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,

#6201

Chen Den-wu

#184928

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Chen Den-wu is a Taiwanese historian from Zhushan, Nantou. He has been the chairman of the Department of History, the vice president for academic affairs, and the director of the Center for General Education at National Taiwan Normal University.

#6202

Quincy D. Newell

#186633

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Quincy D. Newell is an American historian of the nineteenth-century American West especially as it involves the religious experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. She is associate professor at Hamilton College, a member of the executive committee of the Mormon History Association, and co-editor of the journal Mormon Studies Review In 2015, Newell presented the 21st Leonard J. Arrington Lecture at the Utah State University: "Narrating Jane: Telling the story of an early African American Mormon woman."

#6203

Timothy Wong Man-kong

#108238

Overall Influence

Timothy Wong Man-kong is a historian from Hong Kong and associate professor within the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. He earned a bachelor's degree from Hong Kong Baptist College followed by MPhil and PhD, both at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wong was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2018.

#6204

Alain Le Boulluec

#90701

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Alain Le Boulluec is a contemporary French patristics scholar working mainly in the sphere of Clement of Alexandria and of Origen of Alexandria. Le Boulluec is the Director Emeritus of Studies of the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, part of the University of Paris. His studies have also focused on heresy and on the Neo-Chalcedonian movement which developed in theology during the reign of the Emperor Justinian .

#6205

Josep Montserrat i Torrents

#56026

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Josep Montserrat i Torrents , better known as José Montserrat Torrents in the Spanish-speaking world, is a Spanish writer, philosopher, historian and Coptic scholar. Biography J. Montserrat was born in 1932, in Barcelona. His education took place in Barcelona, Rome, Munster, Paris, and Benares. Due to his activism and writings in the Catalan Press regarding the Second Vatican Council he was censured in the newspapers from 1966 to 1977. A teacher since 1954, the government denied him the "certificate of political good behavior" due to his anti-Francoist activism, and he was thus unable to continue in that profession.

#6206

Eve M. Troutt Powell

#188248

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Eve M. Troutt Powell is an American historian of the Middle East and North Africa and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a previous recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

#6207

Stéphane Van Damme

#183598

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Stéphane Van Damme is historian and Professor of Early Modern History at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France. Graduated from the university of Panthéon-Sorbonne and the EHESS, agrégé d’histoire, he received his PhD in 2000 under the supervision of Daniel Roche. After entering at the CNRS in 2001, he moved to Oxford at the Maison Française to take in charge the programme in history of science. In 2007, he was appointed by the University of Warwick as associate professor in Modern French History and director of its Eighteenth-Century studies center. In 2009, he moved to SciencesPo as associate professor in early modern history and history of science at the Centre d’histoire.

#6208

Margaret Strobel

#138165

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Margaret Strobel is a retired US academic. She studied the history of African women during European colonialism and ran the Women's Studies Program at University of Illinois Chicago. Early life Margaret Ann Strobel was born February 15, 1946, in Grand Forks, North Dakota in the United States. She attended schools in Grand Forks and St. Louis, Missouri, then studied at Michigan State University on a National Merit Scholarship. Strobel took her PhD in African studies at UCLA on a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship in 1975, having decided to write her dissertation on African women's history. This joined...

#6209

Barbara Bombi

#184254

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Barbara Bombi, is an Italian historian and academic, specialising in medieval and ecclesiastical history. Since 2018, she has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kent. She was previously a researcher at the German Historical Institute in Rome, the University of Padua, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

#6210

A. G. Rigg

#119326

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Arthur George Rigg was a British academic and medievalist. Rigg was born in Wigan on 17 February 1937, and attended Wigan Grammar School. He enrolled at Pembroke College, Oxford between 1955 and 1959, and also earned a doctorate at Oxford University. As a doctoral student, Rigg taught at Merton College and Balliol College. Rigg was visiting assistant professor at Stanford University from 1966 to 1968, after which he moved to the University of Toronto.

#6211

Peter Sherlock

#117800

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Peter Sherlock is an Australian academic and inaugural Vice-Chancellor of the University of Divinity in Melbourne, a role he has held since 2012. He specialises in the cultural history of Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and is a recognised authority on historic monuments.

#6212

Andrew May

#147686

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Andrew May is an Australian social historian. He is a professor of Australian history in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies of the University of Melbourne. Education and career May has a D.Phil from the University of Melbourne.

#6213

Annie Sartre-Fauriat

#150652

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Annie Sartre-Fauriat, born Annie Fauriat on 17 November 1947, is a French historian specialising in funerary archaeology and Greek and Latin epigraphy of the Greco-Roman Near East, as well as travel and travellers in the East in both the 19th and 20th centuries.

#6214

Yosef Gorny

#170731

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Yosef Gorny , is Professor of Study of Zionism and head of the Zionist Research Institute at the Tel Aviv University. He is a former head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism, at the same university.

#6215

Aydin Mammadov

#91034

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Aydin Balamirza oghlu Mammadov is an Azerbaijani historian, scientist-demographer, specialist on historical demography, Ph.D. in history, and associate professor of the department of "source study, historiography and methods" of Baku State University. He is one of the 100 Notable alumni of Baku State University.

#6216

Paul Clark

#176485

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Paul F. Clark is an American writer who is professor of labor studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is head of the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations . He also holds a professorship in the Department of Health Policy and Administration.

#6217

Julian C. Chambliss

Julian C. Chambliss

#186061

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Julian C. Chambliss is professor of history at Michigan State University and previously taught at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and is primarily known as a scholar of the real and imagined city and on comics. He serves as coordinator of the Africa and African-American Studies Program at Rollins. He is the Coordinator of the Media, Arts, and Culture Special Interest Section for the Florida Conference of Historians. His work is in critical making; notable projects include Project Mosaic: Zora Neale Hurston, Advocate Recovered, and Oscar Mack.

#6218

Nupur Chaudhuri

#176285

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Nupur Chaudhuri is an Indian academic who has lived and worked in the United States since 1963. She was one of the early members of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and served as editor of its newsletter from 1975 to 1980; as executive secretary and treasurer from 1981 to 1987, and president from 1995 to 1998. Chaudhuri drafted the guidelines to increase diversity and inclusion and eliminate racism and sexism for the National Women's Studies Association in 1979. She was elected to membership in the teaching division of the American Historical Association in 1997. Since 2010, the ...

#6219

Stephen Gadd

#175202

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Stephen Gadd is an English operatic baritone. He graduated in Engineering from St. John's College, Cambridge and then studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, under Patrick McGuigan. He was a finalist in Operalia, , and among other numerous awards he won the 1990 Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship. He has performed the title role in Macbeth at the Glyndebourne Festival, and Conte Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro for the Salzburger Festspiele.

#6220

Anna Agnarsdóttir

#187276

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Anna Agnarsdóttir is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Iceland. Early life Anna was born in Reykjavik. Her parents were Ólöf Bjarnadóttir and Agnar Kl. Jónsson , ambassador and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was raised in London and Paris during the years 1951–1961 and graduated with a matriculation examination from Reykjavik Grammar School in 1967.

#6221

Tadeusz Kruczkowski

#185799

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Tadeusz Kruczkowski is a Polish-Belarusian historian and activist. He was the President of the Union of Poles in Belarus from 2000 to 2005. He is a lecturer at the Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno.

#6222

Christian Müller

#188427

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Christian Müller is a German historian previously residing in Ningbo, China. His research focuses on global connections between the West and Asia from the early modern period to the 21st Century, emphasizing imperialism, transnationalism, normative orders, labour mobility, travel writing, encounters between civilizations, curiosity, and identities.

#6223

Lukáš M. Vytlačil

#183029

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (40 years)

Lukáš Michael Vytlačil is a Czech flutist, historian, musicologist and conductor. Curriculum vitae After studying at the Conservatory in Teplice, where he studied the transverse and recorder and later also conducting with Jan Valta, he continued at Charles University. Here he first graduated in the class of Jana Semerádová in the field of Historical Musical Practice, realized at the Faculty of Education in cooperation with the Týn School Collegium Marianum , and then at the Faculty of Arts musicology . Under the leading of Rebecca Stewart, he also studied the interpretation of vocal polyphony...

#6224

Eugene F. Rice Jr.

#164772

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Eugene Franklin Rice Jr. was an American historian specializing in the Church Fathers, Early Modern Europe, and Western homosexualities. Rice was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and raised in Puerto Rico, where his father was president of The Central Aguirre Sugar Company.

#6225

Nils Gilman

#190202

Overall Influence

#6226

Dagmar Barnouw

#178196

Overall Influence

1936 - 2008 (72 years)

Dagmar Barnouw was a German cultural historian. From 1988 until her death, she served as professor of German and comparative literature at the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California .

#6227

S. Walter Poulshock

#134627

Overall Influence

1901 - 1997 (96 years)

S. Walter Poulshock was an American historian and psychotherapist. As a young assistant professor at Rutgers University, he resigned his position after it was discovered that his 1965 book The Two Parties and the Tariff in the 1880s, among other work, was based on fabricated quotes. The case has been described as one of the most notable examples of academic fraud in American historical research prior to the more widely publicised Arming America case. Poulshock subsequently retrained as a psychotherapist, and practiced in this field until his death in 1997.

#6228

Garth Pratten

#151013

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Garth Pratten is an Australian historian in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. Pratten has worked for the Australian Army's Training Command, as a historian at the Australian War Memorial, and taught at Deakin University, in the War Studies Department at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and at the Australian National University. In 2010, Pratten deployed to Afghanistan as part of the team compiling the war diary for ISAF's Regional Command South while working for the British Ministry of Defence. Pratten undertook field work in France, Belgium, ...

#6229

Olav Bø

#171841

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

Olav Bø was a Norwegian folklorist. He was born in Bygland. Bø was appointed at the University of Oslo from 1956, as professor from 1974. Among his books are Norsk skitradisjon from 1966, Vår norske jul from 1970, and Trollmakter og godvette from 1987. He wrote a biography of cross-country skier and resistance member Johan Grøttumsbråten. He was decorated Knight, First Class of the Order of St. Olav in 1985.

#6230

Volodymyr Okarynskyi

#188915

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Volodymyr Okarynskyi is a Ukrainian historian, candidate of historical , docent . Member of the National Union of journalists of Ukraine . Awards of the president of Ukraine and the Cabinet of ministers for young scientists. Winner of the Volodymyr Hnatyuk Ternopil regional award .

#6231

Gabriela Cano Ortega

#175555

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Ruth Gabriela Cano Ortega is a Mexican historian focused on the history of women in Mexico and sexual diversity during the Porfirian, revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods of Mexico. She specializes in gender analysis. Cano is a professor at the El Colegio de México.

#6232

Anke Voss-Hubbard

#187613

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Anke Voss-Hubbard is an archivist, writer and feminist. Early life and education Voss-Hubbard is a native of Germany and holds degrees in history and archival preservation and management. She attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for her BA in History and MA in United States Political, Social, and Women’s History. She completed her Master's in Library Science at New York State University in Albany.

#6233

David Levy

#185905

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

David W. Levy is Professor Emeritus of the Department of History of Oklahoma University at Norman Oklahoma. Not only has he written and lectured extensively, many of his former students have gone on to achieve their own notability have stated that he was one of their favorite teachers and mentors.

#6234

Márton Illés

#186890

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Márton Illés , is a Hungarian composer and pianist. Illés received musical training in piano, composition and percussion in Győr from 1981 to 1994. In 1993 he spent one academical term at the conservatory of Zurich with pianist Hadassa Schwimmer. He studied the piano with László Gyimesi at the Hochschule für Musik Basel, completing his solo diploma in 1998. He continued his piano studies with Karl-Heinz Kämmerling in Hannover. He studied composition with Detlev Müller-Siemens from 1997 to 2001 in Basel, with Wolfgang Rihm and music theory under Michael Reudenbach at the Hochschule für Musik Ka...

#6235

G. Derek West

#186200

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Geoffrey Derek West was a British academic specialising in Medieval French and Arthurian literature, on which he authored two books and numerous articles. He also took a professional interest in American frontier and military history. He was a professor and dean at McMaster University, Ontario, for seventeen years, before retiring and returning to England.

#6236

Anne Tihon

#177701

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Anne Tihon is a Belgian historian of science specializing in the history of astronomy, with works on Theon of Alexandria, Byzantine astronomy, and astronomical tables. She is a professor emerita in the Faculty of Philosophy, Arts and Letters of the Université catholique de Louvain.

#6237

Jiří Jirmal

#181426

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Jiří Jirmal was a classical guitarist who also was dedicated to jazz. He was born as Jiří Novák in Prague. Some of his compositions incorporate elements of Brazilian music . He contributed the musical background for Gene Deitch's 1962 Tom and Jerry cartoon Tall in the Trap, in which he was credited as George Jirmal.

#6238

Matt Gilbert

#159913

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert is a distinguished associate professor in the department of history and a Dean's Fellow and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an enrolled member of the Hopi Tribe. A graduate of The Master's College, Talbot School of Theology, and the University of California, Riverside, Gilbert specializes in researching and teaching on Native American history and the American West.

#6239

Reavis L. Mitchell Jr.

#178259

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Reavis Lee Mitchell Jr. was an American historian and academic administrator. He was the dean of the School of Humanities and Behavioral Social Sciences and professor of history at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. He was the chairman of the Tennessee Historical Commission from 2015 to 2020.

#6240

John Herstad

#182040

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

John Herstad is a Norwegian historian. He was born in Bergen. Herstad was appointed professor at the University of Bergen from 1980. He served the head of the National Archives of Norway from 1982 to 2006. He was decorated Commander of the Order of St. Olav in 2005.

#6241

Julia Boyer Reinstein

Julia Boyer Reinstein

#175738

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Julia Boyer Reinstein was an American teacher and historian who grew up in western New York and began her career teaching in Deadwood, South Dakota. After more than a decade of teaching, she became a founder of the Erie County Historical Federation and the first historian of Cheektowaga, New York. Committed to preserving the history of the area and educating citizens about their heritage, she and her husband were instrumental in donating properties for the establishment of a nature preserve, several libraries and to higher education. She was a subject of an anthropological study evaluating ge...

#6242

Regina Kunzel

#189050

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Regina Kunzel is an American author, historian, and academic. She is the Larned Professor of History at Yale. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, she held the Doris Stevens Chair at Princeton University, the Paul R. Frenzel Chair at the University of Minnesota, and the Fairleigh Dickinson Chair at Williams College. Her book Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality received the American Historical Association’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.

#6243

Suzanne Wasserman

Suzanne Wasserman

#187904

Overall Influence

1957 - 2017 (60 years)

Suzanne Wasserman , was a Chicago-born historian, Professor, writer, and film director. Besides her tenure as Director of the Gotham Center for New York City history, she was also known for her first film, completed in 2003, Thunder in Guyana, which she wrote, produced, and directed. The film documented the life of her mother's first cousin, Chicago-born Janet Rosenberg Jagan, the president of Guyana from 1997 to 1999.

#6244

Susanna L. Blumenthal

#186844

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Susanna L. Blumenthal is the William Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She won the Merle Curti Award for her book Law and the Modern Mind. Life She graduated from Radcliffe College, and from Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. and JD.

#6245

J. Donald Freeze

#79955

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

James Donald Freeze, S.J. was the Academic Vice President for the main campus of Georgetown University from 1979 to 1991. In this role, he supervised all academic programs of Georgetown's College of Arts and Sciences, School of Foreign Service, School of Language and Linguistics, School of Business Administration, Graduate School, and School for Summer and Continuing Education.

#6246

Leila Leah Bronner

#182915

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Rebbetzin Leila Leah Bronner was an American historian and biblical scholar. Biography She was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to the United States in 1937, growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

#6247

David Hill

#179653

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

David Hill is an English-born Australian business leader and author. Background and early career Born out of wedlock in Eastbourne in 1946, into an impoverished family of four boys, Hill and his twin brother spent time in Barnardo's children's home in Barkingside.

#6248

Florence Newman Trefethen

#130133

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Florence Marion Newman Trefethen was an American codebreaker, historian of operations research, poet, and English professor. Early life and education Florence Marion Newman was born in 1921, in Philadelphia. She graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1943.

#6249

Nada Milošević-Đorđević

#183167

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Nada Milošević-Đorđević was a Serbian literary historian and professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. She was born in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia. She was a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in which she was engaged as a member of the editorial board of the Serbian Encyclopedia, the president of the Board for Folk Literature, and a member of the Administrative Board of the Endowment of Branko Ćopić. She published many works in the field of folk literature.

#6250

Gurinder Singh Mann

#79140

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Gurinder Singh Mann is a Punjabi-American scholar and professor of Sikh studies, and the author of multiple books on Sikh religion and society. Mann taught religion at Columbia University from 1988 to 1999 and then held the Kundan Kaur Kapany Chair in Sikh Studies from 1999 to 2015 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He retired from Santa Barbara in 2015, and founded the Global Institute for Sikh Studies in New York City, which he presently directs.

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