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,

#2401

Gerald Stourzh

#70090

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Gerald Stourzh is an Austrian historian who studies modern history, especially the history of North America, of Austria, of political ideas, of constitutions and especially of human rights. He taught, as a professor, at the Free University of Berlin from 1964 to 1969, and at the University of Vienna from 1969 until 1997, when he became professor emeritus.

#2402

Andrew Gordon

#33573

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon is a British academic maritime war historian, who wrote the First World War history The Rules of the Game . Early life Gordon received his early formal education at Glenalmond College, in Perthshire, Scotland. He received a BSc in Economics from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a PhD in War Studies from King's College London, University of London.

#2403

Wayne R. Dynes

#22714

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Wayne R. Dynes was an American art historian, encyclopedist, and bibliographer. He was professor emeritus in the Art Department at Hunter College, where he taught from 1972 to 2005. Dynes spent his early years in southern California, where he attended UCLA and received his B.A. in 1969. After extended sojourns in Italy and England, he settled permanently in Manhattan, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. The subject of his dissertation was the eleventh-century illuminated Stavelot Bible from Belgium. His training as a medievalist provided the...

#2404

Manuel Tuñón de Lara

Manuel Tuñón de Lara

#32384

Overall Influence

1915 - 2015 (100 years)

Manuel Tuñón de Lara was a Spanish historian. Life Born in Madrid on 8 September 1915. He earned law degree from the University of Madrid in 1936. In 1932 he had joined the Communist Youth Union, in 1937 becoming director of the cadre school of the Unified Socialist Youth, and earning a place on the central committee. At the end of the Spanish Civil War he was interned in a concentration camp.

#2405

Jacques Heurgon

#41184

Overall Influence

1903 - 1995 (92 years)

Jacques Heurgon was a French university, normalian, Etruscan scholar and Latinist, professor of Latin language and literature at the Sorbonne. Married to Anne Heurgon-Desjardins, founder in 1952, of the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, he was the father of , politician and historian, Catherine Peyrou and Edith Heurgon who continued the "Colloques of Cerisy".

#2406

Jacques Freymond

Jacques Freymond

#26731

Overall Influence

1911 - 1998 (87 years)

Jacques Freymond was a Swiss political historian. He was born in Lausanne, and studied in his hometown as well as in München, Sorbonne and Sciences Po. He worked in the upper secondary school from 1935 to 1942. From 1943 to 1955 he was a professor in modern history at the University of Lausanne. He was also a writer in Gazette de Lausanne from 1946. In 1949–50 he was a guest scholar at Yale and Columbia. He spent his later career at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He chaired the International Political Science Association from 1964 to 1967.

#2407

W. J. Rorabaugh

#84365

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

William Joseph Rorabaugh was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Washington, and from 2003–08 he was the managing editor of Pacific Northwest Quarterly. Life He graduated from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in 1976. He was a book reviewer and the author of several works of American history. In July 2006 he became president of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

#2408

Werner Jochmann

#53019

Overall Influence

1921 - 1994 (73 years)

Werner Jochmann was a German historian and director of the Research Centre for the History of National Socialism in Hamburg, Germany. Early life and career Werner Jochmann grew up the son of a modest farmer. After completing the Abitur and graduating from high school in Reichenbach in 1940, he was immediately drafted into the German defense force . In August 1941 he was wounded in Russia, and in 1942, after being discharge from the hospital, Jochmann studied history, German, geography and philosophy at Wrocław. However, he was expelled from the university due to a conflict with a communist f...

#2409

Antoni Mączak

#88720

Overall Influence

1928 - 2003 (75 years)

Antoni Mączak was a Polish historian specializing in the economic, political and social history of Poland and history of Europe. Biography Antoni Maczak was born in Lwów in 1928 in a family with scientific and pedagogical traditions. His father was an academic teacher in Lviv and a high school principal. During the Second World War he fought in the Gray Ranks paramilitary Boy Scout units of the Polish resistance against the Nazis, and in the ranks of Home Army. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising of August–October 1944. Captured by the Nazis, he remained a prisoner until Germany surrendered in 1945.

#2410

Henk J. M. Bos

#27250

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Hendrik Jan Maarten "Henk" Bos is a Dutch historian of mathematics. Career Hendrik was a student of Hans Freudenthal and Jerome Ravetz at Utrecht University and in 1973 wrote a thesis "Differentials, higher order differentials, and the derivative in the Leibnizian calculus" for his doctorate.

#2411

R. Owen Williams

R. Owen Williams

#56613

Overall Influence

Rick Owen Williams is a former president of the Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium of sixteen nationally recognized liberal arts colleges located throughout the South. Prior to becoming president at ACS, Williams served as the twenty-fifth president of Transylvania University, the sixteenth oldest college in America. He has served as vice-chair of the board at Gratz College and is currently on the board of Morehouse College, as well as the alumni advisory board of Cambridge University. Williams was formerly an investment banker for over two decades.

#2412

Yaffa Eliach

#65657

Overall Influence

1937 - 2016 (79 years)

Yaffa Eliach was an American historian, author, and scholar of Judaic studies and the Holocaust. In 1974, she founded the Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation and Research in Brooklyn, New York, which collected over 2,700 audio interviews of Holocaust survivors as well as thousands of physical artifacts. Eliach created the "Tower of Faces" made up by 1,500 photographs for permanent display at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

#2413

Szymon Rudnicki

#105703

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Szymon Rudnicki is a Polish historian. He specializes in the history of the Second Polish Republic, right-wing political movements of that era, and Polish-Jewish relations. He lectured at the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw, from 1973 to 1987, he was its deputy director. In November 1996 he received a degree of professor. Rudnicki focuses mostly on the ideology and activities of Polish interwar right-wing movements. He also focuses on the Jewish question in Poland and Polish-Jewish relations in interwar Poland. His book Żydzi w parlamencie II Rzeczypospolitej , published in 2003, won the KLIO Prize in 2004 for the best scientific monography.

#2414

Yaroslav Dashkevych

#47202

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

Yaroslav Dashkevych was Ukrainian historian, archaeographer, armenologist. He wrote over 1700 scientific and publicist works. Dashkevych was a representative of Hrushevsky school of history and a victim of Stalinist terror. He was a Doctor of Historical Sciences.

#2415

William Sheridan Allen

#100348

Overall Influence

1932 - 2013 (81 years)

William Sheridan Allen was an American historian. Biography Allen was born in Evanston, Illinois, and studied at the universities of Michigan, Connecticut, and Minnesota, and in Germany at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Göttingen. The Nazi Seizure of Power was his first book. He also wrote The Infancy of Nazism and worked on studies of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda and of the Social Democratic underground in the Third Reich. He retired in 2001 as professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

#2416

Helmut Neuhaus

#71994

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Helmut Neuhaus is a German historian who specialises on the Early modern period. From 1989 to 2009 he held the Chair of Modern History I at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. life and work Born in Iserlohn, Neuhaus studied history, German and philosophy as well as law and political science at the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg. In 1971 he passed his first Staatsexamen for the teaching profession at grammar schools. In 1975 he received his doctorate in Marburg under Gerhard Oestreich in the subjects Medieval and Modern History, Ancient History and Modern German Literature with the thesis Reichstag und Supplikationsausschuss.

#2417

Ian McBride

#100803

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Ian McBride is Foster Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. He is a visiting professor of Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame. Career McBride earned his BA at Jesus College, Oxford, after which he completed three years as a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of London and lectured at the University of Durham. He joined King's College in 2000 as professor of Irish and British history. McBride is also Patrick B. O'Donnell Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame.

#2418

Aristotle Kallis

#70470

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Aristotle Kallis is a British historian who specialises in modern European history, with an emphasis on the study of inter-war German and Italian fascism, as well as propaganda in Nazi Germany. He is an author and editor of several books on the subject of fascism and totalitarianism, including Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe . His 2005 book, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, deals with the subjects of Nazi propaganda and the Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops.

#2419

Caroline Robbins

#26239

Overall Influence

1903 - 1999 (96 years)

Caroline Robbins or Caroline Herben was a British historian who was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. Life Robbins was born in Middlesex in 1903. Her parents were Rowland Richard and Rosa Marion Robbins . Her father was a farmer and he was a Councillor on the Middlesex County Council. Her brother, Lionel, would become an economist.

#2420

Robert Bothwell

#60442

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Robert Selkirk Bothwell is a Canadian professor of Canadian history. Bothwell is considered to be the foremost scholar on Canadian Cold War participation, as well as a frequently published author.

#2421

Charles Thomas

#36347

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Antony Charles Thomas, was a British historian and archaeologist who was Professor of Cornish Studies at Exeter University, and the first Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, from 1971 until his retirement in 1991. He was recognised as a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth with the name Gwas Godhyan in 1953.

#2422

Ernst Kossmann

#53957

Overall Influence

1922 - 2003 (81 years)

Ernst Heinrich Kossmann , often named as E. H. Kossmann in his books, was a Dutch historian. He was professor of Modern History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His magnum opus is The Low Countries. History of the Southern and Northern Netherlands.

#2423

Alan Trachtenberg

#35393

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Alan Zelick Trachtenberg was an American historian and the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and professor emeritus of American Studies at Yale University. Biography Born in Philadelphia, Trachtenberg attended Temple University, and earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, writing his dissertation on the Brooklyn Bridge in American literature.

#2424

Alfred F. Young

Alfred F. Young

#67494

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Alfred Fabian "Al" Young was an American historian. Young is regarded as a pioneer in the writing of the social history of the American Revolution and was a founding editor of the academic journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.

#2425

Prys Morgan

#69382

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Prys Morgan FRHistS FSA FLSW is a Welsh historian. Biography Prys Morgan was born in Cardiff in 1937, the son of academic T. J. Morgan. His parents first met at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 1926. Like his late brother, Rhodri Morgan, Prys Morgan was educated at Whitchurch Grammar School and St John's College, Oxford.

#2426

Mark Elvin

#62196

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

John Mark Dutton Elvin is a professor emeritus of Chinese history at Australian National University, specializing in the late imperial period; he is also emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.

#2427

Anne Goldgar

#34133

Overall Influence

Anne Goldgar is an American historian, author and academic, specializing in seventeenth and eighteenth century European cultural and social history, and of Francophone culture across Europe. She holds the inaugural Van Hunnick Chair in European History at the University of Southern California Dornsife. She was previously Professor of early modern history at King's College London, UK. In 2016/7 she was a Descartes Theme Group Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

#2428

Thomas Wellock

#59210

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Thomas Wellock is the American historian for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Trained as both an engineer and a historian, he writes scholarly histories of the regulation of commercial nuclear energy. His most recent book is Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk with the University of California Press in 2021. A review in the New Yorker called Safe Enough? a "refreshingly candid account of how the government . . . approached the bottom-line question posed by the book's title."

#2429

Victor Bulmer-Thomas

#57737

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Victor Bulmer-Thomas CMG OBE is a British academic who has specialised in Latin America and the Caribbean. Born in London, his first experience of the Americas was as a V.S.O. in Belize , where he taught several of the future leaders of the country. He studied at New College, Oxford University for his undergraduate degree, where he obtained a first. In 1975 he graduated with a PhD from St Antony's College, Oxford, with an original dissertation on Costa Rica where he pioneered the concept of constructing databases from primary sources and applying them to Latin American economic history. While...

#2430

Jürgen Renn

#39303

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jürgen Renn is a German historian of science, and since 1994 Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Short biography Renn studied physics at the Free University of Berlin and at the Sapienza University of Rome. In 1987 he received his Ph.D in mathematical physics from the Technical University of Berlin.

#2431

Milan Ristović

#92224

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Milan Ristovic is Serbian historian and university professor. Ristovic was born in 1953 in Pristina, Kosovo, then SFRY. He graduated from the department of Contemporary History, University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. In 1981 he was awarded his master's degree and in 1991 he completed his PhD studies at the same faculty. From 1978 to 1989 he worked as an assistant at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade. In 1990, he joined the Department of History, Faculty of History. In 1991 he was given the title of assistant professor. In 1998 he was elected associate professor and in 2001, he was appointed as full professor.

#2432

Nicholas Canny

#62787

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nicholas Patrick Canny is an Irish historian and academic specializing in early modern Irish history. He has been a lecturer in Irish history at the University of Galway since 1972 and professor there from 1979 to 2011. He is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Galway.

#2433

Marnie Hughes-Warrington

Marnie Hughes-Warrington

#60600

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

#2434

Elliott West

#84568

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Elliott West is an American historian and author. He studies the history of the American West. Biography West grew up in a family of journalists. His father was an editor for the Dallas Morning News, and his brother was a travel writer. West received an undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. West completed master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Colorado. He said that he applied to Colorado because he liked the state, and although he applied to the school's history program, he was still planning to become a journalist.

#2435

John Y. Simon

#64309

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

John Younker Simon was an American Civil War scholar known for editing the papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Biography Born in Highland Park, Illinois, to Jane Younker and Jay Simon, he was on the history faculty of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, for 44 years. Simon had MA and PhD history degrees from Harvard University. He received the Lincoln Prize Special Achievement Award in 2004 from the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College for his then-24, later 31 volume Grant series. The same year, he also received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. He died July ...

#2436

Evan Mawdsley

#45286

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Evan Mawdsley is a British historian and former Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow's School of Humanities. He is currently a Professorial Research Fellow. He specializes in Russian history and the history of World War II.

#2437

Joep Leerssen

#54674

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Joseph Theodoor "Joep" Leerssen is a Dutch comparatist and cultural historian. He is professor of European studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he also holds a Royal Netherlands Academy Research Professorship. He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 2008.

#2438

David D. Hall

#20920

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

David Drisko Hall is an American historian, and was Bartlett Professor of New England Church History, at Harvard Divinity School. Life Hall was born on July 8, 1936. He graduated from Harvard University, and from Yale University with a PhD. He is well known for introducing lived religion to religious studies scholarship in the United States, most notably at Harvard Divinity School.

#2439

Mridu Rai

#28302

Overall Influence

Mridu Rai is an Indian historian who serves as a professor at Presidency University, Kolkata. Rai is the author of the prizewinning book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir .

#2440

Idith Zertal

#20750

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Idith Zertal is an Israeli historian, considered one of the "New Historians". Career After a career in journalism, Zertal began a career as a professor of history and cultural anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Chicago and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

#2441

Hans L. Trefousse

#37602

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Hans Louis Trefousse Early and military life Trefousse was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1935 as his parents fled the increasingly totalitarian Nazi regime. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York City College in 1942. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served as an intelligence officer in World War II, using his fluent German to interrogate German soldiers. He also participated in the Liberation of Paris, and in Leipzig saved hundreds of lives by arguing for 11 hours with a Nazi commander holed with many troops, convincing him to surrender to Allied force...

#2442

Claude Gauvard

#47475

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Claude Gauvard is a French historian and Middle Ages specialist. She has been the President of Société de l'histoire de France since 2009. Life She was an assistant at the University of Rouen in 1969, then at the Sorbonne in 1971. She is a professor at the Pantheon - Sorbonne University. In 1989, she defended her doctoral thesis, Crime, État et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge .

#2443

Eric Arnesen

#42775

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Eric Arnesen is an American historian. He is currently the James R. Hoffa Professor of Modern American Labor History at George Washington University. He was a Fulbright Scholar, and is a member of the Organization of American Historians.

#2444

Oliver Padel

#40051

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Oliver James Padel is an English medievalist and toponymist specializing in Welsh and Cornish studies. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic in the University of Cambridge. and visiting professor of Celtic at the University of the West of England

#2445

Adam Leszczyński

#60060

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Adam Janusz Leszczyński is a Polish historian and journalist, associate professor at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Works Skok w nowoczesność: Polityka wzrostu w krajach peryferyjnych 1943–1980 . Warszawa: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN. Introduction by Zygmunt Bauman

#2446

Mary Louise Roberts

#62178

Overall Influence

Mary Louise Roberts is an American historian currently the WARF Distinguished Lucie Aubrac Professor and Plaenert Bascom Professor of History at University of Wisconsin. For the 2020–2021 academic year, she additionally is Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at the United States Military Academy.

#2447

Immanuel C. Y. Hsu

#26511

Overall Influence

1923 - 2005 (82 years)

Immanuel Chung-Yueh Hsü was a sinologist, a scholar of modern Chinese intellectual and diplomatic history, and a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Biography Born in Shanghai in 1923, he studied at Yenching University in Beijing, and the University of Minnesota. He held a Harvard-Yenching Fellowship at Harvard University from 1950 to 1954. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard, he spent the years 1955–1958 as a Research Fellow at Harvard's East Asian Research Center. He taught modern Chinese history at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1959 until his retirement in 1991, serving as Chair of the History department from 1970 to 1972.

#2448

Don Higginbotham

Don Higginbotham

#67074

Overall Influence

1931 - 2008 (77 years)

Don Higginbotham was an American historian and Dowd Professor of History and Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A leading scholar of George Washington, he was a pioneering practitioner of the “new” military history and an expert on colonial and revolutionary America and the early national United States. He served twice as visiting professor of history at the United States Military Academy.

#2449

Richard W. Leopold

#72630

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Richard William Leopold was a prominent diplomatic and military historian at Northwestern University. Early life and education The second son of Harry Leopold, Sr., and Ethel Kimmelstiel, Richard Leopold grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. He attended the Franklin School before attending Phillips Exeter Academy in 1926, where he graduated cum laude in 1929. He then attended Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors in 1933.

#2450

Dana L. Robert

#77319

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Dana Lee Robert is a historian of Christianity and a missiologist. She is a professor at Boston University, where she has worked since 1984. She was the co-founder of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission in 2001, one of the first university-based Centers on World Christianity in North America. For years, Robert held the School of Theology's Truman Collins Professorship in World Christianity and History of Mission, but in 2022 she was installed in the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship, the highest distinction bestowed upon senior faculty members who remain actively...

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