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,

#6151

Bob Clarke

#167898

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Bob Clarke is an English archaeologist and historian. He gained a PhD at Exeter and is published widely. Current themes of research include the use of selected space to enact organised events, and the landscape archaeology of defence.

#6152

Sally Hadden

#127929

Overall Influence

Sally Hadden is an American historian. She is an associate professor and the director of graduate studies in the history department at Western Michigan University and the author of Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Her other books include Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History , A Companion to American Legal History , and Traveling the Beaten Path: Charles Tait's Charges to Federal Grand Juries, 1822-1825 .

#6153

Lawrence Black

#91144

Overall Influence

Lawrence Black, FRHistS, is an academic historian specialising in the political culture of twentieth-century Britain. Since 2012, he has been Professor of Modern British History at the University of York.

#6154

Ed Guerrero

#113090

Overall Influence

Ed Guerrero is an American film historian and associate professor of cinema studies and Africana studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His writings explore black cinema, culture, and critical discourse. He has written extensively on black cinema, its movies, politics and culture for anthologies and journals such as Sight & Sound, FilmQuarterly, Cineaste, Journal of Popular Film & Television, and Discourse. Guerrero has served on editorial and professional boards including The Library of Congress' National Film Preservation...

#6155

Erik M. Conway

#189078

Overall Influence

#6156

Shen Zhihua

#178040

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Shen Zhihua is a professor of history at East China Normal University and adjunct professor at Peking University and Renmin University of China. Shen is an expert in the history of the Soviet Union, Sino-Soviet relations, and the Cold War. He is director of the Center for Oriental History Studies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and honorary researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2011 Shen was public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

#6157

Philip Jones

#110123

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Philip James Jones, FBA, FRHistS was a British medieval historian, known for his work on medieval and Renaissance Italy. Born in London, Jones was educated at St Dunstan's College and Wadham College, Oxford, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was assistant lecturer at the University of Glasgow from 1949 to 1950, lecturer at the University of Leeds from 1950 to 1961, reader at Leeds from 1961 to 1963, and fellow and tutor at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1963 until his retirement.

#6158

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

#175940

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is a Canadian historian and Professor Emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame. Biography Kerby-Fulton completed her PhD, titled "The voice of honest indignation : A study of reformist apocalypticism in relation to Piers Plowman" at the University of York in 1986.

#6159

Christina Laffin

#112523

Overall Influence

Christina Laffin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is also a Canada Research Chair in premodern Japanese literature and culture, and co-director at the Centre for Japanese Research. Her research interests include medieval travel diaries; women's education and socialization before 1600; poetic practices and waka culture; theories of travel, gender, and autobiography; noh theatre; and comparative approaches to medieval literature.

#6160

Pierre Cassou-Noguès

#125298

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Pierre Cassou-Noguès is a French philosopher and writer. Biography He was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure in 1991. He obtained the agrégation in mathematics in 1995 and wrote his PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Jean-Michel Salanskis in 1999. From 2001 to 2011, he was research fellow at the CNRS. Since 2011, he has been Full Professor at Université Paris-VIII. He is also co-editor of the journal SubStance.

#6161

Mikhail Nikolaevich Artemenkov

#172539

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Mikhail Nikolaevich Artemenkov is a Russian historian and teacher. From 2017 to 2019, Artemenkov was the acting rector of Smolensk State University. In 2022, Atremenkov became famous for arbitrary firing.

#6162

Thongchai Winichakul

#189136

Overall Influence

#6163

Andrzej Gąsiorowski

#145348

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Prof. Dr. hab. Andrzej Gąsiorowski is a research scientist at the Stutthof concentration camp Museum in Sztutowo, Professor in the Institute of Politology, Faculty of Social Sciences of the Gdańsk University, awarded the title of profesor zwyczajny by the President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski. He served as President of the Regional Commission of the Institute of National Remembrance in Gdańsk and, at present, is the President of the Scientific Advisory to Instytut Bałtycki. Gąsiorowski specializes in World War II history of Poland, with focus on the anti-Nazi resistance in Pomerania. He ...

