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,

#5351

Margo Todd

#159090

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Margo Todd is an American historian. Education Todd obtained an undergraduate degree from Tufts University and attended the Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned a master's degree and doctorate.

#5352

Robert D. Cherry

Robert D. Cherry

#81074

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Robert D. Cherry is an American academic who is professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, with a Ph.D. in Economics from Kansas State University received in 1968. Before retiring, he was Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College.

#5353

Pierre Bouet

#94116

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Pierre Bouet is a 20th-century French historian specializing in Norman and Anglo-Norman historians of Latin language . Works Works in collaboration: External links Robert de Torigni by Pierre BouetBibliographie de Pierre Bouet by François Neveux on Persée"Hastings 14 octobre 1066" video

#5354

Robert D. Black

#124027

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Robert D. Black is an emeritus professor of Renaissance history at the University of Leeds. Black received a B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago in 1968, and a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974. His doctoral supervisor was Nicolai Rubinstein. Black is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Società Toscana per la Storia Patria, of the Accademia Petrarca di Arezzo, and of the Società Storica Aretina. In 1992-1993, he was a Fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, where he was a Robert Lehman Visiting Professor in 2014 and a member of the Selection Committee from 2012 to 2016.

#5355

Ruslan Skrynnikov

#160171

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Ruslan Grigorievich Skrynnikov was a Russian historian who studied the reign of Ivan the Terrible. He later moved on to study the Time of Troubles. For Skrynnikov, control over the bureaucratic apparatus was the primary point of contention explaining Muscovite political struggles of the 15th and 16th centuries. In the late 1960s he described Ivan's Oprichnina as the reign of terror designed to root out every possible challenge to the autocracy:

#5356

Nisith Ranjan Ray

#110170

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Nisith Ranjan Ray was an Indian historian, social activist and the founder of the Society for Preservation, Calcutta, an organisation working for the preservation of the cultural heritage of Kolkata.

#5357

Enrique Krauze

#96181

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Enrique Krauze Kleinbort is a Mexican historian, essayist, editor, and entrepreneur. He has written more than twenty books, some of which are: Mexico: Biography of Power, Redeemers, and El pueblo soy yo . He has also produced more than 500 television programs and documentaries about Mexico’s history. His biographical, historical works, and his political and literary essays, which have reached a broad audience, have made him famous.

#5358

David Emil Mungello

#131471

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

David Emil Mungello is an American historian on the cultural interaction between Europe and China since 1550. He has written on the introduction of Christianity into China and the reception of Confucianism into Europe. He is recognized as one of the leading modern authorities on the Jesuit missions in China. He has also written on the history of queer Western men in China.

#5359

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly

#112489

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is an Irish Germanist and Founder of WiGS . Biography Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is Emeritus Fellow and Tutor in German at Exeter College, Oxford, and Professor of German Literature at Oxford University. She specialises in the early modern period, and is a distinguished scholar in this field, and in the field of German literature as a whole. She works in particular on European court culture in the early modern period and on German literature written by women or representing women; from 2005 to 2008 she co-directed the AHRC major research project at Oxford University entitled 'The Representation of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media, 1500–present'.

#5360

Stanley B. Kimball

#133068

Overall Influence

1926 - 2003 (77 years)

Stanley Buchholz Kimball was a historian at Southern Illinois University. He was an expert on eastern European history and also wrote on Latter-day Saint history, including his ancestor Heber C. Kimball and the Mormon Trail.

#5361

L. Jackson Newell

#147424

Overall Influence

L. Jackson Newell is an American historian and philosopher of higher education, specializing in the study and leadership of progressive colleges from Antioch College and Berea College prior to the Civil War through the new wave taking root in the early 2020s, including Outer Coast College, Thoreau College, and the Tidelines Institute. He has served as professor of educational leadership and dean of Liberal Education at the University of Utah, and as president of Deep Springs College.

#5362

Michael Questier

#173402

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Michael C. Questier is an English academic and historian. Questier studied at Worth School and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1991 he completed a D.Phil at the University of Sussex on early modern politico-religious history. He has published works on post-Reformation history, and English Catholicism between the early Reformation and the English Civil War, particularly focusing on anti-popery, aristocratic culture, the Jacobean exchequer, and the experience of conversion. He taught at Worcester College, Oxford, was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London, and in 2002, became...

