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,

#1251

Alistair Cameron Crombie

#14358

Overall Influence

1915 - 1996 (81 years)

Alistair Cameron Crombie was an Australian historian of science who began his career as a zoologist. He was noted for his contributions to research on competition between species before turning to history.

#1252

Askold Ivantchik

#71665

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Askold Igorevich Ivantchik is a Russian historian. Receiving his Ph.D. in history in 1996, Ivantchik was made a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2003 and is Professor of History at Moscow State University. Since 2009 he has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ancient History. Ivantchik specializes in the study of the ancient Eurasian steppe nomads such as the Cimmerians and Scythians. From 2017 he is a editor-in-chief of the Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia and foreign Corresponding Member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

#1253

Randall J. Stephens

#35903

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Randall J. Stephens is an editor and historian of American religion. Career Stephens is a Professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. From 2004 to 2012 he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of History at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, and from 2012 to 2018 he was a Reader and Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Northumbria University, in Newcastle, England. He served as editor of the Journal of Southern Religion from 2006 to 2010, and from 2005 to 2013 he was an editor of Historically Speaking published by Johns Hopkins University Press, based out of Boston University.

#1254

Gabriel Gorodetsky

Gabriel Gorodetsky

#26891

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Gabriel Gorodetsky is an Israeli academic who is the Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University. Gorodetsky studied History and Russian Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and went on to obtain his Ph.D degree under the supervision of British historian E. H. Carr in Oxford. He was the director of the Cummings Center for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University from 1991–2007. He has been a visiting fellow of St. Antony's College in Oxford in 1979 and in 1993, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washingto...

#1255

Robert L. Paquette

#42118

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Robert Louis Paquette is an American historian and former Professor of American History at Hamilton College, and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He is particularly known for his work on the history of slavery in Cuba.

#1256

Edwin Gaustad

#26858

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Edwin Scott Gaustad was a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. He achieved fame with his study of the genealogy of religion in the United States, Historical atlas of religion in America. The 1972 edition of this work has been used in secular histories of Mainline Protestantism and the Emergent church movement for decades, and his a Religious History of America was a standard text for college students. A graduate of Baylor University and Brown University, Gaustad dedicated his career to sharing his expansive research on religious history. Gaustad was president of the American Society of Church History.

#1257

William B. Taylor

#27780

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

William B. Taylor is a historian of colonial Mexico, who held the Sonne Chair of History at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement. He made major contributions to the study of colonial land tenure, peasant rebellions, and many aspects of colonial religion in Mexico. In 2007 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History, the highest honor of the professional organization of Latin American historians.

#1258

Sean McMeekin

#49010

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Sean McMeekin is an American historian, focused on European history of the early 20th century. His main research interests include modern German history, Russian history, communism, and the origins of the First and Second World Wars and the roles of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

#1259

John Charmley

#31866

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

John Denis Charmley is a British academic and diplomatic historian. Since 2002 he has held various posts at the University of East Anglia: initially as Head of the School of History, then as the Head of the School of Music and most recently as the Head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Humanities. Since 2016 he has been Pro-Vice Chancellor for Academic strategy at St Mary's University, Twickenham. In this role he has been responsible for initiating the University's Foundation Year Programme, reflecting Professor Charmley's commitment to widening educational access.

#1260

Michael Grant

#13965

Overall Influence

1914 - 2004 (90 years)

Michael Grant was an English classicist, numismatist, and author of numerous books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. Having studied and held a number of academic posts in the United Kingdom and the Middle East, he retired early to devote himself fully to writing. He once described himself as "one of the very few freelancers in the field of ancient history: a rare phenomenon". As a populariser, his hallmarks were his prolific output and his unwillingness to oversimplify or talk down to his readership. He published ove...

#1261

Amnon Netzer

#14243

Overall Influence

1934 - 2008 (74 years)

Amnon Netzer was an Iranian-born Israeli historian, researcher, professor and journalist. Netzer was a leading authority on Iranian history and culture as well as Persian and Judeo-Persian languages. Netzer founded Israel Broadcasting Authority's Persian Service in 1958 and was a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his death in 2008.

#1262

Gunther Stent

#8940

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

Gunther S. Stent was Graduate Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the early bacteriophage biologists, he was known also for his studies on the metabolism of bacteria and neurobiology of leeches, and for his writing on the history and philosophy of biology.

#1263

George Makdisi

#4286

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

George Abraham Makdisi was born in Detroit, Michigan, on May 15, 1920. He died in Media, Pennsylvania, on September 6, 2002. He was a professor of oriental studies. He studied first in the United States, and later in Lebanon. He then graduated in 1964 in France from the Paris-Sorbonne University.

#1264

Andrew Hussey

#17005

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Andrew Hussey OBE is an English historian of French culture and biographer. He has published multiple books, focusing primarily on 20th century French history and biography. Early life Born in Liverpool, Hussey was educated at the University of Manchester and the Jean Moulin University Lyon 3. He received his PhD for a thesis on Georges Bataille, eventually published as his first book.

#1265

Donald Adamson

#11392

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Donald Adamson , is a British literary scholar, philosopher and historian. Books which he has written include Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist, and Thinker about God and The Curriers' Company: A Modern History. His works are regarded as a gateway to European literature.

#1266

Henry Friedlander

#16260

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Henry Egon Friedlander was a German-American Jewish historian of the Holocaust who was noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of casualties of the Holocaust. Born in Berlin, Germany, to a Jewish family, Friedlander moved to the United States in 1947 as a survivor of Auschwitz, obtaining his BA in history at Temple University in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and 1968.

#1267

Verene Shepherd

#29385

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Verene Albertha Shepherd is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of social history at the University of the West Indies in Mona. She is the director of the university's Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and specialises in Jamaican social history and diaspora studies. She has published prolifically in journals and books on topics including Jamaican economic history during slavery, the Indian experience in Jamaica, migration and diasporas and Caribbean women's history, and is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.

#1268

Ivo Goldstein

#22716

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ivo Goldstein is a historian, author and ambassador from Croatia. Goldstein is a recipient of the Order of Danica Hrvatska and the City of Zagreb Award . Biography Education Ivo Goldstein graduated from the Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb and in 1976 he enrolled into undergraduate History studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb where he graduated in 1979.

#1269

Sheppard Frere

#32310

Overall Influence

1916 - 2015 (99 years)

Sheppard Sunderland Frere, CBE, FSA, FBA was a British historian and archaeologist who studied the Roman Empire. He was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Biography The son of Noel Gray Frere, of the Colonial Service, and his wife Agnes , Sheppard "Sam" Frere was born in 1916. He was educated at Lancing College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a master at Epsom College from 1938–41, and became classics master and housemaster at Lancing College from 1945 to 1954, when he was in charge of the excavations at Canterbury during his summer vacations. He made a number of broadcasts about his work at that time.

#1270

Richard Drayton

#39636

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Richard Drayton FRHistS is a Guyana-born historian and Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London. Biography Richard Drayton was born in Guyana in 1964, to parents Kathleen and Harold Drayton , and grew up in Barbados, where he migrated with his family in 1972. He went to school at Harrison College in Bridgetown, from which he left as a Barbados Scholar to Harvard University. He was a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford as the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar, and at Yale University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Paul Kennedy.

#1271

Stephen Prothero

#35165

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Stephen Richard Prothero is an American scholar of religion. He is the C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor of Religion in America at Boston University and the author or editor of eleven books on religion in the United States, including the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy.

#1272

A. I. Sabra

#25184

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Abdelhamid Ibrahim Sabra was a professor of the history of science specializing in the history of optics and science in medieval Islam. He died December 18, 2013. Sabra provided English translation and commentary for Books I-III of Ibn al-Haytham's seven book Kitab al-Manazir , written in Arabic in the 11th century.

#1273

Heinrich Fichtenau

#33883

Overall Influence

1912 - 2000 (88 years)

Heinrich von Fichtenau was an Austrian medievalist best known for his studies of medieval diplomatics, social, and intellectual history. He spent his academic career at the University of Vienna and from 1962 to 1983 served as director of the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung . Many of Fichtenau's books were translated into English and he remains one of the few Austrian medievalists of the postwar period whose work has enjoyed a broad and influential reception in Anglophone scholarship.

#1274

David Arnold

#22820

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

David Arnold is a historian and has held the position of Professor of Asian and Global History at Warwick University since 2006. Previously he held the position of professor of South Asian History at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He was one of the founding members of the subaltern studies group in the 1970s, remembered by Ranajit Guha in 1993 as "an assortment of marginalised academics". Arnold contributed seven articles in total to the publication and co-edited the eighth volume with David Hardiman in 1994. He later described this period as consisting of ...

#1275

Ann Lambton

#18704

Overall Influence

1912 - 2008 (96 years)

Ann Katharine Swynford Lambton, , usually known as A.K.S. Lambton or "Nancy" Lambton, was a British historian and expert on medieval and early modern Persian history, Persian language, Islamic political theory, and Persian social organisation. She was an acknowledged authority on land tenure and reform in Iran .

#1276

Marilyn Yalom

#11109

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Marilyn Yalom was a feminist author and historian. She was a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and a professor of French. She served as the institute's director from 1984 to 1985. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Yalom taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and California State University Hayward .

#1277

Barbara Levick

#30609

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Barbara M. Levick is a British historian and epigrapher, focusing particularly on the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire. She is recognised within her field as one of the leading Roman historians of her generation.

#1278

Retha Warnicke

#42580

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Retha Marvine Warnicke is an American historian and Professor of History at Arizona State University. Career Warnicke graduated with a BA from Indiana University, magna cum laude, in 1961. She then moved on to Harvard University, where she earned her MA and PhD in 1963 and 1969, respectively. During her junior year, she joined Phi Beta Kappa and in her senior year, she was granted the Listenfelt Scholarship, for outstanding Undergraduate History Major, following in 1961 with the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

#1279

Constantin Zureiq

Constantin Zureiq

#14865

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Constantin Zurayk was a prominent and influential Syrian Arab intellectual who was one of the first to pioneer and express the importance of Arab nationalism. He stressed the urgent need to transform stagnant Arab society by means of rational thought and radical modification of the methods of thinking and acting. He developed some ideas, such as the "Arab mission" and "national philosophy", which were to become key concepts for Arab nationalist thinkers, and in more recent years was a strong proponent of an intellectual reformation of Arab society, emphasizing the need for rationalism and a...

#1280

Moshe Zimmermann

Moshe Zimmermann

#33301

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Moshe Zimmermann is an Israeli historian and writer. Since 1986 he has been director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Moshe Zimmerman was born in Jerusalem.

#1281

Pascal Ory

#41562

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Pascal Ory is a French historian. A student of René Rémond, he specialises in cultural and political history and has written on Fascism ever since his master's dissertation on the Greenshirts of Henri Dorgères. In the 1970s, he contributed to a better definition of cultural history.

#1282

W. G. Hoskins

#31308

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

William George Hoskins was an English local historian who founded the first university department of English Local History. His great contribution to the study of history was in the field of landscape history.

#1283

John Robert Greene

John Robert Greene

#23501

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

John Robert Greene is an American historian who was the Paul J. Schupf Professor, History and Humanities, the director of the History Program, co-director of the History/Social Science major, and the College Archivist, at Cazenovia College in Cazenovia, New York. Greene specializes in American history, with research and writing interests in the American presidency. He has edited or written twenty books, including works on Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He has also written several volumes on the history of higher education.

#1284

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

#21483

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is a Malawian historian, literary critic, novelist, short-story writer and blogger at The Zeleza Post. He was president of the African Studies Association. He was the Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Quinnipiac University. He served as Vice Chancellor of the United States International University Africa from 2016 to 2021, located in Nairobi, Kenya. He served as Associate Provost and North Star Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio from 2021 to 2023, and was appointed to his current position as Senior Advisor for Strategic Init...

#1285

Thomas W. Laqueur

Thomas W. Laqueur

#18440

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Thomas Walter Laqueur is an American historian, sexologist and writer. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, and is currently the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California. Laqueur was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.

#1286

Colette Beaune

#57821

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Colette Beaune is a French historian and professor emeritus at the University of Paris X - Nanterre. Biography Beaune was born in the town of Chailles, located in the department Loire-et-Cher, in 1943. She developed a passion for the study of Joan of Arc while reading the entirety of the documents related to Joan's trial during her second year of preparatory courses at her high school, the Lycée Molière, in Paris. She continued her studies at the École normale supérieure and received her agrégation for History in 1966. Her thesis for her habilitation, which she defended in 1984, was published in 1985 as La Naissance de la nation France.

#1287

Anne Firor Scott

#52632

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Anne Firor Scott was an American historian, specializing in the history of women and of the South. Early life and education Scott was born April 24, 1921, in Montezuma, Georgia. In 1941 she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Georgia. She then worked for the National League of Women Voters in Washington, D.C. She earned a master's degree in political science from Northwestern University in 1944. She married Andrew MacKay Scott in 1947. She then began her doctoral studies at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, while raising their children, a daughter and two ...

#1288

William G. McLoughlin

#43487

Overall Influence

1922 - 1992 (70 years)

William Gerald McLoughlin was an historian and prominent member of the history department at Brown University from 1954 to 1992. His subject areas were the history of religion in the United States, revivalism, the Cherokee, missionaries to Native Americans, abolitionism, and Rhode Island.

#1289

Bill Nichols

#20879

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

See also Bill Nichols . Bill Nichols is an American film critic and theoretician best known for his pioneering work as founder of the contemporary study of documentary film. His 1991 book, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, applied modern film theory to the study of documentary film for the first time. It has been followed by scores of books by others and by additional books and essays by Nichols. The first volume of his two-volume anthology Movies and Methods helped to establish film studies as an academic discipline. Nichols is Professor Emeritus in the Cinema Depar...

#1290

Wang Gungwu

#6023

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Wang Gungwu, is an Australian historian, sinologist, and writer specialising in the history of China and Southeast Asia. He has studied and written about the Chinese diaspora, but he has objected to the use of the word diaspora to describe the migration of Chinese from China because both it mistakenly implies that all overseas Chinese are the same and has been used to perpetuate fears of a "Chinese threat", under the control of the Chinese government. An expert on the Chinese tianxia concept, he was the first to suggest its application to the contemporary world as an American Tianxia.

#1291

David Brody

#28368

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

David Brody is an American historian, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of California-Davis. Life and education Brody was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, his parents had immigrated to the United States. Working his way through Harvard University, he received his bachelor's degree in 1952, a master's degree in 1953 and Ph.D. in history in 1958. His dissertation director was Oscar Handlin.

#1292

Bill Gammage

#43216

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

William Leonard Gammage is an Australian academic historian, adjunct professor and senior research fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University . Gammage was born in Orange, New South Wales, went to Wagga Wagga High School and then to ANU. He was on the faculty of the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Adelaide. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and deputy chair of the National Museum of Australia.

#1293

Erik Lönnroth

#20439

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

Erik Lönnroth was one of the most notable Swedish historians of the 20th century. He was a life member of the Swedish Academy from 1962 and member of various faculties. Background Nils Erik Magnus Lönnroth was born in Gothenburg and obtained a PhD in history at Gothenburg University College in 1934 at 24 years of age. His thesis treated Thomas Simonsson, the medieval Swedish theologian and Bishop of the Diocese of Strängnäs. He was professor at Uppsala University between 1942-1953 and then at Gothenburg University between 1953 and 1977.

#1294

Claude Cahen

#27506

Overall Influence

1909 - 1991 (82 years)

Claude Cahen was a 20th-century French Marxist orientalist and historian. He specialized in the studies of the Islamic Middle Ages, Muslim sources about the Crusades, and social history of the medieval Islamic society .

#1295

Antony Polonsky

Antony Polonsky

#27764

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Antony Barry Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of many historical works on the Holocaust, and is an expert on Polish Jewish history. Career Antony Polonsky was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who arrived in South Africa in the late 19th century. His father was from a Yiddish speaking family from near Grodno and his mother was from a Russified Jewish family from Lithuania. Polonsky was not raised in a Polish speaking background.

#1296

Volker Press

#64513

Overall Influence

1939 - 1993 (54 years)

Volker Press was a German historian. Life and career Volker Press studied history and English from 1957 to 1965 at the University of Munich. He completed his doctorate in 1966 with Friedrich Hermann Schubert with a dissertation on the Electorate of the Palatinate in the confessional age. After serving as an assistant at the University of Kiel and the University of Frankfurt, he took a post as a full professor of modern history at the University of Giessen. In 1980 he moved to a post at the University of Tübingen where he taught medieval and modern history until his sudden death in 1993.

#1297

Mark Galeotti

#9282

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Mark Galeotti is a British historian, lecturer and writer on transnational crime and Russian security affairs and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He is an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, and an associate fellow in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy.

#1298

Steve Tsang

#41397

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Steve Tsang is a Hong Kong-born political scientist and historian whose expertise includes politics and governance in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the foreign and security policies of China and Taiwan, and peace and security in East Asia. He is the current Director of the SOAS China Institute at the SOAS University of London.

#1299

Philip Grierson

#40143

Overall Influence

1910 - 2006 (96 years)

Philip Grierson was a British historian and numismatist, emeritus professor of numismatics at Cambridge University and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College for over seventy years. During his long and extremely prolific academic career, he built the world's foremost representative collection of medieval coins, wrote very extensively on the subject, brought it to much wider attention in the historical community and filled important curatorial and teaching posts in Cambridge, Brussels and Washington DC.

#1300

Sam Willis

#47878

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Samuel Bruce Adlam Willis is a British historian, television presenter and writer. He is a visiting Fellow in Maritime and Naval History at the University of Plymouth, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He is the editor of Navy Records Online, the online-publishing branch of the Navy Records Society. Willis has published fourteen books and numerous academic articles on maritime and naval history.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions