in August 1948.

#5248

Sarah Speight

#83148

Overall Influence

Sarah Speight is an academic and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Nottingham. Since 2020, she has been Pro Vice Chancellor for Education and Student Experience and was previously head of the School of Education.

#5249

Victor Nosach

#85438

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Victor Ivanovich Nosach was a Soviet and Russian historian, Doctor of Historian Sciences, Member of the Academy of Humanitarian Sciences, Honored Scientist of Russian Federation. Known as a chronicler of the history of workers and trade union of Russia, he created the fundamentals of the science of trade unions in Soviet Union.

#5250

Jonathan Rée

#37399

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Jonathan Rée is a British freelance historian and philosopher from Bradford. Educated at Sussex University and then at Oxford, Rée was previously a professor of philosophy at Middlesex University, but gave up a teaching career in order to "have more time to think".

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