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,

#2101

Denys Lombard

#43621

Overall Influence

1938 - 1998 (60 years)

Denys Lombard was a leading Asian expert with contributions to Southeast Asian studies, Sinology, and the history of maritime Asia. He was famous for efforts to compare insular Southeast Asia and the Asian Seas to the Mediterranean area.

#2102

Otto Pflanze

#56697

Overall Influence

1918 - 2007 (89 years)

Otto Paul Pflanze was an American historian. He was one of the leading historians of 19th century German history. He is perhaps best known for his biographies and writing on the German politician Otto von Bismarck.

#2103

Clarence Taylor

#14883

Overall Influence

Clarence Taylor is professor emeritus of History at Baruch College in New York City and author of books on racism, religion, and civil rights in 20th-century America. Background Clarence Taylor was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the East New York elementary school and Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. He received a BA from Brooklyn College and MA from New York University. In 1992, he received a doctorate in American history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

#2104

John Gillingham

#31454

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John Bennett Gillingham is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. On 19 July 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Gillingham is renowned as an expert on the Angevin Empire.

#2105

Andres Kasekamp

Andres Kasekamp

#33217

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Andres Ilmar Kasekamp is the director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute and Professor of Baltic Politics at the University of Tartu, Estonia . Andres Kasekamp served as chairman of the Board of the Open Estonia Foundation from 2004 to 2008. His main research interests are extreme-right movements and contemporary Baltic history.

#2106

James Henretta

#66747

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

James A. Henretta is an American historian. He is a Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Henretta is a Fulbright Scholar, and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

#2107

Austin Woolrych

#31751

Overall Influence

1918 - 2004 (86 years)

Austin Herbert Woolrych was an English historian, a specialist in the period of the English Civil War. Early life and education Austin Woolrych was born in Marylebone, London, the son of Stanley Herbert Cunliffe Woolrych and May Gertrude Woolrych, née Wood. His father was a distinguished British Army intelligence officer during the First World War who became a businessman. Woolrych was descended from an old Shropshire gentry family, and was related to Sir Thomas Wolryche, 1st Baronet, Royalist governor of Bridgnorth during the English Civil War.

#2108

Vicente L. Rafael

#42560

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Vicente L. Rafael is a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his B.A. in history and philosophy from Ateneo de Manila University in 1977 and his Ph.D. in history at Cornell University in 1984. Prior to teaching at the University of Washington, Rafael taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Currently, he sits on advisory boards of Cultural Anthropology, Public Culture, and positions.

#2109

Mohammad Ebrahim Bastani Parizi

Mohammad Ebrahim Bastani Parizi

#64887

Overall Influence

1924 - 2014 (90 years)

Mohammad Ebrahim Bastani Parizi was an Iranian historian, translator, poet, essayist and author of non-fiction books. His numerous publications are mostly popular reads on topics such as the history of Iran and the history of his hometown Pariz in Kerman province.

#2110

Lawrence D. Reddick

#45068

Overall Influence

1910 - 1995 (85 years)

Lawrence Dunbar Reddick was an African-American historian and professor who wrote the first biography of Martin Luther King Jr., strengthened major archives of African-American history resources at Atlanta University Center and the New York Public Library, and was fired by Alabama's state board of education for his support for student sit-ins at Alabama State College—an event that earned him honor for his courage and brought Alabama State College censure by the American Association of University Professors.

#2111

John Pickstone

#50975

Overall Influence

1944 - 2014 (70 years)

John Victor Pickstone was a British historian of science and the Wellcome Research Professor in the Centre for the History of science, Technology and Medicine, in the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Manchester.

#2112

Edward Acton

#34626

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Edward David Joseph Lyon-Dalberg-Acton is a British academic and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. His title from birth is The Honourable but is never referred as such professionally or on the university website.

#2113

Bogdan Suchodolski

#46754

Overall Influence

1903 - 1992 (89 years)

Bogdan Suchodolski was a Polish philosopher, historian of science and culture and teacher. He served as a senior marshal of the Sejm from 1985 to 1989. Biography Bogdan Suchodolski was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, on 27 December 1903. He was a professor at the University of Lviv in 1938 and at the University of Warsaw from 1946 to 1970. He was also university director of the Institute of Pedagogical Sciences 1958–68.

