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,

#2301

Boris Vadimovich Sokolov

#31070

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Boris Sokolov , is a historian and a Russian literature researcher . In 1979 he graduated from the department of geography of the Moscow State University, specialising in economic geography. His works have been translated into Japanese, Polish, Latvian and Estonian. He has also translated literary works from various languages.

#2302

Harvey J. Kaye

#60565

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Harvey J. Kaye is an American historian and sociologist. Kaye is an author of several political books including “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America”, and “The Fight for the Four Freedoms”. He has appeared as an expert on several political news shows and podcasts including “Bill Moyers Journal” and “That’s Jacqueline”. He is a regular guest on The David Feldman Show.

#2303

Kevin Danaher

#21956

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

Kevin Danaher was an Irish folklorist with a special interest in ethnography and military history. Danaher is the author of 10 books about Irish traditional customs and beliefs, the best known of which are The Year in Ireland, In Ireland Long Ago, and Folktales from the Irish Countryside. A respected scholar, Danaher published more than 200 articles in academic journals.

#2304

Peter Iverson

#93847

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Peter Iverson was the Regents Professor of History at Arizona State University. Iverson received his B.A. in 1967 from Carleton College; his M.A. in 1969, and Ph.D., 1975, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he studied with Al Bogue, Robert Berkhofer, Catharine McClellan, and Herb Lewis. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999 and served as the President of the Western History Association. His primary area of research is Native American history in the 20th and 21st centuries.

#2305

Alberto Melloni

#57319

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Alberto Melloni is an Italian church historian and a Unesco Chairholder of the Chair on Religious Pluralism & Peace, primarily known for his work on the Councils and the Second Vatican Council. Since 2020, he is one of the European Commission's Chief Scientific Advisors.

#2306

Walter Kaegi

#54376

Overall Influence

1937 - 2022 (85 years)

Walter Emil Kaegi was a historian and scholar of Byzantine history, professor of history at the University of Chicago, and a Voting Member of The Oriental Institute. He received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1959 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1965. He was known for his researches on the period from the 4th through 11th centuries with a special interest in the advance of Islam, interactions with religion and thought, and military subjects. Kaegi is also distinguished for analyzing the Late Roman period in European and Mediterranean context, and has written extensively on Roman, Vandal, Byzantine and Muslim occupation of North Africa.

#2307

Lucyna Kulińska

#80726

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lucyna Kulińska is a Polish historian specializing in modern history and university lecturer. She has authored several books, collections of documents, publications and articles on the subject of Polish-Ukrainian relations, globalization and international relations. Lucyna Kulińska is the chairwoman of Społeczna Fundacja Pamięci Narodu Polskiego.

#2308

Robert Legget

#36350

Overall Influence

1904 - 1994 (90 years)

Robert Ferguson Legget was a civil engineer, historian and non-fiction writer. He is internationally known for his contributions to engineering, geology and building research and standardization. He is credited with the establishment of co-operation among Canadian geotechnical engineers, geologists and pedologists.

#2309

Dean C. Jessee

#82569

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Dean Cornell Jessee is a historian of the early Latter Day Saint movement and leading expert on the writings of Joseph Smith Jr. Biography Jessee was one of the sons of Phillip Cornell Jessee and Minerva Boss. He was raised in Springville, Utah as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He served an LDS mission to Germany.

#2310

Andrew Thorpe

#57830

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Andrew Thorpe is a British historian. He is Professor of Modern History and was Head of History at the University of Exeter. He went on to be Exeter's Director of Research for Humanities and Social Sciences before moving to the University of Leeds in 2019.

#2311

Bernard Haykel

#8106

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Bernard Haykel is professor of Near Eastern Studies and the director of the Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia at Princeton University. He has been described as "the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology" by journalist Graeme C.A. Wood.

#2312

Arnold Eisen

#19840

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Arnold M. Eisen is an American Judaic scholar who was Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He stepped down at the end of the 2019-2020 academic year. Prior to this appointment, he served as the Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and Religion and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 1986, he taught at Tel Aviv University and Columbia University.

#2313

Joan Jacobs Brumberg

#25955

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is an American social historian and writes and lectures in the fields of women's history and medical history. Her first appointment at Cornell University was in Women's Studies and Human Development. From that point, her research, teaching and writing have been interdisciplinary and focused on gender. She is a Professor Emerita of Cornell University, and lectures and writes about the experiences of adolescents through history until the present day. In the subject area of Gender Studies, she has written about boys and violence, and girls and body image.

#2314

Raymond Chevallier

Raymond Chevallier

#48249

Overall Influence

1929 - 2004 (75 years)

Raymond Chevallier was a French historian, archaeologist and Latinist. A former member of the École française de Rome, honorary president of the "Société française de Photogrammétrie et télédétection", he was a lecturer at the École pratique des hautes études, then teaching assistant and finally professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Tours. His seminar of historic topography and photo interpretation was attended by numerous French : R. Agache, , R. Goguey, D. Jalmain, L. Monguilan, etc. He specialized in the study of Roman roads and ancient traces by aerial photograph...

#2315

Peter G. J. Pulzer

#54486

Overall Influence

1929 - 2023 (94 years)

Peter George Julius Pulzer was an Austrian-born British historian who was Gladstone Professor of Government at the University of Oxford from 1985 till 1996. Biography Peter G. J. Pulzer was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1929 and his family migrated to the United Kingdom in 1939. He studied history at Cambridge University and gained a doctorate. Pulzer's 1966 book "The Emergence of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria 1867–1914" was published, the book was critically acclaimed in the academic work and well regarded concerning the research of anti-Semitism and is still regarded as the b...

#2316

Kevin Gutzman

#41005

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Kevin R. Constantine Gutzman is an American constitutional scholar and historian. He is Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University. Biography Gutzman holds a B.A. from the University of Texas ; a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law , a Master of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas , and an M.A. and the PhD in history from the University of Virginia.

#2317

J. F. Ade Ajayi

#22982

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Jacob Festus Adeniyi Ajayi, commonly known as J. F. Ade Ajayi, was a Nigerian historian and a member of the Ibadan school, a group of scholars interested in introducing African perspectives to African history and focusing on the internal historical forces that shaped African lives. Ade Ajayi favours the use of historical continuity more often than focusing on events only as powerful agents of change that can move the basic foundations of cultures and mould them into new ones. Instead, he sees many critical events in African life, sometimes as weathering episodes which still leave some parts of the core of Africans intact.

#2318

Howard Dodson

#50629

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Howard Dodson, Jr is an American scholar who was the Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Howard University Libraries, and was formerly the long-time director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which post he occupied for over a quarter of a century .

#2319

Clive Emsley

#42074

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Clive Emsley was a British historian and criminologist. He was a research director and lecturer at the Open University. Biography After his first degree at the University of York, where he was one of the initial intake of 150 undergraduates, he did research at Peterhouse, Cambridge, into the maintenance of public order in England during the French Revolution. At this point he had to make a career decision, having been a prominent member of the National Youth Theatre as an actor during his time at university. He played the part of Enobarbus in a celebrated production of 'Anthony and Cleopatra', with Helen Mirren as Cleopatra, and as a result was offered professional roles.

#2320

Stephen White

#37498

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Stephen Leonard White is British political scientist and historian, emeritus professor at University of Glasgow, an author of many articles and books about politics of Soviet Union and Russia. Stephen White graduated from Trinity College, Dublin with degrees in history and political science, and then completed a PhD in Soviet studies at University of Glasgow and a DPhil in politics at Wolfson College, Oxford. White was awarded the Marshall Scholarship.

#2321

Michael Auslin

#30216

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Michael Robert Auslin is an American writer, policy analyst, historian, and scholar of Asia. He is currently the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a Senior Fellow in the Asia and National Security Programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a senior fellow at London's Policy Exchange. He was formerly an associate professor at Yale University and a resident scholar and director of Japanese studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

#2322

Pieter Judson

#96946

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Pieter M. Judson is an American professor of history. Education and academic interests Pieter Judson attended Swarthmore College and graduated in 1978. He received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 1987. He has taught history at Swarthmore College between 1993 and 2014 and is currently a professor of 19th and 20th century history at the European University Institute in Florence. For more than ten years, he served as an editor of the Austrian History Yearbook and the President of the Central European History Society of North America.

#2323

Dan T. Carter

#32714

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Dan T. Carter is an American historian. Life Carter graduated from University of South Carolina, University of Wisconsin, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a Ph.D. in 1967. He taught at the University of Maryland, and the University of Wisconsin. He was Kenan University Professor at Emory University, and Educational Foundation Professor at University of South Carolina, retiring in 2007. In 2009, he was the Dow Research Professor at the Roosevelt Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands. He was president of the Southern Historical Association.

#2324

John Manuel Cook

#92631

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

John Manuel Cook, was a British classical archaeologist. He was educated at Marlborough College, and went to King's College, Cambridge . His older brother was Robert Manuel Cook, also a noted scholar of antiquity.

#2325

Richard A. Fletcher

#72989

Overall Influence

1944 - 2005 (61 years)

Richard Alexander Fletcher was a historian who specialised in the medieval period. Early years Richard Fletcher was the eldest child and only son of Alexander Kendal Humphrey Fletcher, a banker from Leeds, by his marriage to Monica Elizabeth Hastings Medhurst/Fletcher. His childhood home was at Wighill, near Tadcaster. He attended, as a scholar, Harrow School and Worcester College, Oxford where he was taught by James Campbell and achieved a First Class Honours degree.

#2326

Jorge Pinto Rodríguez

Jorge Pinto Rodríguez

#45608

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jorge Manuel Pinto Rodríguez, is a Chilean historian. He is known in Chile for his study of the history of Araucanía, social history and demography. In 2012 he gained the Chilean National History Award.

#2327

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

#26796

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger FBA is a German historian. She mainly researches the early modern period and has held the chair for early modern history at the University of Münster. Stollberg-Rilinger is one of the leading representatives of research that examines the constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire on the basis of symbolic-ritual forms of communication. Her work on rituals, symbolic communication and ceremonial influenced research on the exercise of power in the pre-modern era.

#2328

Pekka Hämäläinen

#73525

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

#2329

Marcel Detienne

#13704

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Marcel Detienne was a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. He was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the Basil L. Gildersleeve chair in Classics. Along with Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Detienne has sought to apply an anthropological approach, informed by the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, to classical and archaic Greece.

#2330

Ken Albala

#65161

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ken Albala is an American food historian, chef, author, and a professor of history at University of the Pacific. He has authored or edited 27 books on food and co-authored "The Lost Art of Real Cooking" and "The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home."

#2331

Elizabeth Hinton

#51521

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Elizabeth Hinton is an American historian. She is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the twentieth-century United States. Hinton was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

#2332

Wen Fong

#64769

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Wen C. Fong was a Chinese-American historian of East Asian art. He was the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art History at Princeton University, where he taught Chinese art history for 45 years. In 1959 he co-founded the first doctoral program in Chinese art and archaeology in the United States, which was later expanded to include Japan. He served as chairman of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology, and as consultative chairman for Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

#2333

Richard Steigmann-Gall

Richard Steigmann-Gall

#36865

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Richard Steigmann-Gall is an Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, and the former Director of the Jewish Studies Program from 2004 to 2010. Education Steigmann-Gall received a BA in history in 1989, an MA in European History in 1992 from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in European History in 1999 from the University of Toronto.

#2334

Dimitrije Đorđević

#32898

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Dimitrije "Mita" Đorđević was a Serbian historian of modern European history, especially of the Balkans. Biography Đorđević was born in Belgrade to a prominent Serbian family. When he was a law student, the Germans invaded Yugoslavia during World War II and he joined the resistance movement of Dragoljub Mihailovic. Đorđević was captured by the Germans and was imprisoned, ultimately in Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria. He survived the war, but was in turn imprisoned by the communist regime in post World War II Yugoslavia. After he was pardoned and released, Đorđević was eventuall...

#2335

Daikichi Irokawa

#61959

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Daikichi Irokawa was a Japanese historian. Biography Irokawa studied at the University of Tokyo. With other historians, such as , he sought to end differences in understanding of Japanese history within the country and internationally. He also sought to tout Japan's rise to prominence in the second half of the 20th century. He was inspired by the works of author Kunio Yanagita and started a daily segment titled Minshūshi, which focused on the daily life of the Japanese population and the evolution of their values.

#2336

Donald A. Gillies

#5744

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Donald Angus Gillies is a British philosopher and historian of science and mathematics. He is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Career After undergraduate studies in mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, Gillies became a graduate student of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics, where he completed a PhD on the foundations of probability.

#2337

Marc B. Shapiro

Marc B. Shapiro

#25624

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Marc B. Shapiro is a professor and the author of various books and articles on Jewish history, philosophy, theology, and rabbinic literature. Education and career Shapiro received his BA at Brandeis University and his PhD at Harvard University, where he was the last PhD student of Professor Isadore Twersky. He received rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Ephraim Greenblatt. Shapiro's father is Edward S. Shapiro, who has published books on American history and American Jewish history.

#2338

Jefferson Cowie

#65256

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Jefferson Cowie is an American historian, author and an academic. He is a James G. Stahlman Professor of History and the Director of Economics and History Major at Vanderbilt University; a former fellow of Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science at Stanford University; a fellow at the Society for Humanities at Cornell University, and at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego.

#2339

Pietro Redondi

#75401

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Pietro Redondi is an Italian historian of science, known for his work on Galileo Galilei. Redondi obtained his doctorate in 1978 at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, in the History of Science. In 1981-1992 he did research for the CNRS at the Centre Alexandre Koyré in Paris, and from 1985 to 1990 as deputy director. In 1983 he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies. From 1983 he was Assistant Professor , then Full Professor of History of Science at the University of Bologna. Redondi is a professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicoc...

#2340

Zigmantas Kiaupa

#91509

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Zigmantas Kiaupa is a Lithuanian historian, archivist, and professor. His specialty is political history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, history of cities and city dwellers, and study of historical sources.

#2341

David Underdown

#59244

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

David Edward Underdown was a historian of 17th-century English politics and culture and Professor Emeritus at Yale University. Born at Wells, Somerset, Underdown was educated at the Blue School and Exeter College, Oxford. The books Revel, Riot, and Rebellion and Fire from Heaven won prizes from the North American Conference on British Studies and the New England Historical Association. After retiring from Yale in 1996, Underdown wrote a well-received book about the history of cricket in the Hambledon era, Start of Play.

#2342

Michael P. Steinberg

#94462

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael P. Steinberg is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and a professor of music and German studies at Brown University. He was the president of the American Academy in Berlin from March 2016 to August 2018. Steinberg was previously the vice provost for the arts at Brown University. Steinberg has been a member of the executive board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and served as founding director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown, from 2005 to 2015. Between 2009 and 2013, he served as dramaturg on a joint production of R...

#2343

Rick Trainor

#16066

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Sir Richard Hughes Trainor, , is an academic administrator and historian who served as the Principal of King's College London from 2004 to 2014. He was previously the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich from 2000 to 2004. He is currently Rector of Exeter College, Oxford.

#2344

Gonzalo Vial Correa

#11816

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Gonzalo Vial Correa was a Chilean historian, lawyer and journalist. He was a member of the State Defense Council and the Council on Ethics in Social Media. In addition he was president of the Barnechea Foundation for Education, which he founded with his wife, María Luisa Vial Cox.

#2345

Alfred A. Cave

#63292

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Alfred A. Cave, Ph.D., D. Litt. was an American professor, historian, and author. He is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Toledo, specializing in the ethnohistory of Colonial America, Native Americans, and the Jacksonian era.

#2346

Geoffrey Alderman

#15285

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Geoffrey Alderman is a British historian who specialises in 19th and 20th centuries Jewish community in England. He is also a political adviser and journalist. Life Born in Middlesex, Alderman was educated at Hackney Downs School , then studied history at Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1962, graduating with a BA in 1965 and an MA and D.Phil. in 1969. After short academic contracts at University College London, and the universities of Swansea and Reading, he joined Royal Holloway College in 1972, lecturing in politics and contemporary history. He was made Professor of Politics and Contemporary...

#2347

Elizabeth Lunbeck

#81839

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Lunbeck is an American historian. She is Professor of the History of Science in Residence in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Books Lunbeck is the author or coauthor of books including:The Americanization of Narcissism Family Romance, Family Secrets: Case Notes from an American Psychoanalysis, 1912 The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America Her edited volumes include:Histories of Scientific Observation Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and...

#2348

Isser Woloch

#74985

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Isser Woloch is the Moore Collegiate Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia. His work focuses on the French Revolution and on Napoleon. He was educated at Columbia and at Princeton . He was the winner of the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association in 1994.

#2349

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

#67369

Overall Influence

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is an Associate Professor of History at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Hanifi received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He subsequently attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

#2350

Christoph Dieckmann

#72404

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Christoph Dieckmann is a German historian and author. Life Dieckmann studied history, sociology and economics at University of Göttingen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Hamburg. He received his doctorate in 2003 at University of Freiburg under the supervision of Ulrich Herbert, his dissertation focused on the German WWII policy in Lithuania, and his subsequent research and work has focused on the same topic.

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