Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#6401

Joseph Ward Swain

1891 - 1971 (80 years)

#6402

Michael Flinn

1917 - 1983 (66 years)

Michael Walter Flinn was a British economic historian. Born into a middle-class family in Chorlton-on-Medlock, he was educated at William Hulme's Grammar School in Manchester, serving as an officer in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. After the end of the war, Flinn took a history degree at the University of Manchester before spending two years as a grammar school teacher while writing a postgraduate dissertation in his spare time. In 1959, he began lecturing at the University of Edinburgh, writing an introductory school textbook for history in 1961, which was still in print at his death.

#6403

Conyers Read

1881 - 1959 (78 years)

Conyers Read was an American historian who specialized in the History of England in the 15th and 16th centuries. A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950.

#6404

J. P. V. D. Balsdon

1901 - 1977 (76 years)

John Percy Vyvian Dacre Balsdon, FBA , known as J. P. V. D. Balsdon in his academic work and otherwise as Dacre Balsdon, was an English ancient historian and writer. He was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1927 to 1969, and president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1968 to 1971.

#6405

Horace Mann Bond

Horace Mann Bond

1904 - 1972 (68 years)

Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college. He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue. In 1945, he became the first African-American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

#6406

Walter Prescott Webb

1888 - 1963 (75 years)

Walter Prescott Webb was an American historian noted for his groundbreaking work on the American West. As president of the Texas State Historical Association, he launched the project that produced the Handbook of Texas. He is a member of the Hall of Great Westerners, which is a part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

#6407

John Shelton Curtiss

1899 - 1983 (84 years)

John Shelton Curtiss , was an American historian of Russia and historical scholar of old Yankee stock. Curtiss was a longtime professor of history at Duke University. Early life and education John Shelton Curtiss was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of prominent attorney, Harlow Clarke Curtiss and his socialite wife, Ethel Curtiss. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Matthew D. Mann.

#6408

William B. Hesseltine

1902 - 1963 (61 years)

William Best Hesseltine was an American historian and politician. As a historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for nearly three decades, Hesseltine's field of expertise was mid-19th century American history, especially the Civil War, Reconstruction Era and American South. He also became known as the mentor of a generation of American historians, many of whom also won prizes for their writing.

#6409

Roberto Weiss

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Roberto Weiss was an Italian-British scholar and historian who specialised in the fields of Italian-English cultural contacts during the period of the Renaissance, and of Renaissance humanism. Early career Weiss was born in Milan, Italy. After spending his later childhood in Rome, he came to Britain to study law at Oxford University. He worked for a short time from 1932 to 1933 in the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, and obtained his D.Phil from Oxford in 1934, in the same year winning the Charles Oldham prize. He was naturalised British in 1934. The author John Buchan became his friend and mentor.

#6410

Eleanora Carus-Wilson

Eleanora Carus-Wilson

1897 - 1977 (80 years)

Eleanora Mary Carus-Wilson, FBA was a British economic historian. Known for her work on rural Medieval textile industries in England, she made significant contributions to the understanding of that technology in the region.

#6411

Anthony Blunt

1907 - 1983 (76 years)

Anthony Frederick Blunt , styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best ...

#6412

W. N. Medlicott

1900 - 1987 (87 years)

William Norton Medlicott was a British historian. He was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College, University College London and the Institute of Historical Research. In 1926 Medlicott took up a post at University College, Swansea and in 1936 he married Dorothy Kathleen Coveney. Medlicott worked at the Board of Trade for the first year of the Second World War before being selected by Sir Keith Hancock to be a member of the Cabinet Office Historical Section. Medlicott published the results of his research in his two-volume work The Economic Blockade.

#6413

Friedrich Lütge

1901 - 1968 (67 years)

Friedrich Lütge was a German economist, social historian and economic historian. He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the University of Leipzig between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that soci...

#6414

Tyler Dennett

1883 - 1949 (66 years)

Tyler Dennett was an American historian and educator. He received the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1933 book John Hay: From Poetry to Politics. Early career and education Born in Wisconsin, but raised in Rhode Island, Dennett graduated high school as valedictorian from the Moses Brown School in Providence. In 1900, Dennett enrolled at Bates College and then transferred to Williams College as a sophomore. At Williams, he was a member of the football team. After his graduation in the spring of 1904 and a year of work in Williamstown, Massachusetts he attended the Union Theological Seminary, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity in 1908.

#6415

Franz Altheim

1898 - 1976 (78 years)

Franz Altheim was a German classical philologist and historian who specialized in the history of classical antiquity. During the 1930s and 1940s, Altheim served the Nazi state as a member of Ahnenerbe, a think tank controlled by the Schutzstaffel , the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, and as a spy for the SS.

#6416

Dumas Malone

1892 - 1986 (94 years)

Dumas Malone was an American historian, minister, and biographer. A professor by occupation, Malone spent the majority of his career teaching at the University of Virginia , where he served as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History.

#6417

George Clark

1890 - 1979 (89 years)

Sir George Norman Clark, was an English historian, academic and British Army officer. He was the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford from 1931 to 1943 and the Regius Professor of Modern History at The University of Cambridge from 1943 to 1947. He served as Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1957.

#6418

George E. Mowry

1909 - 1984 (75 years)

George Edwin Mowry was an American historian focusing primarily on the Progressive Era. As a professor at UCLA and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he taught large classes and directed over 50 PhD dissertations. Mowry published five books, co-authored six others and edited three books. He published 10 book chapters, over 50 encyclopedia articles and over 100 book reviews in magazines and professional journals. He joined John Donald Hicks as coauthor of a highly successful university textbook. He was active in many organizations, especially the Organization of American Historians.

#6419

Henry Guerlac

1910 - 1985 (75 years)

Henry Edward Guerlac was an American historian of science. He taught at Cornell University where he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of History and a member of the Department of History. Biography Guerlac earned his PhD in European history from Harvard in 1941.

#6420

Paul Herman Buck

Paul Herman Buck

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Paul Herman Buck was an American historian. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1938 and became the first Provost of Harvard University in 1945. Biography Buck was born in Ohio. He received a Bachelor's degree and an MA from Ohio State University. While an undergraduate, Buck was initiated into the Kappa Sigma fraternity. In 1922 he published his first book Evolution of the National Parks System. He went to Harvard University for his graduate studies, and received a Master's degree in 1924. After studying for one year in Britain and France under a Sheldon traveling fellowship, he joined Harvard as an instructor in history in 1926.

#6421

Marcus Cunliffe

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Marcus Falkner Cunliffe was a British scholar who specialized in cultural and military American Studies. He was particularly interested in comparing how Europeans viewed Americans and how Americans viewed Europeans.

#6422

Câmara Cascudo

1898 - 1986 (88 years)

Luís da Câmara Cascudo was a Brazilian anthropologist, folklorist, journalist, historian, lawyer, and lexicographer. He was born in Natal, Northeast Brazil. He lived his entire life in Natal and dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian culture and he was a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. He was also interested in music and was a co-founder of the Natal Instituto de Música in 1933. The institute of anthropology there now bears his name.

#6423

E. Merton Coulter

1890 - 1981 (91 years)

Ellis Merton Coulter was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was chair of the History Department for 18 years. He was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, and published 26 books on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

#6424

George MacKinnon Wrong

George MacKinnon Wrong

1860 - 1948 (88 years)

George MacKinnon Wrong was a Canadian clergyman and historian. Life and career Born at Grovesend in Elgin County, Canada West , he was ordained in the Anglican priesthood in 1883 after attending Wycliffe College. In 1894, as successor to Sir Daniel Wilson, he was appointed professor and head of the Department of History at the University of Toronto from which he retired in 1927. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1908 and received an honorary LLD from McGill University in 1919 and the University of Toronto in 1941. Wrong died in Toronto, Ontario on June 29, 1948.

#6425

Abraham Nasatir

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Abraham Phineas Nasatir was an American educator and historian who specialized in early California and the Mississippi Valley areas. Nasatir was born in Santa Ana, California, to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Lithuania. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley when he was 19. He largely studied under Herbert Eugene Bolton at UC Berkeley.

#6426

Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky

1907 - 1990 (83 years)

Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky was a Russian historian, expatriate in the United States since 1949. He specialized in Economic, Eastern European and Central Asian history. Life Europe Zenkovsky was born on 16 June 1907 in Kiev. His father Aleksandr was a professor of economics, his mother Elena the daughter of a physician and professor of surgery; he also had a sister, Nadezhda. After the Russian Revolution, the family fled first to Constantinople, then Berlin and Prague, where Zenkovsky graduated in economic history. He then left his family in Prague to move to Paris, where his uncle Vasilii Vasilievich Zenkovsky lived.

#6427

Robert Seton-Watson

Robert Seton-Watson

1879 - 1951 (72 years)

Robert William Seton-Watson , commonly referred to as R. W. Seton-Watson and also known by the pseudonym Scotus Viator, was a British political activist and historian who played an active role in encouraging the breakup of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia during and after the First World War.

#6428

Laurence M. Larson

1868 - 1938 (70 years)

Laurence Marcellus Larson was a Norwegian born, American educator, historian, writer and translator. His notable works included his translation from Old Norse of Konungs skuggsjá. Biography Laurence Larson was born at Bergen in Hordaland, Norway. He was the son of Christian Spjutoy Larson and Ellen Mathilde Larson . He emigrated to the United States with his family in May 1870. He studied at Drake University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Larson was appointed to the UW faculty as a Scandinavian languages and history professor on April 17, 1906, but resigned later that year, on June 27.

#6429

Dixon Ryan Fox

1887 - 1945 (58 years)

Dixon Ryan Fox was an American educator, researcher, and president of Union College, New York from 1934 until his death in 1945. Fox graduated from Columbia College in 1911. He took his Ph.D in history at Columbia University where he was influenced by James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Herbert L. Osgood. He married Osgood's daughter and taught at Columbia from 1912 to the mid-1930s.

#6430

Hector Menteith Robertson

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Hector Menteith Robertson was an economic historian who held the positions of Jagger Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town and president of the Economic Society of South Africa . He was also an editor and frequent contributor to the South African Journal of Economics.

#6431

John E. Stambaugh

1939 - 1990 (51 years)

John Evan Stambaugh was an American classical scholar and professor at Williams College. Stambaugh was educated at Trinity College and then at Princeton University, earning a Ph.D. in 1967. Stambaugh taught at Williams from 1965 until 1990 and was a specialist in the field of Greco-Roman religion as well as early Christianity. In addition to teaching at Williams, Stambaugh was a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. and a faculty and managing committee member and chair of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Italy.

#6432

Marcus Jernegan

1872 - 1949 (77 years)

Marcus Wilson Jernegan was an American historian and a professor at the University of Chicago. In 2017, a scholar from Harvard referred to him as one of the leading historians of his time who influenced textbooks of his era and noted the tainted and bigoted sources he relied on.

#6433

Helen Cam

1885 - 1968 (83 years)

Helen Maud Cam, was an English historian of the Middle Ages, and the first woman to be appointed a tenured professor at Harvard University. Life and career Cam was born at Abingdon, Berkshire . Educated at home by her father William Herbert Cam, the headmaster of Abingdon School, she did her undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway College gaining a First in History there, and later an MA in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish studies at the University of London, after a fellowship year at Bryn Mawr College This degree led to her first book, Local Government in Francia and England, 768–1034 .

#6434

Christopher Dawson

1889 - 1970 (81 years)

Christopher Henry Dawson was an English Catholic historian, independent scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and emphasized the necessity for Western culture to be in continuity with Christianity not to stagnate and deteriorate. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century" and was recognized as being able to expound his thought to "Catholic and Protestant, Christian and non-Christian."

#6435

Garrett Mattingly

1900 - 1962 (62 years)

Garrett Mattingly was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history. In 1960 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

#6436

W. L. Morton

1908 - 1980 (72 years)

William Lewis Morton was a Canadian historian who specialized in the development of the Canadian west. Along with Arthur R. M. Lower and Donald Creighton he is regarded as one of the dominant Canadian historians of his generation.

#6437

Fawn M. Brodie

1915 - 1981 (66 years)

Fawn McKay Brodie was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at UCLA, who is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History , a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History , an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

#6438

Wayland Hand

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Wayland Debs Hand was an American folklorist. Biography Hand was born in New Zealand, where his parents had emigrated. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Utah, where Hand grew up. He attended the University of Utah, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in German in 1933 and 1934. He then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1936, writing his dissertation on German folk songs.

#6439

Hajo Holborn

1902 - 1969 (67 years)

Hajo Holborn was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history. Early life Hajo Holborn was born the son of Ludwig Holborn, the German physicist and "Direktor der Physikalisch-Technischen Reichsanstalt," and became a student of Friedrich Meinecke at Berlin University, where he achieved a doctor of philosophy in 1924. After establishing at Heidelberg in 1926 as lecturer in medieval and modern history, he became Privatdozent there until he was called back to Berlin as Carnegie Professor of History and International Relationships at the private Deutsche Hochschule für Politik.

#6440

Frederick John Teggart

1870 - 1946 (76 years)

Frederick John Teggart was an Irish-American historian and social scientist, known for work on the history of civilizations. Life He was born in Belfast on 9 May 1870, and was educated at Methodist College Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. He emigrated to the United States and graduated B.A. at Stanford University in 1894. He then worked as a librarian, first at Stanford and then at the Mechanics-Mercantile Library in San Francisco.

#6441

Eric G. Forbes

1933 - 1984 (51 years)

Eric Gray Forbes FRSE FRAS was Professor of the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Life He was born in St. Andrews in Fife on 30 March 1933. He went to Madras College in St Andrews University and graduated BSc. He then continued as a postgraduate at St Andrews and the University of London gaining a PhD in Astronomy.

#6442

William Cecil Dampier

1867 - 1952 (85 years)

Sir William Cecil Dampier FRS was a British scientist, agriculturist, and science historian who developed a method of extracting lactose from whey. He was born in London, the son of Charles Langley and Mary Whetham and the grandson of Sir Charles Whetham, a former Lord Mayor of London. In 1886, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and in 1889 commenced his varied researches in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1891 was elected a Fellow of Trinity.

#6443

Robert C. Binkley

1897 - 1940 (43 years)

Robert Cedric Binkley was an American historian. As chair of the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in the 1930s he led several projects in the areas of publication using new near-print technologies, microphotography, copyright and archival management, many under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. His theoretical writings on amateur scholarship and the ways non-experts could contribute to scholarship have been influential on recent thinking about digital humanities and web publishing.

#6444

Raymond James Sontag

1897 - 1972 (75 years)

Raymond James Sontag was an American historian of European diplomacy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Life He was born on October 2, 1897. He received his B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois in 1920 and 1921, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924.

#6445

D. P. Walker

1914 - 1985 (71 years)

Daniel Pickering Walker was an English historian and author of several noted studies on the occult in Western history. Life Walker was trained at Oxford. He spent much of his career at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. He was made senior research fellow in 1953, and held the Warburg's Chair in the History of the Classical Tradition from 1975 until his retirement in 1981.

#6446

Julia de Lacy Mann

1891 - 1985 (94 years)

Julia de Lacy Mann was an English economic historian. She was principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, for 27 years, from 1928 to 1955. Early life and education Julia de Lacy Mann was born in London on 22 August 1891, the daughter of James Saumarez Mann, a classical scholar, and Amy Bowman Mann, the daughter of a classical scholar. Julia's only sibling, James Saumarez Mann, was killed by a sniper in Iraq in 1920.

#6447

Vincent Desborough

1914 - 1978 (64 years)

Vincent Robin d'Arba Desborough, FBA, FSA was an English historian and archaeologist. His is credited with discovering the Greek Dark Ages. Life and career Born on 19 July 1914 at Tunbridge Wells, Desborough's father was Latvian and his mother British. He was schooled in France and Switzerland before attending St Augustine's in Ramsgate and Downside School. He then studied classics at New College, Oxford, from 1932, graduating in the second class in 1936. He completed the BLitt at Oxford under Sir John Myres's supervision. In 1937, he was awarded the Macmillan Studentship by the British Schoo...

#6448

Keith Hancock

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Sir William Keith Hancock, , also known as W. K. Hancock, was a prominent Australian historian and academic. Hancock was an Anglican and keen admirer of the British Empire. Early life and education He was born in Melbourne, Colony of Victoria, the son of Archdeacon William Hancock. At the age of nine, he won the Royal Humane Society's medal for rescuing another child from drowning in the Mitchell River. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and later the University of Melbourne where he was resident at Trinity College from 1917, winning the Perry Scholarship, Trinity's most prestigious award.

#6449

Arthur McCandless Wilson

1902 - 1979 (77 years)

Arthur McCandless Wilson was a professor of biography and government. He is known primarily for his two-volume biography of Diderot. Wilson graduated in 1922 with A.B. from South Dakota's Yankton College. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1926 with B.A., in 1927 with B. Litt., and in 1931 with M.A. . He married Julia Mary Tolford in 1927. At Harvard University he graduated with M.A. in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1933. In Dartmouth College's department of biography, he was appointed in 1933 instructor, in 1936 assistant professor, and in 1940 full professor, retiring in 1967 as professor emeritus.

#6450

Ralph Pugh

1910 - 1982 (72 years)

Ralph Bernard Pugh was an historian and editor of the Victoria History of the Counties of England from 1949 to 1977. He was also a professor of English history at the University of London, a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a teacher of palaeography, and an expert on medieval penology.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions