The Most Influential People Across History
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 …
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List of the most influential people in History,
#651
Christian Settipani
#25504
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Christian Settipani is a French genealogist, historian and IT professional, currently working as the Technical Director of a company in Paris. Biography Settipani holds a Master of Advanced Studies from the Paris-Sorbonne University , received a doctorate in history in December 2013 from the University of Lorraine with a dissertation titled Les prétentions généalogiques à Athènes sous l'empire romain and obtained in June 2019 from the Sorbonne university an habilitation for a dissertation titled "Liens dynastiques entre Byzance et l'étranger à l'époque des Comnène et des Paléologue" . He co...
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Sheila Miyoshi Jager
#6878
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an American historian. She is a Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, author of two books on Korea, co-editor of a third book on Asian nations in the post-Cold War era, and a forthcoming book on great power competition in northeast Asia at the turn of the 19th-20th century. She is a well-known historian of Korea and East Asia.
Go to Profile#653
Frederic Wakeman
#15915
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Frederic Evans Wakeman Jr. was an American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along," adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years."
Go to Profile#654
Alexander Etkind
#19211
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alexander Etkind is a historian and cultural scientist. He is a professor of history and the Chair of Russia-Europe relations at the European University Institute. He is fellow of the European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
Go to Profile#655
Wyatt Tee Walker
#5857
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Wyatt Tee Walker was an African-American pastor, national civil rights leader, theologian, and cultural historian. He was a chief of staff for Martin Luther King Jr., and in 1958 became an early board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference . He helped found a Congress for Racial Equality chapter in 1958. As executive director of the SCLC from 1960 to 1964, Walker helped to bring the group to national prominence. Walker sat at the feet of his mentor, BG Crawley, who was a Baptist Minister in Brooklyn, NY and New York State Judge.
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David Kertzer
#7611
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David Israel Kertzer is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic, specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. His book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. From July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2011, Kertzer served as Provost at Brown.
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O. W. Wolters
#24646
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Oliver William Wolters was a British academic, historian and author. He was also a Malayan civil servant and administrator. At his death, he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Southeast Asian History Emeritus at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#658
D. Michael Quinn
#15263
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Dennis Michael Quinn was an American historian who focused on the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He was a professor at Brigham Young University from 1976 until he resigned in 1988. At the time, his work concerned church involvement with plural marriage after the 1890 Manifesto, when new polygamous marriages were officially prohibited. He was excommunicated from the church as one of the September Six and afterwards was openly gay. Quinn nevertheless identified as a Latter-day Saint and continued to believe in many LDS teachings, though he did not actively practic...
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Jan Luiten van Zanden
#16994
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jan Luiten van Zanden is a Dutch economic historian and professor of Global Economic History at Utrecht University. He is a widely acknowledged specialist in Dutch, European and Global Economic History.
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Robert H. Hewsen
#17757
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Robert H. Hewsen was an Armenian-American historian and professor of history at Rowan University. He was an expert on the ancient history of the South Caucasus. Hewsen is the author of Armenia: A Historical Atlas , a major reference book, acclaimed as an important achievement in Armenian studies.
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Włodzimierz Borodziej
#29555
Overall Influence
1956 - 2021 (65 years)
Włodzimierz Borodziej was a Polish historian and writer specializing in contemporary European history with particular focus on Polish-German relations. Borodziej was a professor of humanistic sciences, and former prorector of the Warsaw University. He was the Polish-side Chairman of German-Polish Textbook Commission from 1997 to 2007.
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Lillian Hoddeson
#5739
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Lillian Hartman Hoddeson is an American historian of science, specializing in the history of physics and technology during the 2nd half of the 20th century. Education and career Hoddeson received in 1957 a high school diploma from the Bronx High School of Science, in 1961 a bachelor's degree in physics from Barnard College, and in 1966 a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University with a dissertation on solid-state physics. She was an assistant professor of physics from 1967 to 1970 at Barnard College and from 1971 to 1976 at Rutgers University. In 1974–1975 she was a visiting fellow at Princeton University and took Thomas Kuhn's "History of Quantum Mechanics" graduate course.
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Sławomir Cenckiewicz
#29436
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sławomir Cenckiewicz is a Polish historian and journalist. Life A former employee of the Institute of National Remembrance, since 2016 Cenckiewicz is president of the Polish Army's History Office. He gained much media attention following the 2008 publication of a book he co-authored with Piotr Gontarczyk, SB a Lech Wałęsa. Przyczynek do biografii , about Lech Wałęsa's service as an informant of the communist Służba Bezpieczeństwa. Gontarczyk and Cenckiewicz argued that in the 1970s the Solidarity leader and former President of Poland Lech Wałęsa was a secret informant for the Polish communis...
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John F. Richards
#42272
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
John F. Richards was a historian of South Asia and in particular of the Mughal Empire. He was Professor of History at Duke University, North Carolina, and a recipient in 2007 of the Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Award. He participated in and encouraged a multi-disciplinary, multi-regional approach to studies.
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Jan Morris
#4253
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Jan Morris was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy , a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.
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Gail Hershatter
#22355
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gail Hershatter is an American historian of Modern China who holds the Distinguished Professor of History chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She previously taught in the history department at Williams College.
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Robert S. Wistrich
#7277
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Robert Solomon Wistrich was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was also the head of the university's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Wistrich considered antisemitism "the longest hatred" and viewed Anti-Zionism as its latest incarnation. According to Scott Ury, "More than any other scholar, Wistrich has helped integrate traditional Zionist interpretations of Jewish history, society, and fate into the study of antisemitism." Other researchers have reproduced much of his work without questi...
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Franz Rosenthal
#10195
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Franz Rosenthal was the Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor of Semitic Languages at Yale University from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 1967 to 1985.
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Charles E. Rosenberg
#28294
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Charles Ernest Rosenberg is an American historian of medicine. He is Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
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Richard Slotkin
#21857
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard Sidney Slotkin is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and, since 2010, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.
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Thomas Trautmann
#7260
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Thomas Roger Trautmann is an American historian, cultural anthropologist, and Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is considered a leading expert on the Arthashastra, the ancient Hindu text on statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. Trautmann has mentored many students during his tenure at the University of Michigan. His studies focus on ancient India, the history of anthropology, and other related subjects. Trautmann's work in Indology has been credited with illuminating the underlying economic philosophy that governed ancient Indian kinship.
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Ian Nish
#17629
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Ian Hill Nish CBE was a British academic. A specialist in Japanese studies, he was Emeritus Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science . His scholarship relating to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japanese foreign policy and Anglo-Japanese relations in the twentieth century has garnered international renown.
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Mark Elliott
#13896
Overall Influence
Mark C. Elliott is the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard University, where he is Vice Provost for International Affairs. He is also a seminal figure of the school called the New Qing History.
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Stephen B. Oates
#14455
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Stephen Baery Oates was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He specialized in the American Civil War era and authored numerous books. Early life and education Stephen Baery Oates was born in Pampa, Texas, on January 5, 1936. He obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1958. He remained at that institution, receiving a Master of Arts two years later. He taught at Texas for four years before being awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in 1969.
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J. Rufus Fears
#19019
Overall Influence
1945 - 2012 (67 years)
Jesse Rufus Fears was an American historian, scholar, educator, and author writing on the subjects of Ancient history, The History of Liberty, and classical studies. He is best known for his many lectures for the Teaching Company.
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Gilles Quispel
#4952
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Gilles Quispel was a Dutch theologian and historian of Christianity and Gnosticism. He was professor of early Christian history at Utrecht University. Born in Rotterdam, after finishing secondary school in Dordrecht, Quispel studied classical philology from 1934 to 1941 at the Leiden University. At Leiden he also began to study theology, which he continued at the University of Groningen. Quispel completed his doctoral work in 1943 at Utrecht University with a dissertation examining the sources utilized in Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem. He devoted study to several Gnostic systems, particularly Valentinianism.
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Patrick J. Geary
#23594
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Patrick J. Geary is an American medievalist. He is a professor emeritus of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2004 to 2011, he also held the title of Distinguished Professor of Medieval History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Peter Longerich
#9006
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Longerich is a German professor of history and historian. He is regarded by fellow historians, including Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans, Timothy Snyder, Mark Roseman and Richard Overy, as one of the leading German authorities on the Holocaust.
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Norman Stillman
#13157
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam , b. 1945, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclop...
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Edward E. Baptist
#16301
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Edward E. Baptist is an American academic and writer. He is a professor of history at Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, where he specializes in the history of the 19th-century United States, particularly the South. Thematically, he has been interested in the history of capitalism and has also been interested in digital humanities methodologies. He is the author of numerous books.
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Hilary Beckles
#15407
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Sir Hilary McDonald Beckles KA is a Barbadian historian. He is the current vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission. Educated at the University of Hull in England, Beckles began his academic career at UWI, and was granted a personal professorship at the age of 37, becoming the youngest in the university's history. He was named pro-vice-chancellor and chairman of UWI's Board for Undergraduate Studies in 1998, and in 2002 was named principal of the university's Cave Hill campus. Although his focus has mainly been on Afro-Caribbean ...
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R. W. Davies
#10401
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Robert William Davies , better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham. Obtaining his PhD in 1954, Davies was promoted to full professor and made chair of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1965. He retired from active teaching in 1989.
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Alan Taylor
#23106
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan Shaw Taylor is an American historian and scholar who is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
#57142
Overall Influence
#686
Annika Mombauer
#34940
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Annika Mombauer is a historian best known for her work on General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. She is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History in the History Department at the Open University in Great Britain, and Associate Dean for the Arts Faculty.
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Edward Ullendorff
#13334
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Edward Ullendorff was a British scholar and historian. He was a prominent figure in Ethiopian Studies and also contributed work on the Semitic languages. Biography Born on 25 January 1920 in Zurich, Switzerland, Ullendorff was educated at the Graues Kloster in Berlin, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Oxford.
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Dominic Sandbrook
#17956
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Dominic Christopher Sandbrook is a British historian, author, columnist and television presenter. He co-hosts The Rest is History podcast with the author Tom Holland. Early life and career Born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, he attended Malvern College and studied history and French at Balliol College, Oxford. He then studied for a master's degree in history at the University of St Andrews and a PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge.
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Clifford Edmund Bosworth
#10962
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Clifford Edmund Bosworth FBA was an English historian and Orientalist, specialising in Arabic and Iranian studies. Life Bosworth was born on 29 December 1928 in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire . His father, Clifford Bosworth, clerked for Board of Guardians before working for Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. His mother was Gladys Constance Gregory. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in modern history from St John's College, Oxford, before achieving an MA in Middle Eastern studies and PhD degrees from the University of Edinburgh.
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George M. Fredrickson
#29121
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
George M. Fredrickson was an American author, activist, historian, and professor. He was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University until his retirement in 2002. After his retirement he continued to publish several texts, authoring a total of eight books and editing four more in addition to writing various articles. One of his best known works remains White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History, which received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and the Merle Curti Award as well as made him a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize for Hist...
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Harvey J. Graff
#31745
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#692
Richard Holmes
#14994
Overall Influence
1946 - 2011 (65 years)
Edward Richard Holmes, CBE, TD, JP, VR , known as Richard Holmes, was a British military historian. He was co-director of Cranfield University's Security and Resilience Group from 1989 to 2009 and became Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield in 1995.
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Jean Delumeau
#14247
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Jean Léon Marie Delumeau was a French historian specializing in the history of the Catholic Church, and author of several books regarding the subject. He held the Chair of the History of Religious Mentalities at the Collège de France and was a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.
Go to Profile#694
Andreas Umland
#9785
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#695
Don E. Fehrenbacher
#29434
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Don Edward Fehrenbacher was an American historian. He wrote on politics, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln. He won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, his book about the Dred Scott Decision. In 1977 David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, which he edited and completed, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997 he won the Lincoln Prize.
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Neil McKendrick
#23485
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Neil McKendrick MA FRHistS was the 40th Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is now a life fellow of the college. McKendrick was educated at Alderman Newton's School, Leicester, and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he won an Entrance Scholarship. He is an Emeritus Reader in History having taught Modern English Social and Economic History as well as Business, Literature and Society, 1690–1990. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. During his time at the college he was successively Lecturer in History, Director of Studies in History, Graduate Tutor and Master.
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Juan Pablo Fusi
#30396
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Juan Pablo Fusi Aizpurúa is a Spanish historian. He specialises in contemporary history, the Basque Country and nationalisms. Studies Fusi has a degree in history from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and has a Ph.D. from the same university.
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Richard J. Jensen
#22032
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Joseph Jensen is an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from 1973 to 1996. He has worked on American political, social, military, and economic history as well as historiography and quantitative and computer methods. His work focuses on Midwestern electoral history, and he has authored The Winning of the Midwest and Historian's Guide to Statistics.
Go to Profile#699
Rashid Khalidi
#5195
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
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Arthur L. Herman
#8251
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Arthur L. Herman is an American popular historian. He currently serves as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. Biography Herman's father Arthur L. Herman, a scholar of Sanskrit, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
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