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.

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List of the most influential people in History,

#1351

Kurt Raaflaub

#35847

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Kurt Arnold Raaflaub was a Swiss historian and Emeritus Professor of Classics and History at Brown University, where he taught Greek and Roman history. He was the brother of conductor Beat Raaflaub.

#1352

Juliet Gardiner

#36539

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Juliet Gardiner is a British historian and a commentator on British social history from Victorian times through to the 1950s. She is a former editor of History Today magazine, a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and an honorary fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and at the University of Edinburgh. She has taught at Middlesex University and Oxford Brookes University. Gardiner has also worked as a publisher for Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Since 2001 she has been a full-time writer.

#1353

Hasso Spode

#24567

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Hasso Spode is a German historian and sociologist. Biography After his childhood in East Germany, Spode fled to West Berlin where he studied philosophy, history, theology, and sociology. He is a professor in Hanover and director of the Historical Archive on Tourism at the Technical University in Berlin. The main focus of his research is historical anthropology and cultural history, but he also works in the field of social and political history. He has written over 200 articles, mostly in German, sometimes in English, and written or edited more than a dozen books. He is co-editor of Annals of Tourism Research, Voyage.

#1354

Charles P. Roland

#30456

Overall Influence

1918 - 2022 (104 years)

Charles Pierce Roland was an American historian and professor emeritus of the University of Kentucky who was known for his research field of the American South and the U.S. Civil War. Roland was a captain in the United States Army and a World War II veteran. He served as the elected president of the Southern Historical Association and contributed to several other historical societies.

#1355

Bathsheba Demuth

#55466

Overall Influence

Bathsheba Rose Demuth is an environmental historian; she is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. She specializes in the study of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in this region was triggered when she moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon, at the age of 18, and learned a wide range of survival skills in the taiga and tundra.

#1356

Harry Harootunian

Harry Harootunian

#36751

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Harry D. Harootunian is an Armenian-American historian of early modern and modern Japan with an interest in historical theory. He is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies, New York University, and Max Palevsky Professor of History and Civilizations, Emeritus, University of Chicago.

#1357

R. A. C. Parker

#52513

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Robert Alexander Clarke Parker was a British historian who specialised in Britain's appeasement of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. Fellow historian Kenneth O. Morgan called him "perhaps the leading authority on the international crises of the 1930s, appeasement and the coming of war".

#1358

Jane M. Oppenheimer

#46936

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Jane Marion Oppenheimer was an American embryologist and historian of science. Early life, interests, and education Oppenheimer was born in Philadelphia, the only child of James H. Oppenheimer and Sylvia Stern. Her father, a physician, encouraged physical activity: sports at school and a personalized exercise regimen at home. She was tutored in French and piano, and developed a love of classical music, fine food, and travel. Oppenheimer's interests in Art were eclectic. The collection she donated to Bryn Mawr includes jade, ivory, and bronze objects, landscape watercolors, and etchings by Pab...

#1359

Anne Morelli

#47096

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Anne Morelli is a Belgian historian of Italian origins, specialized in the history of religions and minorities. She is currently assistant director of the Interdisciplinary center for study of religion and secularism of the Université Libre de Bruxelles , where she is a teacher.

#1360

Prasenjit Duara

#21403

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Prasenjit Duara , originally from Assam, India, a historian of China, is Oscar Tang Family Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Duke University, after being the Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National University of Singapore where he was also Director of Asian Research Institute and Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences. Duara also taught at George Mason University and the Department of History in the University of Chicago, where he was chairman of the department from 2004–2007.

#1361

Chris Wickham

#45508

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Christopher John Wickham is a British historian and academic. From 2005 to 2016, he was the Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; he is now emeritus professor. He had previously taught at the University of Birmingham from 1977, rising to be Professor of Early Medieval History from 1997 to 2005.

#1362

David Armitage

#45906

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

David Armitage is a British historian who has written on international and intellectual history. He has been chair of the history department and is Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.

#1363

Bogo Grafenauer

Bogo Grafenauer

#40086

Overall Influence

1916 - 1995 (79 years)

Bogo Grafenauer was a Slovenian historian, who mostly wrote about medieval history in the Slovene Lands. Together with Milko Kos, Fran Zwitter, and Vasilij Melik, he was one of the founders of the so-called Ljubljana school of historiography.

#1364

Jane Caplan

#50882

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jane Caplan is an academic and historian specialising in Nazi Germany and the history of the documentation of individual identity. She is currently Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, University of London, Visiting Professor of History at Gresham College and Emeritus Fellow at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford.

#1365

Olivier Clément

#30632

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Olivier-Maurice Clément was a French Eastern Orthodox theologian who taught at St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, France. He actively promoted the reunification of Christians , dialogue between Christians and people of other beliefs, and the engagement of Christian thinkers with modern thought and society.

#1366

Brigitte Hamann

Brigitte Hamann

#18799

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Brigitte Hamann was a German-Austrian author and historian based in Vienna. Biography Born in Essen, Germany, Hamann studied history in Münster and Vienna. She worked as a journalist in her native Essen for some time. In 1965, she married historian Günther Hamann , moved to Vienna and obtained Austrian citizenship in addition to her German. The couple had three children; one of them is journalist and feminist Sibylle Hamann. Brigitte Hamann worked with her husband at the University of Vienna and in 1978 obtained a doctor's degree on the basis of a thesis on the life of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria.

#1367

William Chafe

#22966

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

William H. Chafe is an American historian, and currently Alice Mary Baldwin Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University in Durham, NC. Career Professor Chafe received his PhD from Columbia University in 1971, and is the author of numerous notable historical texts on United States history. Chafe's research interests focus on gender and racial equality. His publications include: Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal ; The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890 to 2008 ; The Unfinished Journey: American Since World War II ; Private Lives/Public Consequen...

#1368

Andrzej Chwalba

Andrzej Chwalba

#49969

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Andrzej Chwalba is a Polish historian. Professor of history at the Jagiellonian University , the university's prorector of didactics , head of the Institute of Social and Religious History of Europe in 19th and 20th century, and the deacon and prodeacon of Department of History.

#1369

David Stevenson

David Stevenson

#33194

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

David Stevenson is a British historian specialising in the period of the First World War. He is Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science .

#1370

Saul Dubow

#52375

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Saul H. Dubow, is a South African historian and academic, specialising in the history of South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 2016, he has been the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He previously taught at University of Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London.

#1371

Herbert P. Bix

#21307

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Herbert P. Bix is an American historian. He wrote Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, an account of the Japanese Emperor and the events which shaped modern Japanese imperialism, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2001.

#1372

Khalid Yahya Blankinship

#47008

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Khalid Yahya Blankinship is an American historian who specialises in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. Biography He graduated in History from the University of Washington in 1973 and in the same year, while still in Seattle, converted to Islam.

#1373

Toby Green

#53769

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Toby Green is a British historian who is a Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in African studies at the University of Birmingham. He is Chair of the Fontes Historiae Africanae Committee of the British Academy, and has written extensively about African early modern history and colonial African slavery, mainly focussed on slavery in the Portuguese colonies.

#1374

Carmen Iglesias

#23476

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

María del Carmen Iglesias Cano, 1st Countess of Gilbert, is a Spanish historian. She is a member of the Real Academia de la Historia since 1991 and its first female director since 2014. As Director of the Real Academia de la Historia, she has been responsible for the launch of the electronic version of Spain´s dictionary of national biography, the Diccionario biográfico español.

#1375

Maureen Perrie

#74912

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Maureen Perrie is a British historian, Professor Emeritus of Russian History at the University of Birmingham, and a lecturer in Russian History at the centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham.

#1376

Norris J. Lacy

#17653

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Norris J. Lacy is an American scholar focusing on French medieval literature. He was the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of French and Medieval Studies at the Pennsylvania State University until his retirement in 2012, a position he had held since 1998. He is a leading expert on the Arthurian legend and has written and edited numerous books, papers, and articles on the topic. In 2014 the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch, presented him an award for Lifetime Service to Arthurian Studies.

#1377

Michael L. Kurtz

#34823

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael L. Kurtz is an American professor emeritus of history at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. Kurtz is known for his research into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kurtz has written two books on the assassination of Kennedy. Crime of the Century was published in 1982 by University of Tennessee Press and The JFK Assassination Debate: Lone Gunman versus Conspiracy was published in 1996 by University Press of Kansas. Ten years after its release, Crime of the Century was described as the only book on the assassination written by an academic historian. Shortly before the rele...

#1378

John Lorne Campbell

#16626

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

Dr John Lorne Campbell FRSE LLD OBE was a Scottish historian, farmer, environmentalist and folklorist, and recognized scholar of both Celtic studies and Scottish Gaelic literature. Early life According to his biographer, Ray Perman, the family of John Lorne Campbell claimed descent from the Clan Campbell tacksmen of Craignish , through a son of disinherited 16th-century heir Tearlach Mòr. According to Penman, however, there is no documentary proof that the son of Tearlach Mòr ever existed.

#1379

Alfred P. Smyth

#35509

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Professor Alfred P. Smyth was an Irish-born historian specialising in the mediaeval history of the British Isles. In 2002 he was named Dean of Arts and Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University College, having been Director of Research there since 1999. He was also Warden of St. George's House, Windsor Castle. Earlier, he was Professor of Mediaeval History at the University of Kent, when he was Master of Keynes College.

#1380

Ian Tyrrell

#76426

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ian Robert Tyrrell is an Australian historian who is notable for his work on American exceptionalism and transnational history. Tyrrell was Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney until his retirement in July 2012 and is now an Emeritus Professor of History there. He is the author of twelve books, including True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860 –1930 and Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970. His main research areas include American history, environmental history, and historiography. He was am...

#1381

Stefan Zawadzki

#62743

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Stefan Zawadzki is a Polish historian, a researcher of Ancient Near East history. He is a professor at Adam Mickiewicz University. He has written a number of monographs.

#1382

Maziar Behrooz

#43614

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Maziar Behrooz , is an Iranian-born American historian of modern Iran, and educator. He lives in Berkeley, California. Biography Maziar Behrooz was born in 1959 in Tehran to parents Sara Khosrovi-Azarbaijani and Jahangir Behrouz. He received his high school diploma from the United Kingdom.

#1383

Reijer Hooykaas

#24116

Overall Influence

1906 - 1994 (88 years)

Reijer Hooykaas was a Dutch historian of science. He along with Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis were pioneers in professionalizing the history of science in the Netherlands. Hooykaas gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews in 1975-77. H. Floris Cohen dedicated his historiographical text The Scientific Revolution to Hooykaas; its section on religion deals primarily with Hooykaas.

#1384

Zenon Kohut

#48094

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Zenon Eugene Kohut is a Canadian historian specializing in early modern Ukrainian history. He retired as professor emeritus, University of Alberta. From 1992 to 2014 Kohut worked at the University of Alberta's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies where he served as the first head of the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine and acted as editor of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies . He was acting director and director of the Program.

#1385

Ole Kristian Grimnes

#79888

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Ole Kristian Grimnes is a Norwegian historian. He was a professor in modern history at the University of Oslo, and is currently professor emeritus at the same university. In particular he has worked with the periods 1890–1905 and 1940–1945 in Norwegian history.

#1386

Peter Garnsey

#55777

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Peter David Arthur Garnsey, is a retired classicist and academic. Born in Australia, where he studied classics at the University of Sydney as a member of St Paul’s College, he has spent most of his career at Cambridge. He was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1974 to 2006, and a professor of the history of classical antiquity at the University of Cambridge from 1997 to 2006. His area of research concerns the history of political theory, intellectual history, social and economic history, food, famine and nutrition, and physical anthropology.

#1387

Li Zehou

#9358

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Li Zehou was a Chinese scholar of philosophy and intellectual history. He resided in the United States. He is considered an important modern scholar of Chinese history and culture whose work was central to the period known as the Chinese Enlightenment in the 1980s.

#1388

Iraj Bashiri

#7161

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Iraj Bashiri is professor of history at the University of Minnesota, United States, and one of the leading scholars in the fields of Central Asian studies and Iranian Studies. Fluent in English, Persian, Tajik, and several Turkic languages, Bashiri has been able to study and translate works otherwise inaccessible to the mostly Russian-speaking Central Asian studies community. Bashiri’s career focus started on Iran, and engaged also with Central Asia, notably the Tajik identity and the relations between Tajiks and the Turkic people of Central Asia, namely the Uzbeks.

#1389

Jacqueline Jones

#27751

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jacqueline Jones is an American social historian. She held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas from 2008 to 2017 and is Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her expertise is in American social history in addition to writing on economics , race, slavery, and class. She is a Macarthur Fellow, Bancroft Prize Winner, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice.

#1390

Michael Hicks

#41059

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Michael A. Hicks is an English historian, specialising in the history of late medieval England, in particular the Wars of the Roses, the nature of late medieval society, and the kings and nobility of the period.

#1391

Thomas Skidmore

Thomas Skidmore

#14159

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Thomas Elliott Skidmore was an American historian and scholar who specialized in Brazilian history. Biography Skidmore graduated in political science and philosophy in 1954 from Denison University. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to study philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford where he met his wife Felicity. He received a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1956 and a master's degree in 1959. He obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960 with a thesis on the German Chancellor Leo von Caprivi.

#1392

Georges Vigarello

#11752

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Georges Vigarello is a French historian and sociologist. He is a Research Director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales of Paris. His main research interests include the sociology of the body, the history of hygiene, representations of the body over the centuries, and the social dimensions of sport.

#1393

Patrick Chabal

#27151

Overall Influence

1951 - 2014 (63 years)

Patrick Chabal was an Africanist of the late 20th and early 21st century. He had a long academic career. Patrick Chabal's latest position was Chair in African History & Politics at King's College London. He published numerous books, book chapters and articles about Africa. He was one of the founders of AEGIS and was a board member for many years.

#1394

Karl Bosl

#51746

Overall Influence

1908 - 1993 (85 years)

Karl Bosl was a German regional historian. He held the chair for Bavarian regional history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1960 until his retirement in 1977. Bosl was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1961, a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy of America in 1970 and of the British Academy the same year. In 1973 he was elected a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences .

#1395

Abdallah Laroui

Abdallah Laroui

#22773

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Abdallah Laroui is a Moroccan philosopher, historian, and novelist. Besides some works in French, his philosophical project has been written mostly in Arabic. He is among the most read and discussed Arab and Moroccan philosophers.

#1396

Martín Almagro Gorbea

Martín Almagro Gorbea

#56693

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Martín Almagro Gorbea is a Spanish prehistorian. He is a professor in prehistory, Ph.D. in history by the "Universidad Complutense de Madrid" with extraordinary prize. Amalgro Gorbea was elected to medalla nº 11 of the Real Academia de la Historia on 17 February 1995 and he took up his seat on 17 November 1996. Perpetual keeper of antiquities of the Real Academia de la Historia.

#1397

Peter Fibiger Bang

#57015

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Peter Fibiger Bang is a Danish historian of Rome, empire, cross-cultural comparison and world history. Bang's main research interests are Roman economic history and imperial power, historical sociology and world history, as well as the reception of Classical culture in later ages.

#1398

Elie Kedourie

#11835

Overall Influence

1926 - 1992 (66 years)

Elie Kedourie was a British historian of the Middle East. He wrote from a liberal perspective, dissenting from many points of view taken as orthodox in the field. From 1953 to 1990, he taught at the London School of Economics, where he became Professor of Politics. Kedourie was famous for his rejection of what he called the "Chatham House version" of history, which viewed the story of the modern Middle East as one of continuous victimisation at the hands of the West, and instead castigated left-wing Western intellectuals for what he regarded as a naively romantic view of Islam.

#1399

Ronan Fanning

#29543

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Ronan Fanning was an Irish historian. Biography The son of an Irish doctor and English Montessori teacher, Fanning was educated at St Michael's College, Dublin and C.B.C. Monkstown. He received his undergraduate degree from UCD and his doctoral thesis on "Balfour and Unionism" from Cambridge University. He was Fulbright Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC in 1976-1977, researching the triangular relationship between Britain, Ireland and the US.

#1400

Gil Troy

#23654

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and a popular commentator on politics and other issues. He is a professor of history at McGill University. Troy is the author of nine books, and the editor of two. He writes a column for The Daily Beast on forgotten history, putting current events in historical perspective and is a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

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