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,

#1451

José Mattoso

#34590

Overall Influence

1933 - 2023 (90 years)

José João da Conceição Gonçalves Mattoso was a Portuguese medievalist and university professor. Biography Mattoso was born on 22 January 1933. He earned his doctoral degree in medieval history from the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, in 1966 , while he was Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Singeverga. He returned to secular life in 1970, and taught at the University of Lisbon and at the New University of Lisbon. He was also a director of National Archives / Torre do Tombo.

#1452

Richard Whatmore

#70687

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Richard Whatmore is a Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. His research topics includes intellectual history. He is the editor-in-chief of History of European Ideas. His books include:The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction Terrorists, Anarchists, And Republicans: The Genevans And The Irish In Time Of Revolution What is Intellectual History? Against War and Empire Republicanism and the French Revolution

#1453

Hakim Adi

#35620

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Hakim Adi is a British historian and scholar who specializes in African affairs. He is the first African-British historian to become a professor of history in the UK. He has written widely on Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of Africa and the African diaspora, including the 2018 book Pan-Africanism: A History. Currently a professor at the University of Chichester, Adi is an advocate of the education curriculum including the history of Africa and its diaspora.

#1454

Piotr Wróbel

#41896

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Piotr Jan Wróbel is a Polish-Canadian historian and expert specializing in Polish history and Central and Eastern European history. His academic research revolves around the national minorities of Central and Eastern Europe with special focus on Polish-Jewish relations and the history of Polish Jewry since the Partitions of Poland.

#1455

Lance E. Davis

#33388

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Lance Edwin Davis was the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology. He researched the economic history of financial markets and institutional and technological change. His work has been recognised by The Cliometric Society via their awarding him a Clio Can in recognition his of exceptional support of cliometrics.

#1456

Aziz al-Azmeh

#22246

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Aziz Al-Azmeh is a Syrian academic and professor at the Department of History, Central European University, Vienna, Austria. Among other books and papers, he published Islams and Modernities. In May 1993, he received the Republican Order of Merit, for services to Arab culture, from former President of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

#1457

Gérard Bouchard

Gérard Bouchard

#11282

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gérard Bouchard is a Canadian historian and sociologist affiliated with the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Born on 26 December 1943 in Jonquière, Quebec, he obtained his master's degree in sociology from Université Laval in 1968 and later obtained his PhD in history from the University of Paris in 1971. Bouchard had authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 26 books, and published 230 papers in scientific journals as of 2005.

#1458

Heinz A. Richter

#41954

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Heinz A. Richter is a German historian, known for his work on the history of World War II in the Balkans, the history of modern Greece and the modern history of Cyprus. Biography Heinz A. Richter was born on 18 March 1939, in Heilbronn, in northern Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He started reading Greek mythology at a very young age and, in high school, his professor of History "excited his interest for classical Greek antiquity." Richter studied History, Political Science and English Literature at the Heidelberg University. He was professor of Greek and Cypriot modern history at the Universit...

#1459

John H. Arnold

#68272

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

John Hugh Arnold is a British historian. Since 2016, he has been the Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge. He previously worked at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he specialised in the study of medieval religious culture. He has also written widely on historiography and why history matters.

#1460

Nicolas Lebourg

#11444

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Nicolas Lebourg is a French historian who specializes on far-right movements in Europe. Biography Born in 1974, Lebourg studied sociology at Aix-Marseille University and history at the University of Perpignan, from which he graduated with a PhD in contemporary history in 2005, after a thesis on French national revolutionaries during the period 1940–2002.

#1461

Sabina Magliocco

Sabina Magliocco

#10948

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Sabina Magliocco , is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia and formerly at California State University, Northridge . She is an author of non-fiction books and journal articles about folklore, religion, religious festivals, foodways, witchcraft and Neo-Paganism in Europe and the United States.

#1462

Christian Meier

Christian Meier

#53793

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Christian Meier is a German historian and professor emeritus of ancient history at the University of Munich. In 2002, Meier was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

#1463

Barbara Ransby

#18908

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Barbara Ransby is a writer, historian, professor, and activist. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, and holds the John D. MacArthur Chair at the University of Illinois Chicago.

#1464

Ronald Smelser

#36403

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ronald Smelser is an American historian, author, and former professor of history at the University of Utah. He specializes in modern European history, including the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and has written several books on these topics. Smelser is the author, together with fellow historian Edward J. Davies, of the 2008 book The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture.

#1465

Erik Davis

#14608

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist and public speaker whose writings have ranged from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is perhaps best known for his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, as well as his work on California counterculture, including Burning Man, the human potential movement, and the writings of Philip K. Dick.

#1466

Fernand Ouellet

#17771

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

Fernand Ouellet was a French Canadian historian, author and educator. Biography He was educated at Université Laval and gained a PhD in 1965. Ouellet taught at Université Laval, Carleton University, and the University of Ottawa in 1961–1985, prior to joining the History Department at York University in 1986.

#1467

Ewald Frie

#75594

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Ewald Frie is a German historian and biographer at the University of Tübingen. His research interests include German history of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, European nobility, poverty and the welfare state, and Australian history.

#1468

Anatoly Khazanov

#24209

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Anatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov is an anthropologist and historian. Born in Moscow, Khazanov attended Moscow State University, where he received an M.A. in 1960. He earned a Ph.D. degree in 1966 and Dr.Sc. in 1976 from the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1990, he became Professor of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and at the moment he is the Ernest Gellner Professor of Anthropology . He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Corresponding Member of the UNESCO International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations, and Honorary Member of the Central Asia...

#1469

C. R. Boxer

#17039

Overall Influence

1904 - 2000 (96 years)

Sir Charles Ralph Boxer FBA GCIH was a British historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history, especially in relation to South Asia and the Far East. In Hong Kong he was the chief spy for the British army intelligence in the years leading up to World War II.

#1470

Daniel Kevles

#10957

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science best known for his books on American physics and eugenics and for a wide-ranging body of scholarship on science and technology in modern societies. He is Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Emeritus at Yale University and J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.

#1471

J. Bowyer Bell

#15437

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

John Bowyer Bell was an American historian, artist and art critic. He was best known as a terrorism expert. Background and early life Bell was born into an Episcopalian family in 1931 in New York City. The family later moved to Alabama, from where Bell attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, majoring in history. He also studied art, and discovered he had "total visual memory"—the equivalent of perfect pitch in a singer. His first solo art showing was in the college library in his senior year. He considered becoming a professional artist and made frequent visits to New York to visit other artists, including his hero Franz Kline, but committed to academia.

#1472

Eliot A. Cohen

#14387

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Eliot Asher Cohen is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

#1473

Janet Browne

#32297

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Elizabeth Janet Browne is a British historian of science, known especially for her work on the history of 19th-century biology. She taught at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London, before returning to Harvard. She is currently Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

#1474

Lothar Höbelt

#61535

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Lothar Höbelt is an Austrian historian and adjunct professor of Modern History at the University of Vienna, known for his right-wing and nationalist viewpoints. His research areas are political and constitutional history of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Thirty Years' War. He also lectures at the Theresian Military Academy.

#1475

Peter Harrison

#23133

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Peter D. Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Career Peter Harrison holds a DLitt from the University of Oxford, a PhD from the University of Queensland, and master's degrees from Yale and Oxford. His academic career began at Bond University on Australia's Gold Coast, where for a number of years he was professor of history and philosophy. From 2007 to 2011 he was the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. During his time at Oxford, he was a fellow...

#1476

Nicholas J. Cull

#19569

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Nicholas J. Cull is a historian and professor in the Master's in Public Diplomacy program at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He was the founding director of this program and ran it from 2005 to 2019.

#1477

Jean Fagan Yellin

#28389

Overall Influence

Jean Fagan Yellin was an American historian specializing in women's history and African-American history, and Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Pace University. She is best known for her scholarship on escaped slave, abolitionist, and author Harriet Jacobs.

#1478

Charlton W. Tebeau

#28443

Overall Influence

1904 - 2000 (96 years)

Charlton W. Tebeau was the former chairperson of the department of history and a professor of history at the University of Miami and an American historian and author who specialized in the history of Florida.

#1479

Craig Steven Wilder

#78874

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Craig Steven Wilder is a professor of American history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography He grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University focusing on urban history, under the tutelage of Kenneth T. Jackson, as well as Barbara J. Fields and Eric Foner. His doctoral dissertation was titled Race and the History of Brooklyn, New York which followed the history of Brooklyn from the arrival of the Dutch to the present day, focusing on the experiences of African-Americans. He has appeared on the History Channel's F.D.R.: A Presidency Revealed and on Ric Burns' PBS series, New York: A Documentary Film.

#1480

Aleksandr Nazarenko

#56238

Overall Influence

1948 - 2022 (74 years)

Aleksandr Vasilievich Nazarenko was a Russian historian who worked in the Moscow State University. He headed the project "Russia and Central Europe in the Middle Ages" in the World History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

#1481

Federico Finchelstein

Federico Finchelstein

#25372

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Federico Finchelstein is an Argentine historian and chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and is director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies. After receiving his undergraduate education at the University of Buenos Aires, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2006. He has previously taught at Brown University.

#1482

Allan R. Millett

#25029

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Allan R. Millett is a historian and a retired colonel in U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He is known for his works on the Korean War, but he has written on other military topics. Early life Millett is the son of John D. Millett, who served as the President of Miami University in Ohio, and his wife Catherine. He has two brothers. He attended DePauw University, graduating in 1959.

#1483

Nathan Stoltzfus

#56706

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Nathan Stoltzfus is an American historian and Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies in the history department at Florida State University. He has authored or edited many books.

#1484

Christopher Haigh

#54755

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Christopher Haigh is a British historian specialising in religion and politics around the English Reformation. Until his retirement in 2009, he was Student and Tutor in Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford and University Lecturer at Oxford University. He was educated at Churchill College, Cambridge and the University of Manchester. Haigh was a very influential revisionist in Tudor historiography and on the English Reformation. Haigh's writings mostly demonstrated that, contrary to orthodox understandings of the English Reformation, religious reform was extremely complex and varied considerably at a parish level.

#1485

Roy Bin Wong

#66162

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Roy Bin Wong is a Chinese economic historian at UCLA. He was the Director of the UCLA Asia Institute from 2004 to 2016. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, and received his MA and PhD from Harvard University.

#1486

Herbert Franke

#58549

Overall Influence

1914 - 2011 (97 years)

Herbert Franke was a German historian of China. He is particularly known for his works on the history of the Jurchen and Mongol empires in China. After the end of World War II, Herbert Franke, along with Wolfgang Bauer, was instrumental in establishing the Sinological Section in the University of Munich. Later, he succeeded Erich Haenisch as the head of the Sinology Department at that university.

#1487

Timo Vihavainen

Timo Vihavainen

#38694

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Timo Juhani Vihavainen is a Finnish historian and a professor of Russian Studies at the University of Helsinki. He has written extensively on Russian and Finnish history. Vihavainen graduated as a Master of Philosophy in 1970, a Licentiate in Philosophy in 1983, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1988 and a Docent in Russian history in 1992. He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters since 2009. At the beginning of the 2000s he was among the contributors of the Kanava magazine.

#1488

Joyce Lebra

#27180

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Joyce Lebra , also known as Joyce Chapman Lebra, was an American historian of Japan and India. Biography Lebra spent her childhood in Honolulu and received her B.A. and M.A. in Asian studies from the University of Minnesota. She received a Ph.D. in Japanese history from Harvard/Radcliffe, and was the first woman Ph.D. in Japanese history in the U.S.

#1489

Lawrence M. Principe

Lawrence M. Principe

#23435

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Lawrence M. Principe is the Drew Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of History of Science and Technology and the Department of Chemistry. He is also currently the Director of the Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, an interdisciplinary center for research at Johns Hopkins. He is the first recipient of the Francis Bacon Medal for significant contributions to the history of science. Principe's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and a 2015-2016 Guggenheim Fellowship.

#1490

Margaret W. Rossiter

#13401

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Margaret W. Rossiter is an American historian of science, and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science, at Cornell University. Rossiter coined the term Matilda effect for the systematic suppression of information about women in the history of science, and the denial of the contribution of women scientists in research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues.

#1491

Glenn C. Altschuler

Glenn C. Altschuler

#29356

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Glenn Altschuler is an American writer and university-level educator and administrator. At Cornell University, he is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies and a Weiss Presidential Fellow. An animating force in American Studies, Altschuler taught large lecture courses in American popular culture and has been a strong advocate for the value of humanities and for high-quality undergraduate teaching and advising. He is a subject-matter expert on Popular Culture, Politics, and Higher Education in the United States.

#1492

Jean-Claude Schmitt

Jean-Claude Schmitt

#20593

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jean-Claude Schmitt is a prominent French medievalist, the former student of Jacques Le Goff, associated with the work of the Annales School. He studies the socio-cultural aspects of medieval history in Western Europe and has made important contributions in his use of anthropological and art historical methods to interpret history. His most significant work has dealt with the relationships among elites and laymen in medieval life, particularly in the realm of religious culture, where he has focused on ideas and topics such as superstition, the occult and heresy in order to flesh out the diffe...

#1493

Jonathan Petropoulos

#37896

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jonathan Petropoulos is an American historian who writes about National Socialism and, in particular, the fate of art looted during World War II. He is John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Before his 1999 appointment to Claremont McKenna College, Petropoulos taught at Loyola College in Maryland.

#1494

Colin Bundy

#22867

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Colin James Bundy is a South African historian, former principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford and former director of SOAS University of London. Bundy was an influential member of a generation of historians who substantially revised understanding of South African history. In particular, he wrote on South Africa's rural past from a predominantly Marxist perspective, but also deploying Africanist and underdevelopment theories. Since the mid-1990s, however, Bundy has held a series of posts in university administration. Bundy is also a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational & Legal Assista...

#1495

Peter Marshall

#61366

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Peter Marshall is a Scottish historian and academic, known for his work on the Reformation and its impact on the British Isles and Europe. He is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Biography Marshall was born on 26 October 1964 in Orkney, Scotland. He was educated at Kirkwall Grammar School, before studying at University College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis was titled Attitudes of the English People to Priests and Priesthood, 1500–1553.

#1496

James T. Patterson

James T. Patterson

#33860

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

James T. Patterson is an American historian, who was the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Brown University for 30 years. He was educated at Harvard University. His research interests include political history, legal history, and social history, as well as the history of medicine, race relations, and education. In 1981–1982, he was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.

#1497

Philip A. Kuhn

#39635

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Philip A. Kuhn was an American historian of China and the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Kuhn was praised by his colleagues. Frederic Wakeman described Kuhn as "one of the West's premier China historians." Stanford University historian Harold L. Kahn added that “Every twenty years, like clockwork, Philip Kuhn produces a book that we are required to read. What he says sticks to the ribs and gives much pleasure,” and Yale University historian Peter Perdue wrote that Kuhn "shaped the field of Qing history more profo...

#1498

Daniel Roche

#19759

Overall Influence

1935 - 2023 (88 years)

Daniel Roche was a French social and cultural historian, widely recognized as one of the foremost experts of his generation on the cultural history of France during the later years of the Ancien Régime. Roche was elected an International member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009.

#1499

Jim Bennett

#37213

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

James Arthur "Jim" Bennett, was a museum curator and historian of science. Bennett's interests lay in the history of practical mathematics from the 16th century to the 18th century, scientific instrumentss and astronomy.

#1500

Josep Fontana

#38696

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Josep Fontana i Lázaro was a Spanish historian from Catalonia. Education Born in Barcelona, he received his master's degree in philosophy and letters at the University of Barcelona in 1956 and his doctorate in history by the same university in 1970. He was a student of Jaume Vicens i Vives and Ferran Soldevila. Their main currents of investigation are economic history, 19th century Spanish history and the history of property. He was influenced in his thought by E.P. Thompson, Pierre Vilar, Gramsci and Walter Benjamin.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions