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,

#5801

Christina Lubinski

#171106

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Christina Lubinski is a German historian and a full professor at Copenhagen Business School. She is the author and editor of numerous academic books and journals articles. Her work is published in leading international and peer-reviewed journals in the fields of business history, entrepreneurship, management, and organizational studies.

#5802

Garth Fowden

#175875

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Garth Lowther Fowden, FBA is a historian. He was Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths at the University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2020. Career Born on 14 January 1953, Garth Fowden was educated at Merton College, Oxford; he graduated in 1974 and completed a doctorate there in 1979, under the title "Pagan philosophers in late antique society: with special reference to Iamblichus and his followers". Fowden was a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1978 to 1982 and then at Darwin College, Cambridge, until he took up a lectureship at the University of Groningen from 1983. In 198...

#5803

Ulrich Johannes Schneider

Ulrich Johannes Schneider

#101038

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Ulrich Johannes Schneider is a German librarian and historian of philosophy. Since 2005 he has been the director of the Leipzig University Library. External links Books on and by Schneider in the Deutschen NationalbibliothekHomepage of Ulrich Johannes SchneiderSchneider on the Leipzig University Library page

#5804

Oliver Furley

#97549

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Oliver Willis Furley was an English historian and political scientist, formerly head of the department of politics and history at Coventry University and afterwards a visiting professor there. He was a specialist in the history and politics of East Africa about which he wrote a number of books.

#5805

Penny Summerfield

#175644

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Penelope Summerfield, FBA, FRHistS, FAcSS , commonly known as Penny Summerfield, is an English historian and retired academic. Early life and education Born in 1951 in London, Summerfield is the daughter of Arthur Summerfield, a professor, and Aline Whalley, a psychologist. She attended the University of Sussex, graduating with a BA in 1973, an MA in 1976 and a DPhil in 1982. Her doctoral studies were supervised by Stephen Yeo.

#5806

George Gajecky

#174674

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

George Gajecky is a Ukrainian American historian, educator, and public activist. He currently serves as president of the Ukrainian Educational Council, the central organ of Ukrainian Saturday schools in the United States.

#5807

Roel Kuiper

#130282

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Roelof Kuiper is a Dutch historian, philosopher, ideologue, politician and university professor. He was from 2007 to 2019 a member of the Dutch Senate, and is professor of Reformational philosophy at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam in the name of the Association for Reformational philosophy, teaching Society Issues at the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede and Gereformeerde Hogeschool Zwolle and Political and social philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam .

#5808

Ana Margarida Arruda

#173827

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Ana Margarida Costa Arruda dos Santos Gonçalves is a Portuguese historian and archaeologist specialized in Phoenician-Punic archaeology. Biography Ana Margarida Arruda graduated in History in 1978, from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. She earned her PhD in Archaeology in 2000 from the same university, where she is working as researcher and professor since 1993. Arruda has collaborated with several universities including the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, the University of Seville or the University Pompeu i Fabra of Barcelona in Spain and the universities of Toulouse an...

#5809

Fernando Iwasaki

Fernando Iwasaki

#70336

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Fernando Iwasaki Cauti is a Peruvian writer and historian. Born into a family with multiple roots . While in Peru, he taught at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima. Since 1989, he has lived in Seville.

#5810

Felipe Maíllo Salgado

#155019

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Felipe Maíllo Salgado . Philologist, historian and Spanish Novelist. Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Salamanca University, accredited as Professor by the Spanish University Council in 2008. Awarded the "María de Maeztu" prize to research excellence by Salamanca University, in 2010.

#5811

David Lowe

#165801

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

David Michael Lowe is an Australian biographer and historian of modern international affairs, and of Australia's role therein, especially with reference to Asia and the Pacific. Early life and education David Lowe was born on 11 November 1964. He completed undergraduate studies at Monash University in Australia, graduating with First Class Honours in 1987. Lowe was awarded his doctorate in 1991 from the University of Cambridge.

#5812

Christopher F. Clark

#99096

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Christopher F. Clark is a British American historian. Life He grew up in the London area and graduated from the University of Warwick, and Harvard University, with a PhD in History. Clark taught at the University of York for eighteen years, and at the University of Warwick for another seven years. He has taught at the University of Connecticut since 2005.

#5813

Brigham D. Madsen

Brigham D. Madsen

#140029

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

Brigham Dwaine Madsen was a historian of indigenous peoples of the American West, of the people of Utah and surrounding states, and of Mormonism. He was a professor at the University of Utah. Madsen published six books on the Shoshone-Bannock. In later life, he became a proponent of 19th-century, as opposed to anciently, positioned Book of Mormon studies, with his edition of the previously unpublished, early-20th-century Studies of the Book of Mormon by B. H. Roberts .

#5814

Terence Rees

#143297

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Terence Albert Ladd Rees was a microbiologist but was best known as a collector of material relating to the theatre and music in Wales and Britain. He was also a published theatre historian and researcher, and, in particular, was an authority on the works of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan who, as Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote 14 comic operas in the late Victorian era.

#5815

Palmira Brummett

#167647

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Palmira Brummett, sometimes credited as Palmira Johnson Brummett is an American historian of Middle Eastern history. She is professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee where she previously served as a Distinguished Humanities Professor and Lindsay Young Professor. Subsequent to her tenure at UT, she was a visiting professor at Brown University from 2011-2016.

#5816

Jolanta Żyndul

#184420

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Jolanta Maria Żyndul is a Polish historian, a specialist on modern Jewish history and Polish-Jewish relations in 19th and 20th century. Life She joined the historical faculty of the John Paul II University of Lublin, but later moved to Warsaw, where she graduated in 1990 from the Faculty of History of University of Warsaw. Since 1991 she works for the university's Mordechaj Anielewicz Centre for the Study and Teaching of the History and Culture of Jews in Poland, initially as a technical assistant, then assistant professor and since 1999 as an adjunkt. When Jerzy Tomaszewski retired in 2001,...

#5817

Paul Grimm

#125062

Overall Influence

1907 - 1993 (86 years)

Paul Grimm was a German prehistorian and also a pioneer of Medieval archaeology, especially of the excavation of abandoned villages and castles. Grimm worked on various periods, but mainly in central Germany – the names of two important Neolithic archaeological cultures in the area, the Baalberge group and the Salzmünde group derive from him. His comprehensive excavations at and were important milestones in the history of German archaeology.

#5818

Hermann Glaser

#143945

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Hermann Glaser was a politically engaged cultural historian and commentator. Life Hermann Glaser was born in Nuremberg, and though he became a national figure, his Middle Franconian provenance was always an important part of his public personality. His father was a secondary school teacher. He studied History, Philosophy, Germanistics and Anglistics at Erlangen and, for two terms, Bristol. It was from Erlangen that he received his doctorate in 1952. His dissertation concerned the place of Hamlet in German Literature. His university studies concluded, in 1953 he embarked on ten years ...

#5819

M. E. Sarotte

#184398

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Mary Elise Sarotte is a post-Cold War historian. She is the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, which is part of Johns Hopkins University.

#5820

Emily Winterburn

#129465

Overall Influence

Emily Winterburn is a British science writer, physicist and historian of science based in Yorkshire. She is a visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds. Among other books, she wrote The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel, published by The History Press in 2017.

#5821

Anne Middleton

#137656

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Anne Middleton was an American medievalist, and the Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Middleton specialized in the study of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower. In 1966, she completed her PhD at Harvard University under the supervision of Morton W. Bloomfield, writing a dissertation on the prose style of Ælfric’s lives of St. Martin. A firm "believ[er] in public universities as public goods", known for "cheerful contempt of the private schools and their ways", she spent the bulk of her career in public education, working first in the Detroit school ...

#5822

William Arthur Smeaton

#151847

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

William Arthur Smeaton was a British chemist and historian of science, who wrote more than seventy-five articles and several books on the history of chemistry in France in the 18th and 19th centuries.

#5823

Walter Fifield Snyder

#173335

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

Walter Fifield Snyder was an American scholar of ancient history. Born in Northfield, New Jersey in 1912, Snyder graduated from Camden High School and earned an A.B. in Classics from Swarthmore College in 1932. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Classics at Yale University in 1936 with a dissertation entitled "Chronological Studies in the History of the Roman Emperors" . He then was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome from 1936 to 1938. He first taught at Hunter College from 1940 to 1941, and then at the University of Richmond from 1941 to 1943. During World War II, he served as an officer in the US Naval Reserve.

#5824

José Álvarez Junco

José Álvarez Junco

#140684

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

José Álvarez Junco is a Spanish historian, emeritus professor of the History of Thought and Political and Social Movements at the Complutense University of Madrid . He is an expert in the study of the nation-building of Spain, nationalisms and the anarchist movement.

#5825

David I. Steinberg

#135224

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

David I. Steinberg is an American historian, currently Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies, and previously Distinguished Professor of Korean Studies, at Georgetown University. He is the author of the 2009 book "Burma / Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know"

#5826

J. C. D. Clark

#184635

Overall Influence

#5827

Katherine B. Crawford

#161122

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Katherine "Katie" B. Crawford is an American historian. She is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and History at Vanderbilt University. Early life and education Crawford was born in 1966. She earned her BA from Columbia University, PhD at the University of Chicago before accepting a Harper Postdoctoral Fellowship for two years.

#5828

Kim Phillips-Fein

#112467

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Kimberly Phillips-Fein is an American historian. and the Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She was formerly a professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the History Department of the College of Arts and Science at New York University .

#5829

John Watts

#169130

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

John Lovett Watts is an English historian specialising in the political history of late-medieval England. Born on 29 September 1964, he studied for his PhD under Christine Carpenter, researching politics and the English constitution during the reign of King Henry VI, which was awarded in early 1991. He had joined Merton College, Oxford, the previous year as a junior research fellow, and from there became a lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth. He returned to Oxford in 1997, joining Corpus Christi College as a fellow and tutor in medieval history. He has described the context of his inte...

#5830

Catharine Coleborne

#175211

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Catharine Coleborne is an Australian medical historian and academic administrator. She is the Head of School and Dean of Arts at the University of Newcastle and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Royal Society of New South Wales.

#5831

Jackie Pigeaud

#95021

Overall Influence

1937 - 2016 (79 years)

Jackie Pigeaud was a French professor of Latin and historian of medicine. He occupied a chair at the University of Nantes and was a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His field of research was the relationship of body and soul in the tradition of medical thought. He died in Orvault in 2016.

#5832

Vijay Prashad

#184696

Overall Influence

#5833

Mario Turchetti

#173414

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Mario Salvatore Turchetti de Bagnoregio was an Italian historian and academic. He specialized in the French Wars of Religion. Biography Turchetti was born to pianist Galliano Turchetti de Bagnoregio and wife teacher Maria Fichera de Taormina in Taormina in 1944. He earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Messina in 1963 and was awarded a scholarship in philosophy in 1968. He perfected his studies of historiography at the Istituto italiano per gli studi storici and began writing papers on religious wars. He earned his doctorate from the University of Geneva in 1982 and four years later became an associate professor of history at the University of Messina.

#5834

R. L. Storey

#167266

Overall Influence

1927 - 2005 (78 years)

Robin Lyndsey Storey , usually cited as R. L. Storey, was an English historian specialising in late medieval English political and church history. Early years Robin Storey was born in 1927 in Northumberland and educated at Whitley Bay Grammar School. He did National Service at the close of World War II in the RAF, which took him to the Netherlands. He studied Modern History at New College, Oxford and from 1948, moved to the University of Durham to carry out doctoral research into the career of Thomas Langley, Bishop of Durham as both 'statesman and bishop,' which was submitted in January 1954....

#5835

Liu Kwang-ching

#100792

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Liu Kwang-ching , who sometimes published under the name K.C. Liu, was a China-born American historian of China. He taught at University of California-Davis from 1963 until his retirement in 1993. He is best known for his scholarship in late-Qing history, astute bibliographical work, and edited volumes, including co-editing Cambridge History of China volumes.

#5836

Neville Brown

#179377

Overall Influence

1932 - 2018 (86 years)

Neville Brown . He was a Doctor of Science in Applied Geophysics. Since 1994 he was a senior member of Mansfield College in Oxford. His career was heavily involved in the interaction between the humanities and physics, particularly on sky sciences. He studied economics with geography at University College London and later modern history at New College, Oxford.

#5837

Matthew Davies

#111030

Overall Influence

Matthew P. Davies is a British academic administrator and urban historian, specialising in late medieval and early modern cities. Since 2016, he has been Executive Dean of the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London where he is also a professor of urban history; between 2002 and 2016, he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research's Centre for Metropolitan History.

#5838

Michael Rothberg

#71302

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Michael Rothberg is an American literature and memory studies scholar. He is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles . He was the founding director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

#5839

Aubrey Newman

#104916

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (98 years)

Aubrey N. Newman is a British historian who has written widely on the topic of Anglo-Jewish history. Newman served as a professor at the University of Leicester, where he founded the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies. He served two terms as President of the Jewish Historical Society of England.

#5840

John H. Eicher

#143003

Overall Influence

1921 - 2016 (95 years)

John Harold Eicher was an organic chemist, philosopher of science, historian, and author. He was a Manhattan Project scientist who worked at Columbia University to develop the first atomic bomb, and taught chemistry at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for 37 years. Eicher was the author of several chemistry publications and, with his son David J. Eicher, was coauthor of the reference book Civil War High Commands.

#5841

C. J. Bartlett

#181952

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Christopher John Bartlett is a British historian and biographer. He was born in Bournemouth and educated at University College, Exeter, where he gained a BA in history in 1953. He was awarded a PhD in international history by the London School of Economics in 1956. From 1957 to 1959 he was assistant lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He was then lecturer in Modern History at the University of the West Indies and Queen's College, Dundee. Afterwards, he was reader in international history . In 1978 he was appointed Professor of International History at the University of Dundee, from whic...

#5842

Robert Zaller

#175164

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Robert Michael Zaller is an American author whose works include volumes of history, criticism, and verse. He is Drexel Distinguished University Professor of History Emeritus , and has been active as an opponent of the death penalty.

#5843

Thomas Schlich

#172326

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Thomas Schlich is a German-Canadian historian of medicine known for his work on the history of surgery. Education Thomas Schlich studied medicine at the University of Marburg, Germany, and worked at the centre of internal medicine, department of Nephrology as a physician. He holds an MD research degree from the Philipps-University of Marburg, and was awarded habilitation by the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg.

#5844

Nicolai Rubinstein

#100015

Overall Influence

1911 - 2002 (91 years)

Nicolai Rubinstein, FBA, FRHistS was a German-born historian of Renaissance Italy who lived in England from 1939. Early life Rubinstein was born on 13 July 1911 in Berlin, Germany, to Latvian and Hungarian Jewish parents. He studied at the University of Berlin and moved to Florence in Italy in the 1930s, where he was an assistant to Nicola Ottakar.

#5845

Nancy C. Unger

#153117

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Nancy C. Unger is an American history professor and author. She chairs the history department at Santa Clara University. She has written books on American women in the environmental movement, Bob La Follette, and Belle La Follette.

#5846

Wilfrid Prest

#172141

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Wilfrid Prest, AM is a historian, specialising in legal history, who is professor emeritus at the University of Adelaide. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia , and Queen's College, University of Melbourne, and a member of the Council of the Selden Society, London.

#5847

Nell Irvin Painter

#184919

Overall Influence

#5848

Wallace L. Daniel

#143943

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Wallace L. Daniel Jr. is an American historian, currently the Provost and a Distinguished University Professor at Mercer University. Previously, Daniel was the Ralph L. and Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University and the Dean of Baylor's College of Arts and Sciences from 1996 to 2005.

#5849

M. Susan Lindee

#171518

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Mary Susan Lindee is an American historian and sociologist of science. She has been the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania since 2013. At the University of Pennsylvania, she previously served as Chair of History and Sociology of Science, and as Associate Dean for the Social Sciences. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.

#5850

Hamid Ahmadi

#145900

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Hamid Ahmadi is a historian of modern Iranian history. He received his Msc in Naval Studies, M.A. in Political Science and worked on his Ph.D in this field at the Free University of Berlin. Ahmadi was a member of the Iranian Military-Naval Strategic Committee and military adviser to the defence minister in 1979 and military adviser to former Iranian president Abulhassan Banisadr in 1980 to 1981.

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