Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#1751

John A. Lynn

#24091

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John Albert Lynn is a military historian who has written on a wide variety of topics in his field, with an emphasis on early modern Europe. Early life and education Born in Glenview, Illinois, in 1943, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , his Master of Arts degree at the University of California, Davis , and his Ph.D. at UCLA .

#1752

Jonathan M. Hall

#40168

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jonathan Mark Hall is professor of Greek history at the University of Chicago. He earned a BA from the University of Oxford in 1988 and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1993 and he is the author of many books, including Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200-479 BCE, Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian, and Reclaiming the Past: Argos and its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era, as well as various articles and reviews on Archaic and Classical Greece. His focus of research is on Greek history, historiography, and archaeology.

#1753

David S. Katz

#31015

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David S. Katz FRHistS is Director of the History of Ideas Program and a member of the Department of History at Brandeis University and Professor Emeritus of early modern European history at Tel Aviv University in Israel, where he taught from 1978 until retiring in 2019. He held the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books at Tel Aviv University and was Director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization . Katz received his B.A. from Columbia University and his D.Phil. from Oxford University where he was a pupil of Hugh Trevor-Roper . He was elected a fellow of...

#1754

Anita J. Prazmowska

#49127

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Anita J. Prazmowska is a Professor in International History at the London School of Economics, England. Her main fields of research lie in the Cold War, communism, contemporary history, Eastern Europe, fascism and Poland. She has published several books and journals. Her articles have been published in The Guardian. Her biography of Władysław Gomułka was released in 2016.

#1755

Hamish Scott

#38369

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Hamish Marshall Scott, was a Scottish historian and academic. He was Professor of International History then Wardlaw Professor of International History at the University of St Andrews. Having studied at the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics, he began his career lecturing at the University of Birmingham.

#1756

G. R. Hawting

#46278

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Gerald R. Hawting is a British historian and Islamicist. Life Hawting's teachers were Bernard Lewis and John Wansbrough. He received his Ph.D. in 1978. He is Emeritus Professor for the History of the Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

#1757

Pentti Virrankoski

#91461

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Pentti Akseli Virrankoski was a Finnish historian. He was born in Vancouver. Virrankoski was professor in Finland's history at Turku University from 1978 to 1992. Virrankoski focused in his research on economic and social history. Amongst his works are a great biography of Anders Chydenius. He has also written the first academic student book about Finland's economic history , two books about North American Indians, and a work on Ostrobothnia and a biography of the musician Heikki Klemetti .

#1758

Khoo Kay Kim

#19665

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Khoo Kay Kim was a Malaysian historian and academic of Chinese descent. He was honoured with Emeritus Professor title by the University of Malaya in 2001. In January 2011, Khoo was appointed Chancellor of KDU University College.

#1759

J. Morgan Kousser

#62337

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Joseph Morgan Kousser is an American historian. He is a professor of history and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology. Early life Kousser was born on October 7, 1943, in Lewisburg, Tennessee. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in history in 1965 after completing a senior thesis titled "Tennessee Politics and the Negro, 1948-1964." He then received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1971 after completing a 492-page long doctoral dissertation titled "The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910" under the supervision of C.

#1760

Reiner Pommerin

Reiner Pommerin

#31716

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Reiner Pommerin is a German historian specializing in the political and military history of the 18th to 21st centuries. Pommerin was a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Center of European Studies in 1979–80 and is a professor emeritus at the University of Dresden.

#1761

Eleanor Robson

#19490

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Eleanor Robson, is a British Assyriologist and academic. She is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London. She is a former chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and a Quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

#1762

Sophie Bessis

#18089

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sophie Bessis is a Tunisian-born French historian, journalist, researcher, and feminist author. She has written numerous works in French, Spanish, and English on development in the Maghreb and the Arab world, as well as the situation of women denouncing the identity imprisonment to which they are subjected. She is the recipient of the Paris Liège literary prize and was honored as Commandeur of the Order of the Republic.

#1763

Michael Levey

#23990

Overall Influence

1927 - 2008 (81 years)

Sir Michael Vincent Levey, LVO, FBA, FRSL was a British art historian and was the director of the National Gallery from 1973 to 1986. Biography Levey was born in Wimbledon, London, and grew up in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. He attended The Oratory School, a Catholic boarding school near Reading. He was called up for National Service in 1945 and served it largely in Egypt. After demobilisation in 1948 Levey went to Exeter College, Oxford to read English; he graduated with first class honours after only two years' study.

#1764

Tera Hunter

#61939

Overall Influence

Tera Hunter is an American scholar of African-American history and gender. She holds the Edwards Professor of American History Endowed Chair at Princeton University. She specializes in the study of gender, race, and labor in the history of the Southern United States.

#1765

Ann M. Blair

#22888

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ann M. Blair is an American historian, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University. She specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe , with an emphasis on France. Her interests include the history of the book and of reading, the history of the disciplines and of scholarship, and the history of interactions between science and religion. She is most widely known for being the author of the bestselling book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age . Blair was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2...

#1766

Peter Landau

#34401

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Peter Landau was a German jurist, legal historian and expert on canon law. After going to school in Berlin, where he was born, and Eisenberg, Thuringia, Landau studied law, history, and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, at University of Freiburg, and University of Bonn. After graduating, he served as the assistant of Stephan Kuttner at Yale University. After his doctoral promotion in 1964 and a habilitating in 1964, Landau accepted a call to University of Regensburg where he became a regular professor. In 1970/71 he served as Prorector of that university and in 1978/79 he was the Dean of the faculty of law.

#1767

Thomas F. Glick

#28614

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Thomas F. Glick is an American academic who taught in the departments of history and gastronomy at Boston University from 1972 to 2012. He served as the history department's chairperson from 1984 to 1989, and again from 1994 to 1995. He has also been the director of the Institute for Medieval History at Boston University since 1998. Dr. Glick's course offerings for the history department covered the topics of medieval Spain, medieval science and medieval technology, and the history of modern science. For the gastronomy department he taught a number of classes, including "Readings in Food H...

#1768

Sidney Fine

#25686

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Sidney Fine was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. He authored books on Frank Murphy, who served successively as Mayor of Detroit, Governor of Michigan, United States Attorney General, and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Fine was a Guggenheim Fellow and twice the winner of the University of Michigan Press Award. He received the University of Michigan's Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1969.

#1769

Charles A. Hale

#22283

Overall Influence

1930 - 2008 (78 years)

Charles Adam Hale was a distinguished historian of Mexico, who published major works on nineteenth and early twentieth-century Liberalism in Mexico. Life Hale was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Lloyd and Elizabeth Hale. He attended Amherst College, graduating in 1951, and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1957, he earned a doctorate in history at Columbia University, with Frank Tannenbaum as his mentor. He married Lenore Briggs Rice, the daughter of Paul North Rice and Genevieve Briggs Rice. He spent most of his academic career in the History Department of University of Iowa. Following his re...

#1770

Alexander J. Motyl

Alexander J. Motyl

#18524

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

#1771

Hans Fredrik Dahl

Hans Fredrik Dahl

#33321

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Hans Fredrik Dahl is a Norwegian historian, journalist and media scholar, best known in the English-speaking world for his biography of Vidkun Quisling, a Nazi collaborationist and Minister President for Norway during the Second World War. His research is focused on media history, the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, and the Second World War. He served as culture editor of Dagbladet 1978–1985 and has been a board member of the paper since 1996. He was a professor at the University of Oslo 1988–2009, and is now a professor emeritus.

#1772

Bahru Zewde

#30266

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Bahru Zewde is an Ethiopian historian and author. He writes extensively about modern Ethiopian history and is now an emeritus professor at Addis Ababa University where he once served as the Head of the History Department and the Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies.

#1773

Anthony Cordesman

Anthony Cordesman

#9017

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is a national security analyst on a number of global conflicts. Career He earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago , his M.A. from the Fletcher School, Tufts University , and his Ph.D. from the University of London .

#1774

James T. Kloppenberg

#51190

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

James T. Kloppenberg is an American historian, and Charles Warren Professor of American History, at Harvard University. Life He graduated from Dartmouth College summa cum laude, and from Stanford University with an M.A. and Ph.D. in 1980. He has held the Pitt professorship at the University of Cambridge, has taught at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and has taught at Brandeis University.

#1775

Jaime Alvar Ezquerra

#78901

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jaime Alvar Ezquerra is a Spanish historian, author and professor at the Charles III University of Madrid, specializing in ancient history. He was born in Granada, studied Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid, and later continued his studies at the University of Cologne . He taught at the Complutense University between 1977 and 1996, the year in which he became professor in Huelva. He was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in 1999-2000. He has been a professor at the Charles III University of Madrid since 2000. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Tor Vergata , Franche-Comté and Potsdam .

#1776

John M. Riddle

#19836

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

John Marion Riddle is an American historian and specialist in the history of medicine. He is Alumni Distinguished Professor emeritus of History at North Carolina State University. Career Riddle specializes in pharmacological history particularly of the classical and medieval periods, based on previously under-utilized ancient and medieval sources. His methodology is to draw on the modern understanding of medicine, pharmacy, and chemistry to interpret texts and uncover the rationality of early medicine. He has written extensively about Dioscorides, who published a description of 500 distinct p...

#1777

Florin Curta

#53987

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

<onlyinclude></onlyinclude> Biography Curta works in the field of Balkan history and is a professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Curta's first book, The Making of the Slavs. History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, A.D. 500–700, was named a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association in 2003. Curta is the editor-in-chief of the Brill series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450. In 2011, he contributed to The Edinburgh History of the Greeks.

#1778

Piotr Wilczek

#25152

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Piotr Antoni Wilczek is a Polish intellectual historian, a specialist in comparative literature and a literary translator, who served as the Ambassador of Poland to the United States and the United Kingdom .

#1779

Jerzy Tomaszewski

#54577

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Jerzy Tomaszewski was a Polish political scientist and historian, born in Radomsko. He graduated from the Warsaw School of Economics and worked there, later moving on to the Warsaw University of Life Science, and finally to Warsaw University. He specialized in the economic history of Poland and the Polish-Jewish history and relations. He authored many books together with his colleague from the Warsaw School of Economics, Zbigniew Landau.

#1780

Arthur Hertzberg

Arthur Hertzberg

#20185

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Arthur Hertzberg was a Conservative rabbi and prominent Jewish-American scholar and activist. Biography Avraham Hertzberg was born in Lubaczów, Poland, the eldest of five children, and left Europe in 1926 with his mother and grandmother to join his father in the United States, where his name was Americanized to Arthur. Hertzberg recalled that as a teenager in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, he would not accept the notion that the literary world of talmudic learning, the kabbalistic books and the writing of the chasidim were less worthy as compared to the Iliad, the Odyssey or Dante's Inferno.

#1781

Simon Thurley

#44027

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Simon John Thurley, is an English academic and architectural historian. He served as Chief Executive of English Heritage from April 2002 to May 2015. In April 2021, he became Chair of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

#1782

W. Warren Wagar

W. Warren Wagar

#43175

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Walter Warren Wagar , better known as W. Warren Wagar, was an American historian and futures studies scholar. Life A specialist in alternative society futures and an expert in the work of pioneering science fiction writer H.G. Wells, Wagar served as history professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York, for 31 years, after graduating from Yale University. His courses on the history of the future and World War III earned him the title of Distinguished Teaching Professor at Binghamton.

#1783

Thomas C. Reeves

#38630

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Thomas C. Reeves is a U.S historian who specializes in late 19th and 20th century America. Born into a blue collar family in Tacoma, Washington, Reeves received his B.A. at Pacific Lutheran University, his M.A. at the University of Washington, and his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966. After four years at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, he went on to become a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside.

#1784

Robin Winks

#46257

Overall Influence

1930 - 2003 (73 years)

Robin W. Winks was an American academic, historian, diplomat, writer on the subject of fiction, especially detective novels, and advocate for the National Parks. After joining the faculty of Yale University in 1957, he rose in 1996-1999 to become the Randolph Townsend Professor of History and Master of Berkeley College. At Oxford University he served as George Eastman Professor in 1992-3, and as Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History in 1999-2000.

#1785

Nwando Achebe

#16733

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Nwando Achebe is a Nigerian-American academic, academic administrator, feminist scholar, and multi-award-winning historian. She is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History and the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Social Science at Michigan State University. She is also founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of West African History. 19th Century, 20th Century, Cultural, Political, Religious, Social, Women & Gender

#1786

D. G. Hart

#26209

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Darryl G. Hart is an American religious and social historian. Hart is Distinguished Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He previously served as dean of academic affairs at Westminster Seminary California from 2000 to 2003, taught church history and served as librarian at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, directed the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, and was Director of Partnered Projects, Academic Programs, and Faculty Development at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. He is ...

#1787

Manisha Sinha

#38635

Overall Influence

Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition , which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

#1788

Ethan Kleinberg

#20545

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ethan Kleinberg works on the acrobatics of modern thought. He is Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University, Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory and was Director of Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. Kleinberg's research interests include European intellectual history with special interest in France and Germany, critical theory, educational structures, and the philosophy of history. Kleinberg's wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of history, philosophy, comparative literature and religion. Together with Joan Wallach Scot...

#1789

Thomas S. Kidd

#39365

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Thomas S. Kidd is an American historian, currently a Distinguished Professor at Baylor University and Distinguished professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Before becoming a professor, Kidd studied at the University of Notre Dame. He is a notable historian and author of such books as George Whitefield, a biography on the 18th-century Anglo-American preacher. Kidd credits George Whitefield as being "profoundly influential on the American nation's founding."

#1790

Daniel R. Schwartz

#46019

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Daniel R. Schwartz is a professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a scholar of Hellenistic Judaism, Flavius Josephus, the Second Temple Period, and the book 2 Maccabees.

#1791

A. Dirk Moses

#21454

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Jou...

#1792

Roderic H. Davison

#52446

Overall Influence

1917 - 1996 (79 years)

Roderic H. Davison was an American historian of the Middle East who taught at George Washington University from 1947 to 1993. He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association and the Turkish Studies Association, and as treasurer of the American Historical Association.

#1793

Femme Gaastra

#69709

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Femme Simon Gaastra was a Dutch Professor of maritime history at the University of Leiden and a leading expert on the history of the Dutch East India Company. Early life and education Gaastra attended the Rijks Lyceum in Heerenveen and began his studies in history at the University of Leiden in 1965, receiving his doctorate in March 1972.

#1794

John F. Marszalek

#67170

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John F. Marszalek is an American historian who served as Executive Director and Managing Editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant project from 2008 to 2022. Background and education Marszalek was born in Buffalo, New York. He received his bachelor's degree from Canisius College in 1961. He received a Master's Degree in 1963 and his Ph.D. in 1968, both from the University of Notre Dame.

#1795

Gro Steinsland

#36529

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Gro Steinsland is a Norwegian scholar of medieval studies and history of religion and since August 2009 has been the Scientific Director of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

#1796

Geoffrey C. Ward

Geoffrey C. Ward

#42769

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Geoffrey Champion Ward is an American editor, author, historian and writer of scripts for American history documentaries for public television. He is the author or co-author of 19 books, including 10 companion books to the documentaries he has written. He is the winner of seven Emmy Awards.

#1797

Martin J. Klein

#20103

Overall Influence

1924 - 2009 (85 years)

Martin Jesse Klein , usually cited as M. J. Klein, was a science historian of 19th and 20th century physics. Biography Klein was born in the Bronx, New York City. He was an only child and both his parents were schoolteachers. After graduating from James Monroe High School at the age of 14, he attended Columbia University, where he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1942 and a master's degree in physics in 1944. In 1948, he received a Ph.D. in physics under László Tisza at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1798

Andrzej Nowak

#45358

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Andrzej Witold Nowak is a Polish historian and opinion journalist. Life and work He is a professor at Jagiellonian University and at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where he is the head of the Section for the History of Eastern Europe and the Empires of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Before that he was visiting professor at Rice University. He was the co-founder and for many years chief editor of the prestigious conservative cultural-political magazine Arcana. He cooperates with the monthly Wpis regularly and is one of the main authors of the publishing h...

#1799

John Erickson

#42602

Overall Influence

1929 - 2002 (73 years)

John Erickson, FRSE, FBA, FRSA was a British historian and defence expert who wrote extensively on the Second World War. His two best-known books – The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin – dealt with the Soviet response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, covering the period from 1941 to 1945. He was respected for his knowledge of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. His Russian language skills and knowledge gained him respect.

#1800

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson

#46221

Overall Influence

Donald C. Davidson was the historian of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway from 1998 to 2020, the only person to hold such a position on a full-time basis for any motorsports facility in the world. Davidson started his career as a statistician, publicist, and historian at USAC. His radio program, The Talk of Gasoline Alley, is broadcast annually throughout the "Month of May" on WFNI in Indianapolis, and he is part of the IMS Radio Network.

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