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,

#751

Jochen Bleicken

#38430

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

Jochen Bleicken was a German professor of ancient history. Biography The son of a salesman, Bleicken studied from 1948 to 1954 history and classical philology at the universities of Kiel and Frankfurt. He wrote his doctorate at the chair of Alfred Heuß at Kiel in 1954 and after his habilitation in 1962 became a professor of history in Hamburg, Frankfurt and from 1977 in Göttingen. He retired in 1991 but gave lectures until 1999.

#752

George Wilson Pierson

#17448

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

George Wilson Pierson was an American academic, historian, author and Larned Professor of History at Yale University. He was the first official historian of the university. Family life Pierson was a descendant of Yale's first rector, Abraham Pierson, and he was related to the college's first student. He was the son of Charles Wheeler Pierson, a New York lawyer who had been valedictorian of the Class of 1886. Like his father, Pierson was at the top of his undergraduate class in 1926.

#753

Elio Lo Cascio

#39683

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Elio Lo Cascio is an Italian historian and teacher of Roman history at the Sapienza University of Rome. Lo Cascio's main research interests are the institutional, administrative, social and economic history of Ancient Rome from the Republic to the Late Empire, and Roman population history.

#754

Maurice Sartre

#28195

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Maurice Sartre is a French historian, an Emeritus professor of ancient history at the François Rabelais University, a specialist in ancient Greek and Eastern Roman history, especially the Hellenized Middle East, from Alexander to Islamic conquests.

#755

Leonard A. Gordon

#7337

Overall Influence

Leonard Abraham Gordon is a historian of South Asia, especially of Bengal, whose 1990 book Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalist Leaders Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose is considered the definitive biography of Subhas Chandra Bose.

#756

George Rousseau

George Rousseau

#23111

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

George Sebastian Rousseau is an American cultural historian resident in the United Kingdom. Early life and education George Rousseau was educated at Amherst College and Princeton University, where he obtained his doctorate.

#757

Mike Davis

#6008

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Michael Ryan Davis was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism .

#758

L. S. Stavrianos

#39094

Overall Influence

1913 - 2004 (91 years)

Leften Stavros Stavrianos was a Greek-Canadian historian. His most influential books are considered to be A Global History: From Prehistory to the 21st Century and The Balkans since 1453. He was one of the first historians to challenge Orientalist views of the Ottoman Empire.

#759

Nancy F. Cott

#16629

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Nancy Falik Cott is an American historian and professor who has taught at Yale and Harvard universities, specializing in gender topics in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has testified on same-sex marriage in several US states.

#760

C. T. Vivian

#8272

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Cordy Tindell Vivian was an American minister, author, and close friend and lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Vivian resided in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded the C. T. Vivian Leadership Institute, Inc. He was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

#761

Rizō Takeuchi

#42530

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

was a Japanese historian. He is best known for his work on historical records pertaining to the ancient and Middle Ages of Japanese history. Background Takeuchi sik born in Aichi Prefecture on December 20, 1907. He graduated from the Tōkyō Imperial University in 1930 where he studied Japanese history.

#762

Jonathan Riley-Smith

#18264

Overall Influence

1938 - 2016 (78 years)

Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith was a historian of the Crusades, and, between 1994 and 2005, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

#763

Sugata Bose

#10234

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sugata Bose is an Indian historian and politician who has taught and worked in the United States since the mid-1980s. His fields of study are South Asian and Indian Ocean history. Bose taught at Tufts University until 2001, when he accepted the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. Bose is also the director of the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata, India, a research center and archives devoted to the life and work of Bose's great uncle, the Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose is the author most recently of His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose an...

#764

Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès

#15860

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Françoise Vergès is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism. Vergès was born in Paris, grew up in Réunion and Algeria before returning to Paris to study and become a journalist.

#765

Denys Hay

#38089

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Denys Hay was a British historian specialising in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and notable for demonstrating the influence of Italy on events in the rest of the continent. Life He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 29 August 1915 the son of Rev W. K. Hay and his wife, Janet Waugh. He was educated at the Newcastle Royal Grammar School then won a place at Oxford University.

#766

C. Warren Hollister

#25700

Overall Influence

1930 - 1997 (67 years)

Charles Warren Hollister was an American author and historian. He was one of the founding members of the University of California Santa Barbara history department. He specialized in English medieval history, especially studies that emphasized the interrelationship of England within the Anglo-Norman realm and the development of administrative kingship. His colleague Jeffrey Burton Russell called Hollister "one of the best medieval generalists in the world."

#767

Fumihiko Sueki

#24176

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Fumihiko Sueki is a Japanese academic and historian, and one of Japan's leading scholars of Japanese Buddhism. He is a professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. A member of the advisory board of Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture's Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, he is also a contributor to the journal itself.

#768

Frank McDonough

#24649

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Frank McDonough is a British historian of the Third Reich and international history. Life Francis Xavier McDonough was born on 17 April 1957 in Liverpool. He read modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Senior Status Scholar. He was at Balliol at the same time as Boris Johnson and knew him. He later earned a PhD in history from Lancaster University, under the supervision of Ruth Henig. He was Professor of International History in the History Department of the School of Humanities and Social Science at Liverpool John Moores University until his retirement in 2021. He is an avid Liverpool F.C.

#769

Alexander Nekrich

#31201

Overall Influence

1920 - 1993 (73 years)

Aleksandr Moiseyevich Nekrich, was a Soviet Russian historian. He emigrated to the United States in 1976. He is known for his works on the history of the Soviet Union, especially under Joseph Stalin’s rule.

#770

Leslie Bethell

#15217

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Leslie Michael Bethell is an English historian and university professor, who specialises in the study of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America, focusing on Brazil in particular. He received both his Bachelor of Arts and doctorate in history at the University of London. He is emeritus professor of Latin American history, University of London, and emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, University of Oxford. Bethell has served as visiting professor at the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Chicago, the Fundação Getulio Varg...

#771

Mitja Ferenc

#37725

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Mitja Ferenc is a Slovenian historian, educator, and author. Ferenc was born in Ljubljana, the son of renowned historian and partisan Tone Ferenc. He graduated from modern history at the University of Ljubljana in 1985. Since 2000, he has researched the graves of people killed on Slovenian territory by the Yugoslav Communist regime after the end of World War II in the Bleiburg repatriations.

#772

Jean-François Bergier

Jean-François Bergier

#23776

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Jean-François Bergier was a Swiss historian. He was a professor at the University of Geneva from 1963 to 1969 and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich until his retirement in 1999.

#773

Ulrich Herbert

#22070

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Ulrich Herbert is a German historian and a specialist in the Nazi era and German history during World War II. He was a professor at the University of Freiburg . In 1999 Herbert received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in modern and contemporary history. He edited European history in the 20th Century, a series of ten surveys by German scholars.

#774

Luis Suárez Fernández

#18466

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (100 years)

Luis Suárez Fernández is a Spanish historian, originally a medievalist, who has extended his studies to include modern and recent history. He belongs to a line of Spanish historians that are in full agreement with Francoism and by some is named a revisionist. He carries the same name as Uruguayan football player Luis Suarez

#775

Charles F. Walker

#44869

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Charles "Chuck" Walker professor of Latin American history at University of California, Davis. He is the director of its Hemispheric Institute on the Americas and director of Global Centers for Latin America & The Caribbean . From 2015–2020 he held the MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in International Human Rights. His interests include Peru, natural disasters, social movements, subaltern politics, truth commissions, and sports and empire.

#776

Peter Green

#13648

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (100 years)

Peter Morris Green is a British classical scholar and novelist noted for his works on the Greco-Persian Wars, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or the death of Augustus in 14 AD. Green's most famous books are Alexander of Macedon, a historical biography first issued in 1970, then in a revised and expanded edition in 1974, which was first published in the United States in 1991; his Alexander to Actium, a general account of the Hellenistic Age, and other works.

#777

Deborah Gray White

#27910

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In addition to teaching at Rutgers, she also directed, "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender", a project at The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis from 1997 to 1999. Throughout 2000-2003 she was the chair of the history department at Rutgers. White has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for excellence in African American histo...

#778

Edward Winter

#9628

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Edward Winter is an English chess journalist, archivist, historian, collector and author. He writes a regular column on chess history, Chess Notes. Chess Notes Chess Notes started as a bimonthly periodical, and was described by its author, in the first issue , as "A forum for aficionados to discuss all matters relating to the Royal Pastime". At the end of 1989, the periodical ceased publication. In 1993, Winter resumed publication of Chess Notes, which appeared, this time, as a syndicated column, in many languages around the world. From 1998 to 2001, it was published exclusively in New In Chess.

#779

Rutger Bregman

#8116

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Rutger C. Bregman is a Dutch popular historian and author. He has published four books on history, philosophy, and economics, including Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, which has been translated into thirty-two languages. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian and the BBC. He has been described by The Guardian as the "Dutch wunderkind of new ideas" and by TED Talks as "one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers". His TED Talk, "Poverty Isn't a Lack of Character; It's a Lack of Cash", was chosen by TED curator Chris Anderson as one of the top t...

#780

Rosamond McKitterick

#20553

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Rosamond Deborah McKitterick is an English medieval historian. She is an expert on the Frankish kingdoms in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, who uses palaeographical and manuscript studies to illuminate aspects of the political, cultural, intellectual, religious, and social history of the Early Middle Ages. From 1999 until 2016 she was Professor of Medieval History and director of research at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and Professor Emerita of Medieval History in the University of Cambridge.

#781

Alain Corbin

#16597

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Alain Corbin Trained in the Annales School, Corbin's work has moved away from the large-scale collective structures studied by Fernand Braudel towards a history of sensibilities which is closer to Lucien Febvre's history of mentalités. His books have explored the histories of such subjects as male desire and prostitution, sensory experience of smell and sound, and the 1870 burning of a young nobleman in a Dordogne village.

#782

Gary W. Gallagher

Gary W. Gallagher

#26229

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gary William Gallagher is an American historian specializing in the history of the American Civil War. Gallagher is currently the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. He produced a lecture series on the American Civil War for The Great Courses lecture series.

#783

Géza Alföldy

#28707

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

Géza Alföldy was a Hungarian historian of ancient history. Life Géza Alföldy was born in Budapest. He studied at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Budapest from 1953 to 1958, where he in 1959 received a doctorate. Alföldy worked at the Budapest city museum from 1957 to 1960, and from 1960 to 1965 he was an assistant professor at the Institute for Ancient History at the University of Budapest. In 1965, he emigrated to West Germany, where he initially worked at the Bonn Rhenanian State Museum from 1965 to 1968. During this time, Alföldy earned a habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1966, where he served as a university lecturer and eventually as a full professor.

#784

Azar Gat

#15057

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Azar Gat is an Israeli researcher of war, nationalism and ideology, and a professor at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. His research combines expertise in the fields of history, evolution, anthropology, and social sciences. He is the author of ten books that deal with the history of military thought, the fundamental questions of war and its causes, the struggles between democratic and non-democratic states, nationalism, and the phenomenon of ideological fixation. His books have been translated into many languages.

#785

Claudio Pavone

#25303

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Claudio Pavone was an Italian historian and archivist. Pavone was the president of the Historic Institute of the Liberation movement in Italy, the president of the Italian Society of Contemporary History and the director of the historical journal Parolechiave . He died aged 95, just one day shy of his 96th birthday.

#786

Asger Aaboe

#16208

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Asger Hartvig Aaboe was a Danish historian of the exact sciences and mathematics who was best known for his contributions to the history of ancient Babylonian astronomy. In his studies of Babylonian astronomy, he went beyond analyses in terms of modern mathematics to seek to understand how the Babylonians conceived their computational schemes.

#787

Aviva Chomsky

#7529

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Aviva Chomsky is an American professor, historian, author, and activist. She is a professor of history and the Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She previously taught at Bates College in Maine and was a research associate at Harvard University, where she specialized in Caribbean and Latin American history.

#788

Benjamin Z. Kedar

Benjamin Z. Kedar

#34707

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Benjamin Ze'ev Kedar is professor emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was president of the international Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East , chairman of the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority and vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities . He is 2019 The EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture laureate in history and the 2020 Israel Prize laureate in history research.

#789

Ivan Ilchev

#33954

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ivan Ilchev , Ph.D. in history, the rector of Sofia University between 2007 and 2015. He specialized in modern history of the Balkan peoples. Ivan Ilchev was born on June 25, 1953, in Sofia. His father is Ilcho Dimitrov, also a famous historian and former minister of education. His mother is of Jewish descent. Ilchev graduated from the 114 English High School in Sofia. He continued his education in Sofia University, where he graduated in history. After his graduation, in 1978, he became assistant professor at the History Department of the Sofia University and associate professor in 1987. He w...

#790

W. A. Speck

#12753

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

William Arthur Speck was a British historian who specialised in late 17th and 18th-century British and American history. He was born in Bradford and was the son of a bookbinder. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School before winning a scholarship to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he gained a BA in 1960 and a D.Phil. in 1966.

#791

Peter Gordon

#22960

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Peter Eli Gordon is a historian of philosophy, a critical theorist, and intellectual historian. The Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, Gordon focuses on continental philosophy and modern German and French thought, with particular emphasis on the German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger, critical theory, continental philosophy during the interwar crisis, and most recently, secularization and social thought in the 20th century.

#792

Barton Bernstein

#16265

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Barton J. Bernstein is Professor emeritus of History at Stanford University and co-chair of the International Relations Program and the International Policy Studies Program. He has published about early Cold War history, as well as about the history of nuclear weapons development and strategy during the 1940s and 1950s.

#793

Touraj Daryaee

#18473

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Touraj Daryaee is an Iranian Iranologist and historian. He currently works as the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture and the director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

#794

Hanna Batatu

#15997

Overall Influence

1926 - 2000 (74 years)

Hanna Batatu was a Palestinian Marxist historian specialising in the history of Iraq and the modern Arab east. His work on Iraq is widely considered the preeminent study of modern Iraqi history. Born in Jerusalem in 1926 to a Palestinian Arab Christian family, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948, the year of the Nakba - a series of events surrounding the establishment of the state of Israel in most of British Mandate Palestine, as well as the creation of a large Palestinian refugee population barred by the new state from returning to their homes. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Georgetown University's Edmund A.

#795

George Chauncey

#10518

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

George Chauncey is a professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known as the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 . Life and works

#796

Bernard Lafayette

#7028

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Bernard Lafayette , Jr. is an American civil rights activist and organizer, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He played a leading role in early organizing of the Selma Voting Rights Movement; was a member of the Nashville Student Movement; and worked closely throughout the 1960s movements with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , and the American Friends Service Committee.

#797

Michael Geyer

#21192

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Michael Geyer is a German historian, and Samuel N. Harper Professor Emeritus of German and European History, at University of Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2012 Axel Springer Berlin Prize and Senior Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He graduated from Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg with a D.Phil.

#798

Hermann von der Dunk

Hermann von der Dunk

#40909

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Hermann Walther von der Dunk was a Dutch historian of German origin. Life Von der Dunk's family fled from Nazi-Germany to the Netherlands in 1937. As his mother was Jewish, his father could not find any work under National Socialist regime. His father found a position at the school of Kees Boeke in Bilthoven. Later, Hermann von der Dunk visited the nearby University of Utrecht. There, he studied history under professor Pieter Geyl and later studied at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. In 1966 he finished his dissertation on "Der Deutsche Vormärz und Belgien, 1930-1948" . On...

#799

John Whitney Hall

#22651

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

John Whitney Hall was an American historian of Japan who specialized in premodern Japanese history. His life work was recognized by the Japanese government, which awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure.

#800

Speros Vryonis

#28410

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Speros Vryonis Jr. was an American historian of Greek descent and a specialist in Byzantine, Balkan, and Greek history. He was the author of a number of works on Byzantine and Greek-Turkish relations, including his seminal The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and The Mechanism of Catastrophe .

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions