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,

#601

Shaye J. D. Cohen

#12036

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Shaye J. D. Cohen is an American Hebraist, historian, and rabbi. He is a modern scholar of Hebrew Bible. Currently he is the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University.

#602

Alain Besançon

#20454

Overall Influence

1932 - 2023 (91 years)

Alain Besançon was a French historian. He specialised in intellectual history and Russian politics. From 1965 to 1992 he was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques of the Institut de France in 1996.

#603

Lucy Riall

#24337

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Lucy Riall is an Irish historian. She was a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and is currently a professor in the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence.

#604

Paul Preston

#5650

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Sir Paul Preston CBE is an English historian and Hispanist, biographer of Francisco Franco, and specialist in Spanish history, in particular the Spanish Civil War, which he has studied for more than 30 years. He is the winner of multiple awards for his books on the Spanish Civil War.

#605

Carol Gluck

#12873

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Carol Gluck is an American academic and Japanologist. She is the George Sansom Professor Emerita of History at Columbia University and served as the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1996.

#606

Gar Alperovitz

#6989

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distin...

#607

Gerhard A. Ritter

#8667

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Gerhard Albert Ritter was a German historian. Biography Ritter was born in and grew up in Berlin and studied from 1947 at the University of Tübingen and at the Free University of Berlin. He died in Berlin in 2015.

#608

Thomas C. Cochran

#23793

Overall Influence

1902 - 1999 (97 years)

Thomas Childs Cochran was an American economic historian. He was the author of several books. He is considered a pioneer in that field. Early life Thomas C. Cochran was born on April 29, 1902, in Manhattan. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from New York University before obtaining his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

#609

Bruce Schulman

#48354

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Bruce J. Schulman is an American historian, currently the William E. Huntington Professor at Boston University. From 2022-23, Schulman served as the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at The Queen's College, Oxford.

#610

Henry Kamen

#19217

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Henry A. Kamen is a British historian, who has published extensively on Europe, Spain, and the Spanish Empire. Biography Henry Arthur Kamen was born in Rangoon in 1936, the son of Maurice Joseph Kamen, an Anglo-Burmese engineer working for Shell Oil, and his wife, Agnes Frizelle, by descent half Anglo-Irish and half Nepalese. Kamen was educated at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, from where he won a Major Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, earning his doctorate at St Antony's College. During National Service he studied Russian, and his first book was a translation of the...

#611

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

#7828

Overall Influence

1953 - 2012 (59 years)

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke was a British historian and professor of Western esotericism at the University of Exeter, best known for his authorship of several scholarly books on the history of Germany between the World Wars and Western esotericism.

#612

Eric Alterman

#6279

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Eric Alterman is an American historian, journalist, author, media critic, blogger, and educator. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of eleven books. From 1995 to 2020, Alterman was "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation. He is a contributing writer there, and at The American Prospect, where under a two-year grant he wrote the newsletter, Altercation, until January 27, 2023. In his farewell newsletter column Alterman stated that he opened a Substack page also entitled, Altercation, on January 21. 2023, and that although publi...

#613

David Roediger

#15982

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

David R. Roediger is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas, where he has been since the fall of 2014. Previously, he was an American Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . His research interests include the construction of racial identity, class structures, labor studies, and the history of American radicalism. He writes from a Marxist theoretical framework.

#614

Amiya Kumar Bagchi

#13588

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Amiya Kumar Bagchi is an Indian political economist. Biography His academic career began when he started teaching in Presidency College, Kolkata. In the 1960s, he taught in the Faculty of Economics in Cambridge , but resigned his post in 1969, to resume his academic career in Presidency College, Kolkata.

#615

Michel Winock

#11790

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Michel Winock is a French historian, specializing in the history of the French Republic, intellectual movements, antisemitism, nationalism and the far right movements of France. He is a professeur des universités in contemporary history at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and member of L'Histoire magazine's editing board. Winock has also worked as a reporter for Le Monde.

#616

Andrzej Paczkowski

Andrzej Paczkowski

#14727

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski is a Polish historian. Professor of Collegium Civitas, director of Modern History Studies in the Political Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences, member of Collegium of Institute of National Remembrance.

#617

Benjamin Isaac

#6871

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Benjamin Henri Isaac is the Fred and Helen Lessing Professor of Ancient History Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the American Philosophical Society

#618

James Joll

#17058

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

James Bysse Joll FBA was a British historian and university lecturer whose works included The Origins of the First World War and Europe Since 1870. He also wrote on the history of anarchism and socialism.

#619

Robert V. Remini

Robert V. Remini

#15477

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Robert Vincent Remini was an American historian and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He wrote numerous books about President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian era, most notably a three-volume biography of Jackson. For the third volume of Andrew Jackson, subtitled The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845, he won the 1984 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction. Remini was widely praised for his meticulous research on Jackson and thorough knowledge of him. His books portrayed Jackson in a mostly favorable light and he was sometimes criticized for being too parti...

#620

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor

#4078

Overall Influence

1915 - 2011 (96 years)

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War, and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts . A BBC journalist once termed him "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".

#621

Webster Tarpley

Webster Tarpley

#13688

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Webster Griffin Tarpley is an American writer, political activist, and conspiracy theorist. A one-time follower of Lyndon LaRouche, Tarpley is known for his role in the 9/11 truth movement, believing 9/11 was a false flag operation.

#622

Roger D. Launius

Roger D. Launius

#21631

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Roger D. Launius is an American historian and author of Lithuanian descent, a former chief historian of NASA. He retired in 2016 as Associate Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Launius is a consulting historian in air and space history. He has written many books on space flight, and also published on the history of the Latter Day Saint movement.

#623

Miriam Gebhardt

Miriam Gebhardt

#25615

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Miriam Gebhardt is a German historian and writer. Life Gebhardt was born in Freiburg, Germany and trained as a journalist. From 1982, she worked as an editor. From 1988 to 1993 she studied social and economic history, regional history and modern German literature at Munich University. In 1988 she obtained a doctorate in Modern History under Clemens Wischermann at the University of Münster with a thesis on family memories.

#624

Wendy Lower

#14106

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Wendy Lower is an American historian and a widely published author on the Holocaust and World War II. Since 2012, she holds the John K. Roth Chair at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and in 2014 was named the director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont. As of 2016, she serves as the interim director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

#625

Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed

#13236

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.

#626

Taner Akçam

#6516

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish-German historian and sociologist. During the 1990s, he was the first Turkish scholar to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, and has written several books on the genocide, such as A Shameful Act , From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide , The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity , and Killing Orders . He is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject. Akçam's frequent participation in public debates on the legacy of the genocide have been compared to Theodor Adorno's role in postwar Germany.

#627

David Lowenthal

#15148

Overall Influence

1923 - 2018 (95 years)

David Lowenthal was an American historian and geographer, renowned for his work on heritage. He is credited with having made heritage studies a discipline in its own right. Biography David Lowenthal was born on 26 April 1923 in New York City to Max Lowenthal and Eleanor Mack , and was also the brother of John Lowenthal and Betty Levin.

#628

Els Witte

#24759

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Els, Baroness Witte is a Belgian historian. She was professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and honorary rector of the university. Els Witte was the first female rector of a Belgian university. She was a member of the Coudenberg group, a Belgian federalist think tank.

#629

J. W. Burrow

#28844

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

John Wyon Burrow, FBA was an English historian of intellectual history. His published works include assessments of the Whig interpretation of history and of historiography generally. According to The Independent: "John Burrow was one of the leading intellectual historians of his generation. His pioneering work marked the beginning of a more sophisticated approach to the history of the social sciences, one that did not treat the past as being of interest only in so far as it anticipated the present."

#630

Sheilagh Ogilvie

#19835

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sheilagh Catheren Ogilvie, FBA is a Canadian historian, economist, and academic, specialising in economic history. Since 2020, she has been Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford. Previously, she taught at the University of Cambridge.

#631

Norman Cohn

#13463

Overall Influence

1915 - 2007 (92 years)

Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA was a British academic, historian and writer who spent 14 years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex. Life Cohn was born in London, to a German Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was educated at Gresham's School and Christ Church, Oxford. According to the Italian scholar Lorenzo Ferrari, "Cohn grew up feeling 'a man between all worlds' with his German-Jewish surname, his mother's Catholic faith , and his numerous German relatives". He was a scholar and research student at Christ Church between 1933 and 1939, taking a first-class degree in Modern Languages in 1936 and in 1939 .

#632

Fuat Sezgin

#13967

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Fuat Sezgin was a Turkish scholar and researcher who specialized in the history of Arabic-Islamic science. He was professor emeritus of the History of Natural Science at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and the founder and honorary director of the Institute of the History of the Arab Islamic Sciences there. He also created museums in Frankfurt and Istanbul with replicas of historical Arabic-Islamic scientific instruments, tools and maps. His best known publication is the 17-volume Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, a standard reference in the field.

#633

Julian E. Zelizer

#4142

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Julian Emanuel Zelizer is a professor of political history and an author in the United States at Princeton University. Zelizer has authored or co-authored several books about American political history; his focuses of study are the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.

#634

Janet Nelson

#26583

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Dame Janet Laughland Nelson , also known as Jinty Nelson, is a British historian. She is Emerita Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. Early life Born on 28 March 1942 in Blackpool, Nelson was educated at Keswick School, Cumbria, and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she received her BA degree in 1964 and her PhD degree in 1967.

#635

Tom Holland

#17837

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Thomas Holland is an English author and popular historian who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history, and the origins of Islam. He has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presented the radio series Making History. He co-hosts The Rest is History podcast.

#636

Firuz Kazemzadeh

#23579

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Firuz Kazemzadeh was a Russian-born American historian who was professor emeritus of history at Yale University. Biography Firuz Kazemzadeh was born in Moscow to an Iranian father and a Russian mother. His father served in the Iranian embassy in Moscow. After completing his primary and secondary education in Moscow, Kazemzadeh and his family moved to Iran. In 1944, during the height of World War II, he travelled from Tehran to the United States and entered Stanford University, graduating with distinction in 1946 and obtaining an MA in 1947. In 1950 Kazemzadeh received a Ph.D. in Russian his...

#637

Tokushi Kasahara

#18788

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Tokushi Kasahara is a Japanese historian. He is a professor emeritus at Tsuru University and his area of expertise is modern Chinese history. Life and career He was born in Gunma Prefecture and graduated from Gunma Prefectural Maebashi High School and the department of humanities at Tokyo University of Education. He started a master's degree at the same university but did not complete it. After serving as a teacher in the faculty of education of Utsunomiya University, he has worked regularly since 1999 at the Nanjing Massacre Research Center of Nanjing Normal University as a visiting professor...

#638

Peter C. Perdue

#29813

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Peter C. Perdue is an American author, professor, and historian. He is a professor of Chinese history at Yale University. Perdue has a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in the field of History and East Asian Languages. His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He has also written on grain markets in China, agricultural development, and environmental history.

#639

Caroline Elkins

#15332

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Faculty Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.

#640

Maurice Meisner

Maurice Meisner

#6157

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Maurice Jerome Meisner was an American sinologist. He was a historian of 20th century China and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His study of the Chinese Revolution and the People's Republic was in conjunction with his strong interest in socialist ideology, Marxism, and Maoism in particular. He authored a number of books including Mao's China: A History of the People's Republic which became a standard academic text in that area.

#641

Frank Moya Pons

#31517

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Dr. Rafael Francisco “Frank” Moya Pons is one of the leading contemporary historians of the Dominican Republic. He has published many important books in the history and cultural heritage of the country. One of his best-known works is Manual de historia dominicana , now in its tenth edition which is a staple work of Dominican historiography. In 1985 he authored the book Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish, in 1998 The Dominican Republic: A National History and in 2007 History of the Caribbean: plantations, trade, and war in the Atlantic world. He has also conducted much work into slave...

#642

Robert Jan van Pelt

Robert Jan van Pelt

#15102

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Robert Jan van Pelt is a Dutch author, architectural historian, professor at the University of Waterloo and a Holocaust scholar. One of the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, he regularly speaks on Holocaust related topics, through which he has come to address Holocaust denial. He was an expert witness in Deborah Lipstadt's successful defence in the civil libel suit brought against her by British author and Holocaust denier David Irving in 1996.

#643

Lev Gumilev

#13870

Overall Influence

1912 - 1992 (80 years)

Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev was a Soviet and Russian historian, ethnologist, anthropologist and translator. He had a reputation for his highly unorthodox theories of ethnogenesis and historiosophy. He was an exponent of Eurasianism. According to geographer Mark Bassin, Lev Gumilev, whose books have now sold millions of copies, can be compared in terms of influence to Herodotus, Karl Marx, Oswald Spengler or Albert Einstein. The "Eurasian vision" of president Vladimir Putin has allegedly been influenced by Gumilev's ideas.

#644

J. H. Hexter

#24185

Overall Influence

1910 - 1996 (86 years)

Jack H. Hexter was an American historian, a specialist in Tudor and seventeenth century British history, and well known for his comments on historiography. Hexter was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

#645

Dmitri Bondarenko

Dmitri Bondarenko

#14870

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Dmitri Mikhailovich Bondarenko is a Russian anthropologist, historian, and Africanist. He has conducted field research in a number of African countries and among Black people in Russia and the United States. He is Principal Research Fellow and Vice-Director for Research with the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the International Center of Anthropology of the HSE University, and Full Professor in Ethnology with the Center of Social Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. He holds the titles of Professor in Ethnology from th...

#646

Dick Harrison

#31831

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Dick Walther Harrison is a Swedish historian. He is currently a Professor of History at Lund University. His main areas of interest are the European Middle Ages, including the medical history of the period and the history of slavery. Harrison regularly writes articles for the Swedish journal Populär Historia . He has also written popular historical works and, during Spring 2010, a blog covering the history of monarchs and monarchies with emphasis on the Swedish monarchy. Harrison regularly gives lectures to the general public on a broad range of historical topics.

#647

Tara Westover

#12495

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Tara Westover is an American memoirist, essayist and historian. Her memoir Educated debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America's Jean Stein Book Award, and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times ranked Educated as one of the 10 Best Books of 2018. Westover was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019.

#648

Greg Grandin

#8568

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Greg Grandin is an American historian and author. He is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University. He is author of a number of books, including Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, as well as for the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

#649

Radu Florescu

#22922

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Radu Florescu was a Romanian academic who held the position of Emeritus Professor of History at Boston College. His work on Vlad Dracula includes a series of bestselling books that he co-authored with his colleague Raymond T. McNally. Along with serving as Director of the East European Research Center at Boston College, Florescu was also a philanthropist and an adviser to Edward Kennedy on Balkan and Eastern European affairs. At the time of his death, Radu Florescu was considered the patriarch of the .

#650

Carl Neumann Degler

#32708

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Carl Neumann Degler was an American historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He was the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus at Stanford University. Early life and education Degler was born on February 6, 1921, in Newark, New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945. He earned a BA in history from Upsala College, and master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. His 1952 PhD dissertation in political science was "Labor in the Economy and Politics of New York City, 1850–1860: A Study of the Impact of Early Industrialism." It was never publ...

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