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,

#1851

Dimitry Pospielovsky

#59645

Overall Influence

1935 - 2014 (79 years)

Dimitry Vladimirovich Pospielovsky was a historian, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario. He was a prominent researcher in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church.

#1852

David Gress

#30568

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Richard Gress is a Danish historian, known for his 1998 survey From Plato to Nato on Western identity and grand narratives. Life He was born in Copenhagen, the son of R. W. B. Lewis, an American literary historian, and the Danish writer, playwright and essayist Elsa Gress. The two were not married, which is why Gress uses his mother's maiden name. She subsequently married the American painter Charles Clifford Wright.

#1853

Caroline Walker Bynum

#26715

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Caroline Walker Bynum, FBA is a Medieval scholar from the United States. She is a University Professor emerita at Columbia University and Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the first woman to be appointed University Professor at Columbia. She is former Dean of Columbia's School of General Studies, served as president of the American Historical Association in 1996, and President of the Medieval Academy of America in 1997–1998.

#1854

Tomasz Kamusella

Tomasz Kamusella

#11388

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Tomasz Kamusella is a Polish scholar pursuing interdisciplinary research in language politics, nationalism, and ethnicity. Education Kamusella was educated at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Faculty of Philology in Sosnowiec Campus , Poland; Potchefstroom University , Potchefstroom, South Africa; and the Central European University , Prague Campus, Czech Republic. He obtained his doctor degree in political science from the Institute of Western Affairs , Poznań, Poland and habilitation in Cultural Studies from the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.

#1855

Edouard Machery

#5472

Overall Influence

Edouard Machery is a French-American philosopher and distinguished professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Early life and education Edouard Machery received a Ph.D. in philosophy at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne in 2004.

#1856

Thomas C. Holt

#36455

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Thomas Cleveland Holt is an American historian, who is the James Westfall Thompson Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago. He has produced a number of works on the people and descendants of the African Diaspora. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1994.

#1857

Richard R. John

#34801

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Richard R. John, Jr. is an American historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and the state. He is a professor of history and communications at Columbia University.

#1858

Lee Edwards

#26189

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Lee Willard Edwards is an American academic and author, currently a fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is a historian of the conservative movement in the United States. Early life and education Edwards was born in Chicago in 1932. Edwards says he was influenced by the politics of his parents, both anti-communist. His father Willard was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune.

#1859

Hichem Djait

#25018

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Hichem Djait , also known as Hichem Jaiet, was a prominent historian and scholar of Islam. Biography Djait was born in 1935 in Tunis, Tunisia to a conservative upper-middle-class family. His father and some of his uncles and relatives were Islamic sages , which made the name of the Djait family become traditionally associated with the Zeytouna Mosque as well as with Islamic Fiqh and Iftah . He completed his secondary education at Sadiki College, where he studied French, world literature, Western philosophy, Arabic, and Islamic Studies. This training made him discover Enlightenment thinkers and...

#1860

Lester L. Grabbe

#27156

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lester L. Grabbe is a retired American scholar and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism at the University of Hull, England. As an historian of ancient Judaism, he has authored several standard treatments. He founded and convenes the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel's History, and publishes the proceedings in the sub-series European Seminar in Historical Methodology. Before retirement, he established and taught for several years a module, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and another module, Religious Sectarianism in History and the Modern World.

#1861

Dominique Kalifa

Dominique Kalifa

#48144

Overall Influence

1957 - 2020 (63 years)

Dominique Kalifa was a French historian, columnist and professor. Early life Kalifa was born in Vichy and attended the local École normale supérieure at Saint-Cloud. Under the supervision of Michelle Perrot, he undertook postgraduate research and received his doctorate in 1994.

#1862

François Bovon

#25608

Overall Influence

1938 - 2013 (75 years)

François Bovon was a Swiss biblical scholar and historian of early Christianity. He was the Frothingham Professor Emeritus of the History of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Bovon was a graduate of the University of Lausanne and held a doctorate in theology from the University of Basel . From 1967 to 1993, he taught in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Geneva. Bovon was an honorary professor at the University of Geneva and in 1993 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He was president of the Swiss Society of Theology from...

#1863

Theodore Porter

Theodore Porter

#31001

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Theodore M. Porter is a professor who specializes in the history of science in the Department of History at UCLA. He has authored several books, including The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900; and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, the latter a vast reference for sociology of quantification. His most recent book, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, is Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981.

#1864

Eric Kurlander

#69726

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Eric Kurlander is an American historian who currently serves as the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson University. He received his B.A. in history from Bowdoin College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in modern European history from Harvard University. Kurlander is a specialist in modern German history and particularly of Nazi Germany, about which he has written three books. The most recent, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, was nominated for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year in 2019.

#1865

Eugen Ewig

#70265

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

Eugen Ewig was a German historian who researched the history of the early Middle Ages. He taught as a professor of history at the University of Mainz and the University of Bonn. In the second half of the 20th century, he was considered the foremost expert on the Merovingian dynasty.

#1866

Beatrice Heuser

#24599

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Beatrice Heuser , is an historian and political scientist. She holds the chair of International Relations at the University of Glasgow. Life Heuser has a B.A. in History from Bedford College, a M.A. in International History from the London School of Economics and a D.Phil. in Political Science from the University of Oxford. In addition, she holds a Higher Doctorate from the University of Marburg. From 1989 to 1991, she worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Subsequently, she became a lecturer and later a professor of Strategic Studies at King's College London. She ha...

#1867

Charles W. Calhoun

#43201

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Charles W. Calhoun is an American historian and academic. He is a professor at East Carolina University. He holds a BA, from Yale University; PhD, Columbia University. Calhoun is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He lives in Greenville, North Carolina.

#1868

Elizabeth Fee

#31260

Overall Influence

1946 - 2018 (72 years)

Elizabeth Fee , also known as Liz Fee, was a historian of science, medicine and health. She was the Chief of the United States National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division. Early life and education Fee was born in Belfast to Deirdre and John Fee, Methodist missionaries. From the age of five months, she began travelling with her parents to destinations including China, Malaysia, India, Egypt and throughout Europe. After contracting scarlet fever in China, Fee lost her hearing in one ear. In her teen years, the family returned to Northern Ireland where Fee attended school.

#1869

Mark von Hagen

#24213

Overall Influence

1954 - 2019 (65 years)

Mark Louis von Hagen was an American military historian who taught Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian history at Arizona State University. He was formerly at Columbia University. He was commissioned by The New York Times to write an independent assessment of Times correspondent Walter Duranty and his reporting on the Soviet Union after the newspaper received a letter from the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding allegations of Duranty's role in the cover-up of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine.

#1870

John Bew

#65133

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

John Bew is Professor in History and Foreign Policy at King's College London and from 2013 to 2014 held the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center.

#1871

Anatol Hrytskievich

#28036

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Anatol Hrytskievich was a Belarusian historian. He was a correspondent member of the International Academy of Science of Eurasia , doctor of history , professor . He was born in Minsk. Anatol Hrytskievich graduated in 1950 from the Minsk Medical Institute and in 1955 — from the Minsk Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages and in 1958 from the Belarusian State University history faculty.

#1872

Gregory Melleuish

#55120

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Gregory Melleuish is an Australian associate professor of history and politics at the University of Wollongong. Subjects he teaches include Australian politics, political theory, world history and ancient history. Previously, he taught European history at the University of Melbourne and Australian Studies at the University of Queensland. He occasionally contributes opinion pieces for The Australian, The Conversation and On Line Opinion. He has been contributing editor of the Canada-based history journal, The Dorchester Review since 2011.

#1873

Marcel Trudel

#24950

Overall Influence

1917 - 2011 (94 years)

Marcel Trudel was a Canadian historian, university professor and author who published more than 40 books on the history of New France. He brought academic rigour to an area that had been marked by nationalistic and religious biases. His work was part of the marked changes to Quebec society during the Quiet Revolution. Trudel's work has been honoured with major awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for French Non-Fiction in 1966, and a second nomination for the award in 1987.

#1874

James B. Allen

#32330

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

James Brown "Jim" Allen is an American historian of Mormonism and was an official Assistant Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1972 to 1979. While working as Assistant Church Historian, he co-authored The Story of the Latter-day Saints with Glen Leonard. After Ezra Taft Benson dismissed the book as secular new history, other events led to the dissolution of the LDS Church History department in 1982. Allen resigned as Assistant Church Historian in 1979, returning to work at Brigham Young University full-time.

#1875

Hans-Christof Kraus

#71014

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Hans-Christof Kraus is a German historian. Life Born in Göttingen, Kraus studied history, German literature and philosophy at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from 1978 to 1984. In the 1980s he was editor of the Young Conservatives Phoenix magazine. In the late 1980s and 1990s he wrote articles for right-wing conservatism journals Etappe and , as the student assistant at the Institute of History at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Niklas Weber, wrote in an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was criticized by Benjamin Hasselhorn as "one-sided and distorting."

#1876

Robin Fleming

#39417

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Robin Fleming is a medieval historian and a professor of history at Boston College. She is the president of the Medieval Academy of America and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She has written several books focusing on the people of Roman Britain and early medieval Britain, using both archaeological evidence and written records.

#1877

Donald Shively

#44378

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Donald Howard Shively was an American academic, historian, Japanologist, author and professor emeritus of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a leader of Japan studies in the United States.

#1878

Otis L. Graham

#71685

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Otis Livingston Graham Jr. was an American historian, with a special interest in political history, immigration, and public history. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 25, 1935, Graham received his BA in history from Yale University in 1957 . After serving three years as an officer in the US Marine Corps, he earned his PhD in history at Columbia University in 1966 with a doctoral dissertation entitled The Old Progressive and the New Deal: A Study of the Modern Reform Tradition. He taught at Mount Vernon Seminary and College and then California State University, Hayward, before he joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966 .

#1879

Lloyd Hustvedt

#41946

Overall Influence

1922 - 2004 (82 years)

Lloyd Hustvedt was an American professor, author, and scholar of Norwegian-American history. Background Lloyd Merlin Hustvedt was born and raised in the Sogn Valley in Goodhue County, Minnesota. His parents, Lars Iversen Hustvedt and Mathilde Anette Hustvedt , were children of Norwegian immigrants. Hustvedt finished his BA degree at St. Olaf College with a major in Norwegian. He received his MA degree from the University of Minnesota and his PhD in Scandinavian studies from the University of Wisconsin.

#1880

Roger D. Abrahams

#23492

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Roger David Abrahams was an American folklorist whose work focused on the expressive cultures and cultural histories of the Americas, with a specific emphasis on African American peoples and traditions.

#1881

Richard Gerberding

#69920

Overall Influence

Richard A. Gerberding is professor emeritus and former director of classical studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He taught Latin and Ancient History courses at Willamette University between Fall 2013 and Spring 2015.

#1882

Peter Coss

#43528

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter R. Coss is a British historian, specialising in the history of the English medieval gentry. He is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University, Wales. His research interests also include 12th- to 15th-century English social history and Italian history from the same period, as well as visual history/social display and literature and history. As of 2008, he was working on a comparative project between the English gentry and the nobility of Tuscany, and another on the foundations of gentry culture. Coss studied under Rodney Hilton.

#1883

Paul Andrew Hutton

Paul Andrew Hutton

#54471

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Paul Andrew Hutton is an American writer, and television personality. He is also Distinguished Professor of History at the University of New Mexico and the former executive director of Western History Association and past president of Western Writers of America.

#1884

Qin Hui

#27215

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Qin Hui is a Chinese historian and public intellectual. He previously held the position of Professor of History, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is now an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

#1885

Priya Satia

#36015

Overall Influence

Priya Satia is an American historian of the British Empire and the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Satia grew up in Los Gatos, California.

#1886

Digby Smith

#9444

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Digby Smith is a British military historian. The son of a British career soldier, he was born in Hampshire, England, but spent several years in India and Pakistan as a child and youth. As a "boy soldier", he entered training in the British Army at the age of 16. He was later commissioned in the Royal Corps of Signals, and held several postings with the British Army of the Rhine.

#1887

Elting E. Morison

#33113

Overall Influence

1909 - 1995 (86 years)

Elting Elmore Morison was an American historian of technology, military biographer, author of nonfiction books, and essayist. He was an MIT professor and the founder of MIT's Science, Technology, and Society program.

#1888

Paul Wallace Gates

Paul Wallace Gates

#43101

Overall Influence

1901 - 1999 (98 years)

Paul Wallace Gates was a professor of history and general historian who is widely considered to be the foremost authority on the history of federal land policy in the United States. Gates wrote 10 books and 75 academic articles, and his magnum opus was History of Public Land Law Development.

#1889

John E. Toews

#28726

Overall Influence

John E. Toews is a Canadian historian in the U.S., and Director of the Comparative History of Ideas Program, University of Washington from 1981 to 2010. He graduated from Harvard University, with a Ph.D. in 1973.

#1890

Richard Talbert

#60570

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and is currently Research Professor in charge of the Ancient World Mapping Center. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and ideas of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.

#1891

Giles Constable

Giles Constable

#51337

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Giles Constable was an English historian of the Middle Ages. Constable was mainly interested in the religion and culture of the 11th and 12th centuries, in particular the abbey of Cluny and its abbot Peter the Venerable.

#1892

Stephen J. Pyne

#31150

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, specializing in environmental history, the history of exploration, and especially the history of fire. Education Pyne received his bachelor's degree at Stanford University after graduating from Brophy College Preparatory, a Jesuit high school, in Phoenix, Arizona. He later attained his master's and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship to Sweden, was awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and had two tours at the National Humanities Center.

#1893

Martin Stuart-Fox

#19870

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Martin Stuart-Fox is a retired Australian professor and foreign correspondent who writes about the history, politics and international relations of Southeast Asia, primarily Laos. After studying biological sciences at the University of Queensland, Martin Stuart-Fox worked as a marine biologist in Papua New Guinea, then taught science in Hong Kong. In 1963 he was employed by the U.S. Agency for International Development as an agricultural extension officer in Laos. There he began reporting for United Press International, initially as a stringer and then as a staff correspondent. In 1965 UPI assigned him to cover the war in Vietnam.

#1894

Jürgen Rohwer

#60588

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

Jürgen Rohwer was a German military historian and professor of history at the University of Stuttgart. Rohwer wrote over 400 books and essays on World War II naval history and military intelligence, which gained him worldwide recognition as a prominent historian and a leading authority on U-boats.

#1895

Eric Birley

#52883

Overall Influence

1906 - 1995 (89 years)

Eric Barff Birley, , was a British historian and archaeologist, particularly associated with the excavation of the forts of Hadrian's Wall, notably at Vindolanda. Early life and education Eric Birley was born in Eccles, Lancashire, on 12 January 1906.

#1896

Robert M. Young

#25630

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Robert Maxwell Young was an American-born historian of science specialising in the 19th century and particularly Darwinian thought, a philosopher of the biological and human sciences, and a Kleinian psychotherapist.

#1897

M. C. Ricklefs

#44791

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

Merle Calvin Ricklefs was an American-born Australian scholar of the history and current affairs of Indonesia. Ricklefs was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on 17 July 1943 and died on 29 December 2019, aged 76.

#1898

Joyce Chaplin

#66018

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Joyce E. Chaplin is an American historian and academic known for her writing and research on early American history, environmental history, and intellectual history. She is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019. In 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

#1899

Cleveland Sellers

Cleveland Sellers

#25600

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Cleveland "Cleve" Sellers Jr. is an American educator and civil rights activist. During the Civil Rights Movement, Sellers helped lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was the only person convicted and jailed for events at the Orangeburg Massacre, a 1968 civil rights protest in which three students were killed by state troopers. Sellers' conviction and the acquittal of the other nine defendants was believed to be motivated by racism, and Sellers received a full pardon 25 years after the incident.

#1900

Elie Rekhess

#27099

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Elie Rekhess is an Israeli scholar of political history of the Arabs in Israel; Islamic resurgence in Israel; the West Bank and Gaza and Palestinian affairs. He serves as Crown Visiting professor in Israel Studies at Northwestern University affiliated with the Department of History and the Department of Jewish Studies. He was formerly on the faculty of the Department of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and served as head of the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation.

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