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.

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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,

#1601

Noel Swerdlow

#22229

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Noel Mark Swerdlow was a professor emeritus of history, astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. Career Swerdlow specialized in the history of exact sciences, astronomy in particular, from antiquity through the 17th century. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1968; his doctoral dissertation, Ptolemy's Theory of the Distances and Sizes of the Planets: A Study of The Scientific Foundations of Medieval Cosmology, was supervised by Asger Aaboe.

#1602

Charles King

#25834

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Charles King is the Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University, where he previously served as the chairman of the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

#1603

James Clifford

#9007

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

James Clifford is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work combines perspectives from history, literature, history of science, and anthropology. Biography He grew up in New York City and was for thirty-three years Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz until his retirement in 2011. Clifford and Hayden White were the first faculty directly appointed to the graduate-only department at UC-Santa Cruz. Clifford served as department Chair from 2004–2007, and was the founding director of UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies. He has been a visiti...

#1604

Emma Rothschild

Emma Rothschild

#24350

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Emma Georgina Rothschild is a British economic historian, a professor of history at Harvard University. She is director of the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Harvard, and an honorary Professor of History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. She formerly served as board member of United Nations Foundation and as a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

#1605

Joan Thirsk

#44225

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Irene Joan Thirsk, was a British economic and social historian, specialising in the history of agriculture. She was the leading British early modern agrarian historian of her era, as well as an important social and economic historian. Her work highlighted the regional differences in agricultural practices in England. She also had an interest in food history and local English history, in particular of Hadlow, Kent.

#1606

Fred Anderson

#49245

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Fred Anderson is an American historian of early North American history. Education and career Anderson received his B.A. from Colorado State University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. He has taught at Harvard and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is currently Professor Emeritus of History. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center of Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

#1607

David Gordon

#13949

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David Gordon is an American libertarian philosopher and intellectual historian influenced by Murray Rothbard's views of economics. He is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and is editor of The Mises Review.

#1608

Frank Barlow

#33568

Overall Influence

1911 - 2009 (98 years)

Frank Barlow was an English historian, known particularly for biographies of medieval figures. His subjects included Edward the Confessor, Thomas Becket and William Rufus. Academic life Barlow studied at St John's College, Oxford.

#1609

Ben-Ami Shillony

#55870

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Ben-Ami Shillony is professor emeritus of Japanese history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His wife, until her death, was Lena Shillony, professor emerita of French literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

#1610

Warren Treadgold

#49547

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Warren T. Treadgold is an American historian and specialist in Byzantine studies. He is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Byzantine Studies at Saint Louis University. His interest in the political, economic, military, social, and cultural history of the Byzantine Empire extends to the Byzantine historians themselves. Treadgold has also taught at UCLA, Stanford, Hillsdale, Berkeley, and Florida International University.

#1611

Evelyn Rawski

#52691

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Evelyn Sakakida Rawski is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History of the University of Pittsburgh and a scholar in Chinese and Inner Asian history. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of Japanese-American ancestry. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1995–1996.

#1612

Maya Jasanoff

#28378

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Maya R. Jasanoff is an American academic who serves as Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, where she focuses on the history of Britain and the British Empire. Early life Jasanoff grew up in Ithaca, New York and comes from a family of academics. Her parents, Sheila and Jay Jasanoff, are both Harvard professors, and her brother Alan is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was educated at Harvard College before studying for a master's degree at Cambridge, where she worked with Christopher Bayly. She earned her PhD at Yale with Linda Colley, completing the...

#1613

Paula Fredriksen

#17111

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Paula Fredriksen is an American historian and scholar of early Christianity. She held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University from 1990 to 2010. Now emerita, she has been distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since 2009.

#1614

Roger S. Bagnall

#57877

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Roger Shaler Bagnall is an American classical scholar. He was a professor of classics and history at Columbia University from 1974 until 2007, when he took up the position of first Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

#1615

Nathaniel C. Comfort

Nathaniel C. Comfort

#7891

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Nathaniel Charles Comfort is an American historian specializing in the history of biology. He is an associate professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In 2015, he was appointed the third Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center. He also serves on the advisory council of METI .

#1616

Sarah Foot

#52984

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Sarah Rosamund Irvine Foot, is an English Anglican priest and early medieval historian. She has been Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford since 2007, and Dean of Christ Church, Oxford since 2023.

#1617

Kurt Pätzold

#36447

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Kurt Pätzold was a German Marxist historian. Life In 1945 Kurt Pätzold moved with his family to Thüringen . From 1948 to 1953 he studied History, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of Jena, where he wrote his dissertation on how the economic crisis affected the Carl Zeiss AG company and received his PhD. He attended HU Berlin University to receive his Doctor of Science and he specialized in "Antisemitism and the persecution of Jews . A study of the political strategies and tactics used by the fascist, German imperialism." After the "turning point" in Germany , he was fired during a settlement lawsuit in 1992.

#1618

Mauno Jokipii

#43124

Overall Influence

1924 - 2007 (83 years)

Mauno Jokipii was a Finnish professor at the University of Jyväskylä in history specializing in World War II. He was a thorough investigator and a prolific author. Among his works were studies of the local history of Jyväskylä and the university and historical province of Satakunta.

#1619

Claude Nicolet

#34260

Overall Influence

1930 - 2010 (80 years)

Claude Nicolet was a 20th-21st century French historian, a specialist of the institutions and political ideas of ancient Rome. Biography Career A former student of the École normale supérieure, agrégé d'histoire and a member of the École française de Rome from 1957 to 1959, he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Tunis, Caen University then de Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and emeritus director of studies from 1997 at the École pratique des hautes études. Elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1986, he was director of the École française de Rom...

#1620

Philip J. Deloria

#40807

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Philip Joseph Deloria is a historian, author and member of the Dakota Nation who specializes in Native American, Western American, and environmental history. He is the son of scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., and the great nephew of ethnologist Ella Deloria. Deloria is the author of the award-winning books Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places , among others. Deloria received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and currently teaches in the Department of History at Harvard University. In 2021 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

#1621

Richard Wall Lyman

#9406

Overall Influence

1923 - 2012 (89 years)

Richard Wall Lyman , the seventh president of Stanford University, was an American educator, historian, and professor. Biography An historian of the British Labour Party, Lyman spent two years at the London School of Economics in 1951 and 1952, researching for his PhD on the first Labour Government. He spent the period 1954-1958 teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1957 his PhD was published as a book, entitled The First Labour Government, 1924. He joined Stanford in 1958.

#1622

Alixe Bovey

#78491

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Alixe Bovey FSA is a Canadian medieval art historian and Dean and Deputy Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a college of the University of London. Her research has been chiefly concerned with pictorial narratives and their cultural and literary context. She has also written on medieval monsters.

#1623

Mark R. Cohen

#23748

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Mark R. Cohen is an American scholar of Jewish history in the Muslim world. Cohen is Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

#1624

Howard Spodek

#61533

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Howard Spodek was an American world historian, a professor of history and geography and urban studies at Temple University. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1963 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1972; while a graduate student, he visited India as a Fulbright Fellow. He joined the Temple faculty in 1972. As well as his faculty position at Temple, Spodek was the treasurer of the World History Association and a member of the editorial board of History Compass.

#1625

Daina Ramey Berry

#61904

Overall Influence

Daina Ramey Berry is an American historian and academic who is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was formerly the associate dean of the graduate school and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies gender and slavery, as well as black women's history in the United States. She has written books about the connection between the idea of skilled work and the gender of enslaved people in antebellum Georgia, the economic history of slavery in the United States, and the historical contribu...

#1626

Stephen F. Jones

#18461

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Stephen F. Jones is an English expert on post-Communist societies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who currently serves as Chair of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.

#1627

Jan Harold Brunvand

Jan Harold Brunvand

#13324

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Jan Harold Brunvand is an American retired folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah. Brunvand is best known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore or story telling. Urban legends are "too good to be true" stories that travel by word of mouth, by print, or by the internet and are attributed to an FOAF: friend of a friend. "Urban legends," Brunvand says, "have a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible and they have a moral."

#1628

Max Crawford

#65795

Overall Influence

1906 - 1991 (85 years)

Raymond Maxwell Crawford , was a leading Australian historian. He was Professor of History at the University of Melbourne from 1937 to 1970. Life and career Crawford was born in Grenfell, New South Wales, where his father was a coalminer and railway worker. His brother, Sir John Crawford, became a distinguished economist. Max Crawford was educated at Sydney Boys High School, the University of Sydney and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English, history, philosophy and fine art . In 1935 he returned to Australia to take up a lectureship in history at Sydney, and in 1937 he succeeded S...

#1629

James Axtell

#40281

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

James L. Axtell was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Axtell, whose interests lie in American Indian history and the history of higher education, was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Axtell retired at the end of the spring 2008 semester, although he taught a class at Princeton University in the fall of 2009.

#1630

Hashem Aghajari

Hashem Aghajari

#5980

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Seyyed Hashem Aghajari is an Iranian historian, university professor and a critic of the Islamic Republic's government who was sentenced to death in 2002 for apostasy for a speech he gave on Islam urging Iranians to "not blindly follow" Islamic clerics. In 2004, after domestic Iranian and international outcry, his sentence was reduced to five years in prison.

#1631

Heydar Aliyev

#12335

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

Heydar Alirza oghlu Aliyev was an Azerbaijani politician who served as the third president of Azerbaijan from October 1993 to October 2003. Originally a high-ranking official in the KGB of the Azerbaijan SSR, serving for 28 years in Soviet state security organs , he led Soviet Azerbaijan from 1969 to 1982 and held the post of First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1987.

#1632

Hans Mottek

#69499

Overall Influence

1910 - 1993 (83 years)

Hans Mottek was one of the most important economic historians of the DDR . Life Mottek was born into a Jewish family and received a humanistic education. From 1929 to 1932, he studied jurisprudence at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin. In 1932/33 he was a legal clerk at the . After the Nazi seizure of power, Mottek had to abandon the professional career which he had only just begun. In the same year, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine. In 1935, Mottek joined the Communist Party of Germany. Subsequently, he lived in Great Britain from 1936 to 1946, where he made his living as an agricultural worker.

#1633

Cemal Kafadar

#34985

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Cemal Kafadar is Professor of History and the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies in the Harvard University Department of History. He is an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society. Kafadar graduated from Robert College, then Hamilton College, and received his PhD from the McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies in 1987 and taught for two years in Princeton's Near Eastern Studies department before going to Harvard. Kafadar teaches seminars related to popular culture, hagiography and Ottoman historiography as well as the early modern history of the Middle East and Balkans. H...

#1634

Spencer R. Weart

Spencer R. Weart

#13879

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Spencer R. Weart is the former director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. Life Originally trained as a physicist, he is now a historian of science. He earned his B.A. in Physics at Cornell University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1968. He then did postdoctoral studies at the Hale Observatories and California Institute of Technology, publishing papers on solar physics; from 1971 to 1974 he studied history of science in the University of California, Berkeley.

#1635

Israel Charny

#23832

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Israel W. Charny is an Israeli psychologist and genocide scholar. He is the editor of two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, and executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem.

#1636

Wilbur Jacobs

#60827

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

Wilbur R. Jacobs was an American historian, with a special interest in Native American, Western, and Environmental history. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1918, Jacobs moved west at a young age and settled in the Los Angeles area. He started college at Pasadena City College, then earned his B.A. and M.A. in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. After military service during World War II, Jacobs started doctoral study at Johns Hopkins University, but decided to return to UCLA to pursue Western Frontier history under the direction of Lewis Knott Koontz. He finished his doctorat...

#1637

Pertev Naili Boratav

#13126

Overall Influence

1907 - 1998 (91 years)

Pertev Naili Boratav, born Mustafa Pertev was a Turkish folklorist and researcher of folk literature. He has been characterized as 'the founding father of Turkish folkloristics during the Republic'.

#1638

Patricia Grimshaw

#36814

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Patricia Ann Grimshaw, is a retired Australian academic who specialised in women's and Indigenous peoples' history. One of her most influential works is Women's Suffrage in New Zealand, first published in 1972, which is considered the definitive work on the story of how New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.

#1639

Lawrence Davidson

Lawrence Davidson

#64959

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history from West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Islamic Fundamentalism, Cultural Genocide and has focused his academic research on American foreign relations with the Middle East.

#1640

James J. Martin

#13931

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

James J. Martin was an American historian and author known for espousing Holocaust denial in his works. He is known for his book, American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941 . Fellow Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes called it "unquestionably the most formidable achievement of World War II Revisionism."

#1641

Philippe Contamine

Philippe Contamine

#35473

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

Philippe Contamine was a French historian of the Middle Ages who specialised in military history and the history of the nobility. Life Contamine was a president of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Société de l'histoire de France, and the Societé des Antiquaires de France. He taught at the Université de Nancy, the Université de Paris X at Nanterre and Université de Paris IV . He was an officer of the Légion d’Honneur and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

#1642

Valery Tishkov

#12660

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Valery Aleksandrovich Tishkov Валерий Александрович Тишков is an ethnologist and former chairman of the State Committee of RSFSR on nationalities from February 27 to October 15, 1992 .

#1643

Jean Seaton

#16490

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and the Official Historian of the BBC. She is the Director of the Orwell Prize and on the editorial board of Political Quarterly. She is the widow of Ben Pimlott, the British historian.

#1644

Zhou Zhenhe

#35895

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Zhou Zhenhe is a Chinese historical geographer and a distinguished senior professor at the Institute of Historical Geography of Fudan University in Shanghai. His main research interests are cultural and administrative geography and history of Sino-foreign cultural relations. He is the chief editor of the 13-volume General History of Chinese Administrative Divisions, published between 2007 and 2016.

#1645

Philippe Burrin

Philippe Burrin

#25712

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Philippe Burrin is a historian whose research focuses on ideologies, movements and political parties in Europe during the interwar period. With his work on the Second World War, he tried to define the notions of mass violence and genocide.

#1646

Heinz Schilling

#54203

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Heinz Schilling is a German historian. Life Heinz Schilling was born in Bergneustadt in Berg and grew up in Cologne. After studying history, German, philosophy and sociology at the University of Cologne and completing a state teaching certification, Schilling moved on to take a doctorate in 1971 at the University of Freiburg with a study of social and religious history of Dutch exiles, working with Gottfried Schramm. From 1971 to 1979 Schilling worked as an assistant and lecturer at the department of medieval history and then in early modern history at the newly founded Faculty of History at the University of Bielefeld.

#1647

Steven Ruggles

#28573

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Steven Ruggles is Regents Professor of History and Population Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the director of the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation. He is best known as the creator of IPUMS, the world's largest population database. IPUMS provides information about two billion people residing in 107 countries between 1703 and the present, including every respondent to the surviving U.S. censuses of 1790 to 1940. He served as founding director of the Minnesota Population Center from 2000 to 2016. He served as the 2015 President of the Population Association of America, the first historian to hold the position.

#1648

Norbert Angermann

#68417

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Norbert Angermann is a German historian. Angermann studied Baltic history in Middle Ages, especially the history of Livland, and Russo-German relationships during the same period. His teacher was Paul Johansen. He was Professor of Eastern European History in University of Hamburg and has been Emeritus since 2002. Norbert Angermann served as an editor for several books, so aside of Robert Auty and Robert-Henri Bautier for the volumes 6 to 9 of the Lexikon des Mittelalters. He lives in Buchholz in der Nordheide.

#1649

Justin McCarthy

#25585

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University , was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey , and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies . His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.

#1650

Eric Rauchway

#46802

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Eric Rauchway is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Davis. He received his B.A. from Cornell in 1991, and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1996. Rauchway's scholarship focuses on modern US political, social and economic history, particularly the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

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