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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#5751

James Turner

#93835

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

James Crewdson Turner is an intellectual historian and Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. After receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 1975, he taught at the College of Charleston , the University of Massachusetts Boston , and the University of Michigan before moving to Notre Dame.

#5752

Steinar Imsen

#175958

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Steinar Imsen is a Norwegian historian, and a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His field of concentration is the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period . Imsen has also worked as editor of Norsk historisk leksikon - the Norwegian Historical Encyclopedia.

#5753

Paul Booth

#78575

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Paul Howson William Booth is a British medieval historian and teacher, specialising in the history of Cheshire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and local history of the North West. Booth is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the University of Keele, having previously held the same honour at the University of Liverpool from 2010 to 2012.

#5754

Henri Bresc

#177252

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Henri Bresc is a French historian who specialises in the Mediaeval history of Sicily, and particularly in the inter-relation in the Mediterranean area between the three principal monotheistic religions. From 1990 until 2008 he was a professor at Paris X Nanterre university, and is director of its Centre d'Histoire Sociale et Culturelle de l'Occident. He previously taught at the University of Nice.

#5755

Enrique García Hernán

Enrique García Hernán

#180186

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Enrique García Hernán is a Spanish historian of the culture of early modern Europe. His research examines the interaction of religious sentiment, political thought and international relations in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It attempts to bridge the gap between the study of forms of cultural and intellectual expression and the realities of political, diplomatic and military organization. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Academy of History , member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Commission for Military History , and Fellow of the Ambrosiana Academy of Milan .

#5756

Robert Francis Byrnes

#182136

Overall Influence

1917 - 1997 (80 years)

Robert Francis Byrnes was an American professor of history, specializing in Russian history and Kremlinology. Life Byrnes graduated from Amherst College in 1939. He became a graduate student at Harvard University in 1939, where he took a survey course in Russian history from Michael Karpovich and studied basic Russian under Samuel H. Cross. In 1943 Byrnes became a civilian employee of the military intelligence services, specializing in intelligence for the American bombing campaign against the Japanese electronics industry. In 1945 he was appointed to a one-year academic position at Swarthmore College, with an opportunity to teach Russian.

#5757

Jean-Noël Jeanneney

#103834

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Jean-Noël Jeanneney is a French historian and politician. He is the son of Jean-Marcel Jeanneney and the grandson of Jules Jeanneney, both important figures in French politics. Education After his secondary schooling in Grenoble, Jeanneney studied in Paris. Beginning at the rue d'Ulm campus of the École Normale Supérieure, he later studied at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris . He earned his doctorate in letters and passed his agrégation in history.

#5758

Amy Fairchild

#112495

Overall Influence

Amy Lauren Fairchild is an American historian who is a professor at Syracuse University. She is co-director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Bioethics. Early life and education Fairchild was an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated in 1990, before moving to Columbia University to complete a master's degree in public health. She remained at Columbia for her graduate studies, where she investigates the health of migrants.

#5759

Serhiy Kot

#147287

Overall Influence

1958 - 2022 (64 years)

Serhiy Ivanovych Kot was a Ukrainian historian. A senior researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, he focused on preservation of historical and cultural property, history of conservation and burial work in Ukraine, cultural property return and restitution. He was a member of the history museum's board, and was awarded the title Merited Culture Worker of Ukraine.

#5760

Lisbeth Haas

#126464

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Lisbeth Haas is an American historian and anthropologist. She is best known for her research into Indian and Hispanic societies in California and the Spanish colonial period. Much of her research centres on women, and she is the head of feminist studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1996, she published Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 under the University of California Press, which documents Californian history and ethnic identify in the period between Spanish colonization and the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on Chicano identity in the San Juan Capistrano and Santa Ana area of Orange County.

#5761

Sébastien Nadot

#100327

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Sébastien Nadot , is a French historian, writer and politician. In the 2017 elections, he was elected as a member of La République En Marche! to the French National Assembly, representing the department of Haute-Garonne's 10th constituency. In December 2018, he was excluded from LREM for having voted against the 2019 draft budget. In May 2020, he was one of the 17 initial members of the new Ecology Democracy Solidarity group in the National Assembly.

#5762

Val Noone

#104751

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Valentine Gabriel Noone is an Australian writer-editor, historian, social activist and academic. He is a recognised authority on Irish emigration to Australia, especially Victoria, since the time of the great Irish Famine . Noone has a particular interest in the history of the Irish language in Australia, its preservation, and the understanding of its social, cultural and linguistic aspects.

#5763

Dorothy Shineberg

#129847

Overall Influence

1927 - 2004 (77 years)

Dorothy Lois Shineberg was an Australian historian who specialised in Melanesian history. In 1950 she was the first Australian woman to win a Fulbright Travelling Scholarship and later taught the first courses in Pacific history at an Australian university.

#5764

Ismael Saz

#173637

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Ismael Saz Campos is a Spanish historian, specialised in the study of Falangism, Francoist Spain and the Spanish-Italian relations during the Spanish Civil War. He is a professor at the University of Valencia.

#5765

Ichirō Inaba

#178411

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

was a Japanese historian of China and professor emeritus at Kwansei Gakuin University. Career Ichirō Inaba graduated from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Letters in 1966. He studied under Ichisada Miyazaki, and his doctoral thesis was on official historians of the Six Dynasties. Following graduation, he lectured at a university for a year and two months before landing an assistant job at Ritsumeikan University, where he taught Chinese Historical Thought and Pre-Modern Chinese History after 1977. In October 1978, he visited China with a group of historians and archaeologists.

#5766

Eero Medijainen

#181428

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Eero Medijainen is an Estonian historian. He is focusing on Estonian history in 20th and 21st century and Estonian foreign politics. Since 1991 he is teaching at Tartu University, Department of Contemporary History.

#5767

Elinor Gadon

#170503

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (100 years)

Elinor W. Gadon is an American cultural historian, Indologist, art historian and author notable for her examination of women in myth and culture in history. Career Gadon has taught at several educational institutions, including the Harvard Divinity School and Tufts University, where she was an associate scholar in the Women's Leadership Program. At the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, she developed and directed a course in women's spirituality. In 2006, she became a resident scholar at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center Scholars Program in Waltham,...

#5768

Adrian Zandberg

#129683

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Adrian Tadeusz Zandberg is a Polish historian, computer programmer, doctor of humanities, and left-wing politician serving as a member of the Sejm for Warsaw I. He is one of the co-leaders of Left Together.

#5769

Denise A. Austin

#125678

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Denise A. Austin is an Australian Pentecostal historian, particularly focused on Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Austin is the Deputy Vice President of Research and Standards, and Professor of History at Alphacrucis College. She is also the Director of the Australasian Pentecostal Studies Centre.

#5770

Jean-Baptiste Kiéthéga

#105326

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Jean-Baptiste Kiéthéga is an archeologist and historian from Upper Volta, currently Burkina Faso. Kiéthéga was born on May 10, 1947, in Yako. He is considered to be one of the first archeologists of West Africa. In course of his career, he was honored with a Prince Claus Award yet in 1998 for his progressions in archeology. At that time he had trained around 40 young scholars in this field, and has taken care that his research was made public in the academic world, as well as to the public via for instance museums.

#5771

John Marshall

#75536

Overall Influence

John Marshall is a British historian. He was the Chairman of the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, and is now Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at the same institution.

#5772

Sean Connolly

#180353

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Sean Joseph Connolly, is an Irish historian, initially specialising in the social history of Irish Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but more recently on post-Reformation and early modern Ireland and modern Belfast. From 1996 to 2017, he was professor of Irish history at Queen's University Belfast, and has been emeritus professor there since 2017. After completing his undergraduate degree at University College, Dublin, and his doctorate at the University of Ulster, Connolly worked as an archivist at Public Record Office of Ireland from 1977 to 1980, before sp...

#5773

Hubert Wolf

#54887

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Hubert Wolf is a German church historian and professor at the University of Münster. He was awarded a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2003. In 2006 he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the International Gutenberg Society and the City of Mainz.

#5774

Andrew Apter

#115758

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Andrew Herman Apter is an American historian, professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the African Studies Center. He was field director of Black Atlantic Studies, for the Social Science Research Council.

#5775

Sara Yael Hirschhorn

#171159

Overall Influence

Sara Yael Hirschhorn is currently the Visiting assistant professor of Israel Studies at Northwestern University. She was formerly the University Research Lecturer and Sidney Brichto Fellow in Israel and Hebrew Studies at the University of Oxford, historian and author. In May 2017, Harvard University Press published her first book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement. She began fieldwork for the book in 2008.

#5776

Learotha Williams

#181334

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Learotha Williams is an American historian. He is a professor of African-American and Public History at Tennessee State University. Early life Williams was born in Tallahassee, Florida. He graduated from Florida State University, where he earned a bachelor's degree followed by a master's degree and a PhD, completed in 2003.

#5777

Soraya de Chadarevian

#84090

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Soraya de Chadarevian is a historian of molecular biology and a professor in the Department of History and the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has numerous publications on the history of molecular life sciences.

#5778

Sara J. Schechner

#170220

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Sara J. Schechner is an American historian of science, the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and a lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University.

#5779

George B. Cooper

George B. Cooper

#136819

Overall Influence

1916 - 1995 (79 years)

George Brinton Cooper was an American historian of British history and professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. Cooper co-founded the Journal of British Studies in 1961, and served as its managing editor for 18 years.

#5780

Damon Salesa

#63975

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Damon Ieremia Salesa is a New Zealand academic. Of Samoan descent, he is the first Pacific person to hold the position of vice-chancellor at a New Zealand university. Education Raised in Glen Innes, Salesa attended Selwyn College and then the University of Auckland. He graduated in 1997 with a master's of arts and the title of his thesis was "Troublesome half-castes" : tales of a Samoan borderland. Salesa was the first Rhodes Scholar of Pacific descent, obtaining his PhD from the University of Oxford. The title of his doctoral thesis was Race mixing: a Victorian problem in Britain and New Zea...

#5781

Jose Harris

#102163

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Jose Ferial Harris, was a British historian and academic. She was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2008, and a fellow and tutor at St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1997.

#5782

Kevin Schürer

#138966

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Kevin Schürer is a British historian, genealogist and statistician, previously Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research and Enterprise, who teaches at the University of Leicester. He specialises in the historical demography, the history of the family and migration in nineteenth-century England and Wales.

#5783

Beata Losman

#112346

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Wendela Beata Losman is a Swedish historian and archivist. Biography Beata Hammarskjöld, later Losman through marriage, was born 27 November 1938 in Malmö. She is the daughter of the physician Sven Hammarskjöld and the librarian Birgit Lundberg.

#5784

Barry Hill

#118415

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Barry Hill is an Australian historian, writer, and academic. He has written poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and libretti. He is known for his biography of anthropologist Ted Strehlow, called Broken Song: T G H Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, published in 2002.

#5785

Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy

#106206

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Scarlett Rebeca O'Phelan Godoy is a Peruvian historian and university professor. Her research focuses on the Peruvian emancipation process, which begins in the 18th century and goes up to the first 35 years of the 19th century. As a professor, she covers the 19th century, as well as the 20th century up to the period of Fujimori's government. She deals with Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Arab, German, and Italian immigration, as well as other topics. In 2008–09, she held the Simón Bolívar Chair in Latin American Studies.

#5786

Thomas W. Hawkins Jr.

#146571

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Thomas W. Hawkins Jr. is an American historian of mathematics. Hawkins defended his Ph.D. thesis on "The Origins and Early Development of Lebesgue's Theory of Integration" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968 under Robert Creighton Buck. Since 1972 he has been based at Boston University. Hawkins was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1974 at Vancouver and in 1986 at Berkeley.

#5787

Monica Charlot

#81079

Overall Influence

1933 - 2005 (72 years)

Monica Charlot OBE née Monica Huber was a historian and political scientist. Life Monica Hubert was born at 6 Maitland Villas, Chalk Farm, in the St Pancras Borough, London, on 31 May 1933. Her father, Joseph, worked at the Swiss consulate. He and Doris May Hubert had three children. Monica was brought up in England which was her mother's country whilst her father worked as the Swiss consul in Britain, New York and Australia. Monica attended Bedford College and studied French.

#5788

Mark M. Boatner III

#110497

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Mark Mayo Boatner III was an American soldier, historian, and author. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in the June 1943 class and fought in World War II and the Korean War. While teaching military history at West Point he wrote and published The Civil War Dictionary in 1959. The Encyclopedia of the American Revolution followed in 1966. Both works have had several revised editions published. He authored Landmarks of the American Revolution in 1973.

#5789

Krassimira Daskalova

#116314

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Krassimira Daskalova is a Bulgarian academic and pioneer in gender studies. She served as editor of L'Homme: European Journal of Feminist History from 2003 to 2011 and is co-editor of Aspasia since 2007. Between 2005 and 2010 she was president of the International Federation for Research in Women's History.

#5790

V. S. Lelchuk

#109734

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Vitaly Semenovich Lelchuk is a Russian historian who is a specialist in the Soviet model of industrialisation, scientific and technological revolution, and the history of the USSR. He graduated from Moscow State University where he also taught before moving to the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He later joined the State Academic University for Humanities in Moscow where he was deputy dean of the Faculty of History.

#5791

Anna Pujol Puigvehi

Anna Pujol Puigvehi

#171729

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Anna Pujol Puigvehí . Historian, professor and archaeologist. Bachelor of Arts from the University of Barcelona , with the thesis “The Indiketes as the literary and archaeological sources”, Dr. summa cum laude in History from the Autonomous University of Barcelona with the doctoral thesis on the “Pre-Roman Population of the Northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. Genesis and development of Iberian culture in the Girona and south of France lands” . She has taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona for over 15 years, and has been Associate professor of Archaeology and Ancient History of the UOC .

#5792

Thomas Haskell

#141821

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Thomas L. Haskell was an American historian. He joined the faculty of Rice University in 1970, and was the Samuel G. McCann Professor of History. Born in 1939, Haskell earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1961. He began teaching at Rice University in 1970 and obtained his doctorate from Stanford University in 1973. Haskell received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He was named professor emeritus in 2009 and died at the age of 78 in 2017, due to complications of Alzheimer's disease.

#5793

Peter Cochrane

#101357

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Peter John Cochrane is an Australian historian and writer. In 2007, his book Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy shared the inaugural Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History with Les Carlyon's The Great War.

#5794

Peter Dickson

#172922

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Peter George Muir Dickson, FBA, FRHistS was a British historian. He was Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford between 1989 and 1996, and a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1960 until his death.

#5795

Jean Meyer

#162704

Overall Influence

1924 - 2022 (98 years)

Jean Meyer was a French historian who specialised in naval and maritime topics. Biography Meyer taught history and geography at high schools in Nantes from 1953 to 1962, before becoming a professor at the University of Rennes from 1963 to 1978. He then became an emeritus at Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV and doctor honoris causa of the University of Marburg. He was director of the , the CNRS research unit devoted to maritime history. Meyer died on 18 April 2022, at the age of 97.

#5796

Mikel de Epalza

#76025

Overall Influence

1938 - 2008 (70 years)

Mikel de Epalza Ferrer was a Spanish academic who was a specialist in Arab and Islamic studies. Born in Pau, France in 1938, he was a specialist on Mudéjars and Moriscos . He encouraged good relations between Mediterranean European and North African nations. He had previously been a Jesuit, and worked in Algeria and Tunisia.

#5797

Kenneth Dean

#160164

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Kenneth Dean is the Raffles Professor in the Humanities at the National University of Singapore and the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor at Yale-NUS College. Previously, he was the James McGill Professor and Drs. Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair of Chinese Cultural Studies in the Department of East Asian Studies of McGill University. Professor Dean received his B.A. in Chinese Studies from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Stanford University.

#5798

William Barr

#118384

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

William Barr is a Scottish historian with a specific interest in the history of exploration of the Arctic, and to a lesser degree, the Antarctic. He holds degrees in Geography from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and McGill University, Montreal, Canada. From 1968 until 1999 he was a member of the faculty of the Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada and is now a professor emeritus there.

#5799

Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson

#99743

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson was an Icelandic folklorist, philologist, and theologian. He was the first professor of folklore at the University of Iceland and published extensively, particularly on Old Norse religion.

#5800

Joel Felix

#181850

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Joël Félix is a professor of European history at the University of Reading. Félix is a specialist in the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. Selected publications Louis XVI et Marie-Antoinette. Un couple en politique, Payot, Paris, 2006. .Finances et politique au siècle des Lumières: le ministère L'Averdy, 1763-1768, Comité pour l'Histoire Economique et Financière de la France, Paris, 1999.Economie et finances sous l'Ancien Régime, guide du chercheur, 1523-1789, Comité pour l'Histoire Economique et Financière de la France, Paris, 1994.Les Magistrats du Parlement de Paris, 1771-1789, Sedo...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions