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.

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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,

#701

Aydın Sayılı

#9595

Overall Influence

1913 - 1993 (80 years)

Aydın Sayılı was a prominent Turkish historian of science. Sayılı's portrait is depicted on the reverse of the Turkish 5 lira banknote issued in 2009. Early life and education Sayılı was born in Istanbul on 2 May 1913. His parents were Abdurrahman Sayılı and Suat Sayılı . He had two sisters. Sayılı graduated from Atatürk High School in Ankara in 1933. His career was aided by a chance meeting with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whom he impressed enough to receive a state-supported scholarship to attend Harvard University, where he studied the history of science.

#702

Paul Forman

#12632

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Paul Forman may refer to:Paul Forman , French-English actor and modelPaul Forman , American historian of the history of physics

#703

Ron Goulart

#9209

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Ronald Joseph Goulart was an American popular culture historian and mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. He worked on novels and novelizations being published under various pseudonyms such as: Kenneth Robeson, Con Steffanson, Chad Calhoun, R. T. Edwards, Ian R. Jamieson, Josephine Kains, Jillian Kearny, Howard Lee, Zeke Masters, Frank S. Shawn, and Joseph Silva.

#704

Hans-Joachim Gehrke

Hans-Joachim Gehrke

#39150

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Hans-Joachim Gehrke, in full Hans-Joachim Günter Adolf Gehrke, is a German historian of ancient and classical antiquity. He was president of the German Archaeological Institute from 2008 to 2011. Life Hans-Joachim Gehrke studied at the city-run Ratsgymnasium Goslar from 1961 to 1965 and passed his final exams there in 1965. He went on to study history and classical philology at the University of Göttingen from 1967 to 1973, where he received his doctorate in 1973 with a study on Phocion. Gehrke conducted research under the supervision of Alfred Heuß and later became his research assistant from 1973 to 1977.

#705

Josiah Ober

#32242

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Josiah Ober is an American historian of ancient Greece and classical political theorist. He is Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor in honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, and professor of classics and political science, at Stanford University. His teaching and research links ancient Greek history and philosophy with modern political theory and practice.

#706

Omer Bartov

#14525

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-born historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a noted historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide. The Forward calls him "one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia."

#707

Alain Daniélou

#4978

Overall Influence

1907 - 1994 (87 years)

Alain Daniélou was a French historian, Indologist, intellectual, musicologist, translator, writer, and notable Western convert to and expert on the Shaivite branch of Hinduism. In 1991 he was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour conferred by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama.

#708

Chester Starr

#37508

Overall Influence

1914 - 1999 (85 years)

Chester G. Starr was an American historian. An authority on ancient history, he specialized in the ancient art and archeology of the Greco-Roman civilization. According to the University of Michigan, he was "the acknowledged dean of ancient history in America."

#709

Barun De

#12957

Overall Influence

1932 - 2013 (81 years)

Barun De was an Indian historian. He served as the first professor of social and economic history of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, founder-director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata and as the honorary state editor for the West Bengal District Gazetteers. He was chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission.

#710

Osvaldo Bayer

#7205

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Osvaldo Bayer was an Argentine writer and journalist. He lived in Buenos Aires. In 1974, during the presidency of Isabel Perón, he went into exile, residing in Linz am Rhein, Germany, throughout the National Reorganization Process dictatorship .

#711

Lizabeth Cohen

#32744

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Lizabeth Cohen is the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, as well as a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. From 2011-2018 she served as the Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Currently, she teaches courses in 20th-century America, with a focus on urbanism, the built environment, and public history. She has also served as the Chair of the History Department at Harvard, director of the undergraduate program in history, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American H...

#712

T. C. W. Blanning

#30846

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Timothy Charles William Blanning is an English historian who served as Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2009. Career Timothy Charles William Blanning attended the King's School in Bruton. He went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree and completing his doctorate there in 1967. In 1965, he was elected to a research fellowship at Sidney Sussex, and in 1968 was elected to a fellowship there. He was appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Cambridge in 1972, being promoted to lecturer four years later.

#713

Vincent Harding

Vincent Harding

#9076

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Vincent Gordon Harding was an African-American pastor, historian, and scholar of various topics with a focus on American religion and society. A social activist, he was perhaps best known for his work with and writings about Martin Luther King Jr., whom Harding knew personally. Besides having authored numerous books such as There Is A River, Hope and History, and Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero, he served as co-chairperson of the social unity group Veterans of Hope Project and as Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. When Ha...

#714

Simon Hornblower

#28480

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Simon Hornblower, FBA is an English classicist and academic. He was Professor of Classics and Ancient History in the University of Oxford and, before retiring, was most recently a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

#715

Roland Mousnier

Roland Mousnier

#22365

Overall Influence

1907 - 1993 (86 years)

Roland Émile Mousnier was a French historian of the early modern period in France and of the comparative studies of different civilizations. Life Mousnier was born in Paris and received his education at the École pratique des hautes études. Between 1932 and 1947, he worked as a school teacher in Rouen and Paris. During the Second World War, Mousnier was a member of the French Resistance. In 1947, he was appointed as a professor at Strasbourg University, before moving to the Sorbonne in 1955, where he remained until 1977. Keenly interested in social history, Mousnier went to the United States to learn sociology and anthropology.

#716

Harry V. Jaffa

#5439

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist, and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont Graduate University, and was a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times".

#717

James Oakes

#16856

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism, and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.

#718

Spencer C. Tucker

#6799

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Spencer C. Tucker is a Fulbright scholar, retired university professor, and author of works on military history. He taught history at Texas Christian University for 30 years and held the John Biggs Chair of Military History at the Virginia Military Institute for six years.

#719

Alexander Rabinowitch

#28244

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Alexander Rabinowitch is an American historian. He is Professor Emeritus of History at the Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught from 1968 until 1999, and Affiliated Research Scholar at the St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, since 2013. He is recognized internationally as a leading expert on the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War.

#720

Bruce Kuklick

#29591

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Bruce Kuklick is an American historian. He currently serves as the Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in diplomatic and intellectual history of the United States and the history of philosophy.

#721

Martin Kitchen

#19131

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, who has specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. He is internationally regarded as a key author for the study of contemporary history.

#722

A. Hunter Dupree

#13293

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Anderson Hunter Dupree was an American historian and one of the pioneer historians of the history of science and technology in the United States. He died in November 2019 at the age of 98. Early education The son of a lawyer, George W. Dupree, and his wife, Sarah Hunter, he attended Oberlin College, where he earned his bachelor of arts degree in 1942. Upon completion of his undergraduate work, he served the United States Navy from 1942 to 1946, and became a Lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

#723

Edward Grant

#12778

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Edward Grant was an American historian of medieval science. He was named a distinguished professor in 1983. Other honors include the 1992 George Sarton Medal, for "a lifetime scholarly achievement" as an historian of science.

#724

Charles Coulston Gillispie

#10129

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Charles Coulston Gillispie was an American historian of science. He was the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science, Emeritus at Princeton University. He was succeeded by Arno J. Mayer. Life The son of Raymond Livingston Gillispie and Virginia Coulston, Gillispie grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He attended Wesleyan University, graduating in 1940 with a major in Chemistry and gained his PhD from Harvard University in 1949. He also served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

#725

Paul L. Maier

#18636

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Paul L. Maier is an American historian and novelist. He has written several works of scholarly and popular non-fiction about Christianity and novels about Christian historians. He is the former Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, from which he retired in 2011, retaining the title of professor emeritus in the Department of History. He previously served as Third Vice President of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

#726

Yang Kuan

#33772

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

Yang Kuan , styled Kuanzheng , was a Chinese historian specializing in pre-Qin Dynasty Chinese history. He is considered an authority of the Warring States period, and his History of the Warring States, first published in 1955, remains the most authoritative treatment of the subject.

#727

Giovanni Levi

#35780

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Giovanni Levi is an Italian historian. He is Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He is one of the pioneers in the field of microhistory. Selected works Centro e periferia di uno Stato assoluto. Tre saggi su Piemonte e Liguria in età moderna. Rosenberg e Sellier, Turin 1985, .Das immaterielle Erbe. Eine bäuerliche Welt an der Schwelle zur Moderne. Wagenbach, Berlin 1986, .On Microhistory. In: New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Pennsylvania State University Press, Cambridge 1992, .Geschichte der Jugend. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, .The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective.

#728

Richard Tarnas

#3055

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Richard Theodore Tarnas is a cultural historian and astrologer known for his books The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Tarnas is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is the founding director of its graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.

#729

Owen Gingerich

#5635

Overall Influence

1930 - 2023 (93 years)

Owen Jay Gingerich was an American astronomer who had been professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he had written many books on the history of astronomy.

#730

Marilyn B. Young

Marilyn B. Young

#12776

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Marilyn B. Young was a historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University. She graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1953 and Vassar College in 1957. Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia. She did her doctoral work under the direction of Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and John King Fairbank, a historian of China. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, The Rh...

#731

Ben Pimlott

#6932

Overall Influence

1945 - 2004 (59 years)

Benjamin John Pimlott FBA was a British historian of the post-war period in Britain. He made a substantial contribution to the literary genre of political biography. Background Pimlott was born in Merton, Surrey on 4 July 1945. His father was John Pimlott, a civil servant at the Home Office and former private secretary to Herbert Morrison. His mother, Ellen Dench Howes Pimlott, was American; her ancestors were Pilgrims, and she was a descendant of a victim of the Salem witch trials. Pimlott held dual citizenship. He grew up in Wimbledon and was educated at Rokeby School , Marlborough College ...

#732

Joseph Rykwert

#8885

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Joseph Rykwert CBE is Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He has spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom and America. He has taught the history and theory of architecture at several institutions in Europe and North America. Rykwert is the author of many influential works on architecture, including The Idea of a Town , On Adam's House in Paradise , The Dancing Column and The Seduction of Place . All his books have been translated into several langua...

#733

Paolo Malanima

#24837

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Paolo Malanima is an Italian economic historian, Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro, and former director of the Institute of Studies on Mediterranean Societies in Naples. Malanima's main research interests are long-term developments in economic history, particularly the performance of the Italian economy since Classical antiquity, history of energy and global history.

#734

Paul Freedman

#29093

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Paul Harris Freedman is an American historian and medievalist who serves as the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University; he is a recipient of the Haskins Medal for his work regarding Medieval Europe. Freedman specializes in medieval social history, the history of Catalonia, the study of medieval peasantry, and the history of American cuisine. Freedman is the author of more than 10 books and 40 academic papers having been published by Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, Cambridge University, University of Toronto, and the University of Bologna, among others.

#735

Henry Reynolds

#13076

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

#736

Peter Englund

#8718

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Peter Mikael Englund is a Swedish author and historian born on April 4, 1957. He focuses on writing non-fiction books and essays, mostly about the Swedish Empire and other historical events. Englund is known for his accessible writing style, which includes narrative details that are often left out in traditional history books. His works have been translated into multiple languages, including German and Czech. From 2009 to 2015, Englund served as the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, before being succeeded by Sara Danius. In January 2019, he and fellow academy member Kjell Espmark ann...

#737

Yuri Slezkine

#33494

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Yuri Lvovich Slezkine is a Russian-born American historian and translator. He was a professor of Russian history, Sovietologist, and served as Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004-2013. He is best known as the author of the books The Jewish Century and The House of Government: A Saga of The Russian Revolution .

#738

Michael Loewe

#16460

Overall Influence

1922 - Present (102 years)

Michael Arthur Nathan Loewe is a British sinologist, historian, and writer who has authored dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese as well as the history of ancient and early Imperial China.

#739

Pierre Milza

#17915

Overall Influence

1932 - 2018 (86 years)

Pierre Milza was a French historian. His work focused mainly on the history of Italy, the history of Italian immigration to France and the history of fascism, of which he was a recognized specialist.

#740

Mike Wallace

#10783

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Mike Wallace is an American historian. He specializes in the history of New York City, and in the history and practice of "public history". In 1998 he co-authored Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which in 1999 won the Pulitzer Prize in History. In 2017, he published a successor volume, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Wallace is a Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice , and at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

#741

Beatrice de Graaf

#27392

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Beatrice A. de Graaf is a Dutch history professor at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. Her areas of expertise are terrorism, international relations and security and the modern history of Europe.

#742

Morris Berman

#15933

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Morris Berman is an American historian and social critic. He earned a BA in mathematics at Cornell University in 1966 and a PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. Berman is an academic humanist cultural critic who specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history.

#743

Marian Kamil Dziewanowski

#29278

Overall Influence

1913 - 2005 (92 years)

Marian Kamil Dziewanowski was a historian of Poland, Russia and modern Europe. Life Born in Zhytomir, Russian Empire , Dziewanowski was the son of Kamil and Zofia Dziewanowski. He grew up and studied in interwar Poland at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 1937–39 he was a foreign correspondent in Berlin, covering the Anschluss with Austria, the Munich Conference, and the German occupation of the Sudetenland.

#744

Wolfgang Wippermann

Wolfgang Wippermann

#33960

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Wolfgang Wippermann was a German historian. He served as supernumerary professor of modern history at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of the Free University of Berlin, and also taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Fachhochschule Potsdam. Wippermann studied history, German and political science in Göttingen and Marburg and received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin.

#745

Emma Dench

#23738

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Emma Dench is an English ancient historian, classicist, and academic administrator. She has been McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University since 2014, and Dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences since 2018. Her previous positions include Professor of Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London and Professor of Classics and of History at Harvard.

#746

Yoshiaki Yoshimi

#11349

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Yoshiaki Yoshimi is a professor of Japanese modern history at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. He is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility. He was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and studied at the University of Tokyo.

#747

Richard Bulliet

#11323

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Richard W. Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society and institutions, the history of technology, and the history of the role of animals in human society.

#748

David W. Bebbington

#21888

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David William Bebbington is a British historian who is a professor of history at the University of Stirling in Scotland and a distinguished visiting professor of history at Baylor University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society.

#749

Edward L. Keenan

Edward L. Keenan

#31850

Overall Influence

1935 - 2015 (80 years)

Edward Louis "Ned" Keenan Jr. was an American professor of history at Harvard University who specialized in medieval Russian history . He became a prominent and controversial figure after conducting various studies that analyzed and ultimately disproved the authenticity of major resources in East Slavic history. Two of his books argue that two texts were not medieval at all, but seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, respectively: The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-century Genesis of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV , and Joseph Dobrovsky a...

#750

Miguel León-Portilla

Miguel León-Portilla

#5854

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Miguel León-Portilla was a Mexican anthropologist and historian, specializing in Aztec culture and literature of the pre-Columbian and colonial eras. Many of his works were translated to English and he was a well-recognized scholar internationally. In 2013, the Library of Congress of the United States bestowed on him the Living Legend Award.

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