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,

#5851

Richard Levis McCormick

Richard Levis McCormick

#129639

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Richard Levis McCormick is a historian, professor and president emeritus of Rutgers University. Early life The son of Richard Patrick McCormick, a Rutgers professor and administrator, and Katheryne C. Levis, a University administrator, Richard Levis McCormick was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

#5852

Richard Griffiths

#133934

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Richard Thomas Griffiths is an English-Dutch historian. Early life Griffiths studied economic history and Russian studies at University College, Swansea and graduated with first class honours in 1970. He was a postgraduate students at Jesus College, Cambridge where he prepared his thesis the apparent stagnation of the Netherlands in the first half of the nineteenth century. He received his PhD in 1977.

#5853

I. B. Holley Jr.

#179049

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

Irving Brinton Holley Jr. was an American historian. He was a leading scholar in the field of American social and intellectual history, and his particular emphasis was on military history and the history of technology.

#5854

Ethan B. Katz

#123579

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Ethan B. Katz is a scholar of history and Jewish studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France, a 2015 winner of the National Jewish Book Award. The book was also awarded the J. Russell Major Prize and the American Library in Paris Book Award. The book traces Jewish-Muslim relations in France and French North Africa using archival research and interviews.

#5855

Kumkum Chatterjee

#134916

Overall Influence

1958 - 2012 (54 years)

Kumkum Chatterjee was an Indian American historian, best known for her works Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters and The Cultures of History in Early Modern India . She was professor of history and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University.

#5856

Jeff Hughes

#177832

Overall Influence

1965 - 2018 (53 years)

Jeff Hughes was an historian of science based at the University of Manchester who researched physics, nuclear culture and scientific communities. Early life Jeffrey Alan Hughes was born in 1965 in Glanamman, Carmarthenshire.

#5857

Christine Proust

#53123

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Christine Proust is a French historian of mathematics and Assyriologist known for her research on Babylonian mathematics. She is a senior researcher at the SPHERE joint team of CNRS and Paris Diderot University, where she and Agathe Keller are co-directors of the SAW project headed by Karine Chemla .

#5858

Jean-Pierre Dedieu

#151448

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Jean-Pierre Dedieu is a French historian, specialist of the history of Spain. Short biography He is known especially for his studies about the Spanish Inquisition. He has been director of the Maison des Pays Ibériques in Bordeaux and member of the scientific board of the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. More recently he has studied the political system of the Spanish monarchy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Because of an interest in the application of informatics to historical research since the late 1980s, he has developed the "Fichoz" database system. Since January 2005, he is "directeur de recherches" at the LARHRA - CNRS UMR 5190 in Lyon.

#5859

John Harris

#99760

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

John Frederick Harris OBE was an English curator, historian of architecture, gardens and architectural drawings, and the author of more than 25 books and catalogues, and 200 articles. He was a Fellow and Curator Emeritus of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, founding Trustee of Save Britain's Heritage and Save Europe's Heritage, and founding member and Honorary Life President of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums.

#5860

Stuart Jones

#123231

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Frank Stuart Jones was a British economic historian who spent most of his career at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and was a respected authority on the country's economy. Selected publications

#5861

Massimo Salvadori

#53006

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Massimo Salvadori, or Max William Salvadori Paleotti was a British-Italian historian and an anti-Fascist. Salvadori was educated at the University of Geneva and the University of Rome. He was involved in the anti-Fascist movement in Italy before World War II. Imprisoned from 1931-32 as a result of his political activities, Salvadori fled Italy for Switzerland. In 1943 he joined the British army and after participating in landings at Salerno and Anzio, parachuted into Italy to organize resistance. As agent of the British Special Operations Executive, Salvadori played a central role in provid...

#5862

François Blanchetière

#132587

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

François Blanchetière is a French New Testament scholar. He is known for his view on continuity between Second Temple period Judaism and Jewish Christianity and considers that Jesus cannot be considered as a "founder" of a religion. Blanchetière considers that "Nazarene" religion was a religious movement of Semitic character within Judaism. His position is often linked to that of Simon Claude Mimouni.

