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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#1151

Darrin McMahon

#17710

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Darrin M. McMahon is a historian, author, public speaker, and currently a professor of history at Dartmouth College, where he is Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History. Prior to joining the Dartmouth Faculty, he was Ben Weider Professor and distinguished research professor at Florida State University.

#1152

Elizabeth Abbott

#20272

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Elizabeth Louise Abbott is a Canadian writer, historian and animal rights activist. She is the former dean of women for St. Hilda's College at the University of Toronto and is currently a senior research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

#1153

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

#10183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh , Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.

#1154

David Pingree

#9829

Overall Influence

1933 - 2005 (72 years)

David Edwin Pingree was an American historian of mathematics in the ancient world. He was a University Professor and Professor of History of Mathematics and Classics at Brown University. Life Pingree graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1950. He studied at Harvard University, where he earned his doctorate in 1960 with a dissertation on the supposed transmission of Hellenistic astrology to India. His dissertation was supervised by Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr. and Otto Eduard Neugebauer. After completing his PhD, Pingree remained at Harvard three more years as a memb...

#1155

Dylan C. Penningroth

#27645

Overall Influence

Dylan C. Penningroth is a historian and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Program grant. Life Penningroth received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1993 and his Masters and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His studies focus on elements of African American life under slavery and in the half-century following slavery’s abolition.

#1156

Jussi Hanhimäki

#21215

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Jussi M. Hanhimäki is a Finnish historian, specializing in the history of the Cold War, American foreign policy, transatlantic relations, international organizations and refugees. Background Hanhimäki is currently professor and the Chair of the Department of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva. He has previously taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His book The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy has been acclaimed by his academic peers. In the U.S. media, however, its reception was lukewarm.

#1157

Richard Carrier

Richard Carrier

#9813

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Richard Cevantis Carrier is an ancient historian. He is long-time contributor to skeptical websites, including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs, Carrier has published a number of books and articles on philosophy and religion in classical antiquity, discussing the development of early Christianity from a skeptical viewpoint, and concerning religion and morality in the modern world. He has publicly debated a number of scholars on the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity. He is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works.

#1158

Paul Ortiz

#63654

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Paul Ortiz is an American historian. Ortiz is a professor of history at the University of Florida and is Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. Life and education Born in 1964, Paul Ortiz is a third-generation military veteran and a first-generation college graduate. Ortiz served as a paratrooper and radio operator, attaining the rank of sergeant, in the United States Army from 1982 to 1986 with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 7th Special Forces Group in Central America. He received the US Armed Forces' Humanitarian Service Medal for meritorious action in the wake of the erup...

#1159

Moshe Sharon

#15784

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Moshe Sharon is an Israeli historian of Islam. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he serves as Chair in Baháʼí Studies.

#1160

Erich S. Gruen

#46979

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Erich Stephen Gruen is an American classicist and ancient historian. He was the Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught full-time from 1966 until 2008. He served as president of the American Philological Association in 1992.

#1161

Andrew Lambert

#20616

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andrew Lambert is a British naval historian, who since 2001 has been the Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Academic career After completing his doctoral research, Lambert was lecturer in modern international history at Bristol Polytechnic from 1983 until 1987; consultant in the Department of History and International Affairs at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, from 1987 until 1989; senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, from 1989 until 1991; senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King'...

#1162

Oliver Rackham

#12236

Overall Influence

1939 - 2015 (76 years)

Oliver Rackham was an academic at the University of Cambridge who studied the ecology, management and development of the British countryside, especially trees, woodlands and wood pasture. His books included Ancient Woodland and The History of the Countryside .

#1163

Anthea M. Hartig

Anthea M. Hartig

#51978

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Anthea M. Hartig is an American historian and museum administrator who is the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian trustees appointed Hartig as director beginning in 2019, succeeding John Gray. She is the museum's first female director.

#1164

Allan Lichtman

#22500

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Allan Jay Lichtman is an American historian. He has taught at American University in Washington, D.C. since 1973. Lichtman created the Keys to the White House model with Soviet seismologist Vladimir Keilis-Borok in 1981. The model uses 13 true/false criteria to predict whether the presidential candidate of the incumbent party will win or lose the next election. Using this model, Lichtman has accurately predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1984, with the exception of 2000. He ran for the U.S. Senate seat from Maryland in 2006, finishing in sixth place in the Democratic primary.

