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,

#2001

Frank Vandiver

#46608

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

Frank Everson Vandiver was an American Civil War historian, the 19th president of Texas A&M University and the former president of the University of North Texas, as well as acting president of Rice University. Vandiver wrote, co-wrote, or edited 24 books, and published an additional 100 scholarly articles or reviews. One of his books was a runner-up for a National Book Award.

#2002

Baruch Hirson

#41332

Overall Influence

1921 - 1999 (78 years)

Baruch Hirson was a South African political activist, academic, author, and historian, who was jailed for nine years in apartheid-era South Africa before moving to England in 1973. He was co-founder of the critical journal Searchlight South Africa, and in 1991, a critic of what he referred to as Stalinist methods used by the African National Congress .

#2003

Vivian Nutton

#65902

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Vivian Nutton FBA is a British historian of medicine. He is Emeritus Professor at the UCL Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, and has been president of the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance .

#2004

A. G. Dickens

#63076

Overall Influence

1910 - 2001 (91 years)

Arthur Geoffrey Dickens was an English academic and author. Early life He was born in Hull, Yorkshire, on 6 July 1910, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Second World War He served during World War II in the Royal Artillery. From May to October 1945 he served with the military government in Lübeck, where he had to supervise and edit the local newspaper.

#2005

Lilly Goren

#45126

Overall Influence

Lilly J. Goren is an American political scientist and historian. She is a professor of political science and global studies at Carroll University, where she has also been Chair of the Department of History, Political Science and Religious Studies. Goren uses popular culture, such as literature and film, to understand American politics. She has published work on how popular culture affects public perceptions of political leadership by women, how feminist ideas are reflected and affected by popular culture, and the politics of re-distribution in the United States Congress.

#2006

Nicholas Campion

Nicholas Campion

#20552

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Nicholas Campion is a British astrologer and historian of astrology and cultural astronomy. He is the author of a number of books and currently pursues an academic career. Career Astrology Campion is a former Daily Mail astrologer, where he took over from John Naylor, the son of R. H. Naylor, the first sun sign astrologer. He was president of the Astrological Lodge of London from 1985 to 1987 and of the Astrological Association of Great Britain from 1994 to 1999. He published a number of books on the practice of astrology between 1987 and 2004 .

#2007

Klim Zhukov

#97398

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Klim Zhukov is a Russian author, vlogger, and historical reenactor. He is a medievalist historian and science fiction author. He is also involved in historical reenactment. He is a bestselling author. In a survey conducted in 2019, he entered the top 10 trust rating in the Russian Internet. He collaborates with Dmitry Puchkov.

#2008

Robert A. Rosenstone

#83644

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Robert A. Rosenstone is an American author, historian, and Professor Emeritus of history at the California Institute of Technology. He is the leading international scholar in the fast growing field devoted to studying the relationship between history and the visual media. He has written two books on the topic, "Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History" , and "History on Film / Film on History" , and has edited an influential collections of essays, "Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past" . His most recent addition to the field , "A Blackwell Comp...

#2009

Rhoads Murphey

#52152

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

W. Rhoads Murphey was a geographer and historian of Asia who taught at University of Washington, Seattle, and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He served for many years as executive director of the Association for Asian Studies, and in 1987-88 as its president. He was editor of the Journal of Asian Studies.

#2010

Alexander Keyssar

Alexander Keyssar

#54443

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alexander Keyssar is an American historian and the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Life Alex graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature from Harvard College in 1969. In 1977 he graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in the History of American Civilization. He taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#2011

Craig Symonds

#49462

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Craig Lee Symonds was the Distinguished Visiting Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History for the academic years 2017–2020 at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He is also Professor Emeritus at the U. S. Naval Academy, where he served as chairman of the history department. He is a distinguished historian of the American Civil War and maritime history. His book Lincoln and His Admirals received the Lincoln Prize. His book Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings was the 2015 recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.

#2012

Hans Werner Debrunner

#69796

Overall Influence

1923 - 1998 (75 years)

Hans Werner Debrunner was a Swiss German historian and theologian whose work mainly covered mission history, West Africa and the African diaspora. He also carried out academic research on history relating to missiology in northern, eastern and southern Africa. Upon his death in 1998, his private library and archive were donated to the Carl Schlettwein Foundation. The "independent, self-contained collection" comprises more than 3100 books and single journal issues on his area of specialty, published mostly in the first half to mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, Debrunner’s academic archives a...

#2013

Michel Christol

#77669

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michel Christol is a French historian, specialist of ancient Rome, and particularly epigraphy. Biography Born in Herault, Michel Christol attended high school in Béziers then his university studies in Montpellier. A student of Hans-Georg Pflaum, Michel Christol devoted his thesis to the crisis of the Roman Empire under Valerian and Gallienus under the direction of William Seston then Charles Pietri, and defended it under the presidency of André Chastagnol. He became professor at the University of Paris-I in 1983, a position he held until his retirement in 2008.

#2014

Christoph Meinel

#97566

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

#2015

Roger Sablonier

Roger Sablonier

#62935

Overall Influence

1941 - 2010 (69 years)

Roger Sablonier was a Swiss historian and writer of non-fiction publications, and Emeritus of the faculty of the University of Zürich. Biography Born in Uster on 16 April 1941 as the son of Mary Ida and Carlo Demetrio Sablonier, Roger Sablonier grew up with two sisters. He studied history, French language history and medieval studies at the University of Zürich and received the PhD in 1967. From 1972 to 1979, Sablonier was assistant professor of history, and habilitated in 1977 in Zürich. Beginning in 1979, Sablonier taught as an associate professor of medieval history. From 1984 to 2006, ...

#2017

Veena Talwar Oldenburg

#55806

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Veena Talwar Oldenburg is Professor of History at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is best known for her widely reviewed book on Dowry murder. Oldenburg is a native of Lucknow, India and subsequently lived in Gurgaon, India. She has a bachelor's degree from Loreto Convent College and an M.A. from the University of Lucknow. She has a second master's from the University of Bridgeport which she earned shortly after immigrating to the United States in 1970 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

#2018

Ken Hammond

#41648

Overall Influence

Kenneth J. Hammond is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. Hammond was a student and Students for a Democratic Society leader at Kent State University from 1967 to 1970. He later completed his degree in Political Science, then studied Modern Chinese language at the Beijing Foreign Languages Normal School in Beijing. Hammond received an M.A. in Regional Studies - East Asia , and a Ph.D in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. In 2007, Hammond was appointed director of the Confucius Institute, a cultural initiative funded in part by Hanban on the NMSU campus that is dedicated to studying and publicizing China and Chinese culture.

#2019

Christopher Collier

#57176

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Christopher Collier was an American historian and fiction writer. Collier was born in New York City. Christopher Collier, known as Kit, is the son of Edmund Collier, a writer, and Katherine Brown. He comes from a family of writers and teachers. He attended Clark University and Columbia University, . He was the official Connecticut State Historian and professor of history emeritus at the University of Connecticut. Collier and his brother, the author James Lincoln Collier, have co-written novels, most of which are based on historic events.

#2020

Paul Dukes

#57068

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Paul Dukes FRSE was a historian at the University of Aberdeen, known for his work relating to Russia and Europe. Early life Dukes was born in Wallington, Surrey, a suburb of London. He was an Exhibitioner at Peterhouse, Cambridge from 1951 to 1954, and then from 1954 to 1956, he was Teaching Fellow in American history at the University of Washington in Seattle, completing an MA thesis under the supervision of Max Savelle, Jonathan Boucher, Tory Parson, Teacher and Political Theorist.

#2021

Cyril Philips

#27917

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Sir Cyril Henry Philips, FRAS , knighted in the 1974 New Years Honours List, was a noted British historian and academic director. Early life His father had worked as an engine driver on the Indian railways, and Philips in the 1920s spent some years in Bihar.

#2022

Brian Tierney

#47684

Overall Influence

1922 - 2019 (97 years)

Brian Tierney was an English historian and medievalist. He was a member of the faculty of the Catholic University of America for eight years until becoming a professor of medieval history at Cornell University in 1959, where he was later appointed as the Goldwin Smith Professor of Medieval History in 1969 and the first Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies in 1977.

#2023

John Haldon

#44415

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

John Frederick Haldon FBA is a British historian, and Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History emeritus, professor of Byzantine history and Hellenic Studies emeritus, as well as former director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University.

#2024

Helge Kragh

#16099

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Helge Stjernholm Kragh is a Danish historian of science who focuses on the development of 19th century physics, chemistry, and astronomy. His published work includes biographies of Paul Dirac, Julius Thomsen and Ludvig Lorenz, and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology which he co-edited with Malcolm Longair.

#2025

Thomas Maissen

#82012

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Thomas Maissen is a professor of modern history at Heidelberg University and co-director of the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context". As of September 2013 he is detached as director of the German Historical Institute in Paris.

#2026

Felix Markham

#59412

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Felix Maurice Hippisley Markham was a British historian, known for his biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. Markham studied at the University of Oxford and taught there for 40 years. He was Fellow and History Tutor at Hertford College, Oxford, from 1931 until 1973.

#2027

Kristian Gerner

Kristian Gerner

#58943

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Kristian Gerner is a Swedish historian, author, expert on Eastern Europe and Professor of History at Lund University . From 1994 to 2002, he was Professor of Eastern European History and Culture, also at Uppsala University. Gerner earned his doctorate at Lund in 1984.

#2028

David Bell

#45260

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#2029

Ariel Toaff

#68678

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ariel Toaff is a professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, whose work has focused on Jews and their history in Italy. He came to international prominence with the 2007 publication of the first edition of his controversial book Pasque Di Sangue , in which he claimed historical basis for ritual use of human blood, obtained by murder. The claim was criticized as lending support to blood libel, an allegation that modern historians have described as unsupported by facts and which the Catholic Church has similarly repudiated since the 13th century. Toaff wrote...

#2030

Leontii Voitovych

Leontii Voitovych

#55457

Overall Influence

1951 - 2023 (72 years)

Leontii Viktorovich Voitovych was a Ukrainian scientist-historian who held a Doctor of Science degree. He was a research fellow of the department of Middle Ages history at the Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies as well as an academic department director of history of Middle Ages and Byzantine studies in the University of Lviv.

#2031

Dieter Timpe

#79190

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Dieter Timpe was a German historian best known for his theories on Arminius and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Biography Dieter Timpe was born in Halle, Germany on 3 November 1931. Since 1950, Timpe studied classical philology at the universities of Berlin, Basel and Freiburg. He received his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 1956. His dissertation on the Principate was supervised by Herbert Nesselhauf.

#2032

Dáibhí Ó Cróinín

#58861

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Dáibhí Iarla Ó Cróinín is an Irish historian and authority on Hiberno-Latin texts, noted for his significant mid-1980s discovery in a manuscript in Padua of the "lost" Irish 84-year Easter table. Ó Cróinín was Professor of History at NUI Galway and Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He specialises in the history of Ireland, Britain and Europe during the Middle Ages and Hiberno-Latin texts.

#2033

Stanley Nider Katz

#22219

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Stanley Nider Katz is an American historian specializing in American legal and constitutional history and the history of philanthropy. He is director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and director emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. He graduated from Harvard University with an AB , MA , and PhD in American colonial history . He taught at Harvard from 1961 to 1965, serving as Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Leverett House from 1963 to 1965. He went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin–Madison , the University of Chicago Law School , Princeton University , and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

#2034

John D. Winters

#39472

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

John David Winters was an American historian at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. He is known for his monograph The Civil War in Louisiana, which was published in 1963, released in paperback in 1991, and is still in print. When published, it was the first and only single volume history covering events in Louisiana from 1861 to 1865.

#2035

Jim Murphy

#40104

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

James John Patrick Murphy was an American author. He wrote more than 35 nonfiction and fiction books for children, young adults, and general audiences, including more than 30 about American history. He won the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2010 for his contribution in writing for teens.

#2036

Peter Štih

#36051

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Peter Štih is a Slovenian historian, specialising in medieval history. Štih was born in Ljubljana, but spent most of his childhood years in the town of Most na Soči in the Goriška region of western Slovenia. He attended grammar school in Tolmin and studied history at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1983. In 1993 he obtained his PhD under the supervision of the historian Bogo Grafenauer. Between 1992 and 1994 he was assistant researcher at the Institute for Austrian History , part of the University of Vienna.

#2037

Marietta Horster

#73340

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Marietta Horster is Professor of Ancient history at the University of Mainz. She specialises in the study of epigraphy in the Roman Empire. Biography Horster studied Ancient History, Latin and Political Science at the Universities of Lausanne, Bonn and Cologne and completed her studies in 1989 in Cologne with a master's degree in Ancient History, Latin and Political Science. From 1990 to 1994 she was Research Associate at the Department of Ancient History of Werner Eck at the University of Cologne, where she was awarded her doctorate in 1995. Her thesis was on the study of building inscriptio...

#2038

Theodor Schieffer

#51077

Overall Influence

1910 - 1992 (82 years)

Theodor Schieffer was a German historian. He was professor of medieval history at the University of Mainz, then at the University of Cologne, and since 1952 he was president of the Association for Middle Rhine Church History. He is the author of Winfrid-Bonifatius und die christliche Grundlegung Europas, the authoritative biography of Saint Boniface.

#2039

Yvonne Hirdman

#33338

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Yvonne Hirdman is a Swedish historian and gender researcher. She has received many awards for her work including the August Prize. Early years and education Yvonne Hirdman is the daughter of the language teacher Einar Hirdman and Charlotte Hirdman, born Schledt , and granddaughter of Gunnar and Maj Hirdman. She is the mother of Anja Hirdman and sister of Sven Hirdman. She grew up in Hökarängen, Malmberget. and Oskarshamn. She received a bachelor's degree in 1968 and PhD in 1974 at Stockholm University with the thesis of Sveriges Kommunistiska Parti 1939–1945 .

#2040

Margaret L. Anderson

#78027

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Margaret Lavinia Anderson is professor emerita at University of California Berkeley where she teaches about Europe since 1453; Central Europe from the late 18th century, especially modern Germany; World War I; Fascist Europe. She won a 2001 Berlin prize by the American Academy in Berlin, and was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. She was a fellow at Stanford Humanities Center.

#2041

Ronald H. Spector

#49550

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ronald Harvey Spector is a military historian who contributes to scholarly journals and teaches history as a professor at George Washington University. Military career He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served in the Vietnam War, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves. He was a historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military history and taught at the University of Alabama. He was tasked to prepare a study of the Grenada operation.

#2042

Rade Mihaljčić

#50185

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Rade Mihaljčić was a Serbian historian and academic. Most of his works deal with medieval Serbia, especially the Serbian empire and the Battle of Kosovo. Major works Monographies:The Fall of the Serbian Empire , 1975.Lazar Hrebeljanović - istorija, kult, predanje, 1984.Heroes of the Kosovo Legends , 1989.The Battle of Kosovo in History and in Popular Tradition, 1989.Bezimeni junak, 1995.Boj na Kosovu u bugaršticama i epskim pesmama kratkog stiha, 1995, co-author with Jelka ReđepProšlost i narodno sećanje, 1995; Srpska prošlost i narodno sećanje, 2001.Izvorna vrednost stare srpske građe, 2001....

#2043

Amir Weiner

#38323

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Amir Weiner is an American historian and associate professor of Soviet history at Stanford University. His interests include mass violence, population politics, totalitarianism, and World War II. Weiner is the director of Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and his research includes the KGB and the Soviet Union's surveillance state. Weiner is a former research scholar for the Wilson Center, and he was affiliated with the Kennan Institute in 1994–1995.

#2044

Edward H. Schafer

#31663

Overall Influence

1913 - 1991 (78 years)

Edward Hetzel Schafer was an American historian, sinologist, and writer noted for his expertise on the Tang dynasty, and was a professor of Chinese at University of California, Berkeley, for 35 years. Schafer's most notable works include The Golden Peaches of Samarkand and The Vermilion Bird, which both explore China's interactions with other cultures and regions during the Tang dynasty.

#2045

John Julius Norwich

John Julius Norwich

#46588

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, , known as John Julius Norwich, was an English popular historian, travel writer, and television personality. Biography Youth Norwich was born at the Alfred House Nursing Home on Portland Place in Marylebone, London, on 15 September 1929. He was the son of the Conservative politician and diplomat Duff Cooper, later Viscount Norwich, and of Lady Diana Manners, a celebrated beauty and society figure. He was given the name "Julius" in part because he was born by caesarean section. Such was his mother's fame as an actress and beauty that the birth attracted a crowd outside the nursing home and hundreds of letters of congratulations.

#2046

David Wyman

#37521

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

David Sword Wyman was the Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Early life and education Wyman was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth and Hollis Judson Wyman, a teacher, of American descent. His grandparents were Protestant ministers; Wyman was a protestant himself. He earned an A.B. in history from Boston University and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.

#2047

Donald T. Critchlow

Donald T. Critchlow

#45681

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Donald Thomas Critchlow serves as Director for the Center for American Institutions at Arizona State University, where he is a professor in History. The Center for American Institutions, established in Fall 2023, states as its mission to strengthen and renew American institutions, political, economic, and social. He has appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, BBC World News, and many talk radio programs. He has written for The Washington Post, The New York Observer, New York Post, NewsMax and National Review, and has lectured in Europe, China, and Brazil.

#2048

Richard Bauman

#11499

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Richard Bauman is a folklorist and anthropologist, now retired from Indiana University Bloomington. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of Folklore, of Anthropology, and of Communication and Culture. Before coming to IU in 1985, he was the Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas and a faculty member in the UT Department of Anthropology. Just before retiring from Indiana, he was chair of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, as well as an important member of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of...

#2049

Karl-Wilhelm Welwei

#75527

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

Karl-Wilhelm Welwei was a German historian. He was regarded as one of the most notable experts on the history of Ancient Greece. Biography Welwei was born on 17 October 1930 in Witten. He studied history and classical philology at the University of Cologne. In 1963, he received a PhD under the tutorage of Hans Volkmann, and earned his habilitation in 1970 at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Between 1972 and 1996 he was Professor of Ancient History. Since 1993 he has been a member of the German Archaeological Institute.

#2050

Alexander Yakobson

Alexander Yakobson

#43643

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Alexander Anatolyevich Yakobson is an Israeli historian, professor of Ancient history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, political activist, and commentator. Background Alexander Anatolyevich Yakobson was born on October 5, 1959, in Moscow. His parents were Soviet dissidents Anatoly Yakobson and Maya Ulanovskaya. His grandparents were Soviet spies Alexander Ulanovsky and Nadezhda Ulanovskaya. Yakobson immigrated to Israel with his family at age 13. He earned his degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: BA cum laude in History and Political Science , MA in History , and doctorate in Ancient History .

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