#5363

Jean Glénisson

#86258

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Jean Glénisson was a French historian, archivist and paleographer. Career Degree in literature at the Faculty of Arts of Poitiers, Studies at the École nationale des chartesArchivist paleographer Member of the École française de Rome Curator at the Archives nationales , responsible for the Trésor des ChartesHead of the Archives of the French Equatorial Africa library in Brazzaville Professor of historiography at the University of São Paulo in BrazilChargé de conférences then director of studies at the VIe section of the École pratique des hautes études Director of the Member of the Interna...

#5364

Murry R. Nelson

#121933

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Murry R. Nelson is an emeritus professor of education and American studies at Penn State University and an author. He has written about the history of American sports, basketball in particular, as well as books on America's school curriculums. He has written biographies of several basketball players.

#5365

Sue Grayzel

#161933

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Susan R. Grayzel is an American academic historian. Since 2017, she has been Professor of History at Utah State University, having previously been Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, where she was also Director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies.

#5366

Katie Pickles

#178246

Overall Influence

Catherine Gillian Pickles is a New Zealand history academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Canterbury. Academic career After an undergraduate at the University of Canterbury and University of British Columbia, Pickles completed a 1996 PhD titled 'Representing twentieth century Canadian colonial identity : the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire ' at McGill University. Pickles returned to the University of Canterbury, rising to full professor.

#5367

Robin Boast

#98836

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Robin Benville Boast is the Professor Emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Media Studies. Until the end of 2012 Prof. Boast was an Associate Professor and Curator for World Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. In December 2021, Prof. Boast retired from the University of Amsterdam where he taught for nine years on Cultural Information Science, Neo-colonial information governance, and the history and sociology of digitally and collecting.

#5368

Chad Gaffield

#118135

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Chad Gaffield is a Canadian historian. He is the University Research Chair Professor in Digital Scholarship at University of Ottawa and also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2017, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada by Governor General David Johnston for "leadership in interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration as a historian and administrator, and for his pioneering work in the digital humanities". He currently serves on the advisory board of the Leaders' Debates Commission.

#5369

Kahar Barat

#64335

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Kahar Barat is a Uyghur American historian known for his work on Buddhism and Islam in Xinjiang. Kahar Barat was born in Yili in 1950. He earned his M.A. degree in Turkology from the Central University for Ethnic Minorities in Beijing; he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1993. He later taught at Yale University and other institutions.

#5370

Thomas A. Guglielmo

#168014

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Thomas A. Guglielmo is an American historian. Life Thomas Angelo Guglielmo was born to Thomas Joseph and Maryloretta Guglielmo in 1969. He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, received a BA from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in 2000. He taught at University of Notre Dame before joining the faculty at George Washington University.

#5371

Joseph Manning

#175424

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Joseph Gilbert Manning is a professor of History at Yale University. Manning holds the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Chair in History & in Classics. He is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, and a Professor in the School of the Environment at Yale.

#5372

John Garry Clifford

#126911

Overall Influence

1942 - 2014 (72 years)

John Garry Clifford was an American historian and professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. Life Born in Massachusetts, he earned his B.A. from Williams College and his Ph.D. in history from Indiana University . His doctoral advisor was the historian Robert H. Ferrell. He also taught at the University of Tennessee and Dartmouth College and has participated in two National Endowment for the Humanities seminars for high school teachers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

#5373

Zoran Lakić

#153950

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Zoran Lakić was a Montenegrin historian who was a member of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts. Lakić was born on 31 October 1933. He died on 20 December 2022, at the age of 89.

#5374

Elizabeth R. Baer

#148052

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Elizabeth R. Baer is an American academic whose work specializes in women's and Holocaust studies. She was a member of the Coordinating Council of the National Women's Studies Association from its founding in 1977 through 1979. She was appointed as the Raymond and Florence Sponberg Chair of Ethics at Gustavus Adolphus College in 2000. In 2004 and again between 2016 and 2017, she was the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Holocaust studies for Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey. She has written numerous books and articles evaluating the impact of war and conflict on women's lives.

#5375

Pamela Radcliff

#110764

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Pamela Beth Radcliff is an American historian and professor at the University of California at San Diego and an authority on the history of modern Spain. Her research focuses on mass politics, gender issues, civil society and democratic transitions. She did a Teaching Company course entitled Interpreting the 20th century: the Struggle over Democracy. Her publications on modern Spanish history received numerous positive reviews. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship and teaching, such as the Keller-Sierra Prize for her monograph From Mobilization to Civil War: The politics of pol...

#5376

Peter L'Estrange

#77027

Overall Influence

Peter John L'Estrange, AO is an Australian Jesuit priest and historian. He was the Master of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford in England from 2006 to 2008. Early life and education Pierre L'Estrange was educated at St Aloysius' College, Sydney. In 1966, he was both school captain and dux, the title conferred on the boy achieving the highest marks in public examinations. From 1981 to 1983, he was the Roman Catholic chaplain to the University of Queensland.