#5863

Catherine Ann Cline

#104291

Overall Influence

1927 - 2005 (78 years)

#5864

David J. Blackbourn

#183166

Overall Influence

David John Blackbourn PhD FRSB is currently Professor of Virology and Director of the Institute of Medical Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests emphasise virus understanding how viruses have evolved to manipulate immune responses. Having previously been Head of the School of Biosciences and Medicine for 8 years. He is also a co-founder of Ducentis BioTherapeutics to produce a novel anti-inflammatory therapeutic drug and until September 2022, was non-executive board member. Blackbourn is an Editor-in-Chief of FEMS Microbiology Reviews.

#5865

Warren Kimball

#183197

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Warren Forbes Kimball is a historian of the Second World War and American foreign policy. He was an academic adviser to the Churchill Centre in London. He graduated from Georgetown University and taught at Rutgers University.

#5866

Berthe Marti

#90886

Overall Influence

1904 - 1995 (91 years)

Berthe Marie Marti was a Swiss-American scholar and teacher of classical and medieval Latin. Education and degrees Baccalauréat, Gymnase classique Cantonal, Lausanne, 1922Licenciée-ès-lettres , University of Lausanne, 1925MA in Latin, Bryn Mawr College, 1926PhD in Latin, Bryn Mawr College, 1934. Dissertation: "The Adoration of the Roman Emperor from Augustus to Charlemagne," under the direction of Lily Ross Taylor.

#5867

Helena Pycior

#98644

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Helena Mary Pycior is an American historian known for her works in the history of mathematics, Marie Curie, and human-animal relations. She is a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

#5868

Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller

#131812

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller is a German historian. External links hergemoeller.de

#5869

Jonathan Edmondson

#170075

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Jonathan Charles Edmondson is a British-born historian. He holds Full Professor and Distinguished Research Professorship status at York University and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

#5870

Tom Behan

#127338

Overall Influence

1957 - 2010 (53 years)

Tom Behan was born from Irish parents. He was an academic and writer on Italian history, politics and culture. Behan was an active member of the British Socialist Workers Party for over 30 years. In his youth he knew the unfair widespread prejudice against the Irish and he found reading Socialist Worker newspaper what was the only thing he thought that made sense on Ireland. He didn't go to university until 1982, so was part of the first post-war youth generation to experience a society of mass youth unemployment. He had lived in Naples in the early 1980s, acquiring an excellent mastery of It...

#5871

Christa Ehrmann-Hämmerle

#154102

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Christa Ehrmann-Hämmerle is a Swiss-born Austrian historian. She is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on military history, particularly World War 1, as well as women and gender history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2011, she has been a spokeswoman for the Military History Working Group. She is co-founder and co-editor of the scientific journal L'Homme - Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft.

#5872

Carlos Ramos Núñez

#86751

Overall Influence

1960 - 2021 (61 years)

Carlos Ramos Núñez was a Peruvian jurist and academic. He was a justice of the Constitutional Court from 2014 until his death.

#5873

Martha Macintyre

#154646

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Martha Macintyre is an Australian anthropologist and historian whose work has focused on studying social change in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia. As of 2021, she is an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne.

#5874

Karl Kaser

#178588

Overall Influence

1954 - 2012 (58 years)

Karl Kaser was an Austrian historian who specialized in Southeastern Europe. Education and career Kaser was born in Pischelsdorf in der Steiermark, Austria in 1954. He studied at the University of Graz, majoring in History and minoring in Slavic Languages and Literature in 1974. He received a PhD from Graz in Southeast European History in 1980. That same year, he began his career as a researcher and Professor of Southeastern Europe at the university. In 1988, he was appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor and in 1996 as full Professor for Southeast European History and Anthropology.

#5875

Dagomar Degroot

#175618

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (40 years)

Dagomar Degroot is an environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University. He co-founded the Climate History Network, an organization of scholars who study past climate change, and established HistoricalClimatology.com, a popular website that explains why studying past climate change matters today. In 2018, he published a book, The Frigid Golden Age, that argues that the Dutch Republic - precursor state to the present-day Netherlands - was resilient and even adaptive in the face of a period of cold climate known as the Little Ice Age. The book was named by the Financial Ti...