#2114

François Bédarida

#50910

Overall Influence

1926 - 2001 (75 years)

François Bédarida, was a French academic historian. His work centred on Victorian England and France in WWII. He made significant research contributions to the study of The Holocaust. He was a director of the Maison française in Oxford among other leadership roles.

#2115

Stefan Ihrig

#18071

Overall Influence

Stefan Ihrig is an academic, author, and speaker. He is professor of history at the University of Haifa and director of the Haifa Center for German and European Studies. His research interests are European and Middle Eastern history, with a focus on media and political and social discourse. His 2014 and 2016 books dealing with German-Turkish history and entanglement have elicited critical praise. He is also an editor of the Journal of Holocaust Research published by the University of Haifa and has contributed articles for HuffPost, Tablet, Haaretz, and History Today, among other publications.

#2116

Maarten van Rossem

Maarten van Rossem

#57309

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Maarten van Rossem is a Dutch historian, presenter and commentator. He specializes in the history and politics of the United States. As an expert on America, he is a frequent guest on television talk shows. His public career started when he was asked to comment on the 1984 vice presidential elections. He makes regular TV appearances and gives frequent public lectures.

#2117

William I. Brustein

William I. Brustein

#14857

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

William I. Brustein is Professor Emeritus at West Virginia University, having recently stepped down as Vice President for Global Strategies and International Affairs and Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History. Previously, he was the Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs at The Ohio State University, as well as the Associate Provost for International Affairs and Director of International Programs and Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brustein has spent much of his administrative career focused on international education. He has published...

#2118

Michael Szonyi

#76362

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Michael A. Szonyi is Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University and former director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research focuses on the local history of southeast China, especially in the Ming dynasty, the history of Chinese popular religion, and Overseas Chinese history.

#2119

Pauli Kettunen

#84770

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Pauli Tapio Kettunen is a professor of Political History in the Social Science Faculty of University of Helsinki. He has mainly written on the history of the Cold War, Nordic welfare societies, labour movements, Conceptual history, and globalisation. Professor Kettunen was a board member of the Finnish Literature Society, the Finnish Historical Society , and is currently the editor of the series Studia Fennica Historica.

#2120

Nancy Farriss

#22620

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Nancy Marguerite Farriss is an American historian who is professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Life Nancy Marguerite Farriss was born on May 23, 1938. She specializes in the colonial history of Mexico, and completed her doctorate from University College London in 1965, after she earned a B.A. at Barnard College. This was followed by brief posts at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. In 1971 she was appointed as Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and continued there for the rest of her career, becoming Annenberg Professor of History in 1990.

#2121

E. B. Potter

#88058

Overall Influence

1908 - 1997 (89 years)

Elmer Belmont "Ned" Potter was an American historian and writer. Potter was the leading naval historian at the United States Naval Academy from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. He was editor of the Naval Academy's textbook on naval history, Sea Power: A Naval History, in collaboration with Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

#2122

Richard Minear

#57700

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Richard H. Minear is a retired Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He taught a survey course of Japanese history and a Hiroshima seminar. Minear got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. He is best known for his book about the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Victors' Justice, He has lived in Japan for many years and translated Japanese works into English .

#2123

Roger Wilkins

#16483

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Roger Wood Wilkins was an American lawyer, civil rights leader, professor of history, and journalist who served as the 15th United States Assistant Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.

#2124

William J. Hamblin

#33026

Overall Influence

1954 - 2019 (65 years)

William James Hamblin was a professor of history at Brigham Young University , and a former board member of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies at BYU. Biography Hamblin was raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he served as a missionary for the Church in Italy from 1973 to 1975.

#2125

Alice Kaplan

#24908

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Alice Yaeger Kaplan is an American literary critic, translator, historian, and educator. She is the Sterling Professor of French and Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University.

#2126

Olwen Hufton

#61400

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Dame Olwen Hufton, is a British historian of early modern Europe and a pioneer of social history and of women's history. She is an expert on early modern, western European comparative socio-cultural history with special emphasis on gender, poverty, social relations, religion and work. Since 2006 she has been a part-time Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London.

#2127

Heath W. Lowry

#47688

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Heath Ward Lowry is the Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies emeritus at Princeton University and Bahçeşehir University. He is an author of books about the history of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey.

#2128

Necip Hablemitoğlu

#46877

Overall Influence

1954 - 2002 (48 years)

Necip Hablemitoğlu was a Turkish historian and intellectual. He was assassinated in front of his home in 2002. The perpetrators of this assassination have still not been found. In Ergenekon trial testimony, however, detained suspects Osman Yıldırım claimed that Osman Gürbüz killed him by the motivation of detained suspects Veli Küçük and Muzaffer Tekin for a false flag operation.

#2129

Pierre Serna

#81570

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Pierre Serna is a French historian, specialist in the French Revolution. He is currently a university professor at University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, and a member of the Institute for the History of the French Revolution which he directed from 2008 to 2015 before his integration into the Institut d modern and contemporary history .

#2130

Nancy Isenberg

#51094

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Nancy G. Isenberg is an American historian, and T. Harry Williams Professor of history at Louisiana State University. Life She graduated from Rutgers University, and University of Wisconsin. Isenberg is Jewish.

#2131

Eberhard Knobloch

Eberhard Knobloch

#35315

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Eberhard Knobloch is a German historian of science and mathematics. Career From 1962 to 1967 Knobloch studied classics and mathematics at the University of Berlin and the Technical University of Berlin, after which he passed his state examination as a high school teacher and even as a high school teacher in ancient languages at Goethe began high school in Berlin before 1970 as a research assistant in the history of science back to the TU Berlin was, where he in 1972 with a thesis on Leibniz's combinatorial in Scriba, Christoph received his doctorate.

#2132

Rowland Berthoff

#74086

Overall Influence

1921 - 2001 (80 years)

Rowland Tappan Berthoff was an American historian, working in the fields of immigration and social life in the USA. He is best known for his 1971 book An Unsettled People: Order and Disorder in American Life.

#2133

Lily E. Kay

#11049

Overall Influence

1947 - 2000 (53 years)

Lily E. Kay was a historian of science noted for her studies of molecular biology. Education and early life Kay was born in Kraków, Poland, the daughter of concentration camp survivors. The family relocated to Israel and then, in 1960, to the United States. Kay graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 and in 1986 earned her Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in the history of science.

#2134

Yumio Sakurai

#86114

Overall Influence

1945 - 2012 (67 years)

Yumio Sakurai was a Japanese historian who specialized in Japanese history and history of Southeast Asia. University of Tokyo, He obtained a PhD in Literature from the University of Tokyo a PhD in Agriculture, also from the

#2135

J. Devika

#45687

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jayakumari Devika is a Malayali historian, feminist, social critic and academician from Kerala. She currently researches and teaches at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram as a Professor. She has authored several books and articles on gender relations in early Kerala society. She is bilingual and has translated both fiction and non-fiction books between Malayalam and English. She also writes on gender, politics, social reforms and development in Kerala on publications like Kafila, Economic and Political Weekly and The Wire.

#2136

Robert Parker

#58324

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert Christopher Towneley Parker, FBA is a British ancient historian, specialising in ancient Greek religion and Greek epigraphy. Robert Parker was educated at St Paul's School, London and at New College, Oxford under Geoffrey de Ste Croix. From 1996 until his retirement in 2016 he was the Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at New College, Oxford University. Before that, from 1976–96, he was Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at Oriel College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. He is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science...

#2137

A. G. L. Shaw

#63616

Overall Influence

1916 - 2012 (96 years)

Alan George Lewers Shaw was an Australian historian and author of several text books and historiographies on Australian and Victorian history. He taught at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney, and was professor of history at Monash University from 1964 until his retirement in 1981.

#2138

Miroslav Hroch

#58345

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Prof. Miroslav Hroch is a Czech historian and political theorist and a professor at the Charles University in Prague. Hroch earned his PhD at the Charles University in 1962. On May 30, 1997 Hroch received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden

#2139

Alaric Hall

#19527

Overall Influence

Alaric Hall is a British philologist who is an associate professor of English and director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. He has, since 2009, been the editor of the academic journal Leeds Studies in English and its successor Leeds Medieval Studies.

#2140

Mohammad-Amin Riahi

Mohammad-Amin Riahi

#40442

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Mohammad-Amin Riahi was a prominent Iranian literary scholar of Persian literature, a historian, writer and statesman. Apart from being one of the authors of Dehkhoda Dictionary and Encyclopædia Iranica, he was the author and editor of several well-known scholarly books. Mohammad-Amin Riahi received his PHD on Persian literature from Tehran University under the supervision of Badiozzaman Forouzanfar. Riahi is best known for his scholarly works on Shahnameh and Ferdowsi, Hafiz, and the ancient iranian languages . He has produced critical editions of some of the major classical Persian texts such as Mersad-al-ebad and Nozhat-al-majalis.

#2141

Gabriel Guarda

#61268

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Gabriel Guarda , was a Chilean historian and architect. Career He studied architecture at the Catholic University of Chile. He was part of the editorial committee of the journal Historia after it was established in 1961. In 1984, he received the Chilean National History Award.

#2142

Christopher Lloyd

#85669

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Christopher Hamilton Lloyd is a British art historian and was Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures . Lloyd worked in the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for twenty years. In 1972, he was appointed to a fellowship at Harvard University's Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, in Florence, Italy. During 1980–81, he was a visiting research curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, concentrating on the art of early Italy.

#2143

K. A. Nizami

#68096

Overall Influence

1925 - 1997 (72 years)

Khaliq Ahmad Nizami was an Indian historian and diplomat. Early life and education Nizami was born in Amroha, United Provinces, British India. He completed his M.A. in history in 1945, from Meerut College, then affiliated to University of Agra, and he was awarded the LL.B. degree by the same university.

#2144

Lawrence Conrad

#17830

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lawrence Irvin Conrad is a British historian and scholar of Oriental studies, specializing in Near Eastern studies and the history of medicine. He currently serves as historian for the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.

#2145

Stephen Haber

#22334

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stephen H. Haber is an American political scientist and historian known for his research on political institutions and economic policies that promote innovation and improvements in living standards. Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

#2146

Janet McCalman

#59384

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Janet Susan McCalman, is an Australian social historian, population researcher and author at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. McCalman won the Ernest Scott Prize in 1984 and 2022 ; the second woman to have won and one of eight historians to have won the prize twice.

#2147

Ian Gordon

#60091

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ian Gordon is a cultural historian. He writes on comic strips and comic books and film and television. Background Gordon earned a PhD in history at the University of Rochester. In 2015-16 he offered a Superhero Entertainments MOOC through the Coursera platform.

#2148

Johannes Paulmann

Johannes Paulmann

#73104

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Johannes Paulmann is a German historian. Education Paulmann studied history and English at the universities of Munich and Leicester. Afterwards, he worked as an adult educator and as a researcher in Tübingen, Munich, and London. In 1991, he finished his doctorate, his dissertation titled Staat und Arbeitsmarkt in Großbritannien , which was supervised by Gerhard A. Ritter. In 1999, he finished his habilitation thesis Pomp und Politik , for which he received an award from the Association of German Historians at the Deutscher Historikertag in 2002.

#2149

Daniel A. Baugh

#57786

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Daniel Albert Baugh is an American historian. He has been labelled "as the definitive historian of [British] naval administration." Baugh has defined his own contribution in explaining "My research field is mainly England, 1660–1840. By studying administration chiefly in terms of administrative problems, I hope to improve our understanding of both the nature of society and the development of government.". After 1982, he focused his attention on maritime, naval and geopolitical history.

#2150

Ronald Steel

#26336

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Ronald Lewis Steel was an American writer, historian, and professor. He is the author of the definitive biography of Walter Lippmann. Early life Ronald Lewis Sklut was born on March 25, 1931, in Morris, Illinois, outside of Chicago. He was Jewish, and his father immigrated to the United States from Russia.

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