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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#6001

Lorri Glover

#179857

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Lorri Glover is an American scholar who holds the John Francis Bannon Endowed Chair in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She specializes in the social history of the English colonies and the creation of the American Republic.

#6002

Naomi Jackson Groves

#119955

Overall Influence

1910 - 2001 (91 years)

Naomi Jackson Groves was a Canadian painter, art historian and linguist. An expert on German expressionist artist Ernst Barlach, she translated a number of his works in addition to releasing a series of books about her uncle, painter A. Y. Jackson, and translations of artist Jens Rosing's writing.

#6003

Claude Longchamp

Claude Longchamp

#38109

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Claude Longchamp is a Swiss historian and political scientist . He is a prominent political analyst for Swiss national television and radio, and he is the main figure behind the research institute gfs.berne, which conducts both the main pre- and post-vote polls and projections of national votes in Switzerland.

#6004

Thomas G. Andrews

#149787

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Thomas G. Andrews is an American historian. Life He graduated from Yale University, and University of Wisconsin–Madison with a Ph.D. in U.S. History, May 2003. He teaches at University of Colorado, Boulder.

#6005

Jean-Marie Lassère

#181466

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Jean-Marie Lassère was a 20th-century French historian of the Roman world. He was professor of Roman history at the Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III. A specialist in Roman Africa, he was also an epigrapher, author of an important textbook.

#6006

Neslihan Şenocak

#159409

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Neslihan Şenocak is a Turkish historian, and instructor at Bilkent University, Ankara and at Columbia University in the city of New York. Career Her work examines medieval religious orders and the daily life in the thirteenth-century Italy, and her most recent project is on the relationship of violent crimes and urbanization in 13th-century Perugia.

#6007

Matthew Jones

#151244

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Matthew Charles Jones is professor of international history at the London School of Economics. Jones is a specialist in British foreign and defence policy since the Second World War, British decolonization and South East Asia, the Vietnam War, nuclear history during the Cold War, American foreign relations since 1941 and Anglo-American relations.

#6008

J. E. Cookson

#172732

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

John Ernest Cookson is an historian specialising in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British history. He was Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Canterbury. He was appointed to Canterbury in 1968 and retired in January 2007.

#6009

John W. Roberts

#179365

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

John W. Roberts is an academic who specialises in Folklore, African-American Studies and English Literature. His work has argued for the "integrity, authenticity, and authority" of African-American vernacular traditions.

#6010

Dorothy Pickles

#88275

Overall Influence

1903 - 1994 (91 years)

Dorothy Maud Pickles was a British university teacher, historian, and broadcaster. Early life and education Dorothy Maud Salmon was born in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire on 8 August 1903; the eldest child of a hatmaker and physical education teacher. A scholarship enabled her to enter University of Leeds from where she received a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in French . After obtaining another scholarship, Salmon went to the Sorbonne to pursue her Master's degree .

#6011

Antonio Rodríguez de las Heras

#106558

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Antonio Rodríguez de las Heras Pérez was a Spanish historian, a professor at the Charles III University of Madrid, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Communication and Documentation and Director of the Institute of Culture and Technology of the Carlos III University. He was also a member of the Advisory Council of TeamLabs since its foundation in 2013.

#6012

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses

#176458

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses is a Portuguese historian, who has lived in Ireland since he was young. He is a professor in Maynooth University, whose historiographical production is predominantly centered around the contemporary history of Portugal.

#6013

James Ramon Felak

#179691

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

James Ramon Felak is an American historian who currently holds the Newman Center Term Professorship in Catholic Christianity at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in European history from Indiana University in 1988. His research specializes in the history of Catholicism in Europe, as well as the intersection of religion and politics in the era of Pope John Paul II.

#6014

Emidio Campi

#187000

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Emidio Campi is a Swiss historian. As a church historian, he is a specialist in the Reformation in Italy and Switzerland, and has researched and published articles on John Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Huldrich Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger and other reformers.

#6015

Elena Conis

#131319

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Elena Conis is an American writer and historian of medicine. Her work focuses on the history of medicine, public health, and the environment, with particular focuses on the history of vaccination, infectious diseases, and pesticides. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

#6016

Sverrir Jakobsson

#99012

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

#6017

Helene Maimann

#174560

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Helene Maimann is an Austrian historian, writer, filmmaker and exhibition organizer. She won an Axel Corti Prize, and Käthe Leichter Prize. Life After studying history, German studies and philosophy in Vienna she did her doctorate in 1973 about the Austrian Exile. Between 1980 and 1994 she worked as a lecturer at the universities of Vienna and Salzburg. In the 1980s Maimann managed various exhibitions about Austria’s contemporary history. From 1995 on – after many years of work for the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft - she started working as an editor for the ORF. In addition she published numerous articles and books.

#6018

Alden Vaughan

#109053

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Alden T. Vaughan is an American historian, having taught at Columbia University, has published several books about New England and Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries and has been largely collected by libraries. His current research is studying the relationships between the Native Americans and non-native settlers.

#6019

Ian Thatcher

#117840

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Ian D. Thatcher is a scholar of Russia. Selected works Journal of Trotsky Studies Leon Trotsky and World War One, August 1914–February 1917 Trotsky External links

#6020

Andrew Lewis

#101234

Overall Influence

The Reverend Professor Andrew D. E. Lewis is an English legal scholar and Anglican clergyman with academic specialisms in Roman law, canon law, English legal history, and European legal history. He is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Legal History at University College London.

#6021

Norbert Wagner

#173050

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Norbert Wagner is a German philologist who specializes in Germanic studies. Biography Norbert Wagner was born in Straubing, Germany on 12 February 1929. After gaining his abitur in 1947, Wagner studied German philology under Ernst Schwarz, and also history and English, at the University of Regensburg. Wagner transferred to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1948, where he studied under Otto Basler and other scholars. Wagner received his Ph.D. in 1955 at the University of Würzburg under the supervision of Franz Rolf Schröder. His thesis was on the Völsunga saga.

#6022

Annemarie Leibbrand-Wettley

#111727

Overall Influence

1913 - 1996 (83 years)

Annemarie Leibbrand-Wettley was a German medical historian. She wrote her medical dissertation in 1939 and a doctoral dissertation in the 1950s. Between 1955 and 1973 she and Werner Leibbrand regularly taught at Sorbonne in Paris. She married Werner Leibbrand 1962 with whom she also co-authored several major works.

#6023

John Howard

#115653

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

John Howard is an English singer-songwriter, pianist and recording artist and published author. With his February 1975 debut album Kid in a Big World , Howard emerged as a late voice of the glam-pop wave of the early 1970s. Across a musical career that has included two main periods of recording activity – 1974-84 and 2004–present – Howard has released 20 studio albums and 12 studio EPs. In March 2018, he became a published author, his first autobiography, Incidents Crowded With Life, covering his childhood up to 1976, was published by Fisher King Publishing. In August 2020, the second volume ...

#6024

Gilbert W. Scharffs

#148382

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Gilbert Woodrow Scharffs was a Latter-day Saint religious educator and author. Biography Scharffs was born to Fritz and Louise Scharffs and raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He served as a missionary in the German Mission of the LDS Church in the late 1950s, where he served as editor for publications and later second counselor to the Mission President. In 1959 he was married in the Salt Lake Temple to Laura Virginia Smith, a granddaughter of LDS President Joseph F. Smith. They would have four children, one of which, Brett, would become a legal scholar.

#6025

Alison Mackinnon

#183699

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Alison Mackinnon as Alison Gay Madin is a social historian who has contributed to both Australian and women's history. Particular areas of expertise are the history of education, women's social and demographic history, the history and politics of population change, population ageing, and work and responsibility changes wrought by globalisation.

#6026

Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard

#169185

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard is a French historian of modern Protestantism and honorary docent at the Faculté de théologie protestante de Paris. She is vice-president of the Société de l'histoire du protestantisme français and a member of the Comité consultatif national d'éthique pour les sciences de la vie et de la santé .

#6027

Maria Hayward

#181940

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Maria Hayward is an English historian of costume and early modern Britain. She is a professor of history at the University of Southampton and has published a number of works on the courts of Tudor and Stuart monarchs.

#6028

Simon Pepper

#160702

Overall Influence

Simon Mark Pepper is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool. He is a specialist in late medieval and early modern military architecture. Career Pepper is professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool. He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is a specialist in late medieval and early modern military architecture and has been on the editorial board of Fort: The International Journal of Military Architecture since 1997. Pepper is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

#6029

Seok Ju-seon

#186089

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Seok Ju-seon was a scholar of traditional Korean clothing and a folklorist. Her works include The History of Korean Dresses and Ornaments. Ju-seon donated over 3,300 items to the museum named for her at Dankook University, so it could curate and conserve Korean historical costume. The Seok Juseon Memorial Folk Museum was established in 1981, and combined with the Central Museum in 1999 to form the Seok Juseon Memorial Museum. Pieces from the collection were included in the first full-scale survey on art from the Joseon dynasty to be shown in the United States, Treasures from Korea: Arts and C...

#6030

Richard L. Greaves

#142633

Overall Influence

1938 - 2004 (66 years)

Richard Lee Greaves was an American historian of seventeenth century British history who was also Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of History at Florida State University. Early life He was born in Glendale, California and was educated at Bethel College, where he graduated in 1960, and Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, where he obtained an MA in 1962. He was awarded a PhD in 1964 from the University of London, where his supervisor was Geoffrey Nuttall.

#6031

David Labaree

#182591

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

David F. Labaree is a historian of education and Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. Works A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling The Trouble with Ed Schools How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939

#6032

Dorothy Page

#138645

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Dorothy Pauline Page is a retired New Zealand historian and academic. She specialised in women's history, biography and public history. Page was appointed as a lecturer in history at the University of Otago in 1969 and was later promoted to associate professor. Page completed a PhD at the university in 1984, with a thesis on disability in nationality of British women . In 1986 Page and her colleague Barbara Brookes introduced the first university-level women's history paper in New Zealand. She retired from the university in 2000. Page remained active in local history events; she was the presid...

#6033

Mark Raider

#176244

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Mark A. Raider is an American historian. He is a professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Cincinnati. Raider received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He has previously served as chair of the Judaic Studies Department at the University at Albany, SUNY and was founding director of its Center for Jewish Studies. He moved to Cincinnati in 2006.

#6034

Zhang Kaiyuan

#160576

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

Zhang Kaiyuan was a Chinese historian and educator. Biography Born in Wuhu, Anhui Province, Zhang Kaiyuan was admitted by the History Department of Nanjing University in October 1946, and graduated there. In December 1948, Zhang went to the Central Plains Liberated Areas in Central China University of Political Research as a graduate student. In July 1949 he went to Wuhan together with the school, and became an assistant professor in the Department of History, College of Education faculty, and in September 1951 into the Huazhong University . He has been successively lecturer, associate professor, professor, and finally president then former president .

#6035

Guillermo A. Baralt

#179959

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Guillermo A. Baralt is a Puerto Rican historian. He obtained his bachelor's degree from Duquesne University in 1970. Later he continued his studies in the University of Chicago where he earned his Master's and Doctor's degrees. He is currently professor of History at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. He is a member of Phi Sigma Alpha fraternity.

#6036

Karl Hack

#171864

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Karl Anthony Hack is a British historian and academic, who specialises in the history of Southeast Asia, the British Empire, and of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Drawing on interviews with insurgents, his work has demonstrated the role of high-level coercion in winning post-war counter-insurgencies, and explored extreme violence and violence limitation. He has also carried out a wide range of public work, ranging across heritage, memory, the media and the courts. He is a professor of history at The Open University where he has also been head of history, and head of the School of History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology .

#6037

Andrzej Januszajtis

Andrzej Januszajtis

#176136

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Andrzej Januszajtis is a Polish physicist, professor and politician who served as the Chairman of the City Council of Gdańsk from 1991 to 1994.

#6038

Lazar Fleishman

#107820

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Lazar Fleishman is a Russian historian and literary scholar and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He is known for his expertise on comparative literature.

#6039

Owen Hannaway

#175955

Overall Influence

1939 - 2006 (67 years)

Owen Hannaway was a Scottish historian. Life He was born on 8 October 1939 in Glasgow, and educated at St Aloysius' College and Glasgow University. He died in 2006. Career He completed his PhD in Chemistry in 1965 at the University of Glasgow.

#6040

Juan Eslava Galán

Juan Eslava Galán

#140151

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Juan Eslava Galán , is a Spanish writer of historic genre, both fiction and non-fiction. He has published some of his works under the pen name Nicholas Wilcox. In 2012 he published Las ciudades de la Bética, an essay by Fundación José Manuel Lara; Historia del mundo contada para escépticos, other essay by Editorial Planeta; and Últimas pasiones del caballero Almafiera, a novel by Editorial Planeta.

#6041

Anders Ekström

#183830

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Anders Ekström, born 1965, is a Swedish historian of ideas, professor at the department of History of Science and Ideas at the University of Uppsala. Biography Ekström's holds a Ph.D from 1994, The World on Display: The Stockholm Exhibition of 1897 and the World's Fairs of the Nineteenth Century , which was awarded the Johan Nordström and Sten Lindroth prize for scholarly excellence. More recently, Ekström has been awarded prizes for his interdisciplinary work and for initiating debates on the role of the humanities in future societies. Anders Ekström previously held positions at Uppsala Unive...

#6042

Richard Smoke

#148179

Overall Influence

1944 - 1995 (51 years)

Richard Smoke was an American historian and political scientist. Life He graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1965, and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in political science in 1972. His doctoral thesis was entitled Toward the control of escalation: a historical analysis and his advisor was William W. Kaufmann. A professor of political science, he became the Research Director of the Watson Institute's Center For Foreign Policy Development at Brown University in 1985. Smoke committed suicide in 1995.

#6043

Sharon Anne Cook

#164087

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Sharon Anne Cook is a Canadian historian, currently the Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Professor of History at University of Ottawa, and also a published author. Education Cook received a B.A. from Carleton University in 1970; a B.Ed. from Queen's University in 1971; a M.A. from the Institute of Canadian Studies, Carleton University in 1987; and a Ph.D. in History from Carleton University in 1990.

#6044

Marjorie Jacobs

#181166

Overall Influence

1915 - 2013 (98 years)

Marjorie Grace Jacobs was an Australian historian and emeritus professor at the University of Sydney. Early life and education Jacobs was born in 1915 in Gordon, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales. She was educated at Ravenswood School but, when that school was sold to the Methodist Church, she transferred to the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School at North Sydney. Jacobs lived at Women's College during her undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and in 1934 won the George Arnold Wood Memorial Prize for first year British history. In her second year she won the Frank Albert Prize with a high distinction in anthropology.

#6045

Bronwyn Labrum

#107857

Overall Influence

Bronwyn Labrum is a New Zealand cultural historian and author. Labrum was born and raised in Whanganui, and attended Whanganui High School. She received a BA Hons and M.A. in history at Massey University, and was deputy editor of the student magazine Chaff. She graduated with a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington in 2000.

#6046

Martha J. Ross

#152858

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Martha Jackson Ross was a leading voice in the field of oral history. She conducted oral histories and educated students and peers on best practices and techniques. Ross was the president of the Oral History Association and a founding member and president of the Oral History Association of the Mid-Atlantic Region .

#6047

Brandon R. Byrd

#165189

Overall Influence

Brandon R. Byrd is an American academic who specializes in African American history, focusing on the intellectual and social history of Black people in the United States and Haiti. He is the author of a monograph, The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti , and co-editor of a collection, Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History . He teaches history at Vanderbilt University.

#6048

Chris Williams

#138189

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Chris Williams is a Welsh academic, best known for his work on editing the diaries of Richard Burton. Since 2017, Williams has been Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, and Professor of History at University College Cork, Ireland.

#6049

Val D. Rust

#44022

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Val Dean Rust is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Background Rust was born into a family with roots in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . In the early 1960s, Rust taught high school in Murray and Salt Lake City, Utah.

#6050

Christopher Read

#187721

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Christopher Read is a British historian of the Soviet Union. Works Religion, Revolution and The Russian Intelligentsia Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution The Making and Breaking of the Soviet System: An Interpretation The Stalin Years: A Reader Lenin: A Revolutionary Life War and Revolution in Russia: 1914–22, The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power

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