#5377

Volodymyr Polovets

#142812

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Volodymyr Polovets is a former Soviet communist official and Ukrainian historian. He is a Doctor of Historical Sciences and a professor of the Chernihiv Collegium. He claims to be of Cuman descent. Biography Polovets was born in an old Ruthenian village of Vepryk on 2 January 1937. In 1958 he graduated the history and philosophy faculty of the Nizhyn Gogol State University. In 1972 Polovets successfully defended his graduate thesis titled as "Development of economical cooperation of Union republics during years of the first five-year plan".

#5378

María del Carmen García Herrero

#147894

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

María del Carmen García Herrero is the Chair of Mediaeval History of the University of Zaragoza. García Herrero graduated at the Faculty of Geography and History of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid specialising in Mediaeval History. She defended in 1982 her dissertation on commercial relations between Castile and Aragon around the middle of the 15th century. She continued her PhD studies in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of Zaragoza, and defended her thesis in 1987 . With a summary of her thesis, she obtained the Prize of Investigation of the City of Zaragoza in 1988, published ...

#5379

Kären Wigen

#168028

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Kären Esther Wigen is an American historian, geographer, author and educator. She is a history professor at Stanford University. Early life and education Wigen was born in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. She graduated from University of Michigan in 1980, where she studied Japanese literature. She earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in geography in 1990.

#5380

Veronica O'Mara

#160772

Overall Influence

Veronica O'Mara is a historian at the University of Hull who is a specialist in medieval English religious literature, particularly sermons, and female literacy. She is joint editor with Carolyn Muessig of Medieval Sermon Studies. O'Mara is engaged in a long-term project on Nuns' Literacies in Medieval Europe which has resulted in conferences in Hull , Missouri-Kansas City , and Antwerp .

#5381

Katja Sturm-Schnabl

#86787

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Katja Sturm-Schnabl is a Carinthian-Slovene linguist and literary historian known for her research and contemporary eyewitness accounts of the 20th century in central Europe. Life and work Katja Sturm-Schnabl was born into a politically active Slovenian family on a farm in Carinthia, Austria, northeast of Klagenfurt. Her first decisive life experience was the family's deportation in April 1942. Sturm-Schnabl described it this way, "They stormed into the house, shouted incomprehensible things in abrupt sentences and there was immediately indescribable chaos in the house... Nemci to the left...

#5382

Frank Jacob

#159518

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Frank Jacob is a German historian and japanologist. Life Jacob studied history and Japanese studies at the universities of Würzburg and Osaka . In 2012 he received his PhD in Japanese Studies from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

#5383

Robert R. Locke

#65465

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Robert R. Locke is an American educator, historian and economist and emeritus professor of history, business, and management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He received his PhD from University of California at Los Angeles in 1965 and was a Fulbright fellow in Germany and England.

#5384

Ivan Roots

#132618

Overall Influence

1921 - 2015 (94 years)

Ivan Alan Roots was a British historian, known as the author of The Great Rebellion and a leading expert on Oliver Cromwell. Biography Ivan Roots was one of five sons of Frank Roots and his wife Ellen née Snashfold. He attended Maidstone Grammar School then studied at Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford he was tutored by Christopher Hill and developed an interest in the history of England in the 17th century, especially in the period 1649–1660 and the Protestant radicals known as the Diggers. After his graduation in 1941 he joined the Royal Signal Corps and served in India and Burma. He saw a...

#5385

Matthew Worley

#174030

Overall Influence

Matthew Worley is a British academic and author. He is Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading. Education He attended Heartsease Comprehensive School in Norwich. He completed his BA and PhD studies at the University of Nottingham.

#5386

Rosalind Hackett

#80331

Overall Influence

Rosalind I. J. Hackett is a British-born American historian, formerly a Distinguished Humanities Professor at the University of Tennessee from 2003 to 2008. She was born and spent her early life in England.

#5387

Pamela Marshall

#110484

Overall Influence

Pamela Marshall is an archaeologist and historian specialising in the study of castles. Marshall was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2007. She worked at the University of Nottingham, teaching in the departments of archaeology and continuing education until her retirement. Marshall's research on castles has examined castles in England and France, as they had a shared castle culture, and is an authority on great towers. Between 2000 and 2014, Marshall was chair/secretary of the Castle Studies Group and is Comité Permanent of the Colloques Château Gaillard, a bia...

