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,

#2501

Robert Rollinger

#98588

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Robert Rollinger is an ancient historian and Assyriologist, known for his works on Herodotus, the Persian-Achaemenid Empire, ancient empires and cross-cultural encountering in the ancient world. He is a full professor at the University of Innsbruck and a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences .

#2502

Richard Vinen

#38221

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Richard Charles Vinen is a British historian and academic who holds a professorship at King's College London. Vinen is a specialist in 20th-century European history, particularly of Britain and France.

#2503

Carter V. Findley

#85682

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Carter Vaughn Findley is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the History Department at Ohio State University, where he teaches the history of Islamic civilization, with emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is the author of several published books and more than thirty scholarly articles in English, French, and Turkish.

#2504

Theodore H. Von Laue

#39101

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

Theodore H. Von Laue was an American historian and professor emeritus of history at Clark University. He was a winner of Guggenheim Fellowship . After having studied at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 1937 Von Laue was sent to Princeton University by his father Max von Laue, who did not want him to grow up "in a country run by gangsters". He finished his studies with a PhD about the social legislation of Otto von Bismarck. He then taught at Swarthmore College, the University of California, Riverside, and the Washington University in St. Louis, when he finally became professor of European History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

#2505

David Welch

#69160

Overall Influence

David Welch is an academic historian specialising in the study of twentieth-century propaganda. He is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Centre for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent. He is the editor of Routledge's Sources in History series and has also written many articles for History Today.

#2506

Levan Chilashvili

#25056

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

Levan Chilashvili was a Georgian archaeologist and historian, an academician of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Meritorious Scholar of Georgia, Doctor of Historical Sciences, and Professor. In 1954, he graduated from the Faculty of History of Tbilisi State University , where he was also a professor from 1967 until his death in 2004. In 1958, Chilashvili received his PhD in history, and in 1967, he received a degree as Doctor of Historical Sciences.

#2507

Philippe Dollinger

#77864

Overall Influence

1904 - 1999 (95 years)

Philippe Dollinger was a French historian, known particularly for his work on the history of the Hanse. Biography Philippe Dollinger attended the Gymnasium Fustel de Coulanges. Dollinger studied history at the University of Strasbourg. He was a pupil of Marc Bloch, Charles-Edmond Perrin and Lucien Febvre. In 1931 he pursued the Agrégation d'Histoire et géographie. From 1932 to 1945 he was a teacher at the Gymnasiums in Colmar, Reims, Strasbourg and Paris. From 1932 until 1934 he worked at the Institut francais in Berlin and in the Bavarian Archives. In 1945 Dolliner became professor of Alsa...

#2508

Gerald Aylmer

#69979

Overall Influence

1926 - 2000 (74 years)

Gerald Edward Aylmer, was an English historian of 17th century England. Gerald Aylmer was the only child of Edward Arthur Aylmer, from an Anglo-Irish naval family, and Phoebe Evans. A great-uncle was Lord Desborough. Educated at Beaudesert Park School and Winchester College, he went to Balliol College, Oxford for a term before volunteering for the Navy, where he was a shipmate of George Melly. Returning to Balliol, he was tutored by Christopher Hill. He graduated in 1950, spent a year at Princeton University as a Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow, and completed his thesis, 'Studies on the I...

#2509

David Garrow

#40065

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Jeffries Garrow is an American author and historian. He wrote the book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. He also wrote Liberty and Sexuality , a history of the legal struggles over abortion and reproductive rights in the U.S. prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama , and other works.

#2510

Earl F. Ziemke

#54978

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Earl Frederick Ziemke was an American military historian whose work was mainly on World War II and especially the Soviet-German clash in Eastern Europe. Biography Earl Ziemke was born on December 16, 1922, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and served in the Marines during World War II. After learning Japanese at Camp Elliot, California, Ziemke served in the Pacific. He fought in the Battle of Peleliu and then won the Purple Heart for wounds received in the assault on Okinawa.

#2511

Svante Lindqvist

#59687

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Lars Svante Albert Lindqvist is a Swedish historian who was the Marshal of the Realm of Sweden and chief of the Royal Court of Sweden from 1 January 2010 until 30 August 2018. Since 1 September 2018 he is appointed Chancellor of the Royal Orders of Knighthood, the chancery overseeing the Orders, decorations, and medals of Sweden.

#2512

Gregor Thum

#89851

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Gregor Thum is a German-American historian of Central and Eastern Europe. From 1988 through 1995, Thum studied history and Slavic studies at the Free University of Berlin. From 1995 to 2001, he was a lecturer at professor Karl Schlögel's chair for East European history at Viadrina European University in Frankfurt an der Oder. There he worked on a Ph.D. thesis about the transformation of German Breslau into Polish Wrocław from 1945 onwards. Completed in 2002 and published as a book the following year, the thesis was very successful on the general book market by the standards of historical monographies.

#2513

Neil Christie

#57304

Overall Influence

Neil Christie is a British archaeologist and historian. He is professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester. Education and career Christie studied archaeology at Newcastle University. After obtaining his doctorate, he held a Rome Scholarship at the British School at Rome, and was later employed there to prepare the excavation report on Santa Cornelia. He was also a Sir James Knott Fellow at Newcastle and a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. He joined Leicester in 1992 and was subsequently appointed professor.

#2514

Yann Le Bohec

#70192

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Yann Le Bohec is a French historian and epigraphist, specializing in ancient Rome, in particular North Africa during Antiquity and military history. Works Military History 1979: 1989: 1989: 1990: 1995: 2001: 2002: 2006: 2009: 2012: Alésia : Fin août-début octobre de 52 avant J-C., Paris, Tallandier2013: La « bataille » du Teutoburg, 9 apr. J.-C., Paris, Éditions Lemme, series "Illustoria"2013: La bataille de Lyon, 197 apr. J.-C., Paris, Éditions Lemme, series "Illustoria"2014: 2014: Histoire militaire des guerres puniques : 264-146 av. J.-C., Paris, Tallandier, series "Texto"2014: Géopolitiq...

#2515

Jörg Fisch

#69151

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jörg Fisch is a Swiss historian. He studied history and philosophy in the University of Zurich and University of Basel. He did his Doctorate from the Heidelberg University.

#2516

David M. Knight

#46854

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

David Marcus Knight was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Durham University. Life The son of the Reverend Marcus Knight, later Dean of Exeter, he read chemistry at Keble College, Oxford and, after serving in the military, read a DPhil in the history of Victorian chemistry under the supervision of Alistair Cameron Crombie, Oxford University's Professor of the History of Science. After Oxford he was appointed as Durham's lecturer in the history of science in the Department of Philosophy and remained there for the duration of his career. He served on the editorial boards of A...

#2517

Michael Klarman

Michael Klarman

#24702

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Michael J. Klarman is an American legal historian and scholar of constitutional law. Currently, Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School. Formerly, he was James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

#2518

John K. Walton

#34824

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

John Kimmons Walton is a professor at the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Spain. Walton is an expert on the history of the development of tourism, and particularly the English seaside. Walton was previously Professor of Modern Social History at Lancaster University, Professor of Social History at the University of Central Lancashire, and Professor of Social History in the Institute of Northern Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University. He was a Member of the Chetham Society, serving as a Member of Council from 1989 and as General Editor from 1991 to 2004.

#2519

Raoul Van Caenegem

#40023

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Raoul Charles, Baron Van Caenegem , was a Belgian historian and noted expert in the field of European legal history. Biography Raoul Van Caenegem was born in Ghent on 14 July 1927. He became a professor at the University of Ghent. In 1974, he was awarded the Francqui Prize in human sciences for his work on medieval history.

#2520

Alan Frost

#58282

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Alan J. Frost , was an Australian historian and professor emeritus at La Trobe University. A major theme of his research involved the European exploration of the Pacific Ocean over the second half of the eighteenth century. He is best known for books in which he challenges common historical stereotypes and misconceptions concerning the colonisation of Australia. These include Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia's Convict Beginnings, Botany Bay: The Real Story, The First Fleet: The Real Story, and Mutiny, Mayhem, Mythology: Bounty's Enigmatic Voyage. Frost's arguments radically challen...

#2521

Andrei Pippidi

#54227

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Andrei-Nicolae Pippidi is a Romanian historian and professor emeritus at the University of Bucharest. He specialised in South-Eastern European history of the 15th–19th century, in Romanian history of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, and in the relationship between South-Eastern Europe and the Occident.

#2522

Thomas Kühne

#48478

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Thomas Kühne is a German historian. He holds the Strassler Chair for the Study of Holocaust History and is the Director of the 'Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies' at Clark University, Massachusetts. His Research and teaching focuses on genocides and wars in modern European history, especially on Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders; he also engages in the study of masculinities and of body aesthetics.

#2523

Brendan Simms

#35830

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Brendan Peter Simms is a Professor of the history of international relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Early life Brendan Simms is the son of Anngret and David Simms, a professor of mathematics. He is also a grand-nephew of Brian Goold-Verschoyle, a member of the Communist Party of Ireland, who became a Soviet spy and died in a Soviet gulag in 1942.

#2524

Michael Balfour

#27203

Overall Influence

1908 - 1995 (87 years)

Michael Leonard Graham Balfour was an English historian and civil servant. He was born in Oxford, the son of Sir Graham Balfour. He was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in history. He first visited Germany in 1930, where he became a friend of Helmuth James von Moltke. During the Second World War Balfour worked at the Ministry of Information and the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office . In 1944 he joined the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and after the war he became ...

#2525

Marius B. Jansen

#84609

Overall Influence

1922 - 2000 (78 years)

Marius Berthus Jansen was an American academic, historian, and Emeritus Professor of Japanese History at Princeton University. Biography Jansen was born in Vleuten in the Netherlands to Gerarda and Bartus Jansen, a florist who moved his family to Johnston, Rhode Island in the fall of 1923. Jansen grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Princeton in 1943, having majored in European history of the Renaissance and Reformation. The same year, he began serving in the Army, studying Japanese and working in the Occupation of Japan. He completed his PhD in history at Harvard in 1950, studying Japan with Edwin O.

#2526

Norbert Finzsch

Norbert Finzsch

#92911

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Norbert Finzsch as Norbert Rollewitz is a German historian. Education and career Norbert Finzsch studied German literature and United States history at the University of Cologne, where he passed the state exam in both majors in 1977. In 1980 he received his PhD in history at Cologne. The title of the dissertation was The Gold miners of California: Conditions of Work, Standards of Living, and Political System in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century. It was a cliometric study. From 1981 to 1988 Finzsch taught American History as an assistant professor at the University of Cologne. In 1983/1984 ...

#2527

Khodadad Rezakhani

#84803

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Khodadad Rezakhani is an Iranian historian of late antique Central and West Asia. He has been associate research scholar at The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies Princeton University from 2016 to 2020.

#2528

Felicity Heal

#97574

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Felicity Margaret Heal, is a British historian and academic, specialising in early modern Britain. From 1980 to 2011, she was a lecturer at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. She had previously taught or researched at Newnham College, Cambridge, the Open University, and the University of Sussex.

#2529

Edward Norman

#34781

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Edward Robert Norman is an ecclesiastical historian and former Church of England priest. From 1999 to 2004, he was Canon Chancellor of York Minster. He was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he received an Open Scholarship.

#2530

Devon A. Mihesuah

#48342

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Devon A. Mihesuah (born 2 June 1957) is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation, a historian and writer, and a previous editor of the American Indian Quarterly. She is the Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. She is the second Native woman to receive a named/distinguished professorship (the first is Henrietta Mann). Her lineage is well-documented in multiple tribal records. Mihesuah has written award-winning books and articles about colonization, boarding schools, stereotypes, research methodologies, Indigenous women, AIM, repatriation, racism...

#2531

Bettina Bildhauer

Bettina Bildhauer

#62816

Overall Influence

Bettina M. Bildhauer is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. She is an expert on medieval German literature in its cultural and multilingual context, and on modern perceptions of the Middle Ages.

#2532

Walter Ziegler

#87045

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Walter Ziegler is a German historian Life Born in Liberec, Ziegler has been living in Bavaria since 1946. He attended Gymnasium in Munich. After the Abitur he studied for the in Freising and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He passed the first Staatsexamen in 1964, the second in 1966. After his doctorate and his habilitation with Andreas Kraus with the work Studien zum Staatshaushalt Bayerns in der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts at the University of Regensburg in 1980, he received a professorship for modern history and regional history as well as didactics of history at the University of Würzburg.

#2533

Serge Gruzinski

Serge Gruzinski

#64225

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Serge Gruzinski is a French historian. He is a Latin America specialist. Career In 1969, he entered the École Nationale des Chartes and prepared a thesis on sixteenth-century Flanders under the direction of Pierre Goubert. In 1970, a trip to Mexico awakened his interest in this country. He was a member of the École française de Rome from 1973 to 1975 and the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. In 1983, he joined the CNRS where he became research director in 1989. He is also the director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences since 1993.

#2534

Dan Stone

#44281

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dan Stone is a historian. As professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and director of its Holocaust Research Institute, Stone specializes in 20th-century European history, genocide, and fascism. He is the author or editor of several works on Holocaust historiography, including Histories of the Holocaust and an edited collection, The Historiography of the Holocaust .

#2535

John Matthews

#71207

Overall Influence

John Frederick Matthews, is a British historian and academic. Since 1996, he has been a professor of Roman history at Yale University, where he was also the John M. Schiff Professor of Classics and History from 2001 to 2014.

#2536

Christian Appy

#64584

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Christian Gerard Appy is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is widely known as a leading expert on the Vietnam War experience. The most recent of his three books on the subject is American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. It explores the war's impact on American politics, culture, and foreign policy from the 1950s to the Obama presidency.

#2537

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

#38157

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is an American historian, philologist and essayist, noted in particular for his studies of the institution of Cantonism, his critique of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's controversial two volume-work about Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, as well as translations of Jorge Luis Borges' works into Russian. He is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University where he teaches Early Modern, Modern and East European Jewish history.

#2538

Carmen Bernand

#60814

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Carmen Bernand is a French anthropologist, historian and Latin Americanist. Biography Carmen Bernand was born in France to Spanish refugee parents, she lived in Argentina for 25 years, where she studied Ethnology at University of Buenos Aires. At the end of 1964, she moved to Paris and prepared a postgraduate thesis under the direction of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 1966, she married the epigraphist .

#2539

James A. Brundage

#64833

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

James A. Brundage was Professor Emeritus of history and, prior to his retirement, Ahmanson-Murphy chair of medieval European history at the University of Kansas. He earned his PhD from Fordham University and was a member of the History department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before moving to Kansas. Brundage specialized in the history of medieval canon law.

#2540

Gerrit Walther

#83279

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Gerrit Walther is a German historian. Life Born Kiel, Walther studied literature, history and philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt from 1980 to 1986 and completed an editorial training course at a daily newspaper. His most important academic teachers were Ulrich Muhlack and Notker Hammerstein. From 1987 to 1997 Walther was a research assistant in Frankfurt. In 1992 he received his doctorate in Frankfurt am Main with a thesis on the historian and politician Barthold Niebuhr supervised by Ulrich Muhlack. The second and third reviewers of the work were Notker Hammerstein and Lothar Gall.

#2541

Robert Fox

#63465

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Dr. Robert Fox MA, DPhil, FSA FRHistS is a leading British authority on the history of science. He is interested in the history of sciences and technology in Europe from the 18th century onwards. He has published extensively. His book The Savant and the State examines science, culture and politics in France between 1814 and 1914, while Science without Frontiers examines developments from the late nineteenth-century until the Second World War. In 2015, Fox received the George Sarton Medal, the premier award of the international History of Science Society . He was recognized as a Chevalier of t...

#2542

Hu Houxuan

#43009

Overall Influence

1911 - 1995 (84 years)

Hu Houxuan was a Chinese historian, chief editor and a contributor of the Jia gu wen he ji shi wen , the modern Chinese transcriptions of the most comprehensive collection of the oracle bone inscriptions. For 26 years, since 1956, he led the editorial team of the Jia gu wen he ji, a monumental collection of over 40,000 pieces of inscribed oracle bones and a milestone in the history of the oracle bone studies. Hu Houxuan was the mentor of Professor Qiu Xigui of Fudan University in China and a leading historian of the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

#2543

Roman Szporluk

#43262

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Roman Szporluk is a Ukrainian-American political scientist and historian. He is a professor emeritus at Harvard and the University of Michigan. He has written several books and many papers. He is the father of poet Larissa Szporluk and novelist Ben Vendetta.

#2544

Victor Lieberman

#63123

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Victor B. Lieberman is an American historian of early modern Southeast Asia and Eurasia. He presently serves as the Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Asian and Comparative History at the University of Michigan, where he began teaching in 1984.

#2545

Parvaneh Pourshariati

#46535

Overall Influence

Parvaneh Pourshariati is an Iranian-born American historian of Middle Eastern studies, scholar, and educator. She is an Associate Professor of History at New York City College of Technology , and former president of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies. She specializes in the late antique, early medieval and modern histories of Iran and the Middle East.

#2546

Fred Harvey Harrington

#68796

Overall Influence

1912 - 1995 (83 years)

Fred Harvey Harrington was an American educator and the 17th president of the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1962 to 1970. Career Born in Watertown, Harrington received his Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University , and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy , both from New York University, where he also taught as an instructor during the 1936-1937 academic year. Upon graduating, he immediately took the post of assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1940, Harrington moved to the University of Arkansas as a full professor of history and political science, and had a brief spell as a visiting professor at West Virginia University in 1942.

#2547

Thomas J. Archdeacon

#52117

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Thomas J. Archdeacon is an American historian. Archdeacon served on the United States Army Reserve from 1964 to 1978, and was on active duty between 1969 and 1972. He graduated from Fordham University in 1964, and pursued graduate study at Columbia University. Archdeacon began teaching at the United States Military Academy in 1969, prior to joining the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 1972. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1985.

#2548

Álvaro Jara

#85983

Overall Influence

1923 - 1998 (75 years)

Álvaro Jara was a Chilean historian who won the National History Award in 1990. His major work is War and Society in Chile, which was not originally published in Chile but in France with the title of Guerre et société au Chili in 1961. This work included a new view on the themes of the conquest of Chile.

#2549

Guy Alitto

#36735

Overall Influence

Guy Salvatore Alitto is an American academic in the History and East Asian Languages and Civilization Departments at the University of Chicago. He is known in China for revitalizing the scholarship on Chinese Confucian scholar Liang Shuming. He is also often quoted in popular Chinese media sources. He is best known in America for his scholarship and for his role as translator for the first official Chinese delegations to the United States after Richard Nixon's first visits to China.

#2550

Ernst Anrich

#44713

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Ernst Anrich was a German modern historian, sociologist, university professor, academic administrator and publisher, who was the principal founder and managing director of the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft publishing company in Darmstadt, one of Germany's leading academic publishing companies and also one of the largest book clubss in Germany.

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