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,

#1901

Brian P. Levack

#69866

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Brian Paul Levack is an American historian of early modern Britain and Europe. He received his B.A. from Fordham University in 1965, and then both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale. In 1969 he joined the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where he is now the John E. Green Regents Professor Emeritus in History. His research interests center on the history of the law, the relationship between law and politics in early modern Britain, the formation of the British state, witch-hunting, and demonic possession.

#1902

Barend Jan Terwiel

#20341

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Barend Jan Terwiel is a Dutch-Australian anthropologist, historian and Thai studies scholar. He has written books on ethnology of Tai peoples and Ahom, the history and culture of Thailand as well as historical travel of Europeans to mainland Southeast Asia. He retired in 2007, although he still writes about Thailand, releasing a new edition of his book Thailand's Political History in 2010. He authored 11 articles over 47 years from 1972 to 2019 for Journal of the Siam Society.

#1903

Wilfried Loth

#31566

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Wilfried Loth is a German historian and political scientist. Life Wilfried Loth was born 29 August 1948 in Wadern. From 1966 to 1972, he studied German studies, History, Philosophy and Education at Saarland University. He obtained his doctorate in 1974. From 1974 to 1984 he worked there as an assistant lecturer and in 1983 he obtained his habilitation in Modern history with a dissertation on Catholics in the German Empire: Political Catholicism in the Crisis of Wilhelminian Germany. From 1984 to 1985 he was Professor of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin, then Professor of Political Science at the University of Münster from 1985 to 1986.

#1904

Henry Graff

#44992

Overall Influence

1921 - 2020 (99 years)

Henry Franklin Graff was an American historian who served on the faculty of Columbia University from 1946 to 1991, including a period as chairman of the History Department. Graff specialized in the history of the Presidency of the United States and of American foreign relations. His pioneering “Seminar on the Presidency,” one of Columbia's most popular courses, was attended by President Harry Truman in 1959 and President Gerald Ford in 1989. Graff has twice served as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize jury in American history.

#1905

Richard C. Lukas

Richard C. Lukas

#46697

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Richard Conrad Lukas is an American historian and author of books and articles on military, diplomatic, Polish, and Polish-American history. He specializes in the history of Poland during World War II.

#1906

Harold Perkin

#24862

Overall Influence

1926 - 2004 (78 years)

Harold James Perkin was a distinguished English social historian who was the founder of the Social History Society in 1976. Background Perkin was born in Hanley, Staffordshire of humble origins. He attended Hanley High School and won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge from 1945, gaining a starred First Class degree in 1948. After National Service in the RAF, he was rejected by his Cambridge college to study for a PhD. He began extramural history teaching from 1950 with the University of Manchester.

#1907

Said Ashour

#53924

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Said A. Ashour was a professor of History at Cairo University. He authored some 22 books and published numerous papers and articles over his long career. Ashour was Chair of the Middle Ages section for many decades at the history departments of Cairo University, Beirut Arab University in Lebanon and Kuwait University. Ashour taught at Alexandria University and was a visiting professor in several universities throughout the Middle East.

#1908

Toshio Kuroda

#30623

Overall Influence

1926 - 1993 (67 years)

Toshio Kuroda was a Japanese academic, historian and university professor. A specialist in medieval Japanese history and in the history of Japanese thought, he greatly influenced Japanese historiography with several innovative and controversial theories. His ideas were the opposite of what mainstream academics at the time believed, and for this reason his name is often at the center of controversies. His work has been called "seminal", "epochal" and "revolutionary".

#1909

Vern Bullough

#9802

Overall Influence

1928 - 2006 (78 years)

Vern Leroy Bullough was an American historian and sexologist. He was a distinguished professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Faculty President at California State University, Northridge, a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, past Dean of natural and social sciences at the Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York, one of the founders of the American Association for the History of Nursing, and a member of the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia.

#1910

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

#35426

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is a professor of Afro-American Studies, African American Religion and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Higginbotham wrote Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880–1920, which won several awards. She has also received several awards for her work, most notably the 2014 National Humanities Medal.

#1911

Leonard Dinnerstein

#33455

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Leonard Dinnerstein was an American historian and author. He was a professor at the University of Arizona and was a specialist on Antisemitism in the United States. He was born in the Bronx, to parents Abraham and Lillian, née Kubrick. The Dinnerstein's were of Jewish descent, with ancestors from Austria, Romania, what became Belarus.

#1912

Paul Cohen

#47956

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Paul A. Cohen is Edith Stix Wasserman Professor of Asian Studies and History Emeritus at Wellesley College and Associate of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. His research interests include 19th-20th century China; historical thought; American historiography on China.

#1913

Haim Zafrani

#37338

Overall Influence

1922 - 2004 (82 years)

Haim Zafrani , born in 1922 in Essaouira-2004 Zafrani is particularly noted for having collected and preserved much or the music and oral poetry of the Jews of Morocco. He recorded, and thereby preserved, the melodies of Rabbi David Buzaglo , widely acclaimed as the greatest paytan of his time.

#1914

Usha Sanyal

#17101

Overall Influence

Usha Sanyal is an American scholar and historian. Her PhD dissertation analysed the Islamic legal scholar Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi. She is Visiting assistant professor of history at Wingate University in North Carolina.

#1915

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra

#49537

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is a faculty member in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professorship in History. He is most notable for his work in Atlantic history, the history of science in the early modern Spanish empire, and the colonizing ideologies of the Iberian and British empires.

#1916

Henry Glassie

#27753

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Henry Glassie College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington, has done fieldwork on five continents and written books on the full range of folkloristic interest, from drama, song, and story to craft, art, and architecture. Three of his books -- Passing the Time in Ballymenone, The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today -- were named among the "Notable Books of the Year" by The New York Times. Glassie has won many awards for his work, including the Charles Homer Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinguished career of humanistic scholarship.

#1917

Daniela Müller

#61888

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Daniela Müller is a German theologian and church historian. She is a full professor in the History of Christianity and Canon Law at Radboud University, and has published extensively on the subjects of heresy and dissidents. Her work focuses on "the concepts of orthodoxy and heterodoxy and on the history of dissident communities."

#1918

Jörn Leonhard

#86630

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jörn Leonhard is a historian and professor of Western European History at the History Department of the University of Freiburg since 2006. From 2007 to 2012, he was co-director of the School of History at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies . His published works focus on the history of liberalism, nationalism, empires and wars. Leonhard has received several important research awards. His books “Die Büchse der Pandora” as well as “Der Überforderte Frieden” established him as an important representative in the research of global history.

#1919

Judith Walzer Leavitt

#32492

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Judith Walzer Leavitt is an American historian. She was the Rupple Bascom and Ruth Bleier Professor of History of Medicine, History of Science, and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her book subjects have included a study of Mary Mallon, a history of childbirth in America, and a history of public health in Milwaukee. She is the wife of Waisman Center medical director Lewis Leavitt, as well as the sister of political theorist Michael Walzer.

#1920

Frank Bongiorno

#69258

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Francis Robert Bongiorno, is an Australian historian, academic and author. He is a professor of history at the Australian National University, and was head of the university's history department from 2018 to 2020. Bongiorno is the President of the Australian Historical Association.

#1921

Paul Fouracre

#67305

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Paul J. Fouracre is professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Manchester. His research interests relate to early medieval history, the history of the Franks, law and custom in medieval societies, charters, hagiography and serf-lord relations in the eleventh century. His recent work on the cost of the liturgy, focusing on the social and economic effects of providing "eternal light", is a study of the interplay between belief and materiality.

#1922

Łukasz Kamiński

Łukasz Kamiński

#32691

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Łukasz Andrzej Kamiński is a Polish historian, specializing in the history of Poland after 1945, particularly the period of Soviet occupation and the Polish People's Republic. He is the President of the European Union's Platform of European Memory and Conscience and formerly served as President of the Institute of National Remembrance from 2011 to 2016.

#1923

Andreas Kappeler

#80548

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Andreas Kappeler is a Swiss historian. He is professor emeritus for the history of Eastern Europe at the University of Vienna. Life Kappeler was born in Winterthur, Switzerland on September 20, 1943. From 1962 to 1969 he studied history, slavistics, publizistik and history of Eastern Europe at the universities of Zurich and Vienna. He spent extensive periods in Paris, Helsinki, and Moscow in the following years before he became a professor for East European History at the University of Cologne. In 1998 he switched to the University of Vienna, where in 2006 he initiated the Doctoral Programme Austrian Galicia and its Multicultural Heritage.

