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,

#1501

John Crook

#69821

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

John Anthony Crook FBA was a professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge and an authority on the law and life of ancient Rome. He wrote several chapters for the Cambridge Ancient History and was an accomplished linguist.

#1502

Maldwyn Jones

#77794

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Maldwyn Allen Jones was a historian who specialised in American history. Jones studied at Jesus College, Oxford, from 1946 to 1949, obtaining a first-class degree in history. He was a lecturer at Manchester University before becoming chairman of the British Association for American Studies in 1968 and Commonwealth Professor of American History at University College London in 1971.

#1503

William Lee Miller

#4343

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

William Lee Miller was an American journalist, academic, and historian who taught in the University of Virginia's religious studies department for 17 years, and remained affiliated with the university after his 1999 retirement.

#1504

Jonathan Haslam

#35471

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jonathan Haslam is George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge with a special interest in the former Soviet Union. He has written many books about Soviet foreign policy and ideology.

#1505

Enrico Decleva

#76137

Overall Influence

1941 - 2020 (79 years)

Enrico Decleva was an Italian historian. He became professor of modern history in the University of Milan in 1974 and full professor of contemporary history in 1976. He authored books on Carlo Rosselli, on the Società Umanitaria of Milan, and on the founder of the Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. For the latter, in 1994 he won the 27th Acqui Award of History.

#1506

Apostolos Vakalopoulos

#63897

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Apostolos Evangelou Vakalopoulos was a distinguished Greek historian, specializing in the Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Greece, and in modern Greek history. Vakalopoulos has been described as one of the greatest Greek historians of the 20th century.

#1507

Martin Campbell-Kelly

#9063

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Martin Campbell-Kelly FCBS FLSW is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick who has specialised in the history of computing. Campbell-Kelly has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing journal. He is a committee member of the Computer Conservation Society, a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society, and is a Gresham College lecturer.

#1508

James E. Fraser

#47036

Overall Influence

James Earle Fraser is a Canadian historian and Picticist. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto, and did masters work at the University of Guelph. He went on to do his Ph.D on the Christianization of Fortriu and its impact of Vikings at the University of Edinburgh, and was a senior lecturer in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology until 2015. Fraser has since returned to Canada as the Chair of the Scottish Studies Foundation at the University of Guelph.

#1509

Frederick Cooper

#37280

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Frederick Cooper is an American historian who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization, and African history. After finishing his BA at Stanford University in 1969, Cooper received his Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1974. From 1974 to 1982 he was Assistant, then Associate Professor at Harvard University. Becoming Professor of History at the University of Michigan in 1982, he left for a professorship of history at New York University where he has worked since 2002.

#1510

Robert N. Burr

#52509

Overall Influence

1916 - 2014 (98 years)

Robert N. Burr was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1948 to 1987, where he established the Latin American Studies program and served as its chair department from 1973 to 1977. He was the author of four widely reviewed books about Latin America and the recipient of scholarly awards.

#1511

Doron Swade

#19701

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Doron Swade MBE, born 1944, is a museum curator and author, specialising in the history of computing. He is especially known for his work on the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine.

#1512

Vasilij Melik

#56011

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Vasilij Melik was a Slovenian historian, who mostly worked on political history of the Slovene Lands in the 19th century. Life He was born in Ljubljana as the only son of the renowned geographer Anton Melik. After finishing the Ljubljana Classical Lyceum, he enrolled at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied under the supervision of the historian Fran Zwitter.

#1513

Antoine Prost

#41438

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Antoine Marie François Prost is a French historian who served as Professor Emeritus of History, University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne. He specialises in 20th-century French history, in particular the First World War.

#1514

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

#14949

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz is an American historian and the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of American Studies and History, emerita, at Smith College. Early life and education Horowitz was born on 31 Jan. 1942 in Shreveport, Louisiana, to Rabbi David Lefkowitz, Jr. and Leona Atlas Lefkowitz. Rabbi David served as rabbi at Temple B'nai Zion in Shreveport and Leona was a tutor in math, informal college counselor, civic worker, community board member, and housewife. David Lefkowitz is her paternal grandfather. Horowitz was educated in Shreveport, and graduated from C. E. Byrd High School in 195...

#1515

Joel Beinin

#25125

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as director of Middle East studies and professor of history at the American University in Cairo.

#1516

Robert I. Frost

#61699

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Robert I. Frost is a British historian and academic. His interests are in the history of Eastern and Northern Europe of 14th to the 19th centuries, with primary focus on Poland–Lithuania and the history of warfare of the period.

#1517

Czesław Łuczak

#18660

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Czesław Łuczak was a Polish historian focusing on World War II. He served as Rector of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań from 1965 to 1972; and, from 1969 to 1981 and from 1987 to 1991, as Director of the University's Institute of History. He was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party in communist Poland.

#1518

Maurice Isserman

Maurice Isserman

#23562

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Maurice Isserman , formerly William R. Kenan and the James L. Ferguson chairs, is a Professor of History at Hamilton College. He has written about the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the emergence of the New Left and the 1960s. He co-authored a biography with Dorothy Ray Healey and authored a biography of Michael Harrington, both of whom were co-founders of Democratic Socialists of America. He has contributed editorials and book reviews to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The American Alpine Review.

#1519

Gerd Tellenbach

#60905

Overall Influence

1903 - 1999 (96 years)

Gerd Tellenbach was a German historian and scholar of medieval social and religious history, particularly of the Papacy and German church during the Investiture Controversy and reform movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Tellenbach also made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the medieval nobility and helped establish a new field of research dedicated to mapping social networks and familial ties among medieval elites . After studying history at the universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg, he taught in Gießen, Münster, and finally the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, where he served as Rektor in 1949–1950 and again in 1957–1958.

#1520

Detlef Brandes

#81918

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Detlef Brandes is a German historian who is known for his writings on the history of the Czech lands. He teaches modern history at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and heads the Institute for the History and Culture of Germans in Eastern Europe there.

#1521

Robert Delort

#35915

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Robert Delort is a French professeur agrégé trained at the École Normale Supérieure in the early 1950s, historian and medievalist specialised in the history of the Republic of Venice, economic history and environmental history. He is particularly interested in the history of relationships between man and animals, as part of the “zoohistory”.

#1522

Jean O'Brien

#47959

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jean Maria O'Brien is an American historian of White Earth Band of Ojibwe ancestry who specializes in northeastern Woodlands American Indian history. Life She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where she studied with the anthropologist Raymond D. Fogelson.

#1523

De Lamar Jensen

#69518

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

De Lamar Jensen is a historian of early modern Europe, and was a faculty member of the history department at Brigham Young University . He wrote several books on Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation.

#1524

Sophie de Schaepdrijver

#59468

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Sophie, Baroness De Schaepdrijver is a Belgian historian. Education She graduated in history at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and obtained a PhD with a dissertation on Elites for the Capital? Foreign Migration to mid-nineteenth-century Brussels at the University of Amsterdam.

#1525

Wilhelm Deist

#54565

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

Wilhelm Deist was a German historian and author who specialised in the European history of 19th and 20th with an emphasis on the history of World War I. Deist was senior historian at the Military History Research Office and honorary professor at the University of Freiburg. Deist was a widely published author and a chief editor of the seminal series Germany and the Second World War from the MGFA.

#1526

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson

#31051

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Heather Cox Richardson is an American academic historian, author, and educator. She is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#1527

Jon Butler

#37693

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jon Butler is a historian and Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University. He earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota, and is known for his research on the role of religion in early American history. At Yale, he served as chair of the American Studies Program from 1988 to 1993, the director of the Division of the Humanities from 1997 to 1999, and chair of the Department of History from 1999 to 2004. He was dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 2004 to 2010, and also served as inte...

#1528

Glenda Gilmore

#37501

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is an American historian of the American South at Yale University. She is the author of many publications, including "These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to Present" , "Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920" , and "Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950" .

#1529

Meir Litvak

#86443

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Meir Litvak is the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. Works

#1530

Marc Raeff

#41235

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Marc Raeff was a Soviet-born American historian. For most of his career he taught at Columbia University in New York, where he held the Bakhmeteff chair in Russian Studies. Harvard University historian Richard Pipes says, "He was very much interested in the Western aspect of Russian culture. He was a pillar of Russian historical studies in this country."

#1531

Barak Kushner

#46817

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Barak Kushner is an American historian, orientalist, and translator. He is a Professor of East Asian History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has written and edited numerous books and articles and has spoken on a range of East Asian history topics including Japanese imperial propaganda, the Japanese empire in East Asia, Japanese war crimes, and justice in East Asia. He has also written on other subjects, ranging from Godzilla and Japanese humor to ramen and the Chinese influence on early twentieth century notions of modern cuisine in Japan. Ku...

#1532

Yaroslav Hrytsak

Yaroslav Hrytsak

#28652

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a Ukrainian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University. He is also the director of the Institute for Historical Studies of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He is chief editor of the scientific journal "Ukraine Modern" and is a nember of the editorial board of the journals Ab Imperio, Critique, Slavic Review, and a member of the supervisory board of Harvard Ukrainian Studies. He is an honorary professor of National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He was a guest professor at Central European University in Budapest ...

#1533

Sujit Sivasundaram

#32594

Overall Influence

Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. Early life Sivasundaram was born in Sri Lanka. He is the great grand son of Lawrie Muthu Krishna, editor of the Ceylonese newspaper and founder of The Polytechnic vocational school. He is the grandson of Mano Muthu Krishna-Candappa, journalist and advocate for women's advancement in Sri Lanka.

#1534

Russell Weigley

Russell Weigley

#38353

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

Russell Frank Weigley was the Distinguished University Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a noted military historian. His research and teaching interests centered on American and world military history, World War II, and the American Civil War. One of Weigley's most widely received contributions to research is his hypothesis of a specifically American Way of War, i.e. an approach to strategy and military operations, that, while not predetermined, is distinct to the United States because of cultural and historical constraints.

#1535

Leslie P. Peirce

#53942

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Leslie P. Peirce is an American professor in history. Her research interests include early modern history of the Ottoman Empire, gender, law, and society. She received her B.A. in History from Harvard College, her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. In 1988–1998 she was with the Cornell University. In 1998–2006 she was professor in the Departments of History and Near Eastern Studies the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2006 she is with Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Is...

#1536

Kris Lane

#63293

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Kris Eugene Lane is a Canadian–American Fulbright scholar, researcher, professor, and author. His areas of academic teaching and research focus on colonial Latin American history. He has written and edited several books and articles on slavery, witchcraft, headhunting, mining, human trafficking, and piracy in the Caribbean.

#1537

Jean Meyer

#19453

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jean Meyer Barth is a French-Mexican historian and author, known for his writings on early 20th-century Mexican history. He has published extensively on the Mexican Revolution and Cristero War, the history of Nayarit, and on the caudillo Manuel Lozada. He is a faculty member at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

#1538

Zbyněk Zeman

#28273

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Zbyněk Anthony Bohuslav Zeman was a Czech historian who later became a naturalized British citizen. He published widely on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. As an academic, he taught at the Universities of St Andrews, Lancaster, Oxford and Prague.

#1539

Bazaryn Shirendev

#16482

Overall Influence

1912 - 2001 (89 years)

Bazaryn Shirendev was a Mongolian historian and politician. He was a member of the Central Committee of the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party from 1947 to 1982 and a member of its Politburo from 1954 to 1958. He was the first president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1982, when he was ousted by leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal. Shirendev wrote official histories of Mongolia, including History of the Mongolian People's Revolution and Bypassing Capitalism.

#1540

Elizabeth Solopova

#26678

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.

#1541

Henning Eichberg

#20073

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

Henning Eichberg was a German sociologist and historian, teaching at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. He became notable by his contributions to the philosophy of body culture and by his political radical writings on folk and nation.

#1542

Maurice Keen

#38744

Overall Influence

1933 - 2012 (79 years)

Maurice Hugh Keen was a British historian specializing in the Middle Ages. Life Keen's father had been the Oxford University head of finance and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and after schooling at Winchester College, Maurice became an undergraduate there in 1954. He was a contemporary and lifelong friend of Tom Bingham, later the Senior Law Lord, as well as of the military historian, Sir John Keegan, whose sister Mary he married.

#1543

Steven T. Katz

#13531

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Steven Theodore Katz is an American philosopher and scholar. He is the founding director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University in Massachusetts, United States, where he holds the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies.

#1544

Francis Christopher Oakley

#40922

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Francis Christopher Oakley is the former Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of ideas at Williams College, President Emeritus of Williams College and President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, New York. He also served as Interim Director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

#1545

Thomas J. McCormick

#62340

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Thomas J. McCormick was an American academic who was emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the same place he got a Ph. D. where he succeeded William Appleman Williams and continued the groundbreaking work of the so-called Wisconsin School of diplomatic history. Indeed he is considered one of the core members of the Wisconsin School, along with Williams, Walter LaFeber, and Lloyd Gardner. He has used Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems approach to describe the dynamics of hegemony in US diplomatic history and also studied US corporatism.

#1546

Edna Greene Medford

#57102

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Edna Greene Medford is a professor of history at Howard University who specializes in 19th-century African-American history. She is a member of the board of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and is on the Executive Committee of The Lincoln Forum.

#1547

René Taton

#51640

Overall Influence

1915 - 2004 (89 years)

René Taton was a French author, historian of science, and long co-editor of the Revue d'histoire des sciences. Life He was born on 4 April 1915 in L'Échelle. He died on 9 August 2004 in Ajaccio. Career In 1935, he became a student of École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.

#1548

Jonathan Sperber

#57146

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jonathan Sperber is an American academic and historian who is a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri and author of modern European History. Early life and academic career Jonathan Sperber was born on 26 December 1952 in New York City, to Louis and Ruth Sperber. He attended the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. Sperber was an undergraduate at Cornell University from 1969 to 1973 and went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. While there, he studied with historian Leonard Krieger. He received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1980. He was an archivist at the Leo Baeck Inst...

#1549

Hans-Erich Volkmann

#56929

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Hans-Erich Volkmann is a German historian, whose works primarily deal with the history of Germany from the 19th–20th century, and particularly how it relates to the East European states. He is one of the authors of the first volume of Germany and the Second World War. He has also been one of the editors of Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift.

#1550

Martin J. S. Rudwick

#43451

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Martin John Spencer Rudwick is a British geologist, historian, and academic. Rudwick is an emeritus professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and an affiliated research scholar at Cambridge University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science. His principal field of study is the history of the earth sciences; his work has been described as the "definitive histories of the pre-Darwinian earth sciences". Rudwick was an early scholar to critique the conflict thesis regarding religion and science.

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