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,

#251

A. L. Rowse

#6173

Overall Influence

1903 - 1997 (94 years)

Alfred Leslie Rowse was a British historian and writer, best known for his work on Elizabethan England and books relating to Cornwall. Born in Cornwall and raised in modest circumstances, he was encouraged to study for Oxford by fellow-Cornishman Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He was elected a fellow of All Souls College and later appointed lecturer at Merton College. Best known of his many works was The Elizabethan Age trilogy. His work on Shakespeare included a claim to have identified the 'Dark Lady of the Sonnets' as Emilia Lanier, which attracted much interest from scholars, but also many co...

#252

Mark Noll

#6122

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Mark Allan Noll is an American historian specializing in the history of Christianity in the United States. He holds the position of Research Professor of History at Regent College, having previously been Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Noll is a Reformed evangelical Christian and in 2005 was named by Time magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America.

#253

Alan Brinkley

#7963

Overall Influence

1949 - 2019 (70 years)

Alan Brinkley was an American political historian who taught for over 20 years at Columbia University. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History until his death. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost.

#254

Tony Wrigley

#11278

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Sir Edward Anthony Wrigley was a British historical demographer. Wrigley and Peter Laslett co-founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1964. Wrigley was born in Manchester on 17 August 1931. Wrigley's scholarly works focus on demographic history, and the long-term causes and effects of urbanization and industrialization. Among his many publications, Wrigley is known for the book Continuity, Chance and Change, published in 1988, in which he explained why Malthus was wrong about the law of diminishing returns slowing population growth. His most celebrat...

#255

Christopher Andrew

#3159

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Christopher Maurice Andrew, is an Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge with an interest in international relations and in particular the history of intelligence services.

#256

Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter

#8168

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Nell Irvin Painter is an American historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and as president of the Southern Historical Association, and was appointed as chair of MacDowell's board of directors in 2020.

#257

Richard S. Westfall

#9849

Overall Influence

1924 - 1996 (72 years)

Richard S. Westfall was an American academic, biographer and historian of science. He is best known for his biography of Isaac Newton and his work on the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Life Born in Fort Collins, Colorado, Westfall graduated from high school in 1942 and enrolled at Yale University. His time at Yale was interrupted by two years of service in World War II, but he returned to complete his B.A. degree in 1948. He subsequently earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale, with a dissertation entitled Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England. The work was an early ...

#258

David W. Blight

#8289

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophic...

#259

David Marshall Lang

#17487

Overall Influence

1924 - 1991 (67 years)

David Marshall Lang , was a Professor of Caucasian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was one of the most productive British scholars who specialized in Georgian, Armenian and ancient Bulgarian history.

#260

Marci Shore

#13890

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Marci Shore is an American associate professor of intellectual history at Yale University, where she specializes in the history of literary and political engagement with Marxism and phenomenology. Shore is the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968, a milieu biography of Polish and Polish-Jewish writers drawn to Marxism in the twentieth century; and of The Taste of Ashes, a study of the presence of the communist and Nazi past in today's Eastern Europe. She translated Michał Głowiński's Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons. Shore married Timothy D.

#261

Ronald Grigor Suny

#9290

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ronald Grigor Suny is an American historian and political scientist. Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and served as director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, 2009 to 2012 and was the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015, and is Emeritus Professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago.

#262

Hiawatha

#2307

Overall Influence

Hiawatha , also known as Ayenwatha or Aiionwatha, was a precolonial Native American leader and cofounder of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was a leader of the Onondaga people, the Mohawk people, or both. According to some accounts, he was born an Onondaga but adopted into the Mohawks.

#263

Glen Bowersock

#20704

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Glen Warren Bowersock is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former Chairman of Harvard’s classics department. Early life Bowersock was born in Providence, Rhode Island and attended The Rivers School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University , another B.A. with First Class Honors in Literae humaniores from Oxford University ; and his M.A., D.Phil. also at Oxford. His mentor was the renowned Roman historian Ronald Syme.

#264

Pierre Vidal-Naquet

#2207

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1969. Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece, but was also interested in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War , during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army, as well as Jewish history. He participated with Michel Foucault and Jean-Marie Domenach in the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons , which was one of the first French new social movements. He was part of debates over historiography in which he criticized negationism, and he was a supporter of Middle East peace efforts.

#265

Ervand Abrahamian

Ervand Abrahamian

#1654

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ervand Abrahamian is an Iranian-American historian of the Middle East. He is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is widely regarded as one of the leading historians of modern Iran.

#266

F. W. Walbank

#18820

Overall Influence

1909 - 2008 (99 years)

Frank William Walbank, was a scholar of ancient history, particularly the history of Polybius. He was born in Bingley, Yorkshire, and died in Cambridge. Early life and education Born at Bingley, Yorkshire, son of schoolmaster Albert Joseph David Walbank and Clarice , née Fletcher, Walbank attended Bradford Grammar School and went on to study Classics at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His father was the son of a cobbler, but had left the family business on winning a scholarship and became a teacher.

#267

Hanna Holborn Gray

Hanna Holborn Gray

#5941

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Hanna Holborn Gray is an American historian of Renaissance and Reformation political thought and Professor of History Emerita at the University of Chicago. She served as president of the University of Chicago, from 1978 to 1993, having earlier served as acting president of Yale University in 1977–1978. At both schools, she was the first woman to hold their highest executive office. When named to the post in Chicago, she became one of the first women in the United States to hold the full presidency of a major university.

#268

Paul Buhle

#10287

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Paul Merlyn Buhle is a Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.

#269

Enzo Traverso

#10779

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Enzo Traverso is an Italian scholar of European intellectual history. He is the author of several books on critical theory, the Holocaust, Marxism, memory, totalitarianism, revolution, and contemporary historiography. His books have been translated into numerous languages. After living and working in France for over 25 years, he is currently the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

#270

Jörg Baberowski

Jörg Baberowski

#14859

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jörg Baberowski is a German historian and Professor of Eastern European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He studies the history of the Soviet Union and Stalinist violence. Baberowski earlier served as Director of the Historical Institute and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy I at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

#271

Forrest McDonald

#11807

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Forrest McDonald, Jr. was an American historian who wrote extensively on the early national period of the United States, republicanism, and the presidency, but he is possibly best known for his polemic on the American South. He was a professor at the University of Alabama, where, together with Grady McWhiney, he developed the hypothesis that the South had been colonized by "Anglo-Celts," rather than the British Protestant farmers who populated the North.

#272

Bettany Hughes

#10898

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Bettany Mary Hughes is an English historian, author and broadcaster, specialising in classical history. Her published books cover classical antiquity and myth, and the history of Istanbul. She is active in efforts to encourage the teaching of the classics in UK state schools. Hughes was appointed OBE in 2019.

#273

Martin Malia

#8126

Overall Influence

1924 - 2004 (80 years)

Martin Edward Malia was an American historian specializing in Russian history. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1958 to 1991. He earned degrees from Yale University and Harvard University .

#274

Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz

#6500

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Stephanie Coontz is an American author, historian, and faculty member at Evergreen State College. She teaches history and family studies and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001 to 2004. Coontz has authored and co-edited several books about the history of the family and marriage.

#275

Pat Hudson

#18098

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Pat Hudson, is a British historian and academic. She is a Professor Emeritus of History at Cardiff University. In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy , the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

#276

Peter Gay

#4113

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers . He received the American Historical Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider , a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time .

#277

Nicolas Werth

#6937

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nicolas Werth is a French historian. Biography Werth is a scholar of communist studies. He is the son of Alexander Werth, a Russian born British journalist and writer who lived in the USSR during World War II.

#278

George Marsden

#4774

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

George Mish Marsden is an American historian who has written extensively on the interaction between Christianity and American culture, particularly on Christianity in American higher education and on American evangelicalism. He is best known for his award-winning biography of the New England clergyman Jonathan Edwards, a prominent theologian of Colonial America.

#279

Arthur Marwick

#9723

Overall Influence

1936 - 2006 (70 years)

Arthur John Brereton Marwick was a British social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University. His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the twentieth century, and the relationship between war and social change. He is probably best known, however, for his more theoretical book The Nature of History , and its greatly reworked and expanded version The New Nature of History . In the latter work he defended an empirical and source-based approach towards the writing of history, and argued against the turn towards postmodernism. He be...

#280

Harvey Klehr

#7390

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Harvey Elliott Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America . Early years He was born in Newark, New Jersey. He received his Bachelor's degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1967. He received his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971, after defending a dissertation entitled The Theory of American Exceptionalism.

#281

Robert Kagan

#5062

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Robert Kagan is an American neoconservative scholar. He is a critic of U.S. foreign policy and a leading advocate of liberal interventionism. A co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, he is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kagan has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for The Washington Post. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kagan left the Republican Party due to the party's...

#282

Patricia Nelson Limerick

#16251

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Patricia Nelson Limerick is an American historian, author, lecturer and teacher, considered to be one of the leading historians of the American West. Early life and education Limerick is the daughter of Grant and Patricia Nelson and was born and raised in Banning, California. She received a B.A. in American studies in 1972 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in American studies in 1980 at Yale University.

#283

Stephen G. Wheatcroft

#5553

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Stephen George Wheatcroft is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as famine and food supply problems in modern world history, the impact of media on history, and in recent developments in Russian and Ukrainian society. Wheatcroft speaks Russian fluently and has spent a good portion of his career researching in the Soviet archives, and he played a major role in publishing materials from the archives.

#284

Rondo Cameron

#17195

Overall Influence

1925 - 2001 (76 years)

Rondo Emmett Cameron was an American professor of economic history. He was a native of Texas. He graduated from Yale and received a Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago . He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1952. In 1969, he went to Emory University where he was Kenan University Professor until his retirement as emeritus professor in 1993. He was president of the International Economic History Association . He is well known for his book A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present . According to the preface, the book was many year...

#285

Peter Novick

#12059

Overall Influence

1934 - 2012 (78 years)

Peter Novick was an American historian who was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He was best known for writing That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession and The Holocaust in American Life. The latter title has also been published as The Holocaust and Collective Memory, especially for non-US anglophonic markets.

#286

Egon Flaig

#19266

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Egon Flaig is a German ancient historian and public intellectual, currently Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Rostock. Flaig's research has ranged from ancient Greek and Roman history to world-historical treatments of topics such as slavery and democracy. He has also been an active commentator on issues such as democracy, national identity, and religion, especially as pertaining to his home country.

#287

William H. McNeill

William H. McNeill

#12139

Overall Influence

1917 - 2016 (99 years)

William Hardy McNeill was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West . He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.

#288

Timothy Tyson

#8339

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Timothy B. Tyson is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.

#289

Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Daston

#9186

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science. Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

#290

David Montgomery

#9979

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

David Montgomery was a Farnam Professor of History at Yale University. Montgomery was considered one of the foremost academics specializing in United States labor history and wrote extensively on the subject. He is credited, along with David Brody and Herbert Gutman, with founding the field of "new labor history" in the U.S.

#291

Gisela Bock

#22363

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gisela Bock is a German historian. She studied in Freiburg, Berlin, Paris and Rome. She took her doctorate at the Free University Berlin in 1971 and her Habilitation at the Technical University Berlin in 1984. She has taught at the Free University Berlin and was professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, at the University of Bielefeld and then at the Free University Berlin. She retired in 2007.

#292

Richard Grove

#19322

Overall Influence

1955 - 2020 (65 years)

Richard Hugh Grove was a British historian, environmental activist, and one of the contemporary founders of environmental history as an academic field. His prizewinning book, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 , was considered a pioneering account of colonial environmental impacts and an origin for early western ideas on environmentalism.

#293

Robert Gellately

#12708

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Gellately is a Canadian academic and noted authority on the history of modern Europe, particularly during World War II and the Cold War era. Education and career He earned his B.A., B.Ed., and M.A. degrees at Memorial University of Newfoundland and his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics.

#294

Norman Golb

#9686

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Norman Golb was a scholar of Jewish history and the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor in Jewish History and Civilization at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Life Golb was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on 15 January 1928 to Joseph and Rose Golb, child immigrants from Ukraine.

#295

David Eisenbach

#18164

Overall Influence

David Eisenbach is a historian and an expert on media and politics and a lecturer in the history department at Columbia University. He was a Democratic candidate for New York City's Public Advocate in the 2017 primary election, where he received 23.42% and 92,246 votes against incumbent Letitia James. He was also a candidate in the February 2019 non-partisan special election for the same position in which he came in 13th place in a field of 17.

#296

Peter Connolly

#33333

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

Peter William Connolly FSA was a British scholar of the ancient world, Greek and Roman military equipment historian, reconstructional archaeologist and illustrator. He was a regular contributor to such periodicals as the Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies and Roman Frontier Studies.

#297

Jonathan Spence

#6101

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

#298

Mark Lewisohn

#3728

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Mark Lewisohn is an English historian and biographer. Since the 1980s, he has written many reference books about the Beatles and has worked for EMI, MPL Communications and Apple Corps. He has been referred to as the world's leading authority on the band due to his meticulous research and integrity. His works include The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions , a history of the group's session dates, and The Beatles: All These Years , a three-volume series intended as the group's most comprehensive biography.

#299

A. G. Hopkins

#10827

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Antony Gerald Hopkins, is a British historian specialising in the economic history of Africa, European colonialism, and globalisation. He is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy.

#300

Malcolm Barber

#16354

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Malcolm Charles Barber is a British scholar of medieval history, described as the world's leading living expert on the Knights Templar. He is considered to have written the two most comprehensive books on the subject, The Trial of the Templars and The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple . He has been an editor for The Journal of Medieval History and written many articles on the Templars, the Cathars, various elements of the Crusades, and the reign of Philip IV of France.

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