#6164

Carlos Andrés Segovia

Carlos Andrés Segovia

#45290

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Carlos Andrés Segovia y Corral, 2nd Marquis of Salobreña , is a Spanish nobleman and academic specialising in philosophy and religious studies. Segovia y Corral is an independent philosopher and scholar, formerly associate professor of religious studies at Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, and currently lecturer in philosophy at that same university.

#6165

Koen Decoster

#116477

Overall Influence

Koen Decoster is a Belgian historian, philosopher and translator. He has published works such as Flavius Josephus and the Seleucid Acra in Jerusalem . and Beyond Conflict and Reduction: Between Philosophy, Science and Religion with William Desmond and John Steffen.

#6166

Emily Greble

#181975

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Emily Joan Greble is a historian of the Balkans and Eastern Europe and a specialist on the history of Muslims in Europe. She is currently chair of the Department of History and Professor of History and of German, Russian, and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.

#6167

Jerrell Shofner

#189221

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Jerrell Harris Shofner was an American historian and professor of history at the University of Central Florida . He wrote 16 books, many about Florida's history. He chaired UCF's history department and became a professor emeritus at the school.

#6168

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

#169264

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is an American-Iranian historian. Currently, she serves as Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on boundary disputes, borderland histories, gender, and identity politics in the Middle East.

#6169

Carole E. Straw

#188402

Overall Influence

Carole Ellen Straw is Professor Emerita of History at Mount Holyoke College. She researches various aspects of Christian history and thought in late antiquity and the early middle ages, with particular emphasis on Gregory the Great and Christian martyrdom. She has worked at the University of Chicago and Mount Holyoke College and received the John Nicholas Brown Prize in 1992 for her book Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection.

#6170

Isabella Lazzarini

#185621

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Isabella Lazzarini is a medieval historian. Her research interests focus on the political, social, and cultural history of late medieval Italy, with an emphasis on Renaissance diplomacy, the growth of different political languages in documentary sources, and - more recently - gender studies.

#6171

Fred Woods

#184756

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Fred Emmett Woods IV is a Brigham Young University professor of Latter-day Saint Church History and Mormon Doctrine, an author specializing in Mormon migration and the Globalization of Mormonism. Biography

#6172

Nigel Linge

#146597

Overall Influence

Nigel Linge is Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Salford. He is a specialist in computer networking and telecommunications heritage. Early life Linge was educated at Wolsingham Comprehensive School and then at the University of Salford where he obtained a degree in Electronics in 1983. He subsequently completed his PhD there in 1987 for a thesis on the subject of "The interconnection of local area networks using bridges".

#6173

Maurie D. McInnis

Maurie D. McInnis

#164701

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Maurie D. McInnis is an American author and cultural historian. She currently serves as the 6th president of Stony Brook University. Education McInnis attended the University of Virginia where she was a Jefferson Scholar. She received a B.A. in Art History with Highest Distinction, and her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University.

#6174

Thomas J. Farrell

#136057

Overall Influence

Thomas J. Farrell is an American medievalist. A professor of English and head of the English department at Stetson University, Florida, he specializes in Geoffrey Chaucer. Farrell, holder of a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, is a contributing editor for the Sources & Analogues of the Canterbury Tales and editor of Bakhtin and Medieval Voices .

#6175

Josefina Cuesta

#179554

Overall Influence

1947 - 2021 (74 years)

Josefina Cuesta Bustillo was a Spanish historian, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Salamanca. Cuesta was born in in the Province of Burgos in 1947. Her speciality was social history and equality of women in Spain in the 20th century. She died in Salamanca on 30 March 2021, at the age of 74. At the time of her death she was catedrática emérita at the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer at the University of Salamanca.

#6176

Richard Barnett

#166449

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Richard Barnett is a medical historian and the writer of six non-fiction books: Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures, The Dedalus Book of Gin, and a trilogy with Thames & Hudson: The Sick Rose, Crucial Interventions, and Smile Stealers.

#6177

Yervand Margaryan

Yervand Margaryan

#185479

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Yervand Margaryan, armenian historian, doctor of historical sciences. Professor, Head of the Department of World History and Foreign Regional Studies in Russian-Armenian University, Leading Researcher of Institute of History of Armenian National Academy of Sciences.

#6178

John Strachan

#138263

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

John Strachan is a literary critic, historian and poet, Professor of English and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Bath Spa University, England. Strachan is the current Director of GuildHE Research and Co-Chair of the Charles Lamb Society. He is Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Strachan has previously held professorships at Northumbria University and the University of Sunderland. Educated at the University of Southampton and Wolfson College, Oxford . Strachan specialises in Romanticism, especially late Georgian comic writing

#6179

Larrie Ferreiro

#176983

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Larrie D. Ferreiro is a naval architect and historian. Early life He was born and raised on Long Island, New York, United States. His great-grandfather was an immigrant from Galicia, Spain. Career He completed his Ph.D at Imperial College London in 2004. He did his M.Sc. and BSE in Naval Architecture.

#6180

Matt Cook

#178695

Overall Influence

Matt Cook is professor of modern history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Oxford University announced on 5 June 2023 that Cook will take up the position as the first Jonathan Cooper chair of the history of sexualities at Mansfield College in October 2023. This will make him UK's first Professor of LGBTQ+ history.

#6181

Michael Moriarty

#121881

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Michael Moriarty is a British historian of French and French literature, currently the Drapers Professor at University of Cambridge and also fellow of the British Academy.

#6182

Wang Jiafan

#181287

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Wang Jiafan was a Chinese historian specializing in economic and social history of China and Jiangnan regional history. He was a professor and doctoral supervisor at East China Normal University. Biography Wang Jiafan was born in the town of Chenmu , Kunshan, Jiangsu, on September 22, 1938. He attended Chenmu Central Primary School. He elementary studied at Chenmu Middle School and secondary studied at Kunshan High School. In 1957 he was accepted to East China Normal University, where he majored in history. After graduation, he taught at the university. He was promoted to associate professor in 1986 and to full professor in 1992.

#6183

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup

#186665

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup is a Danish historian. She is a professor at the University of Southern Denmark and the director of its Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies who specializes in the Early Modern Period. Best known for her comparative research on witchcraft trials in Denmark and Italy. Kallestrup has also written widely on such related topics as gender in the contexts of legal proceedings and urbanization, and on demonology and is a frequent cultural commentator in the Danish press and on radio.

#6184

Daniel Vidart

#104983

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Daniel Vidart was a Uruguayan anthropologist, writer, historian, and essayist. He was one of the most notable social scientists of the region. In 2010 he was awarded the Grand National Prize for Intellectual Activity.

#6185

Birgit Schäbler

#182608

Overall Influence

Birgit Schäbler is a historian who is known for her work on Germany, Europe, and Oriental/Islamic studies. She is a professor at the University of Erfurt where she is in the department of Middle East History.

#6186

Harold D. Hunter

#179939

Overall Influence

Harold D. Hunter is a renewal theologian and historian within the Pentecostal movement. He serves the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.

#6187

Ståle Dyrvik

#187157

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Ståle Dyrvik was a Norwegian historian. He graduated with the cand.philol. degree from the University of Bergen in 1971. From 1975 to 1988 he worked as an associate professor at the University of Bergen, and he became a professor there in 1988.

#6188

Keith A. Sandiford

#172375

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Keith Albert Sandiford is a Barbadian-born historian. He has taught literature at Louisiana State University since 1986. Life and career Sandiford was born in Barbados and educated at Combermere School in Bridgetown. He received a BA from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, and an MA and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His PhD dissertation was titled "The Evolution of Racial and Political Consciousness in Three Black Writers of Eighteenth-Century England."

#6189

Cassander

#184571

Overall Influence

Cassander was a Macedonian nobleman who lived in the 4th century BC. Cassander was the son of Iolaus by an unnamed mother and brother of the powerful Regent and general Antipater. Cassander’s family were distant collateral relatives to the Argead dynasty. Cassander, like Antipater, was originally from the Macedonian city of Paliura and was a contemporary to Aristotle.

#6190

Martha Sonntag Bradley-Evans

#171507

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Martha Sonntag Bradley-Evans is an American academic who is a professor in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. She was the president of the Mormon History Association. Bradley-Evans is also the author of several books, and is known for her history of Mormon feminism.

#6191

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

#189529

Overall Influence

#6192

Sidney H. Chang

#103030

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Sidney Hsu-Hsin Chang was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in the history of China, modern Far East, and East Asian civilizations. For nearly half a century he was a professor at California State University, Fresno. He was a visiting professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. On behalf of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Chang served as an attaché at the Far East Trade Service Center in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany and as a cultural attaché in Russia , while on sabbatical from teaching. He was a member of the Republican Presidential Task Force and...

#6193

Liu Xuyi

#156123

Overall Influence

1913 - 2018 (105 years)

Liu Xuyi was a Chinese historian, scholar, writer and expert on US studies. Biography Liu was born into a poor intellectual family in Huangpi District of Wuhan, Hubei, on 13 May 1913, a year after the fall of the Qing dynasty.

#6194

Nellie Longsworth

#181461

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Nellie Leber Longsworth is an American historian and advocate of historic preservation. She was a founder and president of the nonprofit Preservation Action for twenty-two years. She worked to preserve historic structures by working and lobbying to pass legislation in United States Congress.

#6195

Anna Hájková

#182807

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Anna Hájková is a Czech-British historian who is currently a faculty member at the University of Warwick. She specializes in the study of everyday life during the Holocaust and sexuality and the Holocaust. According to Hájková, "My approach to queer Holocaust history shows a more complex, more human, and more real society beyond monsters and saints."

#6196

Celsa Albert Batista

#179965

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Celsa Albert Batista is a black Dominican academic, writer and historian. She wrote one of the major works on slavery and is one of the few scholars who have focused on black identity in the Dominican Republic. Widely recognized for her work, she has received the Pedro Henríquez Ureña Gold Medal from the Government of the Dominican Republic, the International José Martí Prize from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization , the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella, among other honors.

#6197

Paul B. Huber

#184645

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Paul Bickford Huber was an American economist and professor of economics at Dalhousie University . He served as a member of the Executive Board of the Association of Dalhousie Retirees and Pensions .

#6198

Nikolay Petrovich Krasnikov

#183163

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (104 years)

Nikolay Petrovich Krasnikov was active in Soviet academia as a philosopher, historian, and religious scholar. Early life Krasnikov graduated from high school in Leningrad in 1940. He was released from military service due to poor eyesight. During World War II, he worked as a mechanic at a repair plant. In addition, he dug trenches for anti-aircraft gunners on the Field of Mars. In 1942, he graduated from Leningrad School of Military Communications and was sent to the 12th Front Railway Park of the North Caucasian Front as a senior equipment repair technician. He served in the railway units on the Ukrainian Front.

#6199

Shifra Baruchson Arbib

#176442

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Shifra Baruchson-Arbib is a Full Professor in the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University Israel, specializing in the history and sociology of media. She was the Head of the Information Science Department and has served as the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Bar- Ilan University . Her major achievements include her studies in the fields of the "History of Hebrew Books and Manuscripts" and of "Information Science", leading the Department of Information Science; and developing the academic field of Social Information Science.

#6200

Hilda L. Smith

#189711

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Hilda L. Smith was an American historian. Smith was an undergraduate at Missouri State University, trained as a high school teacher, and subsequently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1975. Her dissertation was titled Feminism in Seventeenth-century England.

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