#5876

Vasko Simoniti

#157050

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Vasko Simoniti is a Slovenian historian and politician. Between 2004 and 2008, he served as the Minister of Culture of Slovenia, being reappointed in 2020. He is an active member of the Slovenian Democratic Party.

#5877

Catherine Schenk

#176491

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Catherine Schenk is a Canadian Professor of Economic & Social History at the History faculty of the University of Oxford. She is also a fellow at St Hilda's College Oxford. She is an associate fellow at Chatham House.

#5878

Neil Foley

#95165

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Neil Foley is an American historian. Life Dr. Neil Foley graduated from the University of Virginia and earned a M.A. from Georgetown University. He also holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Michigan, where he attained the Ph.D. in American Culture in 1990.

#5879

Matthias Theodor Vogt

Matthias Theodor Vogt

#111125

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Matthias Theodor Vogt is a German academic with a focus on cultural policy and an author of studies on cultural conditions that might serve to strengthen the democratic potential in diverse European countries. Between 1992 and 1995, Vogt developed the overall blueprint for the Free State of Saxony’s law on cultural areas, and contributed to its acceptance and implementation. Since 1994 he has acted as the founding director of the Saxonian Institute for Cultural Infrastructure and since 1997 has been Professor for Cultural Policy and Cultural History at the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences .

#5880

Kevin O'Connor

#107443

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Kevin C. O'Connor is an American historian and professor who is the departmental chair of history at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Books History of the Baltic States Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revolution Culture and Customs of the Baltic States .

#5881

Michael Carlebach

Michael Carlebach

#75370

Overall Influence

Michael L. Carlebach is an American photographer and historian known for his books on the subject of early American photojournalism; American Photojournalism Comes of Age and The Origins of Photojournalism in America, as well as his photographs of south Florida and the US. He was staff photographer for The Miami Herald for a brief time and taught at the University of Miami from 1978 to 2005.

#5882

Deno Geanakoplos

#118835

Overall Influence

1916 - 2007 (91 years)

Deno John Geanakoplos was a renowned scholar of Byzantine cultural and religious history and Italian Renaissance intellectual history and the Bradford Durfee Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History, Renaissance History, and Eastern Orthodox Church History at Yale University. He was the author of 13 books and over 100 articles and was considered one of the foremost Byzantine scholars in the world. He was the father of Yale Economist and Professor John Geanakoplos.

#5883

Michael Seadle

#87654

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Michael S. Seadle is an information scientist and historian. He is professor for digital libraries at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin. He was Chair of the iSchools from 2014 to 2016. In 2017 he became the Executive Director with a term until March 2020. In 2016 he became one of the founders of the Humboldt-Elsevier Advanced Data and Text Centre at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

#5884

Stephen G. Nichols

#136746

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Stephen George Nichols Jr. is an American medievalist. Nichols earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and completed a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale University. Upon graduation, he began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two years later, Nichols joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he remained for three years. Between 1968 and 1985, Nichols taught at Dartmouth College, and was Edward Tuck Professor of French from 1984. He was named professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, and appointed Edmund J.

#5885

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

#138488

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Gavriel David Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of academic specialization include the history of Nazi Germany, memory studies, and counterfactual history. He is an editor of The Journal of Holocaust Research and edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review, which features news, analysis, and commentary from the world of counterfactual and alternate history.

#5886

Gabrielle Hecht

#136833

Overall Influence

Gabrielle Hecht is an American historian and Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security and Professor of History at Stanford University. She is known for her works on radioactive residues, mine waste, air pollution, and the Anthropocene in Africa.

#5887

Gabrielle Démians d'Archimbaud

#178753

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Gabrielle Démians d'Archimbaud was a French archaeologist specialising in deserted medieval villages and religious buildings. She was a pioneer of the study of material culture in the Middle Ages and Professor emerita of History of Art.

#5888

John Chartres

#179463

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

John Anthony Chartres is the former professor of economic and social history at the University of Leeds. He is a specialist in the economic history of agriculture in England. Selected publications Books Internal trade in England, 1500-1700. Macmillan, London, 1977. Pre-Industrial Britain. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1994. Agricultural Markets and Trade, 1500-1750. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

#5889

Susan Schrepfer

#185478

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Susan Rita Schrepfer was an American environmental historian. Life Susan Schrepfer was born in San Francisco in 1941, and grew up in Gilroy, California. After graduating from high school, she worked as a farm labourer before studying history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving her AB in 1963. She gained an MA and a PhD in history at the University of California, Riverside.

#5890

Armando Nieto

#178658

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

Armando Nieto Vélez was a jesuit priest and Peruvian historian. Biography His parents were Manuel R. Nieto and Rosa Vélez Picasso. He studied in Colegio de la Inmaculada in Lima from 1938 to 1948. He was admitted into the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

#5891

Jean-Pierre Verdet

#99059

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Jean-Pierre Verdet is a French astronomer, historian of astronomy and mathematician. Biography Jean-Pierre Verdet is a Bachelor of Mathematics. Doctor of Science at Paris Diderot University . In 1963, he entered the Paris Observatory, where, after studying the solar corona, he inaugurated infrared astronomy in France, then studied the radiation of the planets in this wavelength domain. He later became head of the Department of spherical astronomy at Paris Observatory. He has regularly taught the MAS of celestial mechanics at the Observatory, a higher education institution which is authorized ...

#5892

Valérie Toureille

#145252

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Valérie Toureille is a French historian and university professor born in 1967 in Île-de-France. She is a specialist in the history of the Middle Ages as well as the crime, criminal gangs and criminal justice of the era.

#5893

Kim Priemel

#114942

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Kim Christian Priemel is a historian of Germany and former professor at Humboldt University Berlin; he now works for the University of Oslo. Works

#5894

Aroha Harris

#113302

Overall Influence

Aroha Gaylene Harris is a Māori academic. As of 2020, Harris is an associate professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in Māori histories of policy and community development. She is also a member of the Waitangi Tribunal.

#5895

Jurij Moskvitin

Jurij Moskvitin

#129399

Overall Influence

1938 - 2005 (67 years)

Jurij Moskvitin was a classical pianist, composer, philosopher, mathematician and boheme. Jurij Moskvitin grew up in Denmark; his mother was a Russian aristocrat and his father was a Danish civil engineer. After World War II he studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. He then obtained a master's degree in Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen.

#5896

Jessica Marglin

#143519

Overall Influence

Jessica M. Marglin is an American historian of religion. She is an Associate Professor of Religion at University of Southern California and served as USC's Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies from 2016 to 2019. She is the author of Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco, which won the 2016 Baron Book prize, awarded by the American Academy for Jewish Research for best first book in Judaic studies.

#5897

Peggy Pascoe

#176119

Overall Influence

1954 - 2010 (56 years)

Peggy Ann Pascoe was an American historian. She was the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She was a member of the University of Oregon History Department from 1996 until her death on July 23, 2010. Prior to her work at UO, Pascoe worked as an assistant professor and then associate professor at the University of Utah, where she taught courses on women’s history, race, and sexuality. Pascoe’s work centers on the history of race, gender, and sexuality, with a particular investment in law and the U.S. West. Together wit...

#5898

Hans Cools

#179865

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Hans Cools is a historian of early-modern Europe. He is a professor at the KU Leuven and a senior research fellow of the Fryske Akademy. Career Cools studied history and philosophy at the universities of Antwerp, Lille and Ghent. He was a researcher at the European University Institute in Florence and completed his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. His thesis, on the nobility in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, was supervised by Henk van Nierop and Wim Blockmans. It charted the networks of patronage and fealty that tied the nobility to the crown.

#5899

Paul Julian Smith

#82027

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Paul Julian Smith is a university professor specializing in Spanish and Mexican cinema and television. He is also a film critic. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Hispanic studies at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.

#5900

Ferdinando Scala

#115235

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Ferdinando Scala is an Italian biologist, science and technology journalist and historian, specialized in strategy and military history. Biography Born in Portici, he spent his first year of life in Foggia, where his father was servicing as a warrant officer of the Italian Air Force, and then he moved to San Giorgio a Cremano, that he then always considered his hometown. Here he frequented elementary and middle school, and then he spent the first two years of high school at Liceo Classico Statale "Quinto Orazio Flacco" of Portici.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions