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).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#951

Darlene Clark Hine

#27831

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Darlene Clark Hine is an American author and professor in the field of African-American history. She is a recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal. Early life and education Darlene Clark was born in Morley, Missouri, the oldest of four children of Levester Clark, a truck driver, and Lottie Mae Clark. She married William C. Hine in 1970 and divorced in 1974. She married Johnny E. Brown in 1981 and divorced in 1986 and has one daughter, Robbie Davine.

#952

Ellen Schrecker

#19108

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Ellen Wolf Schrecker is an American professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University. She has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU. She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism. Historian Ronald Radosh has described her as "the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians."

#953

Amanda Vickery

#35051

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Amanda Jane Vickery is an English historian, writer, radio and television presenter, and professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London. Education and career Vickery was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, and attended Penwortham Girls' Grammar School. She graduated from the former Bedford College, London , where she completed her PhD in Modern History.

#954

Isaac Kramnick

#17706

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Isaac Kramnick was an American political theorist, historian of political thought, political scientist, and the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University. He was a subject-matter expert on English and American political thought and history.

#955

Sander Gilman

#6677

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Sander L. Gilman, born on February 21, 1944, is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books.

#956

Peter Brunt

#45446

Overall Influence

1917 - 2005 (88 years)

Peter Astbury Brunt FBA was a British academic and ancient historian. He was Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1970 to 1982. During his career, he lectured at the University of St Andrews, Oriel College, Oxford, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Brasenose College, Oxford.

#957

Petr Sommer

#53771

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Petr Sommer was a Czech historian and archaeologist. He focused on church archaeology, spiritual culture of the Middle Ages and its reflection in archaeological sources. Life and research Petr Sommer was born in Rakovník. He studied history and prehistory at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and later he worked as archaeologist for the Museum of East Bohemia in Pardubice and for the City of Prague Museum. In 1976, he started to work for the Institute of Archaeology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and he became its director in 1993–1998. Then, he was the deputy direc...

#958

Eric Henry Monkkonen

#36679

Overall Influence

1942 - 2005 (63 years)

Eric Henry Monkkonen was an American urban and social science historian who conducted authoritative studies on the history of crime as well as urban development. His work produced evidence that countered and overturned many assumptions, such as that crime rates are higher in urban areas, and increased during post-war periods and economic downturns. His works on the history of crime in several cities were extensive, cataloging close to every recorded homicide in New York City since 1798, and every homicide in Los Angeles since 1827, and conducting extensive studies on several more cities, primarily in the Western world.

#959

Cyriac Pullapilly

#17044

Overall Influence

Cyriac K. Pullapilly was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former priest of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church and a professor of history at Saint Mary's College, Indiana. Biography Cyriac Pullapilly was an only child, born in what is now Kerala, India, on June 15, 1932. Raised by his mother, Anna, he was educated at St. Thomas College and St. Joseph's Pontifical Seminary before becoming an ordained priest in the Eastern Rite Syro-Malabar Catholic Church on March 16, 1958. According to some source, the ordination was the culmination of his mother's ambitions for him, although others say that his parents were initially reluctant for him to enter the church.

#960

Cyril Mango

#19484

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Cyril Alexander Mango was a British scholar of the history, art, and architecture of the Byzantine Empire. He is celebrated as one of the leading Byzantinists of the 20th century. Mango was Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, the University of Oxford Bywater and Sotheby Professor Emeritus of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature and emeritus professorial fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

#961

Lynne Viola

#26606

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lynne Viola is a scholar on the Soviet Union. She is a professor at the University of Toronto and has written four books and 30 articles. Early life Raised in Nutley, New Jersey, she graduated from Nutley High School in 1973.

#962

Richard Sakwa

#10224

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Richard Sakwa is a British political scientist and a former professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, a senior research fellow at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and an honorary professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University. He has written books about Russian, Central and Eastern European communist and post-communist politics.

#963

Roger Owen

#28702

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Edward Roger John Owen was a British historian who wrote several classic works on the history of the modern Middle East. His research interests included the economic, social and political history of the Middle East, especially Egypt, from 1800 to the present, as well as the theories of imperialism, including military occupations.

#964

Adrienne Mayor

#17982

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Adrienne Mayor is a historian of ancient science and a classical folklorist. Mayor specializes in ancient history and the study of "folk science", or how pre-scientific cultures interpreted data about the natural world, and how these interpretations form the basis of many ancient myths, folklore and popular beliefs. Her work in pre-scientific fossil discoveries and traditional interpretations of paleontological remains has opened up a new field within the emerging discipline of geomythology and classical folklore. Mayor's book, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs, on the origins o...

#965

Yang Kuisong

#65963

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Yang Kuisong is a Chinese historian. His work covers the history of the Chinese Communist Party. He is currently a professor of history at the East China Normal University, a researcher at the Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities, and concurrently holds a position as a professor at Peking University.

#966

Robin Jeffrey

#16876

Overall Influence

Robin Bannerman Jeffrey is a Canadian-born professor. His primary research interest is the modern history and politics of India, especially with reference the northern area of Punjab and Kerala in the south. He is also interested in Indian media studies and development studies.

#967

Matti Klinge

#26563

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Matti Klinge was a Finnish historian. Klinge studied at the University of Helsinki and gained his Ph.D. in 1969. He later served as a visiting professor at the University of Paris and held the Swedish Professorship of History at the University of Helsinki between 1975 and 2001. Klinge was one of the most prolific Finnish historians.

#968

R. I. Moore

#42736

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Robert Ian Moore , most commonly known as R. I. Moore, is a British historian who is Professor Emeritus of History at Newcastle University. He specialises in medieval history and has written several influential works on the subject of heresy. Moore was a pioneer in the UK of the teaching of world history to undergraduate students, has published numerous papers on comparative world history, and is series editor of the Blackwell History of the World.

#969

Peter H. Wilson

#55028

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Peter Hamish Wilson, FRHistS is a British historian. Since 2015, he has held the Chichele Professor of the History of War chair at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Biography Wilson studied at the University of Liverpool and at the Jesus College of the University of Cambridge . He specialized in German history and military history. In 1990 he became a lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Sunderland and in 1994, at Newcastle University. In 1998, he returned to Sunderland as a Reader, and was subsequently Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sunderland from 2001 to 2006.

#970

Nicholas Orme

#28581

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Nicholas Orme is a British historian specialising in the Middle Ages and Tudor period, focusing on the history of children, and ecclesiastical history, with a particular interest in South West England.

#971

John Higham

#37712

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

John William Higham was an American historian, scholar of American culture, historiography and ethnicity. In the 1950s he was a prominent critic of Consensus history. Historian Dorothy Ross says, "The multi-ethnic environment of his early life in Queens, the wartime optimism, and his immersion in Progressive history, with its fundamental faith in American democracy, gave him a vision of an egalitarian, cosmopolitan, American nationalism in which he never lost faith."

#972

John McManners

#17508

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

John McManners was a British clergyman and historian of religion who specialized in the history of the church and other aspects of religious life in 18th-century France. He was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 1984. He also served as Fellow and Chaplain of All Souls College, Oxford, from 1964 to 2001.

#973

Francis Robinson

#27309

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Francis Christopher Rowland Robinson CBE, DL, FRAS is a British historian and academic who specialises in the history of South Asia and Islam. Since 1990, he has been Professor of History of South Asia at the University of London. He has twice been president of the Royal Asiatic Society: from 1997 to 2000, and from 2003 to 2006.

#974

Guy Beiner

#17126

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Guy Beiner is an Israeli-born historian of the late-modern period with particular expertise in Irish history. Academic career Guy Beiner was born and raised in Jerusalem and later moved to kibbutz Glil Yam. After traveling abroad, he relocated to the Negev region. Beiner is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and holds a PhD from the University College Dublin . He was a Government of Ireland Scholar at UCD, an Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish S...

#975

Wolfgang Mieder

Wolfgang Mieder

#4963

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Wolfgang Mieder is a retired professor of German and folklore who taught for 50 years at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont, USA. He is a graduate of Olivet College , the University of Michigan , and Michigan State University . He has been a guest speaker at the University of Freiburg in Germany, the country where he was born.

#976

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

#12020

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi was the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, a position he held from 1980 to 2008. Early life and education Yerushalmi was born in the Bronx, New York City on May 20, 1932, to Yiddish-speaking Russian parents who had immigrated to the United States. His father was a Hebrew teacher. His name was originally Joseph Hyman Erushalmy.

#977

Eric Van Young

#13231

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Eric Van Young, Distinguished Professor of History at University of California, San Diego, is an American historian of Mexico who has published extensively on socioeconomic and political history of the colonial era and the nineteenth century. He is particularly well known for his 2001 book, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1821, which won a major prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History. His article "The Islands in the Storm: Quiet Cities and Violent Countrysides in the Mexican Independence Era," published in Past and Present won the Conference on Latin American History Award in 1989.

#978

Ian Morris

#19607

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian, archaeologist, and Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University. Early life Morris was born on 27 January 1960 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England. He attended Alleyne's High School, a comprehensive school in Stone, Staffordshire. He studied at the University of Birmingham, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. He undertook a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1985. His doctoral thesis was titled "Burial and society at Athens, 1100-500 BC".

#979

Hartmut Kaelble

#40489

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Hartmut Kaelble is a German historian. From 1971 to 1991, he taught Economic and Social history as a professor at the Free University of Berlin and from 1991 to 2008, he taught social history as a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Kaelble is well known amongst social historians of the Federal Republic of Germany.

#980

Allen G. Debus

#20709

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Allen George Debus was an American historian of science, known primarily for his work on the history of chemistry and alchemy. In 1991 he was honored at the University of Chicago with an academic conference held in his name. Paul H. Theerman and Karen Hunger Parshall edited the proceedings, and Debus contributed his autobiography of which this article is a digest.

#981

Stephen Kinzer

#3768

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stephen Kinzer is an American author, journalist, and academic. A former New York Times correspondent, he has published several books and writes for several newspapers and news agencies. Reporting career During the 1980s, Kinzer covered revolutions and social upheaval in Central America and wrote his first book, Bitter Fruit, about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, The New York Times appointed Kinzer to head its Berlin bureau, from which he covered Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from the Soviet bloc. Kinzer was The New York Times chief in t...

#982

Eiji Oguma

#41274

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Eiji Oguma is a Japanese historical sociologist, a professor at Keio University, a documentary filmmaker, and a guitarist. Born in Akishima in Tokyo Metropolis in 1962, Oguma received his PhD from Tokyo University in 1998. Since 1997, he has been on the faculty at Keio University, where he was named a full professor in 2007. Oguma has written extensively on postwar social and political history, and issues of Japanese nationalism. Recently, he has turned to documentary filmmaking, directing a documentary on Japanese protests against nuclear power in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake ...

#983

Dina Porat

#23772

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dina Porat is an Israeli historian. She is professor emeritus of modern Jewish history at the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University and the chief historian of Yad Vashem. Academic career Dina Porat served as head of the Jewish History Department at Tel Aviv University's Stephen Roth Institute. She is head of the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and holds the Alfred P. Slaner Chair for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University.

#984

Sebastian Balfour

Sebastian Balfour

#4452

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sebastian Balfour is an English historian and Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics. Works Author BooksChapters in collective worksArticles in academic journals

#985

Trond Nordby

#38318

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Trond Nordby is a Norwegian historian and political scientist. He graduated candidatus philologiæ in 1972, and received his PhD in 1984. He worked as a research fellow and lecturer of history at the University of Oslo from 1975 to 1986. From 1985 to 1989 he was a researcher for NAVF, and from 1990 he worked at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research. He is now a professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, having been promoted in 1995.

#986

Walter A. McDougall

#35831

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Walter Allen McDougall is an American historian, currently a professor of history and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. McDougall graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College and fought in Vietnam before completing his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in 1974. He was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. He also received an Earhart Foundation Fellowship. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley for 13 years before moving to Pennsylvania.

#987

Annie Kriegel

#26844

Overall Influence

1926 - 1995 (69 years)

Annie Kriegel, née Annie Becker was a French historian, a leading expert on communist studies and the history of Communism, a cofounder of the academic journal Communisme , and a columnist for Le Figaro.

#988

Kiyoshi Inoue

#36131

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Kiyoshi Inoue was a Japanese academic, historian, author and professor emeritus of the Kyoto University. He was considered a specialist in modern Japanese history. He was also known as a "progressive historian" and a "Marxist historian."

#989

Adam Fairclough

#51510

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Adam Fairclough is a British historian of the United States. He is the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Between 2008 and 2014, he served as the chair of the Netherlands American Studies Association. He has written on a number of subjects, and specializes in the Civil Rights Movement and the period of Reconstruction. His best known work is To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Fairclough is a qualified expert in the field of American History, but specialize...

#990

John L. Heilbron

#18827

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

John Lewis Heilbron was an American historian of science best known for his work in the history of physics and the history of astronomy. He was Professor of History and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and visiting professor at Yale University and the California Institute of Technology. He edited the academic journal Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences for twenty-five years.

#991

Andreas Gestrich

#52081

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Professor Andreas Gestrich is a German historian who has been director of the German Historical Institute London since September 2006. Early life and education Gestrich was born on 3 July 1952. He studied from 1973 to 1979 history, Latin and Russian at the Free University of Berlin and at the Universities of Tübingen and Bristol. In 1979 he completed his studies with the first state examination for teaching at grammar schools in the subjects of history and Latin. Instead of teaching, Gestrich became a research assistant to a DFG project on the social history of childhood, youth and family at the Institute of Education at the University of Tübingen.

#992

Kevin M. Kruse

#13437

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Kevin Michael Kruse is an American historian and a professor of history at Princeton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the making of modern conservatism. Outside of academia, Kruse has attracted substantial attention and following for his Twitter threads where he provides historical context and applies historical research to current political events.

#993

Dimitri Obolensky

Dimitri Obolensky

#23123

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky was a Russian-British historian who was Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford and the author of various historical works. Biography Prince Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky was born in the Russian Soviet Republic on 1 April 1918 in Saint Petersburg, the son of Prince Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky and Countess Maria . His family was descended from Rurik, Igor, Svyatoslav, St Vladimir of Kiev, St Michael of Chernigov, and Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov: however, as one of his students has written, "he was a sober enough sc...

#994

Colin Lucas

#21625

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Sir Colin Renshaw Lucas, is a British historian and university administrator. From 1997 to 2004, he was the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. In May 2006, he was appointed Chair of the Board of the British Library for a four-year term ending 2010.

#995

William C. Kirby

#18577

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. He is the chairman of the Harvard China Fund, Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai, Harvard's first University-wide center located outside the United States, former Director of Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, former Chair of the History Department and the former Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he oversaw 10,000 students, 1,000 faculty members, 2,500 staff, and an annual budget of $1 billion and announced his resignation...

#996

Michael Kort

#62546

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Michael Kort is an American historian, academic, and author who studies and has written extensively about the history of the Soviet Union. He teaches at Boston University. Biography Michael Kort was born in 1944. He received a B.A. in history from Johns Hopkins University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Russian history from New York University.

#997

Jacob Katz

#14767

Overall Influence

1904 - 1998 (94 years)

Jacob Katz was an acclaimed Jewish historian and educator. Katz described "traditional society" and deployed sociological methods in his study of Jewish communities, with special attention to changes in halakhah and Orthodoxy. He pioneered the modern study of Orthodoxy and its formation in reaction to Reform Judaism.

#998

Tanika Sarkar

#37115

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Tanika Sarkar is a historian of modern India based at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Sarkar's work focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and politics in both colonial and postcolonial South Asia, in particular on women and the Hindu Right.

#999

Michael Harsgor

Michael Harsgor

#43087

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Michael Harsgor was an Israeli historian and a professor of history at the Tel Aviv University. Harsgor's expertise was in the history of Europe in the late Middle Ages. Biography Harsgor was born Michael Goldberg in Bucharest into a Jewish family who were refugees from the October Revolution in Russia who settled in Romania. Early on, Harsgor's parents had the desire to give him a Western education and therefore his family moved to France. The economic crisis of 1929 damaged his father's business and therefore in 1933 his family returned to Romania. Harsgor's family intended to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine, but this proved impossible during World War II.

#1000

John Mack Faragher

#24927

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

John Mack Faragher is an American historian. Life Born in 1945, he was raised in southern California, the oldest of eight children. Several of his siblings have been in the music business, including Danny Faragher, Jimmy Faragher, Tommy Faragher, Davey Faragher, Pammy Faragher, and Marty Faragher. He graduated from the University of California, Riverside in 1967, did social work for several years, then graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in 1977. He taught at Mount Holyoke College from 1978 to 1993; then at Yale University from 1993 until his retirement as Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies in 2016.

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