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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#551

William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple

#5302

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

#552

Imanuel Geiss

#14958

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Imanuel Geiss was a German historian. Life Imanuel Geiss was born in Frankfurt am Main, the youngest of the five children of a working-class family affected by the economic crisis. His unemployed father had to raise the children alone as their mother suffered from meningitis. She was killed in 1941 by Aktion T4 after the father had died in 1940. The five children were brought to a rather liberal orphan home which made it possible for Imanuel to study after completing his Abitur in 1951 at Carl-Schurz-Gymnasium.

#553

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

#15431

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a British professor of history and author of several popular works, notably on cultural and environmental history. Life and career He was born in London; his father was the Spanish journalist Felipe Fernández Armesto and his mother was Betty Millan, a British-born journalist and co-founder and editor of The Diplomatist , the in-house journal of the diplomatic corps in London.

#554

İlber Ortaylı

#9255

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

İlber Ortaylı is a Turkish historian and professor of history of Crimean Tatar origin at the MEF University, Galatasaray University in Istanbul and at Bilkent University in Ankara. In 2005, he was appointed as the director of the Topkapı Museum in Istanbul, until he retired in 2012.

#555

Ambeth Ocampo

#5920

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ambeth R. Ocampo is a Filipino public historian, academic, cultural administrator, journalist, author, and independent curator. He is best known for his definitive writings about Philippines' national hero José Rizal and on topics on Philippine history and Philippine art through Looking Back, his bi-weekly editorial page column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

#556

Timothy Naftali

Timothy Naftali

#19275

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Timothy Naftali is a Canadian-American historian who is clinical associate professor of public service at New York University. He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev. He is a regular CNN contributor as a CNN presidential historian.

#557

John Patrick Diggins

John Patrick Diggins

#15461

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

John Patrick Diggins was an American professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, Princeton University, and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was the author/editor of more than a dozen books and thirty articles on widely varied topics in U.S. intellectual history.

#558

Victor Kiernan

#12100

Overall Influence

1913 - 2009 (96 years)

Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan was a British historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. Kiernan's work was prominent in the field of Marxist historiography in Britain, analyzing historical events from a Marxist point of view. Belonging to a group of prominent British Marxist historians active in the 20th century, Kiernan was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1934 until 1959, when he left in protest over the party's response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also involved in promoting Urdu poetry among Western audiences.

#559

Alan Knight

#8320

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Alan Knight is a professor and researcher of Latin American history and former professor at the University of Oxford in England. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government.

#560

Giorgi Melikishvili

#10859

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Giorgi Aleksandresdze Melikishvili was a Georgian historian known for his fundamental works in the history of Georgia, Caucasia and the Middle East. He earned international recognition for his research on Urartu.

#561

Alexander Demandt

#23706

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Alexander Demandt is a German historian. He was professor of ancient history at the Free University of Berlin from 1974 to 2005. Demandt is an expert on the history of Rome, Late Antiquity, historiographical studies, and the links between philosophy and history.

#562

Michael Phayer

#11634

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Michael Phayer is an American historian and professor emeritus at Marquette University in Milwaukee and has written on 19th- and 20th-century European history and the Holocaust. Phayer received his PhD from the University of Munich in 1968 and joined Marquette's Department of History in 1970. He attained the rank of Professor in 1990 and retired in 2002. He is the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University. He has published numerous research articles and books relating to Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the Catholic Church, including his most recent, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War .

#563

George Bournoutian

George Bournoutian

#16101

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

George A. Bournoutian was an Iranian-American professor, historian, and author of Armenian descent. He was a professor of history and the author of over 30 books, particularly focusing on Armenian history, Iran and the Caucasus. He taught Iranian history at UCLA, and Armenian history at Columbia University, Tufts University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Connecticut, Ramapo College, and Glendale Community College and Russian and Soviet history at Iona College. Bournoutian was one of the 40 editors of the Encyclopaedia Iranica.

#564

Paul W. Schroeder

#22736

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Paul W. Schroeder was an American historian who was professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. He specialized in European international politics from the late 16th to the 20th centuries, Central Europe, and the theory of history. He is known for his contributions to diplomatic history and international relations.

#565

Muzaffar Alam

#16321

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Muzaffar Alam is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Biography Muzaffar Alam is a historian trained at Jamia Millia Islamia , Aligarh Muslim University and Jawaharlal Nehru University , where he obtained his doctorate in history in 1977. Before joining the SALC at the University of Chicago in 2001, he taught three decades at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has held visiting positions in the Collège de France , Leiden University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the EHESS .

#566

Roger Collins

#19308

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Roger J. H. Collins is an English medievalist, currently an honorary fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh. Collins studied at the University of Oxford under Peter Brown and John Michael Wallace-Hadrill. He then taught ancient and medieval history at the universities of Liverpool and Bristol. He arrived at the University of Edinburgh in 1994 and joined the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities before becoming an honorary fellow in the Department of History in 1998.

#567

Mark D. Steinberg

#35246

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Mark D. Steinberg is a historian, writer, and professor. He taught at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from which he retired in 2021. He is the author of many books and articles on Russian history.

#568

Nathan O. Hatch

#11929

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Nathan Orr Hatch is an American academic administrator. He most recently served as the President of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, having been officially installed on October 20, 2005. Before coming to Wake Forest, Hatch was a professor and later dean and provost at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to his career in academic administration, he was a historian who was a leading scholar on issues related to the history of religion in the United States.

#569

Wayne S. Vucinich

#22251

Overall Influence

1913 - 2005 (92 years)

Wayne S. Vucinich was an American historian. Following World War II, he was one of the founders of Russian, Slavic, East European and Byzantine studies at Stanford University, where he spent his entire academic career.

#570

Maria Todorova

#15138

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Maria Nikolaeva Todorova is a Bulgarian historian who is best known for her influential book, Imagining the Balkans, in which she applies Edward Said's notion of "Orientalism" to the Balkans. She is the daughter of historian and politician Nikolai Todorov, who was Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria and acting President of Bulgaria in July 1990.

#571

Benjamin Arthur Quarles

#28694

Overall Influence

1904 - 1996 (92 years)

Benjamin Arthur Quarles was an American historian, administrator, educator, and writer, whose scholarship centered on black American social and political history. Major books by Quarles include The Negro in the Civil War , The Negro in the American Revolution , Lincoln and the Negro , and Black Abolitionists . He demonstrated that blacks were active participants in major conflicts and issues of American history. His books were narrative accounts of critical wartime periods that focused on how blacks interacted with their white allies and emphasized blacks' acting as vital agents of change rat...

#572

Raymond Arsenault

#33798

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Raymond Ostby Arsenault is an American historian and academic in Florida, United States of America. He has taught at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg campus since 1980 and is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program . Arsenault is a specialist in the political, social, and environmental history of the American South.

#573

Bernard Bachrach

#19621

Overall Influence

1939 - 2023 (84 years)

Bernard Stanley Bachrach was an American historian. He taught history at the University of Minnesota from 1967 until his retirement in 2020. He specialized in the Early Middle Ages, mainly on the topics of medieval warfare, medieval Jewry, and early Angevin history . He also wrote an important article about the treatment of Jews in the Visigothic kingdom.

#574

Antonio Santosuosso

#36091

Overall Influence

1936 - 2014 (78 years)

Antonio Santosuosso was a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. Assessment of the Battle of Tours In Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, Santosuosso, considered an expert historian of the Carolingian era, makes a case that the defeats of invading Muslim armies by Charles Martel, including the famous defeat at Tours, were important as in their defense of Western Christianity and the preservation of those Christian monasteries and centres of learning which ultimately led Europe out of the Dark Ages. He also makes a case that while Tours was cons...

#575

Vartan Gregorian

Vartan Gregorian

#2245

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Vartan Gregorian was an Armenian-American academic, educator, and historian. He served as president of the Carnegie Corporation from 1997 to 2021. An Armenian born in Iran, Gregorian moved to the United States at 22. He graduated with a PhD from Stanford University. He subsequently taught at several universities and his work as a historian focused mainly on the Muslim world. He went on to join the University of Pennsylvania faculty, then as its provost. From 1981 to 1989 he served as president of the New York Public Library during which he succeeded in financially stabilizing the institution and revitalizing its cultural importance.

#576

Mary Beth Norton

#16103

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Mary Beth Norton is an American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emeritus of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University. Norton served as president of the American Historical Association in 2018. She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Norton received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan . The next year she completed a Master of Arts , going on to receive her Ph.D.

#577

Moshe Idel

#7109

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Moshe Idel is a Romanian-born Israeli historian and philosopher of Jewish mysticism. He is Emeritus Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

#578

Karl Schlögel

#23584

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Karl Schlögel is a noted German historian of Eastern Europe who specialises in modern Russia, the history of Stalinism, the Russian diaspora and dissident movements, Eastern European cultural history and theoretical problems of historical narration.

#579

Eberhard Wächtler

#19249

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Eberhard Wächtler was a German economic historian. He was particularly notable for research in coal and steel sciences in postwar Germany. Wächtler was born in Dresden, Weimar Republic, in 1929. After graduating from high school in 1947, he studied history, literature, philosophy and political economy at the University of Leipzig. In 1953 he graduated with a degree in history. He first worked as a research assistant in Leipzig, after which he worked as a research associate at the Institute of History of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin until 1962. He received his doctorate in 1957 on ...

#580

Jozo Tomasevich

#3697

Overall Influence

1908 - 1994 (86 years)

Josip "Jozo" Tomasevich was an American economist and historian who was a leading expert on the economic and social history of the former Yugoslavia, and after his retirement was appointed professor emeritus of economics at San Francisco State University. Tomasevich was born in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, part of Austria-Hungary, and after completing his schooling gained a doctorate in economics at the University of Basel in Switzerland. In the mid-1930s he worked at the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and published three well-received books on Yugoslav national debt, fiscal policy, and ...

#581

Henry Abramson

#7540

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Henry Abramson is an American historian who is the dean of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences in Flatbush, New York. Before that, he served as the Dean for Academic Affairs and Student Services at Touro College's Miami branch . He is notable for his teachings on Jewish history and Judaism as a religion.

#582

René Rémond

#4675

Overall Influence

1918 - 2007 (89 years)

René Rémond was a French historian, political scientist and political economist. Born in Lons-le-Saunier, Rémond was the Secretary General of Jeunesses étudiantes Catholiques and a member of the International YCS Center of Documentation and Information in Paris . The author of books on French political, intellectual and religious history, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1998. He was also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

#583

Hope Cooke

#10408

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Hope Cooke was the Gyalmo of the 12th Chogyal of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal. Their wedding took place in March 1963. She was termed Her Highness The Crown Princess of Sikkim and became the Gyalmo of Sikkim at Palden Thondup Namgyal's coronation in 1965.

#584

Jacob Metzer

#9695

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jacob Metzer is an Israeli economic historian who is the Alexander Brody Emeritus Professor of Economic History in the Department of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the eighth President of the Open University of Israel.

#585

John Womack

#18411

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

John Womack Jr. is an American economist and historian of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution , and Emiliano Zapata. He is a former professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard University. He is the grandfather of the late rapper Lil Peep.

#586

Gerard Labuda

#14890

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Gerard Labuda was a Polish historian whose main fields of interest were the Middle Ages and the Western Slavs. He was born in Kashubia. He lived and died in Poznań, Poland. Life Labuda was born in Nowa Huta, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Kartuzy, Poland , into a Kashubian family. He was the son of Stanislaw Labuda and Anastazja Baranowska. From 1950 he was a professor at Poznań University; rector 1962–1965; from 1951 a member of the Polish Academy of Learning ; president 1989–1994; from 1964 member of the Polish Academy of Sciences ; vice-president 1984–1989; from 1959 to 1961 director of the Western Institute in Poznań and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

#587

Linda Colley

#18039

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dame Linda Jane Colley, is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She previously held chairs at Yale University and at the London School of Economics. Her work frequently approaches the past from inter-disciplinary perspectives.

#588

Edwin G. Burrows

#18693

Overall Influence

1943 - 2018 (75 years)

Edwin G. "Ted" Burrows was a Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College. He is the co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 , and author of Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War, , which won the 2009 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.

#589

Gerald Horne

#20088

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Gerald Horne is an American historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Background Gerald Horne was raised in St. Louis, Missouri. After his undergraduate education at Princeton University, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

#590

Kai Brodersen

#11861

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Kai Brodersen is a contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of Erfurt. He has edited, and translated, both ancient works and modern classical studies. His research focuses on "Applied Sciences" in antiquity, geography, historiography, rhetoric and ancient jokes, mythography and paradoxography, Septuagint studies and Aristeas, inscriptions and curse tablets, early Greek and Hellenistic history, Roman provinces , women and men in the Ancient World, turning points of Ancient History, history of classical scholarship and reception, often with twist - plus a ...

#591

Peter Funke

#36462

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Funke is a German ancient historian. Life Peter Funke studied history and German studies at the University of Münster from 1969 to 1974. From 1975 to 1978, he held a research assistant position at the ancient history department of the institute for ancient world studies at the University of Cologne. In 1978, he received a doctorate from the University of Cologne, after which he continued to work as a research assistant at Cologne until 1985. Between 1979 and 1981, Funke simultaneously taught the subject of ancient history at the University of Siegen. In 1985 he achieved the habilitation at Cologne for a work entitled, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Struktur des Aitolischen Bundes .

#592

Ronald Hamowy

#6054

Overall Influence

1937 - 2012 (75 years)

Ronald Hamowy was a Canadian academic, known primarily for his contributions to political and social academic fields. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus of intellectual history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Hamowy was closely associated with the political ideology of libertarianism and his writings and scholarship place particular emphasis on individual liberty and the limits of state action in a free society. He is associated with a number of prominent American libertarian organizations.

#593

John Dunn

#24449

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John Montfort Dunn, FBA is emeritus Professor of Political Theory in the Human, Social, and Political Sciences department at King's College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Chiba University.

#594

Jeffrey Herf

#5212

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jeffrey C. Herf is an American historian of modern Europe, particularly modern Germany. He is Distinguished University Professor of modern European at the University of Maryland, College Park. Biography He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Herf's father escaped from Nazi Germany in 1937 and immigrated to the United States. His mother's parents left Ukraine to came to the United States before World War I. He grew up in a Reform Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

#595

David Eastwood

#14251

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Sir David Stephen Eastwood, , is a British academic and long serving university leader who was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham between 13 April 2009 and December 2021. Early life Eastwood was born on 5 January 1959 in Oldham, Lancashire, and educated at Sandbach School. In 1980, he graduated from St Peter's College, Oxford, with a First Class Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History, and was promoted to Master of Arts in 1985. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in 1985, also from the University of Oxford.

#596

Johannes Hürter

#38655

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Johannes Hürter is a German historian. He is the director of the Munich research division of the Institute of Contemporary History. His research interests focus mainly on the history of Nazi Germany and on post-war anti-terrorism policy.

#597

Derek Penslar

#16142

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Derek Jonathan Penslar, is an American-Canadian comparative historian with interests in the relationship between modern Israel and diaspora Jewish societies, global nationalist movements, European colonialism, and post-colonial states.

#598

Ida Altman

#17814

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ida Louise Altman is an American historian of early modern Spain and Latin America. Her book Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century received the 1990 Herbert E. Bolton Prize of the Conference on Latin American History. She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Florida and served as Department Chair.

#599

Michael Adas

#28693

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Michael Adas is an American historian and currently the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University. He specializes in the history of technology, the history of anticolonialism and in global history.

#600

François Dosse

#15610

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

François Dosse is a French historian and philosopher who specializes in intellectual history. Biography After devoting his doctoral thesis to the Annales School, Dosse turned his research interests to structuralism, the philosopher Paul Ricœur and the historian Michel de Certeau. François Dosse is one of the founders of the journal EspacesTemps. In 2007, he published Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, biographie croisée , where he advocated the rehabilitation of Guattari in an intellectual history that had made place only for Deleuze. In 2011 he published a biography on the French historian...

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