Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#2201

Joanna Bourke

#49233

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Joanna Bourke, is a British historian and academic. She is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London. Biography Born to Christian medical-missionary parents, Bourke was brought up in New Zealand, Zambia, Solomon Islands and Haiti. She attended the University of Auckland, gaining a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in History. She undertook her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the Australian National University and subsequently held academic posts at the ANU, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Birkbeck, University of London. Her primary affiliation is with Birkbeck, University of L...

#2202

Paul Moon

#40061

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Evan Paul Moon is a New Zealand historian and a professor at the Auckland University of Technology. He is a writer of New Zealand history and biography, specialising in Māori history, the Treaty of Waitangi and the early period of Crown rule.

#2203

Michael McGerr

#80901

Overall Influence

Michael McGerr is an American historian working at Indiana University in the History Department, a unit of the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 he was appointed the Paul V. McNutt Professor of American History, an endowed professorship at Indiana University. In his career, Michael McGerr has worked at MIT, Yale and Indiana University. He is the author of A Fierce Discontent and a co-author of the text Making a Nation.

#2204

John C. McManus

#64580

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

John Coyne McManus is a military historian, author, and professor of military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology from St. Louis, Missouri. McManus has published thirteen books on numerous American military history topics, including: the Allied invasion of Normandy, American infantry soldiers, and the 7th Infantry Regiment.

#2205

Kan Kimura

#38609

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Kan Kimura is a Japanese scholar of political studies and area studies. He is now a professor at Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies, Kobe University, Japan. Career Kimura was born in 1966 in Higashiosaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. He studied at Kyoto University and received his L.L.D. in 2001 for his first book, Chosen/Kankoku Nashonarizumu to 'Shokoku-Ishiki .

#2206

Dominic Montserrat

#62423

Overall Influence

1964 - 2004 (40 years)

Dominic Alexander Sebastian Montserrat was a British egyptologist and papyrologist. Early life and education Montserrat studied Egyptology at Durham University and received his PhD in Classics at University College London, specializing in Greek, Coptic and Egyptian Papyrology.

#2207

Mary E. Daly

#46379

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mary Elizabeth Daly, is an Irish historian and academic. She is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin. From 2014 to 2017, she served as the President of the Royal Irish Academy.

#2208

Bernd Bonwetsch

#85995

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

Bernd Bonwetsch was a German historian, the founding director in 2003 of the German Historical Institute Moscow. Early life and education Bernd Bonwetsch was born in Berlin on 17 October 1940. From 1962 to 1967 he studied History, Slavic studies and Comparative education in Hamburg and at the Free University of Berlin. He then studied at Stanford University, 1968-69.

#2209

Merle Goldman

#32761

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Merle Goldman was an American historian and sinologist of modern China. She was Professor Emerita of History, Boston University, especially known for a series of studies on the role of intellectuals under the rule of Mao Zedong and on the possibilities for democracy and political rights in present-day China.

#2210

Morgen Witzel

#28929

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Morgen Witzel is a Canadian historian, business theorist, consultant, lecturer and author of management books, especially known from his work on "Doing business in China" and on "Managing in virtual organizations".

#2211

Kathleen Burk

#49723

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kathleen Mildred Burk is Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London. Her field of research is international history, especially politics, diplomacy and finance.

#2212

Houchang Chehabi

#27642

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Houchang Esfandiar Chehabi is a scholar of Iranian studies at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University where he is Professor of International Relations and History. Chehabi is Iranian-German and was born in Tehran, Iran. He is a former Harvard faculty member, as well as UCLA. He received his MA and DPhil from Yale University.

#2213

Barbara D. Metcalf

#33598

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Barbara Daly Metcalf is a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Davis. She is a specialist in the history of South Asia, especially the colonial period, and the history of the Muslim population of India and Pakistan. She previously served as the dean of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis, and as the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History at the University of Michigan . She was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1994 and the president of the American Historical Association in 2010–11.

#2214

Ki-baik Lee

#27435

Overall Influence

1924 - 2004 (80 years)

Ki-baik Lee was a South Korean historian. He was born in Jeongju-gun, in North Pyeongan province in what is today North Korea. He graduated from the Osan School in 1941, attending Waseda University in Tokyo but ultimately graduating from Seoul National University in 1947.

#2215

Ali M. Ansari

#57261

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Ali Massoud Ansari FRSE is the Professor in Modern History with reference to the Middle East at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies.

#2216

Raouf Abbas

#76627

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

Raouf Abbas Hamed was an Egyptian historian and a professor of modern history at Cairo University, until his death in 2008. He served as the president of the Egyptian Society of Historical Studies. He filled various senior academic positions, most of which in the Cairo University.

#2217

Sophia Rosenfeld

#29499

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sophia Rosenfeld is an American historian. She specializes in European intellectual and cultural history with an emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy. In 2017, she was named the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

#2218

Adrian Desmond

#37494

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Adrian John Desmond is an English writer on the history of science and author of books about Charles Darwin. Life He studied physiology at London University and went on to study history of science and vertebrate palaeontology at University College London before researching the history of vertebrate palaeontology at Harvard University. He was awarded a PhD in the area of the Victorian-period context of Darwinian evolution.

#2219

Helene Ahrweiler

Helene Ahrweiler

#17530

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Helene Glykatzi-Ahrweiler FBA is a Greek-French academic Byzantinologist. She is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Greece. In the 2008 show Great Greeks, she was named amongst the 100 greatest Greeks of all time.

#2220

Paul K. Davis

#76766

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Paul K. Davis is a historian specializing in military history. Education and career Born in Texas, he was educated at Southwest Texas State University before earning his PhD from King's College London with a thesis on the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War. He has been consulted as an expert military historian by the BBC and National Public Radio. He has lectured at St. Mary's University, the Alamo Colleges system, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

#2221

David Herlihy

#87763

Overall Influence

1930 - 1991 (61 years)

David Joseph Herlihy was an American historian who served as the president of the American Historical Association. He wrote on medieval and renaissance life, and was married to fellow historian Patricia Herlihy. His study of the Florentine and Pistoiese Catasto of 1427 is one of the first statistical surveys to use computers to analyze large amounts of data. The resulting book examines statistical patterns in tax-collecting surveys to find indications of social trends.

#2222

Tomas Baranauskas

Tomas Baranauskas

#100856

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Tomas Baranauskas is a Lithuanian historian specializing in the history of medieval Lithuania. Baranauskas spent his youth in Žeimelis and Anykščiai. In 1998, he graduated from the Faculty of History at the Vilnius University. Since September 1996 he works in the Lithuanian Institute of History.

#2223

Steven Heller

#11865

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Steven Heller is an American art director, journalist, critic, author, and editor who specializes in topics related to graphic design. Biography Steven Heller was born July 7, 1950, in New York City to Bernice and Milton Heller. He attended the Walden School, a progressive prep school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as well as military school. In 1968, he enrolled at New York University with a major in English, later transferring to the School of Visual Arts illustration and cartoon program but not graduating from either. After leaving SVA, he was hired to teach a newspaper design class.

#2224

Alice Teichova

#55048

Overall Influence

1920 - 2015 (95 years)

Alice Teichova was an Austrian-born British economist and economic historian. She was considered one of the leading economic historians of modern Central Europe. Her publications included a landmark survey of the international business relations of Czechoslovakia, An Economic Background to Munich, published in 1974. She co-authored her most recent work, Nation, State and the Economy in History , with the Austrian economist historian, Herbert Matis.

#2225

Mercia MacDermott

#41016

Overall Influence

1927 - 2023 (96 years)

Mercia MacDermott was an English writer and historian. She was known for her books on Bulgarian history. Early life Mercia was born on 7 April 1927 in Plymouth, Devon, United Kingdom. Her father was Geoffrey Palmer Adshead, a Royal Navy surgeon captain, and her mother was Olive May Adshead, a teacher. Due to her father's work in the navy, she spent some of her early years in Weihai, China, where Mercia learned Mandarin Chinese. She grew up in Ditchling and later was educated at Westonbirt School, Gloucestershire and St Anne's College, Oxford University where she read Russian Literature. In t...

#2226

John Ridpath

#32745

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

John B. Ridpath was a Canadian intellectual historian. He was an Objectivist and an associate professor of economics and intellectual history at York University in Toronto. He also taught courses at Duke University.

#2227

Stefan Inglot

#33919

Overall Influence

1902 - 1994 (92 years)

Stefan Inglot was a Polish historian and a cooperative activist. He graduated from the Lwów University. At the same university he gained PhD in 1926 and passed his habilitation in history in 1932. He was professor on the Lwów University since 1939. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II he became principal of the Underground University of Lwów, accidentally jailed.

#2228

Uta Merzbach

#33872

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Uta Caecilia Merzbach was a German-American historian of mathematics who became the first curator of mathematical instruments at the Smithsonian Institution. Early life Merzbach was born in Berlin, where her mother was a philologist and her father was an economist who worked for the Reich Association of Jews in Germany during World War II. The Nazi government closed the association in June 1943; they arrested the family, along with other leading members of the association, and sent them to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on August 4, 1943. The Merzbachs survived the war and the camp, an...

#2229

Mark Ravina

#58003

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Mark Ravina is a scholar of early modern Japanese history and Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 2019. He currently holds the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair in Japanese Studies. From 1991 to 2019 he taught at Emory University. Outside of academic circles, he is likely most well known for his book The Last Samurai: the Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori, published in 2004.

#2230

August Nitschke

#76906

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

August Nitschke was a German historian and co-founder of the Historical anthropology movement. Life August Nitschke was the eldest son of the pediatrician Halle Alfred Nitschke and the physician Maria Nitschke .

#2231

Édouard Husson

#68533

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Édouard Husson , is a French historian, university professor, and former CEO of ESCP Europe. He was elected in 2009 as Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Picardy. From 2009 to 2010, he was responsible for the humanities and social sciences at Valérie Pécresse. On 11 August 2010, he became Vice-Chancellor of the Universities of Paris until September 2012, when he was appointed Director of the ESCP Europe.

#2232

Abdeljelil Temimi

Abdeljelil Temimi

#56674

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Abdeljelil Temimi, also transliterated as Abdoljalil Tamimi , is a Tunisian historian. He specialises in the cultural and architectural influences of the Ottomanss and Moriscos in the Arab world. Life Temimi was born on July 21, 1938, in Kairouan. He followed primary, secondary and higher education in Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq and France, and obtained his doctorate in 1972 in modern history at the University of Aix-Provence. Furthermore, he obtained several academic diplomas in Architecture, Information Science and Library and information science at the National Archives of France, the University ...

#2233

Barbara Thiering

#35854

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Barbara Elizabeth Thiering was an Australian historian, theologian, and biblical exegete specialising in the origins of the early Christian Church. In books and journal articles, she challenged Christian orthodoxy, espousing the view that new findings present alternative answers to its supernatural beliefs. Her analysis has been rejected by both New Testament scholars and scholars in Judaism.

#2234

Konrad Kwiet

#58189

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Konrad Kwiet is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is currently Pratt Foundation Professor at the University of Sydney and Resident Historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum. He has worked in universities, museums and research centres around the world, including Heidelberg, Israel, Washington DC, Oxford and Berlin.

#2235

Michael Borgolte

#95247

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Michael Borgolte is a German Historian. Besides the history of medieval endowments he studies mainly the Comparative history of Europe and the Global history of the Middle Ages. Career Borgolte was educated at the University of Münster, where he gained his doctorate in 1975. In 1981 he qualified as a professor at the University of Freiburg, where he was assistant to the palaeographer Johanne Authenrieth from 1975 onwards. in 1991 he was one of the first professors newly appointed to Humboldt-University after the Berlin Wall came down. He held the chair for Medieval History until 2018. Since 2...

#2236

Homa Nategh

#68633

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Homa Nategh was an Iranian historian, Professor of History at University of Tehran. A specialist in the contemporary history of Iran, she resided in Paris, France, until her death. She was active during Iran's 1979 revolution. After the revolution she was purged from the University of Tehran and moved to Paris, where she was appointed as professor of the Iranian Studies at the Sorbonne. In Sorbonne she published several articles on Iranian history in Qajar period.

#2237

Cassandra Pybus

#68957

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Cassandra Jean Pybus is an Australian historian and writer. She is a former professorial fellow in history at the University of Sydney, and has published extensively on Australian and American history.

#2238

Alison Bashford

#74149

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Alison Caroline Bashford, is a historian specialising in global history and the history of science. She is Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population. Alison Bashford was previously Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge .

#2239

Margaret Higonnet

#60120

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Margaret Randolph Higonnet is an American author, teacher and historian who currently serves as a Professor Emerita at University of Connecticut. Early life and education Higonnet was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and came from an academic family – her mother a librarian and her father a professor. Later, the family moved from New Orleans to Maryland and then to Saint Louis, Missouri. Later, they would spend years in Pasadena, California, Vienna, Austria and Mexico City, Mexico. Margaret was the second of four girls and attended schools for girls and women. The family lived one year in Vienna, an occupied city where the impact of World War II was very visible.

#2240

Donald A. Bullough

#64210

Overall Influence

1928 - 2002 (74 years)

Donald Auberon Bullough FSAScot FRPSL was a British historian who taught and published on the cultural and political history of Italy, England and Carolingian France during the early Middle Ages. He was the brother of mathematician Robin Bullough .

#2241

Josef Foschepoth

#56687

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Josef Foschepoth is a German historian and a professor at the University of Freiburg. His research interest is the surveillance in post-WWII Germany. Bio Foschepoth studied history, theology and social sciences and received his doctorate in 1975 from the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster with a thesis on the Reformation and the Peasants' War in the history of the GDR . After five years as a high school teacher at the Evangelisch Stiftisches Gymnasium Gütersloh , he became a research assistant and head of the new research area "Post-War History" at the German Historical Institute in ...

#2242

Tan Tai Yong

#23949

Overall Influence

Tan Tai Yong is a Singaporean academic who is the current President of Singapore University of Social Sciences. He served as the President of Yale-NUS College from 2017 to 2022. He is also Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of South Asian Studies, an autonomous university-level research institute in NUS. He was a former Nominated Member of Parliament and served from 2014 to 2015.

#2243

Steffen Patzold

#76110

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Steffen Patzold is a German historian. Patzold is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Tübingen and specializes in the political and religious history of the Carolingian Empire. Biography Steffen Patzold was born in Hanover, Germany on 1 September 1972. Patzold studied history, art history and journalism at the University of Hamburg from 1991 to 1996, gaining his MA in history under the supervision of Hans-Werner Goetz. He gained his PhD in 1999. From 2000 to 2006, Patzold was the assistant of Goetz. He completed his habilitation at the University of Hamburg in 2006. Since 2007,...

#2244

Irwin Abrams

#28429

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

Irwin Martin Abrams was a long-time professor of history at Antioch College, a pioneer in the field of peace research, and a global authority on the Nobel Peace Prize. His book, The Nobel Peace Prize and the Laureates, first published in 1988 and subsequently updated and revised, is regarded as the authoritative reference work on the subject. His other books included Words of Peace, which brought together selections from the acceptance speeches of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, and five volumes of Nobel Lectures in Peace.

#2245

Yves Ternon

#50614

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Yves Ternon is a French physician and medical historian, as well as an author of historical books about the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. He is professor of the history of medicine at University Paris IV Sorbonne. He is also an active member of Doctors Without Borders organization.

#2246

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

#62288

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

William Fitzhugh Brundage is an American historian, and William Umstead Distinguished Professor, at University of North Carolina. His works focus on white and black historical memory in the American South since the Civil War.

#2247

Helga Grebing

#12241

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Helga Grebing was a German historian and university professor . A focus of her work is on social history and, more specifically, on the history of the labour movement. Life Provenance and early years Grebing was born on 27 February 1930 in Pankow, Berlin, to a Roman Catholic father, who worked in the building trade, and a Protestant mother. She has referred to her paternal grandmother "without wishing to sound negative", as a "bigot catholic" . Her mother was a factory worker, who later switched jobs, moving into the food retailing sector. Grebing grew up in and around Berlin.

#2248

Dubravka Stojanović

Dubravka Stojanović

#38802

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Dubravka Stojanović is a Serbian historian, and professor at University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. She is a vice-president of the Thessaloniki based History Education Committee organized by the Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in South Eastern Europe as well as a consultant of the United Nations on the issues of misuses of history in education. Her primary fields of interest are processes of modernization in Southeast Europe, democratization in Serbia, history of Belgrade, historical memory and presentations of history in history textbooks. In 2015, Dubravka Stojanović received...

#2249

Theo Barker

#57465

Overall Influence

1923 - 2001 (78 years)

Theodore Cardwell Barker , usually known as Theo Barker, was a British social and economic historian. Life Barker was born in St Helens, Lancashire, England on 19 July 1923. After schooling in the area, he studied at the University of Oxford, obtaining a first-class degree in Modern History from Jesus College, Oxford in 1948. He obtained a doctorate from the University of Manchester in 1951, on the 19th century history of St Helens. This led to his first book, co-written with a school contemporary, John Harris, who had been researching St Helens in the 18th century. A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution was influential in the emerging field of urban history.

#2250

Margot Fassler

#47755

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Margot Fassler is an American music and Christianity historian, currently the Keough-Hesburgh Professor Professor of Music History and Liturgy at University of Notre Dame.

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