#1165

Konrad Repgen

#33099

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Konrad Repgen was a German historian and a professor emeritus at the University of Bonn. He was revered for his work on contemporary church history. Life Konrad Repgen was born in 1923 at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Hütte, part of the conurbation of Troisdorf a short distance to the south-east of Cologne. His father was a teacher and an active member of the Catholic Centre Party. In January 1933, a régime change heralded a rapid switch to single-party government, and Repgen's father, identified as an activist member of one of the "wrong" parties, lost his teaching job the same year.

#1166

Pierre Hadot

#5655

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Pierre Hadot was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy specializing in ancient philosophy, particularly Epicureanism and Stoicism. Life In 1944, Hadot was ordained, but following Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis left the priesthood. He studied at the Sorbonne between 1946–1947. In 1961, he graduated from the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1964, he was appointed a Director of Studies at EPHE, initially occupying a chair in Latin Patristics, before his chair was renamed "Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity" in 1972. He became profe...

#1167

Trevor N. Dupuy

Trevor N. Dupuy

#29175

Overall Influence

1916 - 1995 (79 years)

Trevor Nevitt Dupuy was a colonel in the United States Army and a noted military historian. Early life Born in Staten Island, New York, the son of accomplished illustrator and artist, Laura Nevitt Dupuy, and noted military historian, R. Ernest Dupuy, Trevor Dupuy followed in his father's footsteps.

#1168

Sorin Antohi

#29777

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Sorin Antohi is a Romanian historian, essayist, and journalist. Biography Antohi was born in Târgu Ocna, Bacău County. He received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Iași and a DEA from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

#1169

Andrew Cayton

#61425

Overall Influence

1954 - 2015 (61 years)

Andrew R. L. Cayton was a scholar of early American history. He taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Ball State, and, from 1990 to 2015, at Miami University . In 2015 he was appointed Warner Woodring Chair in History at the Ohio State University. He has been the John Adams Professor of American Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands; a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Center at Bellagio, Italy; and a resident fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in Monticello, Virginia; and was the 2012–2013 Frank H. Kenan Fellow at the National Humanities Center i...

#1170

Christian Hartmann

Christian Hartmann

#51457

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

For the composer, see Christian Hartmann . Christian Hartmann is a German historian. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. Life and work Hartmann grew up in Tübingen. In 1981, he worked in the Tel Joseph kibbutz in Israel. Following his compulsory military service, he studied history, German and sport at the universities of Tübingen, Cologne and Freiburg. He completed his university studies in 1986 with the First State Exam for grammar school teaching. In 1989, he completed his PhD in Cologne with a thesis on General Franz Halder, chief of the General Staff of the German Army, 1938–1942.

#1171

J. C. D. Clark

#26281

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark is a British historian of both British and American history. He received his undergraduate degree at Downing College, Cambridge. Having previously held posts at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford into 1996, he has since held the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History at the University of Kansas.

#1172

John R. Lampe

#55189

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

John R. Lampe is an American educator. He is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Biography Lampe received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1971. He has published several books; his first was Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950, From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations, with Marvin Jackson, published by Indiana University Press in 1982. It was the winner of the first annual Vucinich Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also the author of Balkans into Southeastern Europe and Yugoslavia as History: Twice There ...

#1173

William S. McFeely

William S. McFeely

#35767

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

William Shield McFeely was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and for advancing the field of African-American history. He retired as the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia in 1997, and was affiliated with Harvard University since 2006.

#1174

Jane Kamensky

#60445

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Jane Kamensky, an American historian, is a professor of history at Harvard University. On October 17, 2023 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates UNESCO World Heritage Site Monticello, in Charlottesville, VA announced Kamensky would assume the Presidency of the Foundation in January, 2024. She is also the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library.

#1175

Timothy Tackett

Timothy Tackett

#49451

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

[[File:|thumb|Timothy Tackett ]] Timothy Tackett is an American historian specializing in the French Revolution and professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. His 1996 book about the members of the National Constituent Assembly of 1789 won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association in 2001; he has also written about the Flight to Varennes and the emergence of the Terror amid the turbulence of the Revolution.

#1176

O. Meredith Wilson

#27992

Overall Influence

1909 - 1998 (89 years)

Owen Meredith Wilson was an American historian and academic administrator. He served as president of the University of Oregon from 1954 to 1960 and as president of the University of Minnesota from 1960 to 1967.

#1177

Philip S. Foner

#27460

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Philip Sheldon Foner was an American labor historian and teacher. Foner was a prolific author and editor of more than 100 books. He is considered a pioneer in his extensive works on the role of radicals, Black Americans, and women in American labor and political history, which were generally neglected in mainstream academia at the time. A Marxist thinker, he influenced more than a generation of scholars, inspiring some of the work published by younger academics from the 1970s on. In 1941, Foner became a public figure as one among 26 persons fired from teaching and staff positions at City Coll...

#1178

Sylvana Tomaselli

#17995

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Sylvana Palma Windsor, Countess of St Andrews is a Canadian-born academic and historian. By virtue of marriage she is a member of the House of Windsor and is related to the British royal family as the wife of George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, eldest son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Katharine, Duchess of Kent and second cousin of King Charles III.

#1179

Alice Echols

#9314

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Alice Echols is Professor of History, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Education Echols received her bachelor's degree from Macalester College, Minnesota in 1973. She obtained her master's degree and Doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1980 and 1986 respectively.

#1180

Viliam Judák

#48659

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Viliam Judák is the diocesan Bishop of Nitra, Slovakia. He was a priest in Nitra, where he gained a Th.D. in 1991, and was then seminary rector of St. Gorazd in Nitra and then dean of Comenius University in Bratislava . He is an academic with specialties in Christian antiquity and the medieval Slovak church history and is the author of several monographs in the field of church history, and many books, articles and publications. He speaks German and Italian.

#1181

Juan Francisco Fuentes

#34653

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Juan Francisco Fuentes Aragonés is a Spanish historian specialized in contemporary history. Born in 1955 in Barcelona, he is professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. His works cover contemporary history and socialism in Spain, including biographies of José Marchena, Francisco Largo Caballero, Luis Araquistáin, and Adolfo Suárez. He collaborated with Javier Fernández Sebastián, with whom he wrote Historia del periodismo español and Diccionario político y social del siglo XX español.

#1182

Dale Allison

#9071

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Dale C. Allison is an American New Testament scholar and historian of Early Christianity. Allison is currently the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. Previously , he served as Errett M. Grable Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church .

#1183

Richard Sutch

#30393

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

Richard Charles Sutch was a professor of economics at the University of California Riverside. He is noted for his work on the economic analysis of U.S. slavery and emancipation. He was awarded a "Clio" Award For Exceptional Support to the Field of Cliometrics, by the Cliometric Society and his work has received recognition by the Economic History Association via its awarding him the Arthur H. Cole Prize for the Outstanding Article in The Journal of Economic History. Over the period 1989-1990 he served as the president of the Economic History Association.

#1184

John Connelly

#33803

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

John Connelly is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests include modern East and Central European history, comparative education and the history of nationalism.

#1185

John Newsinger

#14451

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

John Newsinger is a British historian and academic, who is an emeritus professor of history at Bath Spa University. Newsinger is a book reviewer for Race & Class and the New Left Review. He is also author of numerous books and articles, as well as studies of science fiction and of the cinema. He teaches on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

#1186

Rolf Peter Sieferle

#49120

Overall Influence

1949 - 2016 (67 years)

Rolf Peter Sieferle was a German historian known for applying the methodology of the social sciences to contemporary topics including ecological sustainability and social capital. He was a pioneer scholar of German environmental history. His work was wide ranging, addressing German conservatism around the period of the First World War, Karl Marx, and the fall of Communism. He was an advisor on climate change to the Angela Merkel government.

#1187

Philip D. Morgan

#43550

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Philip D. Morgan is a British historian. He has specialized in Early Modern colonial British America and slavery in the Americas. In 1999, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry .

#1188

Raymond Detrez

#45369

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Raymond Detrez is Professor of East European history and cultures and modern Greek history at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Biography He has studied Eastern European languages and history at the University of Ghent and specialised in Bulgarian philology at the University of Sofia . For around two decades, he worked as a producer of the Belgian Radio and then became a professor of Eastern European history and culture. In 1986, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on the autobiography of Grigor Parlichev. Detrez has published books and articles on 19th and 20th century Balkan history, minority questions and nationalism.

#1189

Sitta von Reden

Sitta von Reden

#52931

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sitta von Reden is a German ancient historian and Professor of Ancient History at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg. She is particularly known for her research on ancient economics, and the social and cultural history of the Graeco-Roman world.

#1190

Pierre Vilar

#47544

Overall Influence

1906 - 2003 (97 years)

Pierre Vilar was a French historian specialized in the history of Catalonia and Hispanism. He is considered one of the most authoritative 20th-century historians for the history of Spain, for both the Ancien Régime and modern history. He and Jaume Vicens Vives were among the most influential historians of Catalonia. His short 1947 essay Histoire de l'Espagne , despite being banned under Francoism, has a great success, and after the death of the Francisco Franco was frequently used in progressive circles and for teaching. In 2009, it reached its 22nd edition.

#1191

Roshdi Rashed

#7538

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Roshdi Rashed , born in Cairo in 1936, is a mathematician, philosopher and historian of science, whose work focuses largely on mathematics and physics of the medieval Arab world. His work explores and illuminates the unrecognized Arab scientific tradition, being one of the first historians to study in detail the ancient and medieval texts, their journey through the Eastern schools and courses, their immense contributions to Western science, particularly in regarding the development of algebra and the first formalization of physics.

#1192

Leonardo Benevolo

#32208

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Leonardo Benevolo was an Italian architect, city planner and architecture historian. Born in Orta San Giulio, Italy, Benevolo studied architecture in Rome where he graduated in 1946. Later taught history of architecture in Rome, Florence, Venice and Palermo. His book Storia dell'archittetura moderna first published in 1960 has been reprinted 18 times, as of 1996, and translated into six other languages. Benevolo developed the concept of ‘neo-conservative’ city which became an important contribution to the understanding of cities’ evolution.

#1193

Rosemarie Said Zahlan

Rosemarie Said Zahlan

#30431

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Rosemarie Said Zahlan was a Palestinian-American historian and writer on the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. She was a sister of Edward Said. In addition to her books, she also wrote for the Financial Times, the Middle East Journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Encyclopedia of Islam.

#1194

Geo Widengren

#22688

Overall Influence

1907 - 1996 (89 years)

Geo Widengren was a Swedish historian of religions, professor of history of religions at Uppsala University, orientalist and Iranist. Widengren wrote a series of works on Iranian religions , Islam, Judaism, Gnosticism, etc. His most popular works include Die Religion Irans, published in 1965 .

#1195

Henry F. May

#23043

Overall Influence

1915 - 2012 (97 years)

Henry Farnum May was an American historian and Margaret Byrne Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. Life Henry May was the son of Henry F. May, a lawyer, and May May. Born in Denver, Colorado, he was reared in Berkeley, California, and spent a formative year in Europe with his family as the youngest of three children. He married Jean Louise Terrace on June 18, 1941, and they had two children. He earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. May was an instructor of history at Lawrence College from 1941 to ...

#1196

Bruce H. Mann

#17974

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Bruce Hartling Mann is an American legal scholar who is the Carl F. Schipper, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and husband of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. A legal historian, his research focuses on the relationship among legal, social, and economic change in early United States. He began teaching at Harvard Law School in 2006, after being the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

#1197

John Deacon

#15328

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

John Richard Deacon is an English retired musician, best known for being the bass guitarist for the rock band Queen. He wrote several songs for the group, including Top 10 hits "You're My Best Friend", "Another One Bites the Dust" and "I Want to Break Free"; co-wrote "Under Pressure", "Friends Will Be Friends" and "One Vision"; and he was involved in the band's financial management.

#1198

Nicola Di Cosmo

#55913

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Nicola Di Cosmo is the Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. His main field of research is the history of the relations between China and Inner Asia from prehistory to the modern period.

#1199

Donald Quataert

#34107

Overall Influence

1941 - 2011 (70 years)

Donald George Quataert was a historian at Binghamton University. He taught courses on Middle East/Ottoman history, with an interest in labor, social and economics, during the early and modern periods. He also provided training in the reading of Ottoman archival sources.

#1200

Donna Gabaccia

#30757

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Donna Rae Gabaccia is an American historian who studies international migration, with an emphasis on cultural exchange, such as food and from a gendered perspective. From 2003 to 2005 she was the Andrew Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and from 2005 to 2012 she held the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair of Immigration History at the University of Minnesota. During the same period, she was the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. In 2013, her book, Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on American Immigration won the Immigration ...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions