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,
#851
Ira M. Lapidus
#21032
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Ira M. Lapidus is an Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at The University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of A History of Islamic Societies, and Contemporary Islamic Movements in Historical Perspective, among other works.
Go to Profile#852
Philip D. Zelikow
#10661
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Philip David Zelikow is an American diplomat, academic and author. He has worked as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and counselor of the United States Department of State. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and was American Academy in Berlin Axel Springer Fellow, in the fall of 2009.
Go to Profile#853
Edith Hall
#13390
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department.
Go to Profile#854
Dennis Showalter
#31258
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Dennis Edwin Showalter was a professor emeritus of history at Colorado College. Showalter specialized in German military history. He was president of the American Society for Military History from 1997 to 2001. In addition, Showalter was an advising fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.
Go to Profile#855
Susan Reynolds
#24196
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Susan Reynolds FBA was a British medieval historian whose book Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted was part of the academic critique on the concept of feudalism as classically portrayed by previous historians such as François-Louis Ganshof and Marc Bloch. Reynolds rejected typical ideas of feudalism and presented a medieval society structured through ‘horizontal’ groups. According to The Guardian, "Few books have been more intensely discussed by professional medieval historians. Largely as a consequence of this work, the word "feudalism", or the "F-word", as it came to be...
Go to Profile#856
Thomas Sugrue
#13615
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the ...
Go to Profile#857
David Abulafia
#29819
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia is an English historian with a particular interest in Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge, rising to become a professor at the age of 50. He retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History. He is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He was Chairman of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, 2003-5, and was elected a member of the governing Council of Cambridge University in 2008. He is visiting Beacon Professor at the new University of Gibraltar, where he also serves on the Academic Board.
Go to Profile#858
Jacques Julliard
#17079
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Jacques Julliard was a French historian, columnist and essayist, and a union leader. He was the author of numerous books. Life Early years Jacques Julliard was born on 4 March 1933 in Brénod, Ain. His father and grandfather had both been mayors of the village where he was born.
Go to Profile#859
Mark Kishlansky
#29568
Overall Influence
1948 - 2015 (67 years)
Mark Kishlansky was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University. Education and academic career Kishlansky was born in Brooklyn. He completed his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1970. He proceeded to graduate study under David Underdown at Brown University, receiving his M.A. in 1972 and his PhD in 1977. His PhD thesis was titled "The Emergence of Radical Politics in the English Revolution". From 1975 to 1991 he taught at the University of Chicago, successively as instructor and professor.
Go to Profile#860
Robert J. C. Young
#11080
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert J. C. Young FBA is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian. Life Young was educated at Repton School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read for a B.A. and D.Phil., taught at the University of Southampton, and then returned to Oxford University where he was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College. In 2005, he moved to New York University where he is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. From 2015 - 2018, he was Dean of Arts & Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Go to Profile#861
Alexander Sergeyevich Orlov
#50205
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Orlov is a contemporary Russian historian and an author of several handbooks. He is a specialist on socio-political history of Russia in the 18th century, in the history of science and in education about that period.
Go to Profile#862
Henk Wesseling
#42973
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Henk Wesseling was a Dutch historian. He was a professor of contemporary history at Leiden University, former rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study between 1995 and 2002. Biography Wesseling was the son of the Catholic journalist and politician C.D. Wesseling. After attending secondary school at the Aloysius College in The Hague, he studied history at Leiden University.
Go to Profile#863
Richard G. Hovannisian
#14354
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Richard Hovannisian was an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known mainly for his four-volume history of the First Republic of Armenia. Biography Background Hovannisian was born and raised in Tulare, California, into a family of Armenian genocide survivors. His father, Kaspar Gavroian, was born in 1901 in the village of Bazmashen , near Kharpert in the Ottoman Empire. Surviving the Genocide of 1915, he moved to the United States by 1920 and changed his last name from Gavroian to Hovannisian, after his father's name, Hovhannes. In 1927, Kaspar married Siroon Nalbandian, born in Kesserig, Kharpert.
Go to Profile#864
J. Matthew Gallman
#19137
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
J. Matthew Gallman, also known as Matt Gallman, is an American educator and author of books about nineteenth-century history, particularly relating to the American Civil War. Education Gallman received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1979 and his Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University in 1986.
Go to Profile#865
Tong Tekong
#47633
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Tong Tekong was a historian, academic and an author. Tong graduated in Nanjing University majoring in history, and finished his PhD at Columbia University, and later taught Chinese history in Columbia University. Tong also worked as professor in City University of New York for 20 years, and retired in 1991.
Go to Profile#866
Gerhard Hirschfeld
#25687
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Gerhard Hirschfeld is a German historian and author. From 1989 to 2011, he was director of the Stuttgart-based Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte / Library of Contemporary History, and has been a professor at the Institute of History of the University of Stuttgart since 1997. In 2016 he also became a visiting professor at the Institute for International Studies, University of Wuhan/China.
Go to Profile#867
Stephen Adebanji Akintoye
#13751
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Stephen Adebanji Akintoye, also known as S. Banji Akintoye , is a Nigerian-born academic, historian and writer. He attended Christ's School Ado Ekiti, Nigeria from 1951–1955, and studied history at the University College , Ibadan , and doctoral studies from 1963-1966 at the University of Ibadan, where he was awarded a PhD in History in 1966. He taught at the History Department at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he became a professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies from 1974-1977. He has also taught African History in universities in the United States includ...
Go to Profile#868
Leon Botstein
#5801
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Leon Botstein is a Swiss-American conductor, educator, and scholar serving as the President of Bard College. Biography 1946–1975: Early life, education, and career Botstein was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1946. The son of Polish-Jewish physicians, Botstein immigrated to New York City at the age of two. Interested in music from an early age, he studied violin with Roman Totenberg and, during the summers, studied with faculty from the National Conservatory in Mexico City. At the age of sixteen, Botstein graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1967, where he graduated with a degree in history.
Go to Profile#869
Rafe de Crespigny
#22105
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Richard Rafe Champion de Crespigny , also known by his Chinese name Zhang Leifu , is an Australian sinologist and historian. He was an adjunct professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He specialised in the history, geography, and literature of the Han dynasty, particularly the translation and historiography of material concerning the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period.
Go to Profile#870
Barbara J. Fields
#29760
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Barbara Jeanne Fields is an American historian. She is a professor of American history at Columbia University. Her focus is on the history of the American South, 19th century social history, and the transition to capitalism in the United States.
Go to Profile#871
Wayne Flynt
#14002
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Wayne Flynt is University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University. He has won numerous teaching awards and been a Distinguished University Professor for many years. His research focuses on Southern culture, Alabama politics, Southern religion, education reform, and poverty. He was the first Editor-in-Chief of the online Encyclopedia of Alabama. Flynt received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard College in 1961 before taking his Master of Science and Ph.D. from Florida State University. After teaching at Samford for 12 years, he joined the faculty at Auburn University in 1977, where he remained until his retirement in 2005.
Go to Profile#872
George Stanley
#10317
Overall Influence
1907 - 2002 (95 years)
Colonel George Francis Gillman Stanley was a Canadian historian, author, soldier, teacher, public servant, and designer of the Canadian Flag. Early life and education George F. G. Stanley was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1907 and received a BA from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He went to Keble College, University of Oxford, in 1929 as the Rhodes Scholar from Alberta, and held a Beit Fellowship in Imperial Studies and a Royal Society of Canada Scholarship. He earned a BA, MA, MLitt and DPhil. Always a keen athlete, he played for the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club, which won the Spengler Cup in 1931.
Go to Profile#873
George Rudé
#19472
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
George Rudé was a British Marxist historian, specializing in the French Revolution and "history from below", especially the importance of crowds in history. Early life Born in Oslo, the son of Jens Essendrop Rude, a Norwegian engineer, and Amy Geraldine Elliot, an English woman educated in Germany, Rudé spent his early years in Norway. After World War I, his family moved to England, where he was educated at Shrewsbury School and Trinity College, Cambridge. A specialist in modern languages, he taught at Stowe and St. Paul's schools. After completing university, Rudé took a trip to the Soviet Union with friends.
Go to Profile#874
Stefan Kieniewicz
#38603
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Stefan Kieniewicz was a Polish historian and university professor, notable for his works on the 19th-century history of Poland. During his work at various universities he became the tutor of several generations of Polish historians and his views on the last two centuries of Poland's history remain influential in modern scholarly works.
Go to Profile#875
John Elliott
#10326
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Sir John Huxtable Elliott was a British historian and Hispanist who was Regius Professor at the University of Oxford and honorary fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He published under the name J. H. Elliott.
Go to Profile#876
Hasia Diner
#19725
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Hasia R. Diner is an American historian. Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History; Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, History; Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University and Interim Director of Glucksman Ireland House NYU.
Go to Profile#877
Lloyd Gardner
#25892
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Lloyd C. Gardner is an American historian, a member of the "Wisconsin School" of diplomatic history along with Walter LaFeber and Thomas J. McCormick. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#878
John Guy
#16368
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Alexander Guy is a British historian and biographer. Biography Born in Warragul, Victoria, Australia, Guy moved to Britain with his parents in 1952. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, and Clare College, Cambridge, where he read history, achieving a First. At Cambridge, Guy studied under the Tudor specialist Geoffrey Rudolph Elton. He was awarded a Greene Cup by Clare College and the Yorke Prize by the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#879
Peter Kolchin
#26381
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Peter Robert Kolchin is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom .
Go to Profile#880
Norbert Frei
#30760
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Norbert Frei is a German historian. He holds the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena, Germany, and leads the Jena Center of 20th Century History. Frei's research work investigates how German society came to terms with Nazism and the Third Reich in the aftermath of World War II.
Go to Profile#881
M. R. D. Foot
#10803
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Michael Richard Daniell Foot, was a British political and military historian, and former British Army intelligence officer with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. Biography The son of a career soldier, Foot was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he became involved romantically with Iris Murdoch.
Go to Profile#882
Brian Bond
#25688
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Brian James Bond is a British military historian and professor emeritus of military history at King's College London. Early life and education The son of Edward Herbert Bond and his wife, Olive Bessie Sartin, Bond was born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where he attended Sir William Borlase's Grammar School from 1947 to 1954. He was raised in Buckinghamshire where his father was the gardener for the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart. Hart took a great interest in the boy and encouraged his academic interests. From 1952 to 1954, Bond served in the Royal Artillery, being commissioned a second lieutenant in the British Army.
Go to Profile#883
Peter J. Bowler
#7977
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Peter J. Bowler is a historian of biology who has written extensively on the history of evolutionary thought, the history of the environmental sciences, and on the history of genetics. His 1984 book, Evolution: The History of an Idea is a standard textbook on the history of evolution; a 25th anniversary edition came in 2009. His 1983 book The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 describes the scientific predominance of other evolutionary theories which led many to minimise the significance of natural selection, in the first part of the twentieth...
Go to Profile#884
Günter Bischof
#26125
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Günter Bischof is an Austrian-American historian and university professor. A specialist in 20th century diplomatic history, and a graduate of University of New Orleans, Innsbruck University and Harvard University, he currently serves as a Marshall Plan Professor of History at the University of New Orleans. He also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Austrian-American History.
Go to Profile#885
Rolf Steininger
#19513
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Rolf Steininger is a German historian and former university professor for contemporary history. Steininger studied English language and literature and history at the universities of Marburg, Göttingen, Munich, Lancaster and Cardiff. He received a doctor's degree in 1971 and habilitated at Leibniz University Hannover in 1976. In 1980, he became a professor in Hannover. In 1983 he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Innsbruck.
Go to Profile#886
Werner Eck
#48118
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Werner Eck is professor of Ancient History at Cologne University, Germany, and a noted expert on the history and epigraphy of imperial Rome. His main interests are the prosopography of the Roman ruling class and the ancient city of Cologne, Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. He also researched the Bar Kokhba revolt from the Roman point of view.
Go to Profile#887
Victor Schnirelmann
#12365
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Victor Alexandrovich Schnirelmann is a Russian historian, ethnologist and a member of Academia Europaea . He is a senior researcher of N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences and an author of over 300 works, including over 20 monographies on archaeology. Schnirelmann's main fields include the ideologies of nationalism in Russia and CIS, ethnocentrism and irredentism.
Go to Profile#888
Mark LeVine
#19441
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mark Andrew LeVine is an American historian, musician, writer, and professor. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Education LeVine received his B.A. in comparative religion and biblical studies from Hunter College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University's Department of Middle Eastern Studies. He speaks multiple languages including Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian, Italian, French, German and English.
Go to Profile#889
Jill Ker Conway
#8506
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-American scholar and author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, she also was Smith College's first woman president and most recently served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. She was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
Go to Profile#890
Michael Bliss
#10135
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
John William Michael Bliss was a Canadian historian and author. Though his early works focused on business and political history, he also wrote biographies of physicians Frederick Banting, William Osler and Harvey Cushing. Bliss was a frequent commentator on political events and issues. He was an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Go to Profile#891
Milton Meltzer
#17944
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Milton Meltzer was an American historian and author best known for his nonfiction books on Jewish, African-American, and American history. Since the 1950s, he was a prolific author of history books in the children's literature and young adult literature genres, having written nearly 100 books. Meltzer was an advocate for human rights, as well as an adjunct professor for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He won the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his career contribution to American children's literature in 2001. Meltzer died of esophageal cancer in 2009.
Go to Profile#892
Henry Mayr-Harting
#38366
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Henry Maria Robert Egmont Mayr-Harting is a British medieval ecclesiastical historian. From 1997 to 2003, he was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford and a lay canon of Christ Church, Oxford.
Go to Profile#893
Horst Möller
#31429
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Horst Möller is a German contemporary historian. He is Professor of Modern History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and, from 1992 to 2011, Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.
Go to Profile#894
Russell Jacoby
#10986
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles , an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-century European and American intellectual and cultural history, specifically the history of intellectuals and education.
Go to Profile#895
Rana Mitter
#13998
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Rana Shantashil Rajyeswar Mitter is a British historian and political scientist of Indian descent who specialises in the history of the Republic of China. He is ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. Until 2023 he was Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, formerly director of Oxford's China Centre, and a Fellow and Vice-Master of St Cross College. His 2013 book China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival , about the Second Sino-Japanese War, was we...
Go to Profile#896
Carl Emil Schorske
#21249
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Carl Emil Schorske , known professionally as Carl E. Schorske, was an American cultural historian and professor emeritus at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture , which remains significant to modern European intellectual history. He was a recipient of the first year of MacArthur Fellows Program awards in 1981 and made an honorary citizen of Vienna in 2012.
Go to Profile#897
Jean-Baptiste Duroselle
#13749
Overall Influence
1917 - 1994 (77 years)
Jean-Baptiste Duroselle was a French historian and professor. He had initially considered an army career or study of geography, but his poor skills in mathematics and drawing led him to turn to historical study. Pierre Renouvin's course fascinated him, and he became his assistant in 1945. He went on to teach at University of Saarbrücken from 1950 to 1957 and returned to the Sorbonne afterward. Duroselle's writings include La Decadence , L'Abime , and others. Duroselle was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1975. He was noted for his study of international relations and won a 198...
Go to Profile#898
David J. Howe
#18739
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David J. Howe is a British writer, journalist, publisher, and media historian. Biography David Howe was born on 24 August 1961 and established himself as an authoritative media historian through writing articles for fanzines and other publications. In the early 1990s, he began to write the first in-depth critical texts of the British television series Doctor Who, and, as a result, has become closely associated with the show's history. He has written or co-written over thirty titles about the show, and continues to be involved with a variety of publications, often acting as consultant or revi...
Go to Profile#899
Peter Linebaugh
#17708
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labour history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Go to Profile#900
Carlo Pedretti
#30260
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Carlo Pedretti was an Italian historian. In his lifetime, he was considered one of the world's leading experts on the life and works of Leonardo da Vinci. He was a professor of art history and Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1960 until his retirement in 1993.
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