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,

#2351

Marjatta Hietala

#24844

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Marjatta Hietala is a Finnish historian specialising in urban history and the history of innovations. She is professor emerita of General History at the University of Tampere. Hietala introduced in Finland the study of innovations and international contacts. She has held a range of positions of trust both in Finland and internationally.

#2352

Winfried Baumgart

#82042

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Winfried Baumgart is a German historian. His work has a particular focus on German history during the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth century. His bibliographical directory of Germany history, which first appeared in 1971, proved sufficiently popular to reach 16 editions by 2006.

#2353

Joost Augusteijn

#69349

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Joost Augusteijn is a Dutch historian and lecturer. He was formerly a lecturer in Modern Irish History at Trinity College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast. He currently is an Associate professor of European History at Leiden University.

#2354

Chi Wang

#67737

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Dr. Chi Wang is a professor of U.S.-China relations and modern China at Georgetown University, where he contributed to the establishment of Georgetown's PhD program in Asian History and is co-chair of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation. Established in 1995, the foundation supports various activities through its Committee for U.S. Libraries and Museum Exchange. At Georgetown, Dr. Wang also contributed to the establishment of Georgetown's PhD program in Asian History Prior to his current positions, Dr. Wang was the head of the Chinese Section at Library of Congress and had worked in the field of ...

#2355

Jean-Marc Berlière

#72243

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jean-Marc Berlière is a French historian who specialises in the history of the French police. He works as a professor at the University of Burgundy. In 1991, he completed a Doctoral thesis on the Police of the French Third Republic.

#2356

Lucien Musset

#43902

Overall Influence

1922 - 2004 (82 years)

Lucien Musset was a French historian, specializing in the Duchy of Normandy and the history of the Vikings. Biography Born in Rennes, Musset served as a professor of history at the University of Caen.

#2357

Geoffrey W. Bromiley

#38057

Overall Influence

1915 - 2009 (94 years)

Geoffrey William Bromiley was an ecclesiastical historian and historical theologian. He was professor emeritus at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, having been Professor of Church History and Historical Theology there from 1958 until his retirement in 1987.

#2358

John Coffey

#72419

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

John Coffey is a British historian who works on religion, politics and ideas in the Protestant Atlantic world, c. 1600-1850. He studied History at Cambridge and completed a PhD under the supervision of Mark Goldie at Churchill College, Cambridge, where he held a Junior Research Fellowship, before taking up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College London. He has taught the University of Leicester. since 1999, serving as Head of History from 2013 to 2016. He has written monographs on Samuel Rutherford and John Goodwin and was an editor on the critical edition of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae.

#2359

Ohto Manninen

#94186

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ohto Heikki Sulevi Manninen , is a Finnish historian, PhD 1977. Manninen was 1984–95 associate professor at Helsinki University, 1995–98 professor of Finland's history at Tampere University. In 1998 he became professor in the history of war at the academy of military science.

#2360

Arthur I. Miller

#28663

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. He took a PhD in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1991 to 2005 he was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London . At UCL, Professor Miller helped restructure an academic unit combining history and philosophy of science, sociology of science, and science communication to create UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies, renamed in 1994. He was instrumental in developing the UK's first undergraduate single honours BSc degree ...

#2361

Richard Clement Wade

#84469

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

Richard Clement Wade was an American historian and urban studies professor who advised many Democratic politicians and candidates, including Adlai Stevenson, Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern. As a historian, he pioneered the interdisciplinary application of social science techniques to the study of urban history and helped make cities an important academic subject. His first book The Urban Frontier was a challenge to Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier thesis, asserting that the catalysts for western expansion were the Western cities like Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, not the...

#2362

Annette Wieviorka

#50716

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Annette Wieviorka is a French historian. She is a specialist in the Holocaust and the history of the Jewish people in the 20th century since the 1992 publication of her thesis, Deportation and genocide between memory and forgetting, defended in 1991 at the Paris Nanterre University.

#2363

Sarah Ansari

#47974

Overall Influence

Sarah Frances Deborah Ansari is a British professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a specialist in the recent history of South Asia, and particularly Pakistan and the partition of India.

#2364

Claude Mossé

#49648

Overall Influence

1924 - 2022 (98 years)

Claude Mossé was a French historian specializing in the history of Ancient Greece. Biography Mossé was born in Paris on 24 December 1924, as the daughter of a wine merchant. She was the sister of Eliane Mossé, researcher in macroeconomics, and Arlette Mosse, clinical nutritionist. In the winter of 1941, during World War II and aged 16, she first read a text on liberty and democracy by Demosthenes; since then, she dedicated her life to Greek history, never having married or having any children.

#2365

Stephen Turnbull

#41714

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Stephen Richard Turnbull is a British historian concentrating on Japanese military history, especially the samurai period, and has published numerous books. He provides information and advice to media organizations about Japan.

#2366

Yitzhak Hen

#45029

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Yitzhak Hen is Anna and Sam Lopin Professor of History, formerly at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev . Since August 2018 he has been the director of Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

#2367

Nigel Worden

#61929

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Nigel Worden is a British/South African historian who has researched the history of Cape slavery and the social and cultural history of early colonial Cape Town. He is Emeritus Professor of History and retired from the Historical Studies department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2016. He graduated from Jesus College Cambridge and was subsequently Research Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and Lecturer in Commonwealth History at the University of Edinburgh. He holds MA and PhD degrees in History from the University of Cambridge and BA degrees in Art History and Li...

#2368

Jing-shen Tao

#87756

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Jing-shen Tao is professor emeritus of Chinese history at University of Arizona and Correspondence Research Fellow at Academia Sinica who specializes in medieval Chinese/Inner Asian history, particularly the Song dynasty, Liao dynasty, and Jin dynasty .

#2369

Dan Berindei

#58831

Overall Influence

1923 - 2021 (98 years)

Dan Berindei was a Romanian historian. He was a titular member of the Romanian Academy from 1992 until his death. Biography A descendant of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, he was born in Bucharest on 3 November 1923. After attending the Clemența School, Berindei completed his secondary education at the . He then studied history at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1945.

#2370

Stanford J. Shaw

Stanford J. Shaw

#31741

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Stanford Jay Shaw was an American historian, best known for his works on the late Ottoman Empire, Turkish Jews, and the early Turkish Republic. Shaw's works have been criticized for their lack of factual accuracy as well as denial of the Armenian genocide, and other pro-Turkish bias.

#2371

Zhu Xueqin

#48595

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Zhu Xueqin is a Shanghai-based Chinese historian and public intellectual. He is a major exponent of contemporary Chinese liberalism. Background Born in Shanghai, Zhu was shaped in his eventual outlook by China's Cultural Revolution, when he was sent to rural Lankao County, Henan as a "sent-down youth" in 1970. In 1972, he was transferred to factory work.

#2372

Geoffrey Best

#67270

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Geoffrey Francis Andrew Best FBA was an English historian known for his studies of warfare and works about Winston Churchill. Early life and family Geoffrey Best was born in Osterley, Middlesex, on 20 November 1928. He was educated at St Paul's School, London. He undertook his national service in the Royal Army Educational Corps teaching illiterate Scottish soldiers to read and write.

#2373

Margaret Gowing

Margaret Gowing

#21697

Overall Influence

1921 - 1998 (77 years)

Margaret Mary Gowing , was an English historian. She was involved with the production of several volumes of the officially sponsored History of the Second World War, but was better known for her books, commissioned by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, covering the early history of Britain's nuclear weapons programmes: Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945, published in 1964, and the two-volume Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52, published in 1974.

#2374

Ira D. Gruber

#72700

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Ira D. Gruber is an American author, bibliographer, and military historian of the American Revolution. Personal life Ira D. Gruber was born January 6, 1934, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He attended Duke University and served in the United States Navy Reserve. From 1955-1957 he held the title of crypto security officer on the USS Wiltsie.

#2375

Hans-Lukas Kieser

#13278

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Hans-Lukas Kieser is a Swiss historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and president of the Research Foundation Switzerland-Turkey in Basel. He is an author of books and articles in several languages.

#2376

Mark Urban

#32360

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Mark Lee Urban is a British journalist, historian, and broadcaster, and is currently the Diplomatic Editor and occasional presenter for BBC Two's Newsnight. His older brother is the film-maker Stuart Urban.

#2377

Barbara Sicherman

#40741

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Barbara Sicherman is an American historian and academic who specializes in women's history. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values Emerita at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

#2378

Robert J. McMahon

#49022

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Robert J. McMahon is an American historian of the foreign relations of the United States and a scholar of the Cold War. He currently holds the chair of Ralph D. Mershon Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University.

#2379

Nancy Dye

#30074

Overall Influence

1947 - 2015 (68 years)

Nancy Schrom Dye was an American historian and philosopher and college academic who served as the first female president of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. As a professional historian, she was the author of numerous articles and several books, and she served on the editorial board of The Journal of American History.

#2380

Gerald James Whitrow

Gerald James Whitrow

#20197

Overall Influence

1912 - 2000 (88 years)

Gerald James Whitrow was a British mathematician, cosmologist and science historian. Biography Whitrow was born on 9 June 1912 at Kimmeridge in Dorset, the elder son of William and Emily Whitrow. After completing school at Christ's Hospital, he obtained a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford in 1930, earning his first degree in 1933; he was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1935 to 1937, taking his MA in 1937, and was awarded his PhD in 1939. At Oxford he worked on an alternative theory of relativity with Professor Edward Arthur Milne. During World War II, he worked as a scientific officer for the Ministry of Supply.

#2381

Roin Metreveli

#10473

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Roin Metreveli is a Georgian academician and historian. He was the first elected rector of the Tbilisi State University, after Petre Melikishvili and Ivane Javakhishvili. Metreveli served as a secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party during the Soviet Union, from 1960 to 1972, and subsequently as its first secretary. From 1972, he was a major editor of the Georgian Encyclopedia. He is the author of multiple scientific publications and books about Georgian history and Caucasiology. For several years, he was member of the Georgian Parliament. He was chairman of the boa...

#2382

Elizabeth Cobbs

Elizabeth Cobbs

#44674

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Elizabeth Cobbs is an American historian, commentator and author of nine books including three novels, a history textbook and five non-fiction works. She retired from Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University , following upon a four-decade career in California where she began working for the Center for Women’s Studies and Services as a teenager. She writes on the subjects of feminism and human rights, and the history of U.S. foreign relations. She is known for advancing the controversial theory that the United States is not an empire, challenging a common scholarly assumption.

#2383

Mario Liverani

#64918

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Mario Liverani , is an Italian historian and Professor of Ancient Near East History at the University of Rome La Sapienza. He is a member of many institutions, such as the American Oriental Society, Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, and doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Copenhagen and the Autonomous University of Madrid.

#2384

Michael Burlingame

#45032

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael A. Burlingame is an American historian noted for his works on Abraham Lincoln. He is the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. Burlingame has written or edited twenty books about Lincoln.

#2385

Laurence Veysey

#24223

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Laurence Russ Veysey was a historian best known for his history of higher education, The Emergence of the American University. He also wrote The Communal Experience. Notes

#2386

W. H. C. Frend

#89306

Overall Influence

1916 - 2005 (89 years)

William Hugh Clifford Frend was an English ecclesiastical historian, archaeologist, and Anglican priest. Academic career Haileybury College Keble College, Oxford Craven Scholarship to study in Berlin and North AfricaResearch fellowship at University of NottinghamAssociate Director, Egypt Exploration Society, Q'asr Ibrim, Nubia 1963–64Bye Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Fellow and university lecturer in divinity. During this time Charles III, then reading archaeology and anthropology at Trinity, was one of his students.Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and Dean of the Facu...

#2387

Władysław Andrzej Serczyk

#32285

Overall Influence

1935 - 2014 (79 years)

Władysław Andrzej Serczyk was a Polish historian-Ukrainist. Born in Krakow, he after graduating Jagiellonian University stayed in the university and began his scientific career. In 1963, he received his doctorate and in 1968 Serczyk received his habilitation. Since 1976 he was a professor. In 1974-1978, Serczyk was a director of Jagiellonian Library. In 1986-1996, he headed a branch of University of Warsaw in Bialystok, Institute of History of Eastern Europe .

#2388

Helen Wallace

#15934

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dame Helen Sarah Wallace, Lady Wallace of Saltaire, DBE, CMG, FBA, MAE, FAcSS , née Rushworth, is a British expert in European studies and, by marriage to William Wallace, Baron Wallace of Saltaire, a peeress. She was Foreign Secretary of the British Academy from 2011 to 2015.

#2389

Robert Bartlett

#45447

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert John Bartlett, CBE, FBA, FRSE is an English historian and medievalist. He is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History Emeritus at the University of St Andrews. After attending Battersea Grammar School in London , he studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, St John's College, Oxford and Princeton University as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow. He obtained research fellowships at several institutions, including the University of Michigan and University of Göttingen, before working at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Chicago and the University of St Andrews, where he curre...

#2390

Munro Price

#49303

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Munro Price is a British historian noted for his award-winning work on French history. Early life Price was born in London to playwright and author Stanley Price and his wife Judy and raised in Highgate.

#2391

Lech Wyszczelski

#80392

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Lech Wyszczelski is a Polish military historian and author of books on Central European history of the 20th century. A retired colonel in the Polish army and professor at various universities, he has written 36 books and 420 articles on military history, notably on the Polish-Bolshevik War and the pre-war Polish army.

#2392

Wolf D. Gruner

#105307

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Wolf D. Gruner is a retired German historian who held the Chair of European History, Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Rostock from 1996 to his retirement. Further reading

#2393

Jeremy Lawrance

#39650

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jeremy Norcliffe Haslehurst Lawrance FBA is a Ugandan born British linguist and historian. Professor at Manchester and later at Nottingham, and Fellow of the British Academy since 2011, he was President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland from 2004 to 2006.

#2394

Peter Schöttler

#51652

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Schöttler is a German historian working in France and Germany. He was a research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris and teaches now at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has held an honorary professorship since 2001.

#2395

Olaf Pedersen

#26760

Overall Influence

1920 - 1997 (77 years)

Olaf Pedersen was a Danish historian of science who was "leading authority on astronomy in classical antiquity and the Latin middle ages." Pedersen was active in the journal Centaurus, the Steno Museum, the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, and the International Academy of the History of Science.

#2396

Lawrence S. Wittner

#51707

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lawrence S. Wittner is an American historian who has written extensively on peace movements, foreign policy, and economic inequality. Biography He attended Columbia College , the University of Wisconsin , and Columbia University . Subsequently, he taught at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, and—under the Fulbright program—at Japanese universities. In 1974, he began teaching at the State University of New York at Albany, where he rose to the rank of Professor of History before his retirement in 2010.

#2397

Richard Marius

#40437

Overall Influence

1933 - 1999 (66 years)

Richard Curry Marius was an American academic and writer. He was a scholar of the Reformation, novelist of the American South, speechwriter, and teacher of writing and English literature at Harvard University. He was widely published, leaving behind major biographies of Thomas More and Martin Luther, four novels set in his native Tennessee, several books on writing, and a host of scholarly articles for academic journals and mainstream book reviews.

#2398

D. M. Schurman

#57470

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Donald Mackenzie Schurman was a Canadian naval historian. He was professor of history at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and also served at the Royal Military College of Canada. In the Festschrift published in his honor in 1997, the editors hailed Schurman as the "founder of the serious study of naval history in Canada".

#2399

A. J. Pollard

#50407

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in north-eastern England during the Wars of the Roses. He is considered a leading authority on the field. He is emeritus professor of the University of Teesside. In addition to works on the Wars of the Roses, he has also written a general history of fifteenth-century England and books on Robin Hood and Warwick the Kingmaker , Henry V and Edward IV . He has in addition edited collections of essays on fifteenth-century history and the history of the north-east of England as a region.

#2400

Lu Ann Homza

#42813

Overall Influence

Lu Ann Homza is an American historian and scholar of the intellectual history of medieval and early modern Europe. She is a professor at the College of William and Mary and the school's former Dean for Educational Policy.

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