#1924

James Mace

#37513

Overall Influence

1952 - 2004 (52 years)

James E. Mace was an American historian, professor, and researcher of the Holodomor. Biography Born in Muscogee, Oklahoma, Mace did his undergraduate studies at the Oklahoma State University, graduating with a B.A. in history in 1973. He pursued his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Roman Szporluk, receiving a Ph.D degree in 1981, with a thesis on national communism in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s.

#1925

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

#25762

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a scholar of Performance and Jewish Studies and a museum professional. Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, she is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. She is currently the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition and Advisor to the Director at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

#1926

Jerzy Holzer

#64691

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Jerzy Stanisław Holzer was a Polish historian. He specialized in the Polish history, German history, and the Polish-German relations. In 1950-1954 he studied history at the University of Warsaw. From 1954 to 2000 he worked at the Institute of History of the university. In October 1990 he gained the title of professor. Holzer worked at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and at Collegium Civitas, he was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He lectured at the universities in Mainz, Freiburg and Berlin.

#1927

P. J. Rhodes

#72024

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Peter John Rhodes, , usually cited as P. J. Rhodes, was a British academic and ancient historian. He was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Durham. He specialized in Ancient Greek politics and political institutions.

#1928

Dietmar Rothermund

#43529

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Dietmar Otto Ernst Rothermund was a German historian and professor of the history of South Asia at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg. He is considered an important representative of modern German historical scholarship. Although he began his academic career as an Americanist, he eventually became a notable figure in the German historiography of South Asia. He helped to lay the foundations for South Asian Studies in Germany and Europe.

#1929

Roger Lockyer

#63753

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Roger Lockyer was an English historian, academic, and writer. He had been educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was a reader in history at Royal Holloway, University of London for many years, specialising in research and writing on the Tudor and Stuart periods.

#1930

Yehoshua Arieli

Yehoshua Arieli

#70846

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Yehoshua Arieli was an Israeli historian and Emeritus Professor of American History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.He was born in Karlovy Vary , Czechoslovakia, and was taken to Ereẓ Israel in 1931. Arieli was perhaps best known for writing Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology. Between 1976 and 1991 Arieli served as chairman and member of the board of directors of the Historical Society of Israel. In 1993, Arieli was awarded the Israel Prize for his contributions to history.

#1931

Touraj Atabaki

#18213

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Touraj Atabaki is Emeritus Professor by special appointment of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at the Leiden University. He was the Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He also held the chair of the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at the School of Middle East Studies of Leiden University, and is past president of the Association for Iranian Studies and the European Society for Central Asian Studies.

#1932

Selim Deringil

#20948

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Selim M. Deringil is a Turkish academic, and professor of history at Boğaziçi University and at the Lebanese American University. Career Deringil earned his doctorate from the University of East Anglia in 1979, and joined Boğaziçi University the same year. He is a notable lecturer on Late Ottoman History, Ottoman Islam and relationships between Ottomans and Europe. He has lectured in the United States, England, France, Lebanon and Palestine . He has written several essays on the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the history of the Republic of Turkey. His book "The Well-Protected Domains: Ideolog...

#1933

Tessa Morris-Suzuki

#56233

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Tessa Morris-Suzuki , born Teresa Irene Jessica Morris, is a historian of modern Japan and North Korea. She Professor Emerita in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University. She served as president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia from 2002-2003.

#1934

Daniel R. Headrick

#87606

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Daniel R. Headrick is an American historian and writer who specializes in the history of international relations, technology, and the environment. Biography Daniel R. Headrick was born on August 2, 1941, in Bay Shore, N.Y., USA. He attended secondary school in Germany and France and university in Spain, Italy, and the United States. He obtained a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College in 1962, an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1964, and a PhD in history from Princeton University in 1971 with a thesis on "The Spanish Army, 1...

#1935

J. Wesley Alexander

#95710

Overall Influence

#1936

Dolores Hayden

#23601

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Dolores Hayden is an American professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University. She is an urban historian, architect, author, and poet. Hayden has made innovative contributions to the understanding of the social importance of urban space and to the history of the built environment in the United States.

#1937

Thomas H. Bender

#39167

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Thomas H. Bender is an American historian, specializing in urban history and intellectual history. He joined New York University in 1974 and served there as University Professor of the Humanities from 1982 until his retirement in May 2015. He contributes regularly to the press, with articles published in The New York Times, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Newsday, among others.

#1938

Michel Vovelle

#55196

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

Michel Vovelle was a French historian who specialised in the French Revolution. Vovelle was born in Gallardon, near Chartres and he was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Lycée Henri IV, the École Normale Supérieure of St Cloud and at the University of Paris. He passed his agrégation d'histoire in 1956 and in 1963 published his first work, an edition of Marat's writings.

#1939

Martyn Housden

#57100

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

V. Martyn Housden is reader in modern history at the University of Bradford. Housden's research interests relate to the history of refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations, the psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm, the history of national minorities, and the history of Germany.

#1940

James Francis McMillan

#89558

Overall Influence

1948 - 2010 (62 years)

James Francis McMillan was a Scottish historian and author, head of the History Department of the University of Strathclyde, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh.

#1941

George Tindall

#37942

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

George Brown Tindall was an American historian and author. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1958 until his retirement, Tindall was "one of the nation's pre-eminent historians of the modern South." He served as president of the Southern Historical Association. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Fulbright Scholar, a visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 1969, Tindall's book The Emergence of the New South: 1913-1945 was given the Lillian Smith Book Award.

#1942

Jean Baubérot

#17190

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jean Baubérot , is a French historian and sociologist specializing in sociology of religions. He is the founder of the sociology of secularism. After holding the chair of "History and Sociology of Protestantism" , he held the chair of "History and Sociology of secularism " at the École pratique des hautes études, where he was the honorary president. He wrote twenty books, including a historical novel. He is coauthor of the Déclaration internationale sur la laïcité, signed by 250 scholars from 30 countries.

#1943

Martti Häikiö

#94494

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Martti Johannes Häikiö , is a Finnish historian and writer. In 1978 Häikiö became an associate professor in political history at Helsinki University. He has also been editor in chief and columnist in many journals and newspapers.

#1944

Mark Moyar

#29210

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Mark A. Moyar is the former Director of the Office for Civilian-Military Cooperation at the US Agency for International Development. He currently serves as the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College. He served previously as the Director of the Project on Military and Diplomatic History at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and has been a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a member of the Hoover Institution Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict.

#1945

Irmtrud Wojak

#66662

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Irmtrud Wojak is a German historian. From the end of March 2009 until November 2011, she was the founding director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. Life Wojak studied history, social history and economic history as well as political science at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She gained her doctorate with a thesis on German Jewish and political emigration during the NS period to Latin America, also in Bochum. She then completed several research stays, including at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

#1946

Yezid Sayigh

#20429

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Yezid Sayigh is a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon. Previously, he was a professor of Middle East Studies at the Department of War Studies at King's College London, a member of the Academic Board of the Gulf Research Center, and a member of the board of trustees of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research . From 1994 to 2003, he was the assistant director of studies at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University. Sayigh also headed the Middle East Research Programme of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London from 1998 to 2003.

#1947

Dick Blok

#87210

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Dirk Peter "Dick" Blok was a Dutch scholar of onomastics. He was director of the Meertens Institute between 1965 and 1986. He succeeded founding director Piet Meertens. In 1979, during Blok's rule as director, the Institute was named after Meertens. Blok fictionally featured in the book cycle by J. J. Voskuil, which was based on figures at the Meertens Institute, where Voskuil worked as well.

#1948

Ross Terrill

#17156

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Ross Terrill is an Australian-born American political scientist and historian. He specializes in the history of China, especially the history of the People's Republic of China. He has made several public appearances in order to testify in front of the United States Congress, and he has also written numerous articles and nine books. For many years he has been a research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and recently, he was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a visiting professor at Monash University in Australia.

#1949

Theodore Ropp

#62108

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Theodore Ropp was an American historian who served as a professor at Duke University. Academic career Theodore Ropp's first teaching position was as an instructor in history at Harvard University in 1937–38. In 1938, Duke University appointed him instructor in history. Remaining at Duke for the remainder of his career, he was appointed professor in 1959 and professor emeritus in 1980.

#1950

David Bercuson

#39148

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

David Jay Bercuson is a Canadian labour, military, and political historian. Career Born on 31 August 1945 in Montreal, Quebec, he attended Sir George Williams University, graduated there in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, and was awarded the Lieutenant-Governor's Silver Medal for the highest standing in history. He continued his studies at the University of Toronto under Ken McNaught and Ramsay Cook and received Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in history in 1967 and 1971, respectively. His doctoral thesis was Labour in Winnipeg: The Great War and the General Strike.

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