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,

#1001

Yuji Ichioka

#21688

Overall Influence

1936 - 2002 (66 years)

Yuji Ichioka was an American historian and civil rights activist best known for his work in ethnic studies, particularly Asian American Studies and for being a leader in the Asian American movement. An adjunct professor at UCLA, he and Emma Gee coined the term "Asian American" in 1968 during the founding of the Asian American Political Alliance, to help unify different Asian ethnic groups , and was considered the preeminent scholar of Japanese American history.

#1002

Erika Weinzierl

Erika Weinzierl

#35102

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Erika Weinzierl was an Austrian historian, gender researcher, and historian of Nazism. A member of the Austrian People's Party and the Curatorium of the Austrian Mauthausen Committee, she was the second director of the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Vienna, succeeding Ludwig Jedlicka. Weinzierl was a recipient of the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, the Preis der Stadt Wien für Geisteswissenschaften, the Benemerenti medal, and the Theodor Körner Prize.

#1003

Audrey Truschke

#22247

Overall Influence

Audrey Truschke is a historian of South Asia and an associate professor at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on inter-community relations in medieval South Asia, especially during the Mughal Empire. In 2017, she was conferred with the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History by American Historical Association.

#1004

Guy Halsall

#40389

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Guy Halsall is an English historian and academic, specialising in Early Medieval Europe. He is currently based at the University of York, and has published a number of books, essays, and articles on the subject of early medieval history and archaeology. Halsall's current research focuses on western Europe in the important period of change around AD 600 and on the application of continental philosophy to history. He taught at the University of Newcastle and Birkbeck, University of London, before moving to the University of York.

#1005

Simon Franklin

#16948

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Simon Franklin is Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is a Fellow of Clare College. In 2007 he was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences for outstanding achievements in research in Russian history and culture.

#1006

Frank Sulloway

#4616

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Frank Jones Sulloway is an American psychologist. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology. After finishing secondary school at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, Sulloway studied at Harvard College and later earned a PhD in the history of science at Harvard. He was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1007

Kent Deng

#50756

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dr Kent Deng, FRHistS, is full professor in Economic History at the London School of Economics. He is a member of the Asian Research Centre and has been Secretary of the History and Economic Development Group UK since 2000.

#1008

Robert M. Citino

Robert M. Citino

#32056

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Robert M. Citino is an American military historian and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National WWII Museum. He is a leading authority on modern German military history, with an emphasis on World War II and the German influence upon modern operational doctrine.

#1009

David Dumville

#31937

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David Norman Dumville is a British medievalist and Celtic scholar. He attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; and received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1976, presenting the thesis "The textual history of the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum". He is professor emeritus of Celtic & Anglo-Saxon at the University of Aberdeen. He has previously taught or held posts at Swansea University , the University of Pennsylvania , and the University of Cambridge, . Among other academic appointments, he was visiti...

#1010

Alex Woolf

#29145

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Alex Woolf is a British medieval historian and academic. He specialises in the history of Britain and Ireland and to a lesser extent Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages, with a particular emphasis on interaction and comparison across traditional ethnic boundaries. He is a senior lecturer at the University of St Andrews.

#1011

Robert J. Richards

#16532

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert J. Richards is an author and the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago. He has written or edited seven books about the history of science as well as dozens of articles.

#1012

Jack P. Greene

#35437

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Jack Philip Greene is an American historian, specializing in Colonial American history and Atlantic history. Greene was born in Lafayette, Indiana and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He spent most of his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-1999 he was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Universi...

#1013

Wolfgang Leonhard

Wolfgang Leonhard

#17210

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Wolfgang Leonhard was a German political author and historian of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Communism. A German Communist whose family had fled Hitler's Germany and who was educated in the Soviet Union, after World War II Leonhard became one of the founders and leaders of the German Democratic Republic until he became disillusioned and fled in 1949, first defecting to Yugoslavia and then moving to West Germany in 1950 and later to the United Kingdom. In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he was a popular and influential professor at Yale University from 1966...

#1014

Ragnhild Hatton

#25812

Overall Influence

1913 - 1995 (82 years)

Ragnhild Marie Hatton was professor of International History at the London School of Economics. As the author of her obituary declared, she was "for a generation Britain's leading historian of 17th- and 18th century Europe...."

#1015

Deborah Dash Moore

#15898

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Deborah Dash Moore is the former director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

#1016

Herman Van der Wee

#30062

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Herman Frans Anna baron Van der Wee is a Belgian economic historian. He was a full professor of social and economic history at the KU Leuven from 1969 to 1993. The academic output of Van der Wee spans economic history, the history of banking, financial history. He has performed research on the period from the Middle Ages to the present time. Geographically he has performed broad research as well, looking into Antwerp, Belgium, the Low Countries, Europe and the world.

#1017

John Iliffe

#13015

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Iliffe is a British historian, specialising in the history of Africa and especially Tanzania. He was Professor of African History at the University of Cambridge and fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was awarded the 1988 Herskovits Prize for The African Poor: A History.

#1018

Werner Abelshauser

#30686

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Werner Abelshauser is a German economic historian. Life Abelshauser studied economics at the University of Mannheim and graduated in 1970. He received his PhD at Ruhr University Bochum in 1973 with his dissertation on West German economy 1945–1948. In 1980 he was appointed as Professor for economic and social history in Bochum. From 1983 to 1988, he was acting director of the institute for the research on the European workers movement . He was visiting professor at Bielefeld, Göttingen, Cologne, , Oxford , Florence , St. Louis, Missouri and Sydney . From 1988 to 1991, he held the chair in European History of the 20th century at the European University Institute in Florence.

#1019

Catherine Merridale

Catherine Merridale

#21470

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Catherine Anne Merridale, FBA is a British writer and historian with a special interest in Russian history. Early life and education Merridale was born on 12 October 1959 to Philip and Anne Merridale. She was educated at Andover Grammar School, a state school in Andover, Hampshire, and at Cricklade College, a further education college that is also in Andover. She studied history at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1982. She continued her studies at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham, and completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1987.

#1020

Sönke Neitzel

#26136

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Sönke Neitzel is a German historian who has written extensively about the Second World War. He is editor of the journal German History in the 20th Century and has written several books such as Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying; The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs based on recordings of German POWs held at Trent Park which he wrote with Harald Welzer. Neitzel edited the book Tapping Hitler's Generals .

#1021

Ubiratan D'Ambrosio

Ubiratan D'Ambrosio

#12554

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Ubiratan D'Ambrosio was a Brazilian mathematics educator and historian of mathematics. Life D'Ambrosio was born in São Paulo, and earned his doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 1963. He retired as a professor of mathematics from the State University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil in 1993.

#1022

Bernard Wasserstein

#16678

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Bernard Wasserstein is a British and American historian. Early life Bernard Wasserstein was born in London on 22 January 1948. Wasserstein's father, Abraham Wasserstein , born in Frankfurt, was Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His mother, Margaret , was born in Budapest. He was educated at the High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Boys' Grammar School, Leicester. He earned a BA in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford in 1969 and a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1974. In 2001 he was awarded the 'advanced research degree' of DLitt by Oxford University. His brother, David J.

#1023

Mark Connelly

#31854

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mark Connelly is a professor and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he is both a military historian, and the Reuters Lecturer in Media History. Connelly specialises in the 19th Century and First World War.

#1024

Seppo Hentilä

#60466

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Seppo Juhani Hentilä , is a Finnish historian. Hentilä was 1980–98 docent in political history at Helsinki University and became 1998 professor in the subject of matter. He has studied the DDR-Finnish relations and Finnish athletics history. Amongst his productions can be found Suomen työläisurheilun historia , Kaksi Saksaa ja Suomi and several academic textbooks.

#1025

Younan Labib Rizk

Younan Labib Rizk

#44210

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Younan Labib Rizk was a prominent Egyptian historian and literary figure. He was a professor of history at Ain Shams University in Cairo; and was also appointed a member of the History Committee of the Supreme Council for Culture. He was formerly Director of Historical Studies at the Institute of Research and Arab Studies. Rizk was a prolific writer with a weekly column appearing in Al-Ahram newspaper where he founded and headed the History Studies Centre. He was the author of several esteemed publications which rendered him an authority on Modern History, which was the subject of his MA and PhD degrees in 1963 and 1967 respectively.

#1026

David Stahel

#16094

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

David Stahel is a historian, author and senior lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales. He specialises in German military history of World War II. Stahel has authored several books on the military operations of the first six months of the Eastern Front, including on the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Kiev and the Battle for Moscow.

#1027

Jože Pirjevec

#12182

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jože Pirjevec , registered at birth Giuseppe Pierazzi because of the Italianization policy under the Fascist regime, is a Slovene–Italian historian and a prominent diplomatic historian of the west Balkans region, as well as a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

#1028

Londa Schiebinger

Londa Schiebinger

#5352

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender and intersectionality in science, technology, and medicine, she is the founding Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium , from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden , and from Universitat de València, Spain .

#1029

William W. Hagen

#35862

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

William W. Hagen is a historian and professor of history at the University of California-Davis. Hagen's focus is on modern European history, primarily in relation to Germany and Eastern Europe. He obtained his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Starting as assistant professor in 1970, he became associate professor of history in 1977 and professor of history in 1981. From 1992 to 1998, Hagen served as director of the UC Davis Center for History, Society, and Culture. In 1996, he served as president of the Conference Group for Central European H...

#1030

Frederick Kagan

Frederick Kagan

#22625

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Frederick W. Kagan is an American resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Career He and his father, Donald Kagan, who was a professor at Yale and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, co-authored While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today . The book argued in favor of a large increase in military spending and warned of future threats, including from a potential revival of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. Frederick and Robert Kagan, who is a mem...

#1031

Abbas Amanat

#13554

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Abbas Amanat is an Iranian-born American historian, scholar, author, editor, and professor. He serves as the William Graham Sumner Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies.

#1032

Alan Milward

#40200

Overall Influence

1935 - 2010 (75 years)

Alan Steele Milward, was a British economic historian. One of the most influential historians of the second half of the twentieth century, Milward's work was well known in Britain, across Europe and beyond. He derived that reputation not from the writing of popular histories or media appearances but from his abilities as a linguist, economic historian, archival researcher, historical narrator and political scientist. He made an essential contribution to the understanding of modern European history and integration: the elements that went to shape contemporary Europe.

#1033

Olivier Zunz

#30849

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Olivier Zunz is a social historian, and Commonwealth Professor at the University of Virginia, known for his work on the twentieth-century history of the American urban society and the development of modern philanthropy. He is also a leading Tocqueville historian.

#1034

Jean-Louis Margolin

#17619

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jean-Louis Margolin is a French academic specialising in the history of eastern Asia. His positions include coordinator and lecturer in history at the University of Provence, and for the Research Institute on Southeast Asia of CNRS. Margolin's works include L'armée de l'empereur: Violences et crimes du Japon en guerre 1937-1945 , which was awarded the Augustin Thierry literary prize in 2007. He was one of authors of The Black Book of Communism.

#1035

Bernd Wegner

#36419

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Bernd Wegner is a German historian who specialises in military history and the history of Nazism. Since 1997 he has been professor of modern history at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany.

#1036

Marshall Poe

#20206

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Marshall Tillbrook Poe is an American historian, writer, editor and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of non-fiction authors. He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian and World history at various universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has also taught courses on new media and online collaboration.

#1037

David F. Noble

#16032

Overall Influence

1945 - 2010 (65 years)

David Franklin Noble was a historian and critic of technology, science and education, best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science and the department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Noble held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Smithsonian Institution, and Drexel University, as well as many visiting professorships.

#1038

David K. Wyatt

#15832

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

David Kent Wyatt was an American historian and author who studied Thailand. He taught at Cornell University from 1969 to 2002, and also served as Chair of the Cornell University Department of History and as the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1993. His book Thailand: A Short History has become a standard text on Thai history in the English language.

#1039

Wilfried Feldenkirchen

#50113

Overall Influence

1947 - 2010 (63 years)

Wilfried Paul Feldenkirchen was a German professor and economic historian. Life Wilfried Feldenkirchen was born in Cologne and studied history, English studies and economics at the University of Bonn. He was awarded a doctorate in 1974 for his thesis on Commerce in the City of Cologne in the 18th Century. In 1980, he earned a Habilitation with his thesis on The Iron and Steel Industry of the Ruhr District 1879-1914. Feldenkirchen was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis in 1982. In 1985, he became a professor at the University of Bonn, where he was also director of the University Academic Exchange Service.

#1040

Marcus Rediker

#31710

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Marcus Buford Rediker is an American professor, historian, writer, and social activist. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976 and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an Master of Arts and Ph.D. in history. He taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994 and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History of the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh.

#1041

Harold Hyman

#51385

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (100 years)

Harold Melvin Hyman was an American historian of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era and the William P. Hobby Professor of History at Rice University. During World War II, Hyman served in the Marines in the South Pacific and there earned his high school diploma. Hyman received a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

#1042

Michael G. Morony

#38723

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Michael Gregory Morony has been a professor of history at UCLA since 1974, with interests in the history of Ancient and Islamic Near East. Morony was born in 1939 in Sacramento and was raised in Alaska. He holds a BA in Near Eastern Languages from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Islamic Studies and a PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, originally advised by Gustave von Grunebaum, was concerned with the history of Mesopotamia after the Islamic Conquests. The edited dissertation was later published as Iraq After the Muslim Conquest.

#1043

Boyd Hilton

#38246

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Andrew John Boyd Hilton, FBA is a British historian and a professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He specialises in modern British history, from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.

#1044

Jean-Jacques Becker

Jean-Jacques Becker

#16375

Overall Influence

1928 - 2023 (95 years)

Jean-Jacques Becker was a French historian. A specialist of contemporary history, he was the brother of historian Annie Kriegel and father to World War I specialist Annette Becker. Biography Jean-Jacques Becker was born into a family descended from the Jewish community of Alsace-Lorraine, located in Paris. In July 1942, he entered the South zone with his parents who settled in Grenoble . He continued his studies at the Lycée Champollion earning his Baccalauréat. Following the popularity of his family to communism, he became a member of the Communist Party from 1947 to 1960. Because of his membership in the Communist Party, he did not participate in the war in Algeria.

#1045

Peter Winn

#5247

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Peter Winn is a professor of history at Tufts University specializing in Latin America. He has written several books, including Americas, which he developed while serving as academic director for the 1993 PBS series of the same name.

#1046

Anthony Pagden

#29759

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Anthony Robin Dermer Pagden is an author and professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Anthony Pagden is the son of John Brian Dermer Pagden and Joan Mary Pagden. Mr Pagden was educated at the Grange School in Santiago de Chile and Westminster School in London. He attended the University of Barcelona from 1964 to 1967. From 1967 to 1969 he worked as an assistant editor at the Trianon Press , and as a free-lance translator. He also spent some time in Cyprus in 1967 and 1968. Admitted in 1969 to Oriel College, Oxford to read Persian and Arabic, he changed the following year to History and Spanish.

#1047

Volker Berghahn

#44934

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Volker Rolf Berghahn is a historian of German and modern European history at Columbia University. His research interests have included the fin de siècle period in Europe, the origins of World War I, and German-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1961 and his PhD, under supervision of Francis L. Carsten, from the University of London in 1964. Prior to teaching in the United States, Berghahn worked in the United Kingdom and Germany. In 1988, he accepted a position at Brown University, and moved to Columbia ten years later.

#1048

Richard Lowitt

#17930

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Richard Lowitt was an American historian. He was a professor of American History at Iowa State University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, and the author of several books about the American West.

#1049

Wilfred M. McClay

#20306

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Wilfred M. McClay is an American academic currently on the faculty of Hillsdale College. Early life and education McClay graduated from St. John's College, and received a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1987.

#1050

Alan Palmer

#32497

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Alan Warwick Palmer was a British author of popular historical and biographical books. A number of these books were translated into other languages. Background Palmer was educated at Bancroft's School, Woodford Green, London, and Oriel College, Oxford. He spent 19 years as senior history teacher at Highgate School before becoming a full-time writer and researcher. His late wife, Veronica Palmer collaborated on several of his books.

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