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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School

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Subdiscipline

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List of the most influential people in History,

#1101

Joseph Pérez

#21572

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Joseph Pérez was a French historian specializing in Spanish history. Pérez specialized in the births of the modern Spanish state and the Latin American nations. Among his books, he examined the independence movements of Hispanic America; Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs; Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Philip II of Spain.

#1102

Matthew Restall

#31115

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

#1103

H. Bruce Franklin

#11359

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Howard Bruce Franklin is an American cultural historian and scholar. He is notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature and marine ecology. He has written or edited twenty books and three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films. His main areas of academic focus are science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history. He was instrumental in helping to debunk false public speculation that Vietnam was continuing to hold prisoners of war.

#1104

François Crouzet

François Crouzet

#35171

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

François Crouzet was a French historian. Considered the greatest French historian of Britain of his generation, he was Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne at the time of his death.

#1105

Andrew Wilson

#12841

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Andrew Wilson is a British historian and political scientist specializing in Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine. He is a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Professor in Ukrainian studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. He wrote The Ukrainians: The Story of How a People Became a Nation and Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World.

#1106

Thomas K. McCraw

#23874

Overall Influence

1940 - 2012 (72 years)

Thomas Kincaid McCraw was an American business historian and Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, who won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for History for Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn , which "used biography to explore thorny issues in economics."

#1107

Joachim Remak

#28742

Overall Influence

1920 - 2001 (81 years)

Joachim Remak was a historian of Modern Europe, especially of Germany and World War I. Born in Berlin, Germany, he fled Nazi Germany in 1938 for the United States. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942 and 1946. He worked for the State Department in Germany and the United Kingdom and then returned to the United States for doctoral study and earned his Ph.D. in history at Stanford University in 1955; his dissertation dealt with "Germany and the United States, 1933–1939." He married Roberta Anne Remak in 1948.

#1108

Jonathan Barnes

#2243

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jonathan Barnes, FBA is an English scholar of Aristotelian and ancient philosophy. Education and career He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford University. He taught for 25 years at Oxford University before moving to the University of Geneva. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, 1968–78; a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, 1978–94, and has been Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College since 1994.

#1109

Mary Poovey

#16120

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mary Louise Poovey is an American cultural historian and literary critic whose work focuses on the Victorian Era. She is currently Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University, and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge. Poovey has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Swarthmore College, and Yale University.

#1110

Sheldon H. Harris

#13697

Overall Influence

1928 - 2002 (74 years)

Sheldon Howard Harris was a historian and Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Northridge. Biography Harris was born in Brooklyn. A professor of History at California State University, Northridge, in 1984 he became involved in research on Japanese biological warfare experimentation in Manchuria. His research led him to deliver several papers to international conferences on science and ethics and to the publication of a number of scholarly articles that aroused considerable interest in the United States, Europe, Japan and China. He published six books and dozens of articles.

#1111

Robert Malcolm Errington

#57439

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Robert Malcolm Errington , also known as R. Malcolm Errington, is a retired British historian who studied ancient Greece and the Classical world. He is a professor emeritus from Queen's University Belfast and the University of Marburg.

#1112

Randolph L. Braham

Randolph L. Braham

#11503

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Randolph Lewis Braham was an American historian and political scientist, born in Romania, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A specialist in comparative politics and the Holocaust, he was a founding board member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Washington, D.C., and founded The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center in 1979.

#1113

Piotr S. Wandycz

#35935

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Piotr Stefan Wandycz was a Polish-American historian. He was also the President of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and professor emeritus at Yale University, specializing in Eastern and Central European history.

#1114

Uri Milstein

#20083

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Uri Milstein is an Israeli historian and philosopher, specializing in military history. Biography Uri Milstein was born in Tel Aviv to Avraham Milstein, a volunteer in the British army in World War II, and Sarah Milstein, a kindergarten teacher. His parents were among the founders of Kibbutz Afikim, and his father was a member of David Ben-Gurion's party; the Mapai, and on the "Haganah" . His older brother was a member of the "Palmach". Uri himself was a member of Mapai's youth party, HaTnuah HaMe'uchedet .

#1115

Timothy Brook

#22079

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Timothy James Brook is a Canadian historian, sinologist, and writer specializing in the study of China . He holds the Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia. His research interests include the social and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty in China; law and punishment in Imperial China; collaboration during Japan's wartime occupation of China, 1937–45 and war crimes trials in Asia; global history; and historiography.

#1116

Ioan-Aurel Pop

#53326

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Ioan-Aurel Pop is a Romanian historian. Pop was appointed Professor of History at Babeș-Bolyai University in 1996. He has since been Chairman of the Department of Medieval History and the History of Premodern Art at Babeș-Bolyai University. Since 2012, Pop has been Rector at Babeș-Bolyai University. In 2018 he was elected President of the Romanian Academy and re-elected in 2022.

#1117

Edward Chaney

#17295

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Edward Chaney is a British cultural historian. He is Professor Emeritus at Solent University and Honorary Professor at University College London . He is an authority on the evolution of the Grand Tour, Anglo-Italian cultural relations, the history of collecting, Inigo Jones and the legacy of ancient Egypt. He also publishes on aspects of 20th-century British art. In 2003, he was made a Commendatore of the Italian Republic. He is the biographer of Gerald Basil Edwards, author of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page which he succeeded in publishing following the author's death in 1976. This has since ...

#1118

David G. Dalin

#31808

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David G. Dalin is an American rabbi and historian, and the author, co-author, or editor of twelve books on American Jewish history and politics, and Jewish-Christian relations. Career Dalin received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University, and a second M.A. and rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. In 2015, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

#1119

Karen Hagemann

#46236

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Karen Hagemann is a German-American historian. She holds the James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on Modern German, European and Transatlantic history, the history of military and war and women’s and gender history.

#1120

Janet Abu-Lughod

#22316

Overall Influence

1928 - 2013 (85 years)

Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod was an American sociologist who made major contributions to world-systems theory and urban sociology. Early life Raised in Newark, New Jersey, United States, she attended Weequahic High School, where she was influenced by the works of Lewis Mumford about urbanization.

#1121

Moshe Gil

#28727

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Moshe Gil was an Israeli historian. Academic career Moshe Gil specialized in the historical interaction between Islam and the Jews, including the history of Palestine under the Islamic domination, the institution of the Exilarchate, and Jewish merchants such as the Radhanites. Gil was professor emeritus of the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University and held the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair in the History of the Jews in Muslim Lands.

#1122

Carmel McCaffrey

#25708

Overall Influence

Carmel McCaffrey is an Irish author of books and lecturer on Irish history, literature, culture, and language at Johns Hopkins University and at the Smithsonian Institution. Biography McCaffrey was born in Dublin, Ireland, and teaches Irish history and Irish literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is also a frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. She founded and edited the literary review Wild About Wilde dedicated to the works of the 19th-century Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. She was the series historical consultant for the three part PBS/RTÉ program In Search of Ancient Ireland and co-author of the book of the same title.

#1123

Joanna Michlic

#28166

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Joanna Beata Michlic is a Polish social and cultural historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland. An honorary senior research associate at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London , she focuses in particular on the collective memory of traumatic events, particularly as it relates to gender and childhood.

#1124

Robert Hugh Ferrell

#22949

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Robert Hugh Ferrell was an American historian and a prolific author or editor of more than 60 books on a wide range of topics, including the U.S. presidency, World War I, and U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. One of the country's leading historians, Ferrell was widely considered the preeminent authority on the administration of Harry S. Truman, and also wrote books about half a dozen other 20th-century presidents. He was thought by many in the field to be the "dean of American diplomatic historians", a title he disavowed.

#1125

Kelly DeVries

#33493

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Kelly Robert DeVries is an American historian specializing in the warfare of the Middle Ages. He is often featured as an expert commentator on television documentaries. He is professor of history at Loyola University Maryland and Honorary Historical Consultant at the Royal Armouries, UK.

#1126

Michael Whitby

#64261

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Lionel Michael Whitby is a British ancient historian of Late Antiquity. He specialises in late Roman and early Byzantine history and historiography. He is currently pro-vice-chancellor and head of the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham.

#1127

Rüdiger Overmans

#13827

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Rüdiger Overmans is a German military historian who specializes in World War II history. His book German Military Losses in World War II, which he compiled as leader of a project sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, is one of the most comprehensive works about German casualties in World War II.

#1128

Albert Nofi

#32611

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Albert A. Nofi , is an American military historian, defense analyst, and designer of board and computer wargaming systems. Early life A native of Brooklyn, he attended New York City public schools, graduating from the Boys' High School in 1961. Nofi attended Fordham University, earning a bachelor's and a master's , and then received a Ph.D. in Military History from the City University of New York .

#1129

Colin Kidd

#18720

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Colin Craig Kidd is a historian who specializes in American and Scottish history. He is currently Professor of History at the University of St Andrews, after he served as Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at Queen's University Belfast, where he has worked since he left the University of Glasgow in 2010.

#1130

Suvira Jaiswal

#50761

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Suvira Jaiswal is an Indian historian. She is known for her research into the social history of ancient India, especially the evolution of the caste system and the development and absorption of regional deities into the Hindu pantheon.

#1131

Peter C. Mancall

#55060

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Peter Mancall is a professor of history at the University of Southern California whose work has focused on early America, American Indians, and the early modern Atlantic world. Biography A 1981 graduate of Oberlin College, Mancall attended graduate school at Harvard University, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1986, under the supervision of Bernard Bailyn. Mancall was a visiting Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College from 1986 to 1987. After teaching as a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard for two years, he took a position at the University of Kansas in 1989....

#1132

Brian Glyn Williams

#47127

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Brian Glyn Williams is a professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who worked for the CIA. As an undergraduate, he attended Stetson University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1988. He received his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Central Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. An expert on history of the Middle East, he has written a number of books on Afghanistan, the War on Terror and General Rashid Dostum. His articles have been published by the Jamestown Foundation. As an expert in the country, he teaches courses on Afghanistan...

#1133

Christian Pfister

#48146

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Christian Pfister is a Swiss historian. Life Pfister studied history and geography at the University of Bern from 1966 to 1970, where he graduated in 1974. This was followed by study visits to the University of Rochester and the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He habilitated in 1982. From 1990 to 1996, Pfister was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation in his research on climate history. From 1997 until his retirement in 2009, he was Full Professor of Economic, Social and Environmental History at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern. For the first time, his professorship combined the three pillars of the sustainability discourse.

#1134

Thomas G. Alexander

#41530

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Thomas Glen Alexander is an American historian and academic who is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he was also Lemuel Hardison Redd, Jr. Professor of Western History and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. After studying at Weber State University and Utah State University , he received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. He taught history at BYU from 1964 until 2004, and served in the leadership of various local and historical organizations.

#1135

Stefan Berger

#31072

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Stefan Berger is the Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and Chairman of the committee of the Library of the Ruhr Foundation. He is Professor of Social History at the Ruhr University. He specializes in nationalism and national identity studies, historiography and historical theory, comparative labour studies, and the history of industrial heritage.

#1136

Daniele Ganser

#14170

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Daniele Ganser is a Swiss author and conspiracy theorist. He is best known for his 2005 book NATO's Secret Armies. Background His father Gottfried Ganser-Bosshart , whose parents were Germans, was a Protestant pastor of the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches . His mother Jeannette Ganser was a nurse. He has a sister named Tea.

#1137

Tim Cornell

#46301

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Timothy J. Cornell is a British historian specializing in ancient Rome. He is an Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester, having retired from his teaching position in 2011.

#1138

Brian Manning

#32219

Overall Influence

1927 - 2004 (77 years)

Brian Manning was a British Marxist historian. Biography Manning's father was sports writer Lionel Manning and his half-brother was Daily Mail sports columnist and one-time Conservative candidate J. L. Manning. Manning was the uncle of Doctor Who actor Katy Manning.

#1139

Adolf M. Birke

#63798

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Adolf M. Birke is professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Munich. He was director of the German Historical Institute London from August 1977 to July 1985.

#1140

John M. MacKenzie

#42861

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John MacDonald MacKenzie is a British historian of imperialism who pioneered the study of popular and cultural imperialism, as well as aspects of environmental history. He has also written about Scottish migration and the development of museums around the world. He is Emeritus Professor of imperial history at Lancaster University and founder of the Manchester University Press ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series .

#1141

Gerd Koenen

#44881

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Gerd Koenen is a German historian and former communist politician. Life and work Born in Marburg, Koenen grew up in Bochum and Gelsenkirchen and studied Romance languages, history and politics in Tübingen. There, he joined the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund in the wake of the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg by the police. In 1968 he moved to Frankfurt, where in 1972, he completed the state exam in history and politics.

#1142

Sirajul Islam

#27636

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sirajul Islam is Bangladeshi historian, writer, columnist, professor and academician. He is the chairman of the Board of Editors of Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia of Bangladesh, and the editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. He is also famous for his works on agriculture, British era land tenure and social history of Bengal.

#1143

B. N. Mukherjee

#51251

Overall Influence

1932 - 2013 (81 years)

Bratindra Nath Mukherjee was an Indian historian, numismatist, epigraphist and iconographist, known for his scholarship in central Asian languages such as Sogdian. He was a Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture at Calcutta University and is reported to have deciphered many ancient scripts. He was the author of 50 books and over 700 articles on ancient history, numismatics and epigraphy. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 1992.

#1144

Dieter Pohl

#31033

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Dieter Pohl is a German historian and author who specialises in the Eastern European history and the history of mass violence in the 20th century. Education and career Dieter Pohl studied history and political science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1984 to 1990, graduating with a Masters of Arts. Under the direction of Hans Günter Hockerts, he completed his PhD dissertation Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 in 1995. From 1995 to August 2010, Pohl was a researcher, and then a department head, at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History. S...

#1145

Adam Ulam

#14795

Overall Influence

1922 - 2000 (78 years)

Adam Bruno Ulam was a Polish-American historian of Jewish descent and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities and top experts in Sovietology and Kremlinology, he authored multiple books and articles in these academic disciplines.

#1146

Judith M. Brown

#38933

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Judith Margaret Brown is a British historian, academic and Anglican priest, who specialises in the study of modern South Asia. From 1990 to 2011, she was the Beit Professor of Commonwealth History and a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Earlier she taught at the University of Manchester and completed her Ph.D. at Girton College, Cambridge. Brown was born in India but educated in Britain. She retired from teaching in 2011.

#1147

Donald Nicol

#50796

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

Donald MacGillivray Nicol, was an English Byzantinist. Life Nicol was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, to a Church of Scotland minister, and received a classical education at King Edward VII School in Sheffield and St Paul's School in London. Registering as a conscientious objector in 1941, he served in 1942–1946 in the Friends' Ambulance Unit, with which he first visited Greece in 1944–1945, visiting Ioannina and the Meteora monasteries.

#1148

Lyndall Ryan

#20562

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#1149

Lyndal Roper

#38418

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Lyndal Anne Roper is a historian. She was born in Melbourne, Australia. She works on German history of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and has written a biography of Martin Luther. Her research centres on gender and the Reformation, witchcraft, and visual culture. In 2011 she was appointed to Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford, the first woman and first Australian to hold this position.

#1150

Rolf-Dieter Müller

#33244

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Rolf-Dieter Müller is a German military historian and political scientist, who has served as Scientific Director of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office since 1999. Rolf-Dieter Müller is also a former professor of military history at Humboldt University.

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