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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#2651

Clifford J. Rogers

#37089

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Clifford J. Rogers is a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has also been a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Swansea University, an Olin Fellow in Military and Strategic History at Yale, and a Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London.

#2652

Ursula Dronke

#24548

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Ursula Miriam Dronke was an English medievalist and former Vigfússon Reader in Old Norse at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College. She also taught at the University of Munich and in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University.

#2653

Kathryn Kish Sklar

#65420

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Kathryn Kish Sklar is an American historian, author, and professor. Her work focuses on the history of women's participation in social movements, voluntary organizations, and American public culture.

#2654

Richard W. Kaeuper

#55751

Overall Influence

Richard William Kaeuper is an American medievalist historian. He was a student of, and mentored by, Joseph Strayer, the noted Princeton scholar. Kaeuper grew up in Richmond, Indiana. Education Kaeuper earned his PhD from Princeton in 1967, and thereafter held several posts, finishing in his present position as professor of medieval history at the University of Rochester. He is active in several scholarly organizations among them De Re Militari.

#2655

Richard O. Cowan

#78714

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Richard Olsen Cowan is a historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a former professor in the Church History Department of Brigham Young University . He was one of the longest-serving BYU faculty and the longest-serving member of the Church History Department ever.

#2656

Paula S. Fass

#36908

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paula S. Fass is an American historian and the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. A social and cultural historian, Fass has published numerous books on the history of childhood and youth in the United States, and served as president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth from 2007 to 2009.

#2657

Walter Z. Laqueur

#110973

Overall Influence

#2658

James P. Carse

#56366

Overall Influence

James P. Carse was an American academic who was Professor Emeritus of history and literature of religion at New York University. His book Finite and Infinite Games was widely influential. He was religious "in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all."

#2659

Bert van der Spek

#94835

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Robartus Johannes van der Spek is a Dutch ancient historian, specializing in the Seleucid Empire. He was a full professor in Ancient Studies at VU University Amsterdam from 1993 to his retirement in 2014, and is currently working on the Babylonian Chronicles of the Hellenistic Age . He is also the author of the best-selling first-year book for ancient history: An introduction to the Ancient World.

#2660

Kemal Karpat

#12824

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Kemal Haşim Karpat was a Romanian-Turkish naturalised American historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early life He was of Turkish origin and born in Babadag, Romania. He received his LLB from the University of Istanbul, his MA from the University of Washington and his PhD from New York University. He previously worked for the UN Economics and Social Council and taught at the University of Montana and New York University. His final post was at Istanbul Şehir University.

#2661

Tony Ballantyne

#36194

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Anthony John Ballantyne is a New Zealand historian at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. After completing his schooling at King's High School, Dunedin, he graduated BA at the University of Otago, Dunedin and obtained a PhD at the University of Cambridge. After brief stints abroad, he returned to the University of Otago, Dunedin, where his career advanced.

#2662

Christopher Goscha

#73876

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Christopher E. Goscha is an American-Canadian historian specializing in the history of the Cold War in Asia, decolonization, and the wars for Vietnam. He teaches the history of international relations, the Vietnam Wars, and world history at the Université du Québec à Montréal . He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2019.

#2663

Richard Utz

#55303

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Richard Utz is a German-born medievalist who has spent much of his career in North America. He specializes in medieval studies, and served as president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism .

#2664

Tara Zahra

#59472

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Tara Elizabeth Zahra is an American academic who is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Zahra received her PhD from the University of Michigan. She has concentrated her studies on sociohistorical models and archival research on family, nation, and ethnicity in the twentieth century leading to an integrative approach across national borders.

#2665

Thomas Weber

#68374

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Thomas Weber is a German-born history professor and university lecturer. Since 2013 he has been Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Aberdeen. He is known for his books on Adolf Hitler.

#2666

Thomas C. Mendenhall

#31302

Overall Influence

1910 - 1998 (88 years)

Thomas Corwin Mendenhall II was a professor of history at Yale University, the sixth President of Smith College, and the leading authority on the history of collegiate rowing in the United States. Early life and education The grandson and namesake of Thomas Corwin Mendenhall , physicist and meteorologist, his father was a Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Charles Elwood Mendenhall , and his mother, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall , a well-known pediatrician. The young Thomas Mendenhall grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and went to Andover before graduating from Yale University in 1932.

#2667

John Philipps Kenyon

#41942

Overall Influence

1927 - 1996 (69 years)

John Philipps Kenyon, FBA was an English historian and Fellow of the British Academy. His area of expertise was 17th-century England. Life Kenyon was born in Sheffield where he attended King Edward VII School, Sheffield and then University of Sheffield where he obtained a first class degree in History in 1948 before going to Cambridge to take a doctorate as a pupil of John H. Plumb. He obtained his doctorate in 1954 and was appointed a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, before going on to become Hull's history professor for 19 years, followed by six years at St Andrews. From 1987 to 1994 he was Distinguished Professor of early modern British history at the University of Kansas.

#2668

Mary Lindemann

#45319

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mary Lindemann is an American historian and professor emerita of history at the University of Miami. She was president of the American Historical Association during the term 2020 and president of the German Studies Association during the term 2017–2018. She is a leading expert on the history of early modern Europe, the history of Germany and the history of medicine, especially early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish history. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

#2669

Erika Lee

#93525

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Erika Lee is the inaugural Bae Family Professor of History at Harvard University, a position she began in July 2023. Previously, she was the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota and an award-winning non-fiction writer.

#2670

A. T. Q. Stewart

#62192

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Anthony Terence Quincey Stewart , known professionally as A. T. Q. Stewart or Tony Stewart, was a Northern Irish historian, teacher and academic, and a best-selling author on the subject of the politics of Ulster and Northern Ireland. Coming from a Presbyterian background, he was a history master at the Belfast Royal Academy and taught for many years at Queen's University, Belfast.

#2671

W. David McIntyre

#62496

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

William David McIntyre was a British-born New Zealand historian, known for his expertise on the military and constitutional histories of the Commonwealth of Nations and British Empire. Early life and family Born in England on 4 September 1932, McIntyre was the son of Rev. J. McIntyre, a congregationalist minister. He was educated at Caterham School and went on to study at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Washington University, earning a Master of Arts degree, and the School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London, where he completed a PhD. His 1959 doctoral thesis was titled Brit...

#2672

Saul Cornell

#54745

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Saul Cornell, is the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University. He was Professor of history at Ohio State University and the Director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute.

#2673

Nelson Lichtenstein

#21358

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.

#2674

Glen M. Leonard

#76083

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Glen Milton Leonard is an American historian specializing in Mormon history. Background Leonard is a native of Farmington, Utah. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Utah. For a time he was managing editor of Utah Historical Quarterly. He has taught at both Brigham Young University and Utah State University. Leonard has been the director of the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City since it opened in 1984.

#2675

KC Johnson

#29029

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Robert David Johnson , also known as KC Johnson, is an American history professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He played a major role in reporting on the Duke University lacrosse rape case in 2006–2007. In 2007 he co-authored a book, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustice of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

#2676

Jan Sapp

#35092

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jan Anthony Sapp is a professor in the Department of Biology, York University, Canada. His writings focus especially on evolutionary biology beyond the classical neo-Darwinian framework, and emphasize the fundamental importance of symbiosis and horizontal gene transfer in heredity and evolution.

#2677

Jan Grabowski

#38539

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jan Zbigniew Grabowski is a Polish-Canadian professor of history at the University of Ottawa, specializing in Jewish–Polish relations in German-occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust in Poland.

#2678

Benjamin Woods Labaree

#82269

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

Benjamin Woods Labaree was a leading historian of American colonial history and American maritime history. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Early life and education Son of the Yale University professor of history Leonard Woods Labaree and Elizabeth Mary Calkins, Benjamin Woods Labaree was raised in New Haven, Connecticut, and attended The Hotchkiss School. He earned his bachelor's degree at Yale University in 1950, after having served in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1945-46. After graduation from Yale, he went on to Harvard University, where he earned his master's degree in history in 1953 and his Ph.D.

#2679

Chiara Frugoni

#87303

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Chiara Frugoni was an Italian historian and academic, specialising in the Middle Ages and church history. She was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1994 for her essay, Francesco e l'invenzione delle stimmate.

#2680

Shūdō Higashinakano

#67830

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Shūdō Higashinakano is a Japanese historian. He is a professor of intellectual history at Asia University who maintains that the Nanjing Massacre committed by Japanese troops during the Second Sino-Japanese War is a hoax.

#2681

Alfred Gollin

#96993

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

Alfred M. Gollin was an American scholar of European history. Early life and education Born on February 6, 1926, in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Gollin enlisted in the US Army in 1943 . He served in the field artillery in the European theater. After the war ended in Europe, Gollin was selected to attend New College, Oxford for a term as part of a program to send outstanding American soldiers to English universities. He returned to the US and earned his B.S. at City College of New York. William L. Langer and Sir John Myers encouraged him to return to Oxford for his B.A. He received the Cromwell Medal and the New College Essay Prize and earned his B.A.

#2682

Kevin Mattson

#56950

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Kevin Mattson is an American historian and critic. Mattson received his BA from the New School for Social Research and his PhD from the University of Rochester. For several years he ran the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University.

#2683

Scott Sandage

#24768

Overall Influence

Scott A. Sandage is a cultural historian at Carnegie Mellon University. He is best known as the author of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, which was selected as an "Editor's Choice" book by Atlantic Monthly, and was awarded the 34th Annual Thomas J. Wilson Prize, for the best "first book" accepted by Harvard University Press. In 2007 he was named as one of America's Top Young Historians by the History News Network.

#2684

Douglas A. Foster

Douglas A. Foster

#32937

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Douglas A. Foster is an American author and scholar known for his work on the history of Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. Life Douglas A. Foster was born in Sheffield, Alabama. He grew up in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Upon completing his undergraduate degree at Lipscomb University in 1974, he became an associate minister at Jackson Park Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee where he served until 1983. While there he completed his graduate work at Scarritt College. He began teaching at Lipscomb University in 1985 where he taught church history. While there he completed his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University.

#2685

Marek Jerzy Minakowski

Marek Jerzy Minakowski

#37941

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Marek Jerzy Minakowski is a Polish historian and genealogist known for creating the Polish genealogy database Wielka Genealogia Minakowskiego. Early life and career Minakowski earned his PhD in classical philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Initially focusing on classical philosophy and logics, he later started publishing about Poland's history and genealogy. In 2001, he founded a genealogy website Wielka Genealogia Minakowskiego and began adding available historical records. By 2020, the site contained genealogy records of around 1 million people.

#2686

David Summers

#70420

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Summers is the Emeritus William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art Theory and Italian Renaissance Art at the University of Virginia. He holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Yale University . He taught at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pittsburgh before accepting an appointment to the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia in 1981. In 1984, he was appointed William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Art and retired in 2015. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.

#2687

J. C. Davis

#79385

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

J. C. Davis was a British historian, whose work often focused on the Utopian thinkers of the 17th-century. He has been described as a "historian of political and religious thought and a brilliant and provocative iconoclast". The book Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600-1900 was written in honour of Davis at the time of his retirement as professor.

#2688

Erik M. Conway

#20409

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Erik M. Conway is the historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He is the author of several books. He previously completed a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998, with a dissertation on the development of aircraft landing aids.

#2689

Alvydas Nikžentaitis

Alvydas Nikžentaitis

#104910

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Alvydas Nikžentaitis is a Lithuanian historian, senior research fellow of the Lithuanian Institute of History and president of Lithuanian National Historians Committee. Biography In 1988 Alvydas Nikžentaitis defended his doctoral thesis on relations between Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Teutonic Order in the first half of the 14th century. In 1992 together with Vladas Žulkus he founded Centre of History of Western Lithuania and Prussia in Klaipėda. Nikžentaitis was also the first director of aforesaid centre and from 1993 he was a head of Historical Department at Klaipėda University. In 1999 ...

#2690

Sergio Romano

#19243

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Sergio Romano is an Italian diplomat, writer, journalist, and historian. He is a columnist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Romano is also a former Italian ambassador to Moscow. Biography Born in Vicenza, he grew up between Milan and Genoa in a middle-class business family. He graduated from the liceo classico Cesare Beccaria of Milan, then began working as a journalist. In 1952, he obtained a degree in Law at the University of Milan, but he never finished his studies in Political Science at the University of Genoa before graduation. He travelled to European capitals recently emerged from the war, which directed him to a diplomatic career.

#2691

José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu

#57519

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu was a Peruvian historian. Biography He completed his studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. After completing his studies he devoted himself to teaching and research and documentation on the history of the conquest and the Viceroyalty of Peru. At 25 he received his PhD in history, before he had studied Education with a major in History and Geography.

#2692

Norman Macdougall

#47398

Overall Influence

Norman Macdougall is a Scottish historian who is known for writing about Scottish crown politics. He was a senior lecturer in Scottish history at the University of St Andrews. Macdougall has written biographies of the kings James III of Scotland and James IV of Scotland. He was also responsible for editing a biography of James V of Scotland. Other publications include a work on the Auld Alliance, and editing Scotland and War, to which he also contributed an article on James IV's Great Michael.

#2693

Jan Glete

#60009

Overall Influence

1947 - 2009 (62 years)

Jan Glete was a Swedish historian. He was professor of history at Stockholm University, specializing in 20th-century Swedish industry and banking as well as the connection between state formation and naval history in early modern Europe.

#2694

Hanan Eshel

#45583

Overall Influence

1958 - 2010 (52 years)

Hanan Eshel was an Israeli archaeologist and historian, well known in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls studies, although he did research in the Hasmonean and Bar Kokhba periods as well. With Magen Broshi he discovered a number of residential caves in the near vicinity of Qumran and co-published a number of historically significant documents from Qumran.

#2695

William J. Connell

#54480

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

William John Connell is an American historian and holder of the Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta Chair in Italian Studies at Seton Hall University. He is a leading specialist in Italian history, Early Modern European history and the history of Italian Americans, and he writes broadly on other topics. In 2019 he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

#2696

Samuel Martin

#16870

Overall Influence

1924 - 2009 (85 years)

Samuel Elmo Martin was a linguist known for seminal work on the languages of East Asia, a professor at Yale University, and the author of many works on the Korean and Japanese languages. Biography Martin was born in Pittsburg, Kansas on 29 January 1924, and grew up in Emporia, Kansas. During World War II he was trained as a Japanese Language Officer, and was stationed in Japan at the end of the war.

#2697

Michael Lynch

#55626

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Michael Lynch, FRHistS, FRSE, FSA Scot is a retired Scottish historian and a leading expert in the history of the Scottish Reformation and pre-modern urbanisation in the Scottish kingdom. In 2010, five years after his retirement, he was described by one reviewer as 'one of the most influential historians in Scotland of the last thirty years', whose work has been characterised by an 'ability to bring ecclesiastical, cultural and urban perspectives to traditional Scottish political and governmental histories', as well as the ability 'to clarify a difficult theory within a deceptively simple ph...

#2698

Nicholas Brooks

#43056

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Nicholas Peter Brooks, FBA was an English medieval historian. Biography Nicholas Brooks was educated at Winchester College, and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1961 with a degree in history. His doctoral studies on the Anglo-Saxon charters in the archive of Canterbury Cathedral, also undertaken at Oxford, were supervised by Dorothy Whitelock, and provided the basis for his monograph The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, published in 1984. Brooks was lecturer and then senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of St Andrews from 1964 until 1985, when he was appo...

#2699

Modris Eksteins

#37187

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Modris Eksteins is a Latvian Canadian historian with a special interest in German history and modern culture. Born in Riga, Latvia, his works include Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age , which won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize and the Trillium Book Award. Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the Heart of Our Century , which juxtaposes the history of World War II and Latvia with personal memoir, and won the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty , which seeks to interpre...

#2700

Carlos Martínez Shaw

Carlos Martínez Shaw

#78134

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Carlos Martínez Shaw is a Spanish historian, professor emeritus of Early Modern History at the National University of Distance Education . He is a member of the Royal Academy of History. Biography Born at calle de Cano y Cueto 14, in Seville on 28 June 1945, he obtained a licentiate degree in History from the University of Seville in 1967. As he joined the University of Barcelona to work in a research project on the colonial trade, he began to write his PhD thesis under the guidance of . He earned the PhD in 1973, reading a dissertation titled Cataluña en la carrera de Indias .

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions