The Most Influential People Across History

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).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#1551

Helmut Koenigsberger

#62164
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Helmut Georg Koenigsberger FBA was a German-born British historian and academic. He was Professor of History at King's College London from 1973 to 1984 and head of its history department. Early life Koenigsberger was born in Berlin, the son of Georg Koenigsberger , chief architect of the borough of Treptow, and Käthe, a sister of the physicist Max Born. His elder brother was the architect and planner Otto Königsberger. Although his family were Lutheran Christians, they were classified as Jewish by the Nazis: both of his grandfathers had been non-practising Jews. His immediate family had all fled from Germany before 1939 under the advice of his brother Otto.
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#1552

Williamson Murray

#34463
Overall Influence
1941 - 2023 (82 years)
Williamson "Wick" Murray was an American historian and author. He authored numerous works on history and strategic studies, and served as an editor on other projects extensively. He was professor emeritus of history at Ohio State University from 2012 until his death.
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#1553

Adeeb Khalid

#34069
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Adeeb Khalid is associate professor and Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History in the history department of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. His academic contributions are highly cited.
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#1554

Heikki Kirkinen

#70413
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Heikki Kirkinen was a Finnish historian who was professor of Finnish and European history at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, Finland. He has been a visiting professor in the Finnish language, literature and culture at Sorbonne, 1966–1970.
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#1555

Victor Farías

Victor Farías
#3445
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Víctor Ernesto Farías Soto is a Chilean historian. Farías is best known for his controversial book Heidegger and Nazism . Education Farías was born in Santiago in 1940. He graduated from the Catholic University of Chile in 1961 and continued his studies in Freiburg, Germany, where he obtained a doctorate in Philosophy. During his stay in Germany, Farías studied under such German thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Rainer Marten, and Eugen Fink. Farías returned to Chile in 1971 but fled back to Germany after the 1973 coup which deposed President Allende. Farías became an investigator and professor...
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#1556

Gilbert Fite

#40294
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Gilbert C. Fite was an American historian best known for his numerous works on American agricultural history. Fite's lengthy catalog included works that focused heavily on how farmers affected the political environment and broader American economy, both of which examined the political power that farmers wielded in various eras. Fite was a professor at the University of Oklahoma, held the Richard B. Russell Chair in American History at the University of Georgia, and was president of Eastern Illinois University from 1971 to 1976.
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#1557

Philip Benedict

Philip Benedict
#57749
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Philip Benedict is an American historian of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, currently holding the title of Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva’s Institute for Reformation History .
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#1558

Samuel Kassow

#38385
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Samuel D. Kassow is an American historian of the history of Ashkenazi Jewry. Early life Kassow was born in a displaced persons' camp in Stuttgart, Germany. His mother survived because a classmate hid her and her sister in a dug-out underneath the barn on his family's farm; his father was arrested by the Russians and spent the duration of the war in a Soviet prison camp. Kassow grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.
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#1559

Giordano Bruno Guerri

Giordano Bruno Guerri
#24888
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Giordano Bruno Guerri is an Italian historian, writer, and journalist. He is an important scholar of twentieth-century Italy, in particular of the Fascist period and the relationship between Italians and the Catholic Church.
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#1560

George Dyson

George Dyson
#3705
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
George Dyson is an American non-fiction author and historian of technology whose publications broadly cover the evolution of technology in relation to the physical environment and the direction of society. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the history of computing, the development of algorithms and intelligence, communications systems, space exploration, and the design of watercraft.
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#1561

Stephen Nissenbaum

#37925
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen Nissenbaum , is an American scholar, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's History Department specializing in early American history through to the nineteenth century. Most notably, he co-authored a book with Paul Boyer in 1974 about the Salem witch trials, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, called "a landmark in early American studies" by John Putnam Demos.
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#1562

Stephen Lovell

#63913
Overall Influence
Stephen Lovell is professor of modern history at King's College London. Lovell's research relates to Russian history since 1750, particularly the cultural and social history of 19th and 20th century Russia. Lovell studied at King's College, Cambridge and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, which today forms part of University College London.
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#1563

Arlette Farge

#44074
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Arlette Farge is a French historian who specialises in the study of the 18th century, a director of research at the CNRS, attached to the centre for historical research at the EHESS. Arlette is the youngest of three siblings born into a modest family which came to Charleville because of the needs of the war. After attending the Lycée Hélène Boucher in Paris, she studied to become a juge des enfants, a magistrate specialised in juvenile law, then changed her focus to take an advanced diploma in legal and institutional history. With no post available, she left France in 1969 to do her thesis a...
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#1564

Judith Herrin

Judith Herrin
#41451
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Judith Herrin is an English archaeologist, byzantinist, and historian of Late Antiquity. She was a Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at King's College London .
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#1565

Alfred E. Senn

Alfred E. Senn
#55154
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Alfred Erich Senn was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Senn was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Swiss philologist and lexicographer, . His father taught at the University of Lithuania, where he met his future wife. After they married, they moved to the United States in 1930 or 1931, along with two daughters.
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#1566

Pierre Singaravélou

#68211
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Pierre Singaravélou is a French Global historian who is a British Academy Global Professor of History at King’s College London. He is also full Professor of Modern History at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and director of the Center for Asian History . Professor Singaravélou is the former director of the Sorbonne University Press and an honorary fellow of the Institut universitaire de France .
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#1567

Volodymyr Viatrovych

Volodymyr Viatrovych
#30847
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Volodymyr Mykhailovych Viatrovych is a Ukrainian historian, civic activist and politician. Viatrovych was the Director of the Center for Research of Liberation Movement in 2002–2010. Viatrovych is a member of the board of trustees of the National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes "Loncky street Prison"" Museum. From 2008 to 2010, he was director of the Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. In 2010-2011 he was senior visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, working in particular with the archival documents of Mykola Lebed. He was Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance since 25 March 2014 until September 2019.
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#1568

Colin Jones

#33984
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Colin David Hugh Jones is a British historian of France and professor of history at Queen Mary University of London. Jones attended Hampton Grammar School. He then studied at Jesus College, Oxford, 1967–71, where he obtained a first-class honours degree in modern history and modern languages and St Antony's College, Oxford, from where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1978.
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#1569

Leonore Davidoff

#28770
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Leonore Davidoff was a feminist historian and sociologist who pioneered new approaches to women's history and gender relations, including through her analysis of the gendered division of roles in public and private spheres. She helped create the Feminist Library in London in 1975. She was also the founding editor of the academic journal Gender & History. For much of her academic career, Davidoff was based at the University of Essex in the UK, and was a Professor Emerita when she died.
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#1570

Robert Bickers

#38194
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Robert A. Bickers is a British historian of modern China and colonialism. He is currently a professor of history at the University of Bristol. Bickers is the author of six books and editor or co-editor of three more.
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#1571

Tadeusz Swietochowski

Tadeusz Swietochowski
#49698
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Tadeusz Świętochowski was a Polish-American historian and Caucasologist, Professor Emeritus of Columbia University and Monmouth University. Biography Świętochowski was born in France into a family of Polish diplomat Stanisław Świętochowski, who died in the USSR, probably in Butyrka prison. After graduating with a degree in Turkish studies from the University of Warsaw, he left Poland for the Middle East, where he earned his MA in Arab Studies at the American University of Beirut, and later studied Arab History at the Cairo University. In 1965, he moved with his wife Marie Lukens, whom he met ...
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#1572

Salvatore Lupo

#32322
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Salvatore Lupo is an Italian historian and author from Siena, specializing in the Sicilian Mafia. Lupo is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Palermo, previously professor of contemporary history at the University of Catania. He is the president of the Southern Institute of History and Social Sciences of Catania and deputy director of the quarterly magazine of the institute, Meridiana, of which he was one of the founders. He is a member of the editorial board of "Storica".
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#1573

Ulrich L. Lehner

#19724
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ulrich L. Lehner is the Warren Foundation Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a trained philosopher, theologian and historian. Life and Education After graduating from the in Straubing in 1996 he received a B.A. in philosophy from the Munich School of Philosophy and a B.A. in theology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1999, and a diploma in theology from the University of Munich in 2003. In 2006 he received his PhD in theology from the Universität Regensburg with a thesis on the concept of providence of Immanuel Kant and Protestant scholasticism. In ...
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#1574

Keith Hitchins

#24152
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Keith Arnold Hitchins was an American historian and a professor of Eastern European history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in Romania and its history. He was born in Schenectady, New York. After graduating from Union College, he went to Harvard University, earning a Ph.D. in history in 1964 under the direction of Robert Lee Wolff. After teaching for seven years at Wake Forest University and then for a short period at Rice University, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, where he spent the rest of his academic career.
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#1575

Thavolia Glymph

Thavolia Glymph
#56967
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation .
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#1576

Boris Mironov

Boris Mironov
#35868
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Boris Nikolaevich Mironov is a Soviet and Russian historian, cliometrist, specialist in the field of historical sociology, social, economic and demographic history of Russia, anthropometric history and research methodology.
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#1577

Lamin Sanneh

Lamin Sanneh
#29662
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Lamin Sanneh was the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School and Professor of History at Yale University. Biography Sanneh was born and raised in Gambia as part of an ancient African royal family, and was a naturalized United States citizen. After studying at the University of Birmingham and the Near East School of Theology, Beirut, he earned his doctorate in Islamic History at the University of London. Sanneh taught and worked at the University of Ghana, the University of Aberdeen, Harvard, and, from 1989–2019, at Yale. He was an editor-at-large of The Christian Century, and served on the board of several other journals.
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#1578

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

#39075
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ramón Arturo Gutiérrez is an American historian of race and ethnic relations. He studies "Mexican-American history, Indian-White relations in the Americas, social and economic history of the Southwest, colonial Latin American and Mexican immigration." He has authored or edited many books and journal articles on these subjects.
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#1579

Bill Schwarz

#23355
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bill Schwarz is an English historian, who is a Professor in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, his research focusing on postcolonial history. Schwarz is the author of Memories of Empire: The White Man's World, which was Book of the Year at the Longman/History Today Awards in 2013. He is literary executor, with Catherine Hall, of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whose posthumously published memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands was co-written with Schwarz. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal, and General Editor of the Duke University Pres...
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#1580

Werner Huß

#77415
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Werner Huß is a German ancient historian. Werner Huß received a doctorate in Roman Catholic theology in 1967 and his habilitation in ancient history in 1975 at Munich with the work Untersuchungen zur Außenpolitik Ptolemaios' IV. . He taught as Professor Ordinarius of Ancient History at the University of Bamberg from 1978 until his retirement in 2001. He is co-editor of the Münchener Beiträge zur Papyrusforschung und antiken Rechtsgeschichte .
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#1581

Jehuda Reinharz

#30896
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jehuda Reinharz served as President of Brandeis University from 1994–2010. He is currently the Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis. He is also the president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. On September 25, 2009, Reinharz announced his retirement as President of Brandeis, but at the request of the Board of Trustees, he stayed on until a replacement could be hired. On January 1, 2011, Reinharz became president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation.
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#1582

Ramón Eduardo Ruiz

#42859
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Ramón Eduardo Ruiz was an American historian of Mexico and Latin America. He was the author of fifteen books on Mexican and Latin American history and in 1998 he was awarded the US National Humanities Medal.
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#1583

Richard P. McCormick

#44706
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Richard Patrick McCormick was a historian, former university professor of history, administrator, professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and president of the New Jersey Historical Society. McCormick was internationally recognized for his expertise in New Jersey and early American political history.
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#1584

Kanji Nishio

#26416
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
is a Japanese intellectual and professor emeritus of literature at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan. He was awarded a degree in German literature and a PhD in literature from the University of Tokyo. He has translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer into Japanese and has written over seventy published works and over thirty translations.
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#1585

Bernard McGinn

#16611
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Bernard McGinn is an American Roman Catholic theologian, religious historian, and scholar of spirituality. A specialist in Medieval mysticism, McGinn is widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of mysticism in the Western Christian tradition. He is best known for his comprehensive series on mysticism, The Presence of God.
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#1586

Barbara Jelavich

#29956
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Barbara Jelavich was an American historian and writer. A prominent scholar in the field of Eastern European history, she specifically focused on the diplomatic histories of the Russian and Habsburg monarchies, the diplomacy of the Ottoman Empire, and the history of the Balkans.
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#1587

Desmond Morton

#30582
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Desmond Dillon Paul Morton was a Canadian historian and political advisor who specialized in the history of the Canadian military, as well as the history of Canadian political and industrial relations.
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#1588

Kenneth S. Davis

#32228
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Kenneth Sydney Davis was an American historian and university professor, most renowned for his series of biographies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Davis also wrote biographies of Charles Lindbergh, Adlai Stevenson, and authored the first biography of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, entitled Dwight D. Eisenhower: Soldier of Democracy.
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#1589

Susan Easton Black

Susan Easton Black
#54637
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Susan Easton Black is a retired professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She is also an author of several books related to Joseph Smith and the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints .
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#1590

Richard Clogg

#43812
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Richard Clogg is a British historian. Life Richard Clogg studied history at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated as Master in 1963. From 1969 on, he was teaching modern Greek history at King's College London, first as lecturer, then reader, finally from 1988 to 1995 as professor of Balkan history. In 1995, he became senior research fellow as well as fellow of the governing board of St Antony's College, Oxford.
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#1591

Joanne Meyerowitz

#42790
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Joanne Meyerowitz is an American historian and author. She was a professor at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati before becoming editor of the Journal of American History from 1999 to 2004. Following her tenure there, she accepted a position at Yale University, where she was subsequently appointed the Arthur Unobskey Professor of History. Her work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Gender & History, the Journal of Women's History, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
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#1592

Dušan T. Bataković

#35657
Overall Influence
1957 - 2017 (60 years)
Dušan T. Bataković was a Serbian historian and diplomat. His specialty was modern and contemporary Serbian and Balkan history as well as French-Serbian relations. The last post he held was that of Director of the Institute for Balkan Studies at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
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#1593

David Maxwell

#78688
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
David James Maxwell is a British historian and academic, specialising in the missionary movement and Christianity in Africa. He is the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge and professorial fellow of Emmanuel College.
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#1594

Richard Oram

#63825
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Professor Richard D. Oram F.S.A. is a Scottish historian. He is a professor of medieval and environmental history at the University of Stirling and an honorary lecturer in history at the University of Aberdeen. He is also the director of the Centre for Environmental History and Policy at the University of Stirling.
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#1595

Peter Stanley

#50928
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Peter Alan Stanley is an Australian historian and research professor at the University of New South Wales in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society. He was Head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia from 2007–13. Between 1980 and 2007 he was an historian and sometime exhibition curator at the Australian War Memorial, including as head of the Historical Research Section and Principal Historian from 1987. He has written eight books about Australia and the Great War since 2005, and was a joint winner of the Prime Minister's Prize fo...
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#1596

Robert Olby

#2402
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Robert Cecil Olby was a research professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Formerly Reader at the University of Leeds, UK, Robert Olby is a historian of 19th and 20th century biology, his specialist fields being genetics and molecular biology. With the assistance of Martin Packer, Olby completed an authorized biography of the late Francis Crick. It is entitled Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets, after an article in The New York Times on February 2, 1962.
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#1597

Bimal Prasad

#58097
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Bimal Prasad was an Indian historian known for his scholarship on modern Indian history. He was Indian ambassador to Nepal during 1991-1995. Academic career Prasad was professor of history at University of Patna, Patna and then South Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He served as Dean, School of International Studies.
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#1598

Jeffrey C. Stewart

#21413
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jeffrey Conrad Stewart is an American Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, described as "a panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired".
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#1599

Clark G. Reynolds

Clark G. Reynolds
#48448
Overall Influence
1939 - 2005 (66 years)
Dr. Clark Gilbert Reynolds, B.A., M.A. , Ph.D. was a historian of naval warfare, with a particular interest in the development of U.S. naval aviation. In addition, he made contributions to the fields of world history, strategic history, and the history of maritime civilizations.
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#1600

Michael Kulikowski

#54981
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Michael Kulikowski is an American historian. He is Professor of History and Classics and Head of the History Department at Pennsylvania State University. Kulikowski specializes in the history of the western Mediterranean world of late antiquity. He is sometimes associated with the Toronto School of History and was a student of Walter Goffart.
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