Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#1051

Adiele Afigbo

#21220

Overall Influence

1937 - 2009 (72 years)

Adiele Eberechukwu Afigbo was a Nigerian historian known for the history and historiography of Africa, more particularly Igbo history and the history of Southeastern Nigeria. Themes emphasised include pre-colonial and colonial history, inter-group relations, the Aro and the slave trade, the art and science of history in Africa, and nation-building.

#1052

August Meier

#32431

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

August Meier was a professor of history at Kent State University and an author. He was a leading scholar on African American history. He edited several books with Elliott Rudwick. The New York Public Library has a collection of his papers.

#1053

Louis Leo Snyder

Louis Leo Snyder

#26148

Overall Influence

1907 - 1993 (86 years)

Louis Leo Snyder was an American scholar, who witnessed first hand the Nazi mass rallies held from 1923 on in Germany; and wrote about them from New York in his Hitlerism: The Iron Fist in Germany published in 1932 under the pseudonym Nordicus. Snyder predicted Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Nazi alliance with Benito Mussolini, and possibly the war upon the French and the Jews. His book was the first publication of the complete NSDAP National Socialist Program in the English language.

#1054

John Morton Blum

#37609

Overall Influence

1921 - 2011 (90 years)

John Morton Blum was an American historian, active from 1948 to 1991. He was a specialist in 20th-century American political history, and was a senior advisor to Yale officials. Life and career Blum was born in New York City, the son of Edna and Morton Gustave Blum, a businessman and inventor. His family was Jewish. He was raised in a household with limited means, and attended Phillips Academy and Harvard University on scholarships and campus jobs. Upon graduation in 1943, he was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy, serving in the Caribbean, the South West Pacific theatre of World War II, and Iwo Jima.

#1055

Dick Geary

#43853

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Dick Geary was a British historian. He studied at City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a degree in History in 1967. Geary's field of research was the European labour movement and the intellectual history of Marxism. He specialized in German History, including the German Empire since 1871, the Weimar Republic and Nazism. More recently Dick Geary developed a second research focus on the history of slavery. His methods included both social history and comparative studies.

#1056

David Nirenberg

#10617

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

David Nirenberg is a medievalist and intellectual historian. He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Divinity School, and Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and the Committee on Social Thought, as well as the former Executive Vice Provost of the University, Dean of the Social Sciences Division, and the founding Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He is also appointed to ...

#1057

Yoshinobu Shiba

#55370

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

is a retired Japanese historian of China and professor emeritus of Osaka University, who specializes in Song dynasty history. A member of the Japan Academy, he has received the Order of Culture, Order of the Sacred Treasure, and Person of Cultural Merit in Japan. In 2018, he jointly received the Tang Prize in Sinology with Stephen Owen. Several of his specialist works have been translated into English, including the landmark study Commerce and Society in Sung China , which remains a respected work on Chinese economic history. He has written two chapters that have been translated into English ...

#1058

Joseph C. Miller

#41124

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Joseph Calder Miller was an American historian and academic. He served at the University of Virginia from 1972 to 2014 as T. Cary Johnson Jr. professor of history, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a historian, Joseph wrote extensively on the early history of Africa, especially Angola, the Atlantic slave trade, women and slavery, child slavery, Atlantic history, and world history.

#1059

Alvin S. Felzenberg

#27137

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Alvin Stephen Felzenberg is an American author, columnist, consultant, educator, historian, public official, and spokesperson. He served as spokesperson of the 9/11 Commission. He has authored books on American history and biographies of U.S. presidents, including The Leaders We Deserved and A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley, Jr. .

#1060

Jens Arup Seip

#42987

Overall Influence

1905 - 1992 (87 years)

Jens Lauritz Arup Seip was a Norwegian historian originally trained as a medieval historian, but stood out as the strongest of his time in interpreting Norwegian political history in the 1800s, particularly known for having created the term "embedsmannsstaten". He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1952 to 1975, he specialized in political history and the history of ideas. He was married to fellow historian Anne-Lise Seip. Seip's use of the Norwegian language and his writing style which numerous historians have described as brilliant, and often tried emulating. Seip was included a...

#1061

Gary North

#4004

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gary Kilgore North was an American writer, Austrian School economic historian, and leading figure in the Christian reconstructionist movement. North authored or coauthored over fifty books on topics including Reformed Protestant theology, economics, and history. He was an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute.

#1062

Jona Lendering

#21812

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jona Lendering is a Dutch historian and the author of books on antiquity, Dutch history and modern management. He has an MA in history from Leiden University and an MA in Mediterranean culture from the Amsterdam Free University, taught history at the Free University, and worked as an archivist employed by the Dutch government, before becoming one of the founders of the history school Livius Onderwijs.

#1063

Harold Marcuse

#21811

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Harold Marcuse is an American professor of modern and contemporary German history and public history. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the grandson of philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

#1064

David H. Pinkney

#46010

Overall Influence

1914 - 1993 (79 years)

David H. Pinkney was a renowned scholar of French history, author, and emeritus professor of history at the University of Washington, from 1967 until his retirement in 1984. Pinkney, born in Elyria, Ohio, attended Oberlin College and received his doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1941. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services and the U.S. Navy. After military service, Pinkney began his long teaching career at the University of Missouri. In 1966 he moved to the University of Washington where he taught until his retirement in 1984.

#1065

Loren Graham

#8620

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Loren R. Graham is an American historian of science, particularly science in Russia. Career He has taught and published at Indiana University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, where he is currently a research associate. He was a participant in one of the first academic exchange programs between the United States and the Soviet Union, studying at Moscow University in 1960-61.

#1066

Nehemia Levtzion

Nehemia Levtzion

#30897

Overall Influence

1935 - 2003 (68 years)

Nehemia Levtzion was an Israeli scholar of African history, Near East, Islamic, and African studies, and the President of the Open University of Israel from 1987 to 1992 and the Executive Director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute from 1994 to 1997.

#1067

Robert E. Lerner

#35875

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Robert E. Lerner is an American medieval historian and professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University. Lerner gained his B.A. at the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1964, where he studied with Joseph R. Strayer.

#1068

Christof Mauch

#59959

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Christof Mauch is a German historian, presently director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and since 2007 professor of American Cultural History and Transatlantic Relations at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. From 1999 to 2007 Christof Mauch was the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C.. Mauch received his Dr. phil. in Modern German Literature from the University of Tübingen in 1990, and his Dr. phil. in Modern History in 1998 from the University of Cologne. He has published and edited many books in the fields of U.S. and German History and Environmental History.

#1069

Shlomo Ben-Ami

#6332

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Shlomo Ben-Ami is a former Israeli diplomat, politician, and historian. Biography Shlomo Benabou was born in Tangiers, Morocco. He immigrated to Israel in 1955. He was educated at Tel Aviv University and St Antony's College, Oxford from which he received a D.Phil. in history. Ben-Ami speaks fluent Hebrew, Spanish, French, and English.

#1070

Susan Wise Bauer

#8279

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Susan Wise Bauer is an American author, English instructor of writing and American literature at The College of William and Mary, and founder of Well-Trained Mind Press . Early life and education Susan Wise Bauer was born on August 8, 1968, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. She grew up on a farm in Virginia, the daughter of Jessie and James Wise. Her father was a pediatrician, and her mother was an educator. She and her two siblings received a homeschool education starting in the 1970s.

#1071

William R. Polk

#14433

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

William Roe Polk was an American foreign policy consultant and author. He was a professor of history at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and was President of the latter's Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.

#1072

Stuart Ewen

#8531

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Stuart Ewen is a New York-based author, historian and lecturer on media, consumer culture, and the compliance profession. He is also a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, in the departments of History, Sociology and Media Studies. He is the author of six books. Under the pen name Archie Bishop, Ewen has also worked as a graphic artist, photographer, pamphleteer, and agitprop activist for many years.

#1073

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

#21421

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.

#1074

Nancy MacLean

#4755

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Nancy K. MacLean is an American historian. She is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. MacLean's research focuses on race, gender, labor history and social movements in 20th-century U.S. history, with particular attention to the U.S. South.

#1075

Tan Qixiang

#23203

Overall Influence

1911 - 1992 (81 years)

Tan Qixiang was a Chinese geographer and historian who is considered a founder of the field of historical geography in Modern China. His magnum opus, the eight-volume The Historical Atlas of China, was published between 1982 and 1988. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1981.