#5388

Michal Frankl

#98539

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Michal Frankl is a Czech historian and a Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Previously, he was the head of the Department of Jewish Studies and of the History of Antisemitism at the Jewish Museum in Prague. He is the Principal Investigator of the Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe project funded as a European Research Council Consolidator grant.

#5389

Guy Berthiaume

#86469

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Guy Berthiaume is Librarian and Archivist of Canada Emeritus. A Canadian historian specialized in the study of Classical Antiquity, he served as Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec from June 22, 2009 to June 21, 2014, and, from June 23, 2014 to August 29, 2019, he served as Librarian and Archivist of Canada.

#5390

Alexandra Minna Stern

#104653

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Alexandra Minna Stern is the Humanities Dean, and Professor of English and History, and at the Institute for Society and Genetics, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Academic career Her research focuses on the history of eugenics, the uses and misuses of genetics, and the extremism of the far right in national and international contexts. She has also written about the history of public health, infectious diseases, and tropical medicine. Through these topics, she explores the dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, social difference, and reproductive politics.

#5391

Friederike Hassauer

#111809

Overall Influence

1951 - 2021 (70 years)

Friederike Hassauer was a German literary scholar and professor for Romance Philology at the University of Vienna. The focus of her work was on French and Spanish literature, along with Media studies. She is considered a pioneer of gender research in the field of Romance studies.

#5392

Tim Beaglehole

#110882

Overall Influence

1933 - 2015 (82 years)

Timothy Holmes Beaglehole was a New Zealand academic and Chancellor of Victoria University of Wellington. Born in Lower Hutt, Wellington, he was the son of the renowned historian John Beaglehole. He gained a MA from Victoria, then receiving a MA and PhD from King's College, Cambridge. He was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard University and taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1978.

#5393

Francis Carsten

#119241

Overall Influence

1911 - 1998 (87 years)

Francis Ludwig Carsten was a British historian of Germany. He was described by Peter Wende as "the doyen of British historians working on Germany". He was the father of British social anthropologist Janet Carsten.

#5394

William Eamon

#90969

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

William Eamon is distinguished Achievement Professor, Regents Professor of History, and Dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University. He is a specialist in the history of science and has published on various aspects of medieval and early modern science, medicine, and technology. His research focuses primarily on the history science and medicine in early modern Italy and Spain. His most influential work is on the history of the "books of secrets" tradition in medieval and early modern culture.

#5395

Julia Kindt

#119363

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Julia Kindt is a German academic and writer who specialises in ancient Greek history and religion. She is a professor at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, Australia.

#5396

Laurie Marhoefer

#79880

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of queer and trans politics who is employed as the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. In January 2021, together with Jennifer V. Evans, they facilitated the Jack and Anita Hess Research Seminar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on LGBTQ+ histories of the Holocaust.

#5397

Albert Camarillo

#133874

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Albert Michael Camarillo is an American historian, author and academic. He is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor, emeritus, in the department of history at Stanford University, and holds a courtesy appointment as a professor in the graduate school of education.

#5398

Wu Xiangxiang

#163630

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Wu Xiangxiang was a Chinese historian. Biography Wu was born in Baisheng Lane, Changde, Hunan, in 1912. His great-grandfather Wu Qingyu and grandfather Wu Jintang were small merchants. His father Wu Qilin was a member of the Tongmenghui. In 1922, he moved to Changsha, capital of Hunan province, and entered Chuyi School . Four years later, he attended the Mingde High School . In 1937, he graduated from Peking University, where he majored in history. After university, he worked at the Academia Sinica in Changsha.When the war of resistance against Japanese aggression broke out, he worked in the Ninth War Zone Command of the Kuomintang.

#5399

Ottar Dahl

#99230

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Ottar Dahl was a Norwegian historian and historiographer. Dahl was born in Nannestad. He took the dr. philos. degree in 1957, worked at the University of Oslo as a scholarship holder from 1957, docent from 1960 and professor from 1966 to 1991. He then retired to a position as professor emeritus.

#5400

Imre Tóth

#93467

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Imre Tóth , born in 1921, was a philosopher, mathematician and science historian, who specialized in the philosophy of mathematics. He worked on non-Euclidean geometry, mathematical irrationality, freedom, Plato and Platonism, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Hege. He was born in Satu Mare, the year after the Treaty of Trianon recognized it as a part of Romania, to a very religious Jewish family that had fled from the 1920 pogroms. Resisting with the Communists during the Second World War and then excluded from the Party, he narrowly escaped death in the camps. After the war he studied at Babeș-Bolyai University.

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