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,

#1651

David Daiches

#14025

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

David Daiches was a Scottish literary historian and literary critic, scholar and writer. He wrote extensively on English literature, Scottish literature and Scottish culture. Early life He was born in Sunderland, into a Jewish family with a Lithuanian background—the subject of his 1956 memoir, Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood. He moved to Edinburgh while still a young child, about the end of the First World War, where his father, Rev Dr Salis Daiches was rabbi to Edinburgh's Jewish community, and founder of the city's branch of B'nai Brith.

#1652

Gail Lee Bernstein

#58557

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Gail Lee Bernstein is an American historian who is a professor emerita of history at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the history of Japanese women, and is considered one of the pioneers in this field. Bernstein retired from full-time teaching in 2007.

#1653

Jerca Vodušek Starič

#80882

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jerca Vodušek Starič is a Slovene historian. She received a bachelor's degree in history at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, a master's degree in 1979, and a PhD in 1991. Her field of expertise is Slovene and European history. Her focus is the government takeover by the communists in Yugoslavia after World War II. Currently she is a professor of modern history at the Faculty of Arts in Maribor. From 2005 to 2008, she was the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana.

#1654

Joel Colton

#54819

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

Joel G. Colton of Durham, North Carolina, was a modern history scholar and author. Colton received his B.A. in history from City College in 1939 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1940. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he returned to Columbia, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1950. He taught at Duke University from 1947 until his retirement in 1982, except while serving as director of humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation between 1974 and 1982.

#1655

Peter Jackson

#33164

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Peter Jackson is a British scholar and historian, specializing in the Crusades, particularly the contacts between the Europeans and the Mongols as well as medieval Muslim India. He is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Keele University and editor of The Cambridge History of Iran: The Timurid and Safavid Periods.

#1656

Edward Malefakis

#44856

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Edward E. Malefakis was an American history professor at Columbia University. He was an expert in Spanish history. The winner of the American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in 1971 for his work Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, Origins of the Civil War , he was a member of the panel of experts, along with Federico Mayor Zaragoza and Juan Pablo Fusi, among others, commissioned in 2004 by the government of Spain to advise over the notorious "Salamanca Papers".

#1657

Louis Hyman

#34292

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Louis Roland Hyman is an American writer and economic historian. He is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University's School of Industrial & Labor Relations.

#1658

John M. Barry

#22537

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

John M. Barry is an American author and historian who has written books on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the development of the modern form of the ideas of separation of church and state and individual liberty. He is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Distinguished Scholar at Tulane's Bywater Institute.

#1659

Hermann Weber

#42283

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Hermann Weber was a German historian and political scientist. He has been described as "the man who knew everything about the German Democratic Republic". Life Early years Hermann Weber was born into a working-class family in the closing years of what would later become known as the Weimar Republic period. His father was a metal worker. When Weber was 4 years old, membership in the Communist Party of Germany was banned by the Nazi Party. This impacted his family greatly – Weber's father was a Communist who found himself harassed and at one stage thrown into prison for a year and a half by t...

#1660

Reino Kero

#89647

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Reino Kero , is a Finnish historian, PhD 1974. Kero was professor in general history at the University of Turku from 1999–2002. Kero has focused on the Finnish emigration to North America. He has also written on Finnish-American immigrants in Soviet Carelia , and a book on American history and on Indians .

#1661

Bonnie G. Smith

#72515

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Bonnie G. Smith is an American feminist historian currently a part of the Board of Governors Distinguished History Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Biography Bonnie G. Smith was born in Bridgeport Connecticut, in 1940. Smith attended Smith College, earning a bachelor's degree there in 1962. Later, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1976. She has since held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the ...

#1662

John Hedley Brooke

John Hedley Brooke

#29324

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

John Hedley Brooke is a British historian of science specialising in the relationship between science and religion. Biography Born on 20 May 1944, Brooke is the son of Hedley Joseph Brooke, and Margaret Brooke, née Brown. He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Retford, then Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. On 30 August 1972, he married Janice Marian Heffer.

#1663

G. L. Harriss

#53208

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Gerald Leslie Harriss FBA was an English historian of the Late Middle Ages. His work focused on the parliamentary, financial and administrative history of the period. Harriss was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

#1664

Eric Grove

#50572

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Eric Grove was a British naval historian and defence analyst. Biography Grove was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1948. He took an MA in War Studies at King's College London in 1971 and was appointed that year as a civilian lecturer in Naval History and Strategic Studies at the Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth and continued in that position till 1984. During the 1970s he wrote books on tanks and armoured warfare. In 1980 and 1981 Grove was the first Dartmouth academic to exchange for a year with the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis.

#1665

Ricardo Krebs

#37795

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

Ricardo Krebs Wilckens was a Chilean historian of German descent. In 1943, Krebs joined the newly founded Pedagogy School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he was in charge of the universal history course. Krebs, as a native of Valparaíso, had until then spent a career in Germany and so he was rather isolated with few contacts in Santiago.

#1666

Jamie Bulloch

#18907

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jamie Bulloch is a British historian and translator of German literature, with fifty published titles to his name. Life and work Bulloch was born at East Dulwich Hospital, London, in 1969 and grew up in Tooting. He first attended Rosemead School, then Whitgift School, where he opened the bowling for the 1st XI. In 1981 he performed with the Children's Music Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe in a production directed by Jeremy James Taylor, which was also filmed for Granada Television the same year. He returned to the Fringe in 1983 and 1989, appearing latterly in Silver, written by Jonathan Smi...

#1667

Ted Steinberg

#65834

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ted Steinberg is a Professor of History and Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University. Background He was born in Brooklyn and raised in Merrick, Long Island, New York. He had a pro-Israel upbringing and had a bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Am in Merrick in April 1974. As an undergraduate he become an anti-Zionist after reading works by Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. He received his BA summa cum laude in 1983 from Tufts University. He received a Ph.D. in history from Brandeis University in 1989, where he worked under the guidance of Donald Worster, David Hackett Fischer, and Morton Horwitz.

#1668

Chris Baker

#32798

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Christopher John Baker is a Thailand-based British writer who has made his home in Bangkok for more than 30 years. He is the co-author of A History of Thailand, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, Thailand's Boom and Bust, and Thailand's Crisis, all written with his wife, Dr. Pasuk Phongpaichit. He was the principal writer of the United Nations Development Programme's Thailand Human Development Report 2007: Sufficiency Economy and Human Development, which praised King Bhumibol Adulyadej's self-sufficient economy theory.

#1669

Tahir Albakaa

#41315

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Tahir Albakaa is an Iraqi historian who received his Master's degree and Ph.D in Modern History from Baghdad University. Albakaa worked at Al-Mustansiriya University from 1983 to 2003 and is the former President of the University. In June 2004 he was chosen as a Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research for the Iraqi Interim Government. Albakaa was a member of the Iraqi National Assembly in 2005, and a member of the Iraqi Constitution Writing Committee.

#1670

Edward J. Davies

#47871

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

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

#1671

Hans-Joachim Voth

#60273

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Hans-Joachim Voth is a German economic historian. He joined the University of Zurich economics faculty in 2014 and has been the Scientific Director of the UBS Center for Economics in Society since 2017. In 2022, he was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

#1672

David Greenberg

#18199

Overall Influence

David Greenberg is a historian and professor of US history as well as of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States. US history books Greenberg’s Ph.D. thesis won Columbia University’s 2001 Bancroft Dissertation Award and became his first book, Nixon’s Shadow , which won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award and the American Journalism Historians Association's Book Award. Calvin Coolidge , a biography in Henry Holt's American Presidents Series, appeared on the Washington Post’s list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR's All Things Considered, and CBS’s Sunday Morning.

#1673

Haggai Erlich

#54651

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Haggai Erlich is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and an academic adviser at the Open University of Israel where he is the head of Middle Eastern History studies. He is the Landau Prize recipient for 2010 in African Studies.

#1674

Shigeru Nakayama

#29874

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Shigeru Nakayama was a Japanese historian of science. Life Nakayama was born in 1928, in Amagasaki, and brought up there. He survived the Hiroshima atom bomb of 1945. He left Hiroshima Higher School in 1948, and graduated from Tokyo University with a degree in mathematical astronomy in 1951.

#1675

Maurice Olender

#27950

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Maurice Olender was a Belgian-French historian, professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His teaching focused in particular on the genesis of the idea of race in the nineteenth century. He also published widely on the intellectual history of the concepts of Indo-European languages and Proto-language, most importantly in his monograph Les langues du Paradis. As editor, he headed the journal and La librairie du XXIe siècle at Éditions du Seuil.

#1676

Khalil Gibran Muhammad

#40827

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is an American academic. He is a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library system, a research facility dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2010, Muhammad was an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington.

#1677

Hans-Werner Goetz

#63554

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Hans-Werner Goetz is a German historian who is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Hamburg. Biography Hans-Werner Goetz was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. From 1969 to 1974, Goetz studied history and English at the Ruhr University Bochum. He received his PhD at Bochum in 1976 under the supervision of Franz-Josef Schmale. From 1976 to 1986, Goetz was a research assistant at Bochum. He completed his habilitation in 1981 under the supervision of Otto of Freising. From 1990 to 2012, Goetz was a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Hamburg. Goetz has particip...

#1678

Sergey Karpov

#66933

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Sergey Pavlovich Karpov is a leading Russian Byzantinist who specializes in the Empire of Trebizond and the history of Gazaria. His work in Italian archives helped bring to light the records of Genoese and Venetian notaries and accountants concerning their Black Sea colonies. Some of his monographs are available in Italian translation. He was awarded a State Prize in 1996 and was elected into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2003. Karpov was Dean of the Department of History of the Moscow State University from 1995 until 2015.

#1679

Ken Inglis

#25852

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Kenneth Stanley Inglis, was an Australian historian. Early life and education Inglis was born in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe, on 7 October 1929, the son of Stan and Rene Inglis. He was educated at Tyler Street Public School, Northcote Boys' High School and Melbourne High School, before going to study at the University of Melbourne. Inglis participated in the Student Christian Movement and amateur dramatics during his studies, and worked as a tutor at Ormond College. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in History and English, he read for a Master of Arts at Melbourne.

#1680

David T. Beito

#44078

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

David T. Beito is an American historian and professor emeritus of history at the University of Alabama. Biography Beito was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received a B.A. in history from the University of Minnesota in 1980 and a Ph.D in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1986. Since 1994, he has taught at the University of Alabama, where he is a professor in history. He married Linda Royster Beito on June 11, 1997 and they live in Northport, Alabama.

#1681

Norman Gash

#34139

Overall Influence

1912 - 2009 (97 years)

Norman Gash was a British historian, best remembered for a two-volume biography of British prime minister Sir Robert Peel. He was professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews from 1955 to 1980 and specialised in the 19th century.

#1682

Jane Burbank

#47596

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jane Richardson Burbank is an American historian who is emeritus professor of history at New York University. She is known for her scholarship on Russia and its empire, as well as global history more broadly.

#1683

Judy Yung

#37391

Overall Influence

1946 - 2020 (74 years)

Judy Yung was professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specialized in oral history, women's history, and Asian American history. She died on December 14, 2020 in San Francisco, where she had returned in retirement.

#1684

David J. Weber

#50463

Overall Influence

1940 - 2010 (70 years)

David Joseph Weber was an American historian whose research focused on the history of the Southwestern U.S. and its transition from Spanish and Mexican control to becoming part of the United States. For a period of time, this field of study had largely been ignored, as both United States and Latin American historians concentrated on the central stories in their fields. He "was among the first scholars to focus on the importance of the relationship between Mexico and the United States."

#1685

Jon Gjerde

#58582

Overall Influence

1953 - 2008 (55 years)

Jon Gjerde was an American historian and the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and American Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as dean of the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

#1686

Claude Mutafian

Claude Mutafian

#31834

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Armen Z. Moutafian is a French mathematician and a historian who specializes in Armenian history. He is a Foreign Member of Armenian Academy of Sciences. He is the son of Zareh Mutafian. Biography Born in 1942 in Clamart, France, Claude Mutafian is an associate professor of mathematics and senior lecturer from the Paris 13 University in Villetaneuse. Following the publication of several books on algebra, Mutafian devoted himself to Armenian history since 1980, particularly to the relations of Armenia with its various neighbors over time. Ph.D. in history from Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne Univer...

#1687

Raphaëlle Branche

#42507

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Raphaëlle Branche is a French historian, professor of modern history at Paris Nanterre University. She is an expert on torture in the Algerian War, and more broadly on colonial violence and colonial wars. She is a professor of contemporary history in the University of Paris and has been since the 2019 academic year.

#1688

Peter Stachura

#44877

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Peter D. Stachura is a British historian, writer, lecturer and essayist. He was Professor of Modern European History at the University of Stirling and Director of its Centre for Research in Polish History. He has published extensively on the subject of the modern history of Poland and its people, the Polish military effort alongside the Allies, and the shaping of the Nazi German state and the European Theatre during World War II.

#1689

Morris Dickstein

#17623

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Morris Dickstein was an American literary scholar, cultural historian, professor, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

#1690

Michael Gehler

#50487

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Michael Gehler is an Austrian historian. He has been teaching at the German University of Hildesheim since 2006. Academic career Michael Gehler graduated from high school in Neustadt near Coburg/Germany, and studied history and German literature at the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck/Austria. From 1992 to 1996 he was a Research Fellow of the Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research Vienna. In 1999 Gehler habilitated at the University of Innsbruck and worked there until 2006 as an associate professor at the Institute for Contemporary History. In 2001/02 he was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow.

#1691

Ari Hoogenboom

#52084

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

Ari Arthur Hoogenboom was professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York. He was a scholar of the Gilded Age, particularly regarding the life and presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.

#1692

Harm Klueting

#48444

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Harm Klueting is a German historian, theologian, university professor and a Roman Catholic priest converted from Lutheranism. His research focuses on church history and general history of the early modern period. But he also has books on the history of Westphalia presented.

#1693

Richard Polenberg

#37204

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Richard Polenberg was an American historian. Background Richard Polenberg was born on July 21, 1937. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College and his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Columbia University, the latter supervised by William E. Leuchtenburg.

#1694

Samuel Finer

#21972

Overall Influence

1915 - 1993 (78 years)

Samuel Edward Finer FBA was a British political scientist and historian specializing in comparative politics, who was instrumental in advancing political studies as an academic subject in the United Kingdom, pioneering the study of UK political institutions. His most notable work is The History of Government from the Earliest Times – a three-volume comparative analysis of all significant government systems. He was also a major contributor to the study of civil–military relations with the publication of his book, The Man on Horseback.

#1695

David R. Marples

#20227

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

David Roger Marples is a Canadian historian and Distinguished University Professor at the Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta. He specializes in history and contemporary politics of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

#1696

Mehrdad Izady

#31502

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Michael Mehrdad R.S.C. Izady or Michael Izady , is a contemporary writer on ethnic and cultural topics, particularly the Greater Middle East, and Kurds. Early life and education Izady was born to a Kurdish father and a Belgian mother, and spent much of his youth in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Korea, as his diplomat parents moved from one assignment to another. He received his BA degree in history, political science and geography from the University of Kansas, and then attended Syracuse University, where he received two master's degrees in remote sensing-cartography and in international relations.

#1697

Andrew Gordon

#56877

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Andrew Gordon is an American japanologist who is a scholar of modern Japanese history. He is a Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University and former chair of the Department of History there from 2004 to 2007. He was Director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies from 1998 through 2004.

#1698

Götz Aly

#22413

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Götz Haydar Aly is a German journalist, historian and political scientist. Life and career Aly was born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg. He is a patrilineal descendant of a Turkish convert to Christianity named who was a chamberlain at the Prussian court in the late 1600s. By family tradition, the oldest son gets the middle name 'Haydar'.

#1699

Gary Sheffield

#37735

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Gary D. Sheffield is an English academic and military historian. He publishes on the conduct of British Army operations in World War I, and contributes to print and broadcast media on the subject. Career Sheffield is a proponent of the "revisionist school" of thought with regard to the conduct of military operations on the Western Front by the British Army during the First World War.

#1700

Glyndwr Williams

#60957

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Glyndwr Williams was a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London since 1974, specialising in the history of exploration and the history of Europe overseas. He was appointed a professor emeritus of the University of London in 1997.

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