#1076

Rajat Kanta Ray

#21181

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Rajat Kanta Ray is a historian of South Asian history, specializing in Modern Indian history. Background He is the son of Kumud Kanta Ray, ICS who was a Home Secretary of West Bengal in the 1960s. His grandfather, Kamakshya Ray was a contemporary of Rathindranath Tagore in Santiniketan.

#1077

Eugene N. Borza

#44711

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Eugene N. Borza was a professor emeritus of ancient history at Pennsylvania State University, where he taught from 1964 until 1995. Academic career Born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Borza came from a family of immigrants from Romania. Borza wrote extensively on the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, his most notable publication In the Shadow of Olympus . He was a guest lecturer for the In the introductory chapter of Makedonika by Carol G. Thomas. He has also been called the dean of US scholars on ancient Macedonia, and served as president of the Association of Ancient Historians for six years, from 1984 to 1989, and was a national lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America for 40 years.

#1078

Robert Fossier

#18985

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Robert Fossier was a French Historian, specializing in the Western Middle Ages. Biography Family and Education Robert Fossier was born into Catholicism. His father, a soldier who served in World War I, was angered by the Munich Agreement. His mother, a piano teacher, encouraged an interest in history and fiction. He did his secondary education in Paris, first at the lycée Janson-de-Sailly, then at the lycée Henri-IV, where he prepped for the entrance exam of the École des chartes.

#1079

Karel C. Berkhoff

#26854

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Karel Cornelis Berkhoff is a senior researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Berkhoff studied history and Russian studies at the University of Amsterdam, Soviet Studies at Harvard University and graduated in 1998 as a historian at the University of Toronto, studying under Paul Robert Magocsi, Chair of Ukrainian Studies. He studies primarily World War II in Russia and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to the ZDF documentary "Holocaust" .

#1080

David Fromkin

#16781

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

David Henry Fromkin was an American historian, best known for his interpretive account of the Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace , in which he recounts the role European powers played between 1914 and 1922 in creating the modern Middle East. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Fromkin wrote seven books, ending in 2007 with The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners.

#1081

Tim Pat Coogan

#11276

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Timothy Patrick "Tim Pat" Coogan is an Irish writer, broadcaster and newspaper columnist. He served as editor of The Irish Press newspaper from 1968-87. He has been best-known for such books as The IRA, Ireland Since the Rising, On the Blanket, and biographies of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. His biography of de Valera proved controversial, taking issue with the former Irish president's reputation and achievements, in favour of those of Collins, whom he regards as indispensable to the creation of the new State.

#1082

Christopher Dyer

#36121

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Christopher Charles Dyer is Leverhulme Emeritus Professor of Regional and Local History and director of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, England. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours.

#1083

Donald Cameron Watt

Donald Cameron Watt

#24442

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Donald Cameron Watt was a British historian. Early life Donald Cameron Watt was a chorister in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and then was educated at Rugby School. He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oriel College, Oxford, graduating from Oxford University with a bachelor's degree in 1951.

#1084

Noboru Karashima

Noboru Karashima

#32465

Overall Influence

1933 - 2015 (82 years)

was a Japanese historian, writer and Professor Emeritus in University of Tokyo, Japan. He also served as Professor Emeritus at the Taisho University, Japan. He was a prominent scholar of Asia in the studies of south Indian and South Asian histories. He has rewritten historical accounts on medieval south India and published a number of writings.

#1085

Emmanuel Todd

#10113

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Emmanuel Todd is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in Paris. His research examines the different family structures around the world and their relationship with beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical events. He has also published a number of political essays, which have received broad coverage in France.

#1086

Robert D. English

#37294

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Robert David English is an American academic, author, historian, and international relations scholar who specializes in the history and politics of contemporary Eastern Europe, the USSR, and Russia. He is an associate professor of International Foreign Policy and Defense Analysis at the University of Southern California School of International Relations.

#1087

Emilio Gabba

#63539

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Emilio Gabba was an Italian historian who specialised in Roman history. Biography Gabba was born in Pavia on 31 March 1927, to an upper-middle-class family. A pupil of Plinio Fraccaro at Pavia from 1949 to 1950, he started there a close working relationship with fellow Romanist Arnaldo Momigliano. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1955 and later was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan.

#1088

Mark Jarzombek

#17855

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mark Jarzombek is a United States-born architectural historian, author and critic. Since 1995 he has taught and served within the History Theory Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

#1089

Neagu Djuvara

#11699

Overall Influence

1916 - 2018 (102 years)

Neagu Bunea Djuvara was a Romanian historian, essayist, philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. Biography Early life A native of Bucharest, he was descended from an aristocratic Aromanian family. His father, Marcel, a graduate of the Technical University of Berlin and a captain in the Romanian Royal Army's Engineer Corps, died of the Spanish flu in 1918; his mother, Tinca, was the last descendant of the Grădișteanu family of boyar origins . Djuvara's uncles Trandafir and Alexandru Djuvara were notable public figures. Djuvara was born during World War I; as an infant, he was taken by...

#1090

John D'Emilio

#20167

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

John D'Emilio is a professor emeritus of history and of women's and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, where his advisor was William Leuchtenburg. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1998 and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1997 and also served as Director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 1995 to 1997.

#1091

Wolfram Wette

#25604

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Wolfram Wette is a German military historian and peace researcher. He is an author or editor of over 40 books on the history of Nazi Germany, including the seminal Germany and the Second World War series from the German Military History Research Office .

#1092

Philip D. Curtin

#32640

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Philip Dearmond Curtin was a Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University and historian on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. His most famous work, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census was one of the first estimates of the number of slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th century and 1870, yielding an estimate of 9,566,000 African slaves imported to the Americas. He also wrote about how many Africans were taken and from what location, how many died during the Middle Passage, how many actually arrived in the Americas, and to what colonies/countries they were imported.

#1093

Christopher Duffy

#18030

Overall Influence

1936 - 2022 (86 years)

Christopher Duffy was a British military historian. Duffy read history at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1961 with the DPhil. Afterwards, he taught military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the college of the British General Staff. He was secretary-general of the British Commission for Military History and vice-president of the Military History Society of Ireland. From 1996 to 2001, he was research professor at the De Montfort University, Leicester. He then worked as a freelance author.

#1094

Jon C. Teaford

#19318

Overall Influence

Jon C. Teaford is professor emeritus in the History Department at Purdue University. He specializes in American urban history and early on in his career he specialized in legal history. Teaford became interested in history at a young age, stemming from his fascination with president Theodore Roosevelt. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1973; his dissertation, The Municipal Revolution in America: Origins of Modern Urban Government, 1650–1825, was also published as a book in 1975. Many of his books received critical acclaim. He retired in 2003. In 2011–2012 he served as pr...

#1095

Carlos Eire

#17307

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. Education Eire received his Bachelor of Arts in History and Theology in 1973 from Loyola University, Chicago. He obtained his doctoral degree from Yale University in 1979.

#1096

Brian Regal

#17578

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Brian Regal is an American historian of science, skeptic and writer. He is an associate professor of the history of science at Kean University in New Jersey. Regal is the author of an encyclopedia of pseudoscience, as well as Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads and Cryptozoology, a scholarly study on cryptozoology. He has also written on the history of the Jersey Devil.

#1097

Woody Holton

#38113

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Abner Linwood Holton III, known as Woody Holton, is an American professor who is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. Early life Abner Linwood Holton III is the son of former Virginia Governor Linwood Holton. His sister, former Virginia First Lady Anne Holton, is the wife of U.S. Senator and former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, the Democratic Party nominee for vice president in 2016. He earned a B.A. in English at the University of Virginia, where he wrote for The Cavalier Daily, in 1981. He received his Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 1990.

#1098

Henry Ashby Turner

#31762

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. was an American historian of Germany who was a professor at Yale University for over forty years. He is best known for his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler in which he challenged the common theory that industrialists in Germany were the Nazi Party’s most influential supporters.

#1099

Emilio Gentile

#18431

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Emilio Gentile is an Italian historian and professor, specializing in the history, ideology, and culture of Italian fascism. Gentile is considered one of Italy's foremost cultural historians of Fascist Italy and its ideology. He studied under the renowned Italian historian Renzo De Felice and wrote a book about him.

#1100

Edwin M. Yamauchi

#18446

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Edwin Masao Yamauchi is a Japanese-American historian, Christian apologist, editor and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Miami University, where he taught from 1969 until 2005. He is married to Kimie Yamauchi .

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