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,

#1801

A R Mallick

#60547

Overall Influence

1918 - 1997 (79 years)

Azizur Rahman Mallick was a Bangladeshi historian and educationist. Early life and education Mallick was born in Dhaka district. He spent his early life in Rangoon, Burma. He and his family returned to Dhaka when he was at seventh grade. He passed SSC from Manikganj Model High School in 1934 and HSC from Dhaka College in 1936. He studied History at Dhaka University, completing bachelor's degree in 1939 and master's degree in 1940. The following year, he joined the university as a lecturer, and he had further teaching stints at Chittagong College and Rajshahi College. After World War II, he we...

#1802

Marie Boas Hall

#34460

Overall Influence

1919 - 2009 (90 years)

Marie Boas Hall was a historian of science and is considered one of the postwar period pioneers of the study of the Scientific Revolution during the 16th and 17th centuries. Biography and career Marie Boas was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1940. During World War II, she worked in the MIT Radiation Laboratory with Henry Guerlac in writing the history of the laboratory and of the operational use of radar during the war. She continued her work with Guerlac at Cornell University and received her PhD in 1949. Her thesis covered the mechanical philosophy of Robert Boyle and was published in the history of science journal Osiris in 1952.

#1803

Anders Winroth

#53193

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Anders Winroth is a professor of medieval history at the University of Oslo and previously taught in the same field at Yale University Life After graduation from Stockholm University, Winroth did his master's and doctoral studies at Columbia University under Robert Somerville, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Newcastle, where he was the Sir James Knott Research Fellow and worked with R. I. Moore.

#1804

Robert J. Young

#18626

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert J. Young is a Canadian historian and former professor of history at the University of Winnipeg . He specializes in 20th century European international politics. A graduate of the University of Saskatchewan and the London School of Economics, Young's doctoral dissertation was written under the supervision of Donald Cameron Watt. It was published by Harvard University Press as In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1940. Over the last forty years, Professor Young, a Canadian, has written numerous academic books and articles including France and the Origins of the Second World War and Louis Barthou: Power and Pleasure.

#1805

Scott Reynolds Nelson

Scott Reynolds Nelson

#65910

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He was formerly the Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is a historian of the Long Nineteenth Century. He specializes in Labor history, international finance, the history of science, and global commodities.

#1806

Thomas Owen Clancy

#46625

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Thomas Owen Clancy is an American academic and historian who specializes in medieval Celtic literature, especially that of Scotland. He did his undergraduate work at New York University, and his Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently at the University of Glasgow, where he was appointed Professor of Celtic in 2005.

#1807

Kenneth Maxwell

#21211

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Kenneth Robert Maxwell is a British historian of Iberia and Latin America, educated at St John’s College, Cambridge University, where he studied under Professor Sir Harry Hinsley and Ronald Robinson and Edward Miller . In 1963 he studied at the University of Madrid and was a Gulbenkian grantee in Lisbon in 1964. In September 1964 he entered the graduate program in Latin American History at Princeton University where his supervisor was Professor Stanley Stein . He was a Newberry library-Gulbenkian fellow in Chicago . He was appointed an assistant and later an associate professor of Luso-Brazilian history at the University of Kansas in Lawrence .

#1808

Woodrow Borah

#41448

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Woodrow Wilson Borah was a U.S. historian of colonial Mexico, whose research contributions on demography, economics, and social structure made him a major Latin Americanist. With his 1999 death "disappears the last great figure in the generation that presided over the vast expansion of the Latin American scholarly field in the United States during the years following World War II." With colleagues at University of California, Berkeley who came to be known as the "Berkeley School" of Latin American history, Borah pursued projects to gather data from archives on indigenous populations, colonia...

#1809

Nick Lloyd

#48070

Overall Influence

Nick Lloyd FRHS, is Reader in Military and Imperial History at King's College London. He has written several books on the First World War. Selected publications Loos 1915. Stroud: Tempus, 2006.The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011Hundred Days: The End of the Great War. London: Viking Press, 2013. Passchendaele: A New History. London: Viking Press, 2017.

#1810

Stanley M. Burstein

#64664

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Stanley Mayer Burstein is a historian whose writings primarily concern the Hellenistic period. He is Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, Los Angeles, and the former Chair of the Department of History. He also served as secretary-treasurer and president of the Association of Ancient Historians.

#1811

László Péter

#65613

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

László Péter was Emeritus Professor of Hungarian History at the University of London. He completed his first degree at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest after which he worked as an archivist and teacher. He left Hungary in 1956, subsequently completing a DPhil at Nuffield College, University of Oxford under the supervision of C. A. Macartney and John Plamenatz. In 1961, he was appointed to a lectureship at SSEES and to a full chair in 1990. He retired in 1994.

#1812

James Merrell

#40510

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

James Hart Merrell is the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College. Merrell is primarily a scholar of early American history, and has written extensively on Native American history during the colonial era. He is one of only five historians to be awarded the Bancroft Prize twice.

#1813

Lee Feigon

#31280

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lee Feigon is an American historian who specialized in the study of 20th-century Chinese history. In 2002 he published Mao: A Reinterpretation, a work of historical revisionism that sought to highlight what Feigon saw as the positive aspects of Mao Zedong's political leadership. He subsequently used that book as a basis for a documentary, The Passion of the Mao.

#1814

Michael Hagemeister

#48779

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Michael Hagemeister is a German historian and Slavist, an authority on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and on Sergei Nilus. Hagemeister was employed at the universities of Marburg, Bochum, Basel, Innsbruck, Frankfurt , and Berlin. Hagemeister served as researcher at the Department of History of the University of Basel and as temporary professor at the Department of History of Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich and at the Department of East European History at Viadrina European University, Frankfurt .

#1815

Gwendolyn Wright

Gwendolyn Wright

#32167

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Gwendolyn Wright is an architectural historian and author. She was one of the hosts of the PBS television series History Detectives. She is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, also holding appointments in both its departments of history and art history. Dr. Wright's specialties are US architectural history and urban history from after the Civil War to the present. She also writes about the exchange across national boundaries of architectural styles, influences, and techniques, particularly examining the colonial and neo-colonial attributes of both modernism and historic pre...

#1816

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

#31520

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Andrew Frederic Wallace-Hadrill, is a British ancient historian, classical archaeologist, and academic. He is Professor of Roman Studies and Director of Research in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. He was Director of the British School at Rome between 1995 and 2009, and Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from August 2009 to July 2013.

#1817

Jonathan Frankel

#77352

Overall Influence

1935 - 2008 (73 years)

Jonathan Frankel was a historian and writer. He was a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1964 to 1985, and a professor between 1985 and 2004. Influence Frankel was a noted historian of Modern Jewry, as testified in many obituaries: “the most highly regarded historian of modern Jewry of his generation” ; “arguably the greatest historian of modern Jewry of his generation” ; “a brilliant historian of Russian and Jewish history” .

#1818

Linda Lear

#15620

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Linda Jane Lear is an American historian of science and biographer. Life and career A native of Pittsburgh, Lear received her A.B. from Connecticut College in 1962, following with an A.M. from Columbia University in 1964; she received a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University in 1974. From 1963 until 1965 she chaired the history department of the Vail Deane School, and from 1965 until 1968 held a similar position at the National Cathedral School. An assistant professor at New Mexico State University from 1974 until 1976, she next worked at the American Association of Retired Persons, remaining there until 1978.

#1819

Phillipp Schofield

#62424

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Phillipp Richard Schofield FLSW is a medieval historian and a professor in Aberystwyth University's Department of History and Welsh History. Career Schofield graduated from University College London in 1986, with a BA in ancient and medieval history. He then undertook a doctorate at Wadham College, Oxford, under the supervision of Barbara Harvey: his DPhil was awarded in 1992 for his thesis "Land, family and inheritance in a later medieval community: Birdbrook, 1292–1412". After spending a year working for a commercial law firm, Schofield returned to the University of Oxford to take up a research position at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in 1993.

#1820

Simone Lässig

#70417

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Simone Lässig is the director of the German Historical Institute Washington DC and a cultural and social historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early life and education Simone Lässig was born in 1964. She graduated from the Extended Secondary School Altenburg in 1982. She then studied until 1987 at the Pedagogical University of Dresden, where in 1990 she obtained her PhD for a thesis on "Military Political action of social democracy in Eastern Saxony".

#1821

Michael King

#21025

Overall Influence

1945 - 2004 (59 years)

Michael King was a New Zealand historian, author, and biographer. He wrote or edited over 30 books on New Zealand topics, including the best-selling Penguin History of New Zealand, which was the most popular New Zealand book of 2004.

#1822

Irving Bernstein

#31242

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

Irving Bernstein was an American professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a noted labor historian. Childhood and education Bernstein was born in 1916 in Rochester, New York. His parents were Latvian immigrants, and his father was a baker.

#1823

Samita Sen

#45843

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Samita Sen is an Indian historian and academic. Having previously taught at the University of Calcutta and Jadavpur University, she has been Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge since 2018.

#1824

Michael Omolewa

Michael Omolewa

#11584

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael Abiola Omolewa is a Nigerian diplomat, scholar, education historian, and civil servant. From September 2003 to October 2005, he served as the 32nd president of the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization . While president, Omolewa led UNESCO to adopt the International Declaration on Human Genetic Data and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. From January 2000 to August 2009, Omolewa served as permanent delegate and ambassador of Nigeria to UNESCO. At University of Lagos, on Wednesday 6 February 2019, Omo...

#1825

Ned Blackhawk

#71428

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ned Blackhawk is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak tribe, Western Shoshone American historian currently on the faculty of Yale University. In 2007 he received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for his first major book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empire in the Early American West which also received the Robert M. Utley Prize in 2007.

#1826

Mark Edward Lewis

#34407

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mark Edward Lewis is an American sinologist and historian of ancient China. Life and career Mark Edward Lewis was born on September 25, 1954. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and studied Chinese at the International Chinese Language Program . His dissertation, entitled "The Imperial Transformation of Violence in Ancient China," was written under the Chinese-American historian Ho Ping-ti. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows.

#1827

Geoffrey Serle

#40565

Overall Influence

1922 - 1998 (76 years)

Alan Geoffrey Serle , known as Geoff, was an Australian historian, who is best known for his books on the colony of Victoria; The Golden Age and The Rush to be Rich and his biographies of John Monash, John Curtin and Robin Boyd.

#1828

Paul Kelly

#13518

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paul John Kelly is an Australian political journalist, author and television and radio commentator from Sydney. He has worked in a variety of roles, principally for The Australian newspaper and is currently its editor-at-large. Kelly also appears as a commentator on Sky News Australia and has written seven books on political events in Australia since the 1970s including on the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Recent works include The March of Patriots, which chronicles the creation of a modern Australia during the 1991–2007 era of prime ministers, Paul Keating and John Howard, and Trium...

#1829

Andrzej Zahorski

Andrzej Zahorski

#64422

Overall Influence

1923 - 1995 (72 years)

Andrzej Zahorski was a Polish historian, professor of University of Warsaw, researcher of history of Poland in the 18th century, history of Warsaw and general history of Napoleonic era. He was the chairman of the Polish Historical Society from 1982 to 1988.

#1830

William L. Van Deburg

#52917

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

William L. Van Deburg was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written on antebellum slavery, on the history of black nationalism, and on contemporary African-American popular culture. Van Deburg retired from teaching in 2008 and is currently Professor Emeritus.

#1831

David Daube

#15745

Overall Influence

1909 - 1999 (90 years)

David Daube was the twentieth century's preeminent scholar of ancient law. He combined a familiarity with many legal systems, particularly Roman law and biblical law, with an expertise in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian literature, and used literary, religious, and legal texts to illuminate each other and, among other things, to "transform the position of Roman law" and to launch a "revolution" or "near revolution" in New Testament studies.

#1832

Harold Shukman

#26317

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Harold Shukman was a British historian, specialising in the history of Russia. Shukman was born in London to a family of Jewish immigrants escaping from the Russian Empire. His father, David Shukman, whose first name he gave to his first born son David Shukman, was part of the Jewish community who lived in Baranow, Congress Poland, before emigrating and settling in the United Kingdom. After college and national service, he took the Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists, in Cambridge and Bodmin, Cornwall. Afterwards, he went on to study Russian and Serbo-Croat at the University of Nottingham, gaining a first-class degree.

#1833

James Belich

#23824

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

James Christopher Belich is a New Zealand historian, known for his work on the New Zealand Wars and on New Zealand history more generally. One of his major works on the 19th-century clash between Māori and Pākehā, the revisionist study The New Zealand Wars , was also published in an American edition and adapted into a television series and DVD.

#1834

Ana Lucia Araujo

Ana Lucia Araujo

#31901

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ana Lucia Araujo is an American historian, art historian, author, and professor of history at Howard University. She is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. Her scholarship focuses on the transnational history, public memory, visual culture, and heritage of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.

#1835

Per Anders Rudling

#30669

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Per Anders Rudling is a Swedish-American historian and an associate professor in the Department of History at Lund University . He specializes in the areas of nationalism. Education Rudling holds a Master of Arts degree in Russian from Uppsala University , a Master of Arts degree in history from San Diego State University , a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta , and completed a post-doc at the University of Greifswald, Germany.

#1836

George McTurnan Kahin

George McTurnan Kahin

#8969

Overall Influence

1918 - 2000 (82 years)

George McTurnan Kahin was an American historian and political scientist. He was one of the leading experts on Southeast Asia and a critic of United States involvement in the Vietnam War. After completing his dissertation, which is still considered a classic on Indonesian history, Kahin became a faculty member at Cornell University. At Cornell, he became the director of its Southeast Asia Program and founded the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. Kahin's incomplete memoir was published posthumously in 2003.

#1837

Fik Meijer

#88004

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Fik Meijer is a Dutch historian and author. Life He studied classics and ancient history at Leiden University and graduated in 1973. He is an emeritus professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam.

#1838

Lawrence W. Levine

#37166

Overall Influence

1933 - 2006 (73 years)

Lawrence William Levine was an American historian. He was born in Manhattan and died in Berkeley, California. He was noted for promoting multiculturalism and the perspectives of ordinary people in the study of history.

#1839

Alojz Benac

#50009

Overall Influence

1914 - 1992 (78 years)

Alojz Benac was a Bosnian and Yugoslav archaeologist and historian. Biography Benac studied classical philology and archaeology in Belgrade's Philosophy Faculty , and received his doctorate from Ljubljana University . He worked in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1947 to 1967 . He then left to assume a professorship in archaeology and ancient history in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo . He later became the founder and first Director of the Centre for Balkan Studies, within the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina , of which he was Ge...

#1840

Edward Shorter

#16533

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Edward Lazare Shorter is an American-born Canadian historian who is Professor & Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. His specializations are in the history of medicine and psychiatry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#1841

Jordi Nadal

#74450

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Jordi Nadal was a Spanish economist and historian. He earned a doctorate in history from the University of Barcelona and became a professor at the University of Valencia and Pompeu Fabra University.

#1842

Martin Ridge

#80141

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

Martin Ridge was an American historian and director of research at the Huntington Library. He is particularly known for the 1982 5th edition of "Westward expansion: a history of the American frontier" co-authored with Ray Allen Billington.

#1843

Christian Renoux

Christian Renoux

#45995

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Christian Renoux is a French historian and an activist for nonviolence. Education and teaching Born in 1960, he is alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud , agrégé in History , alumnus of the École française de Rome, the French Historical Institute of Rome , doctor in Early modern History of the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and graduated in Catholic theology from the Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg.

#1844

Yehoshua Porath

Yehoshua Porath

#57093

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Yehoshua Porath was an Israeli historian and professor of Middle East history. Academic career Yehoshua Porath was a lecturer in the History of Muslim Countries at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specialized in the history of Palestinian nationalism. Porat won the Landau Prize and the Ben-Zvi Prize for his book on Yonatan Ratosh. His other research included:Communism in Arab Israeli communitiesMaronite Peasants' Revolt in Lebanon 1858-1860Palestine, Arab unity and British policy 1930–1945

#1845

Ann Curthoys

#49791

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Ann Curthoys, is an Australian historian and academic. Early life and education Curthoys was born in Sydney, New South Wales, on 5 September 1945, and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney. In 1965, she took part in the Freedom Ride which highlighted racism against Aboriginal Australians in several towns. She completed a PhD at Macquarie University in 1973 and subsequently worked as a tutor and research assistant.

#1846

Peter Marshall

#4736

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter Hugh Marshall is an English author of over a dozen works of philosophy, history, biography, travel writing, and poetry. He is best known for his 1991 history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, and his 1984 biography of William Godwin.

#1847

Erhan Afyoncu

#42320

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Erhan Afyoncu is a Turkish historian, writer, academician, television programmer and columnist. Rector of the National Defense University. Personal life He saw his primary and secondary education in Tokat, the place of birth. After graduating from Gazi Osman Paşa High School in 1984, Marmara University Atatürk Education Faculty Department of Social Studies Education Department began.

#1848

Cushing Strout

#56015

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (101 years)

Cushing Strout was an American intellectual historian. He was Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University. Works The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard The American Image of the Old World Hawthorne in England: Selections from "Our Old Home" and "The English Note-Books" Conscience, Science & Security: The Case Of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer editorSpirit of American Government by J. Allen Smith editorIntellectual History in America editor, two volumes, Contemporary Essays on Puritanism, the Enlightenment & Romanticism, ...

#1849

Örjan Wikander

#73615

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Örjan Wikander is a Swedish classical archaeologist and ancient historian. His main interests are ancient water technology, ancient roof terracottas, Roman social history, Etruscan archaeology and epigraphy.

#1850

David Priestland

#43961

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

David Priestland is a British historian. He teaches modern history at the University of Oxford and is Fellow of St Edmund Hall. Career Priestland's research focuses on the history of the Soviet Union and the development of communism and neoliberalism. He is an occasional political and cultural commentator for The Guardian and New Statesman. In 2013, Priestland published a book Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes, which focuses mainly on a power struggle between three castes fighting for domination within society. Priestland's main argument is that humanity has shift...

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