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,

#2751

R. Stephen Humphreys

#66972

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

R. Stephen Humphreys is an American historian specializing in the history of Southwest Asia and North Africa. He was the 'Abd al-Aziz al-Sa'ud Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now an emeritus professor at that institution.

#2752

João Paulo Borges Coelho

#70081

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

João Paulo Borges Coelho is a Mozambican historian and writer. He studied history in Maputo and was awarded a PhD in economic and social history from the University of Bradford. He is professor of contemporary history at the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, and editor of Arquivo, the journal of the Mozambican National Archive in Maputo, a specialist in military history and has acted as an academic adviser to the Mozambican Ministry of Defence. He is also a writer; in 2009 he won the LEYA Novel Prize.

#2753

Martha S. Jones

#37462

Overall Influence

Martha S. Jones is an American historian and legal scholar. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She studies the legal and cultural history of the United States, with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women, the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early United States, and the development of birthright citizenship in the United States as promoted by African Americans in Baltim...

#2754

Barry Supple

#32142

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Barry Emanuel Supple, CBE, FBA , is Emeritus Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge, and a former Director of the Leverhulme Trust. He is the father of theatre and opera director Tim Supple.

#2755

Philip Choy

#85790

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Philip P. Choy was an architect and historian of Chinese American studies. He is the author of San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History & Architecture , Canton Footprints: Sacramento’s Chinese Legacy , and The Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese . Choy has been a community activist known for landmark preservation in San Francisco.

#2756

Charles H. Trout

#59796

Overall Influence

1935 - 2006 (71 years)

Charles H. Trout was a historian and college president. He served as president of Washington College for five years and then president of Harcum College for four years. Trout earned received his Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College and his Master of Arts and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His teaching career began at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He joined the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1969 and became chairman of its history department. While at Mount Holyoke, he was named a National Endowment fo...

#2757

Igor Lukes

#56691

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Igor Lukes is a professor of history at Boston University, who focuses on central European history since World War I. He is also an Honorary Consul General of the Czech Republic. Works The Munich Crisis, 1938: Prelude to World War II. Psychology Press. 1999.

#2758

Richard H. Helmholz

#19807

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Richard H. Helmholz is the Ruth Wyatt Rosenson Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1965 and also earned an A.B. in French literature at Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in medieval history from the University of California at Berkeley.

#2759

Tarif Khalidi

#43115

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Tarif Khalidi is a Palestinian historian who now holds the Shaykh Zayid Chair in Islamic and Arabic Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Family Khalidi is the son of Ahmad Samih Khalidi and Anbara Salam , brother of Usama al-Khalidi and half-brother of Walid Khalidi. His sister is Randa al-Fattal, a Palestinian-Syrian author, playwright and political activist. Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi is Tarif's first cousin.

#2760

Stanley J. Stein

#58463

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Stanley J. Stein was an American historian of Spanish America and Iberia, with interests in colonialism and post- colonialism as well as imperial history, political economy, and social history. Until his retirement, he taught at Princeton University, holding the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture. His most well-known book is The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, published jointly with his wife, Barbara H. Stein , which explores the idea that Spain's restrictive policies on trade meant that Spanish America's wealth did not enrich the region while simultaneously turning Spain into a dependency of Northern Europe.

#2761

Reynald Secher

#50482

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Reynald Secher is a French historian famous for his work on the War in the Vendée. Vendée Under the supervision of Jean Meyer at the Paris-Sorbonne University, Secher wrote a history of his home town, La Chapelle-Basse-Mer. His thesis on the revolt in the Vendée won him a Doctorat d'État. These were both published in 1986.

#2762

Virginia DeJohn Anderson

#80708

Overall Influence

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is an American historian. She is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of three books: New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century , Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America , and The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution .

#2763

Bai Shouyi

#71895

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Bai Shouyi , also known as Djamal al-Din Bai Shouyi, was a Chinese ethnologist, historian, social activist, and writer who revolutionized recent Chinese historiography and pioneered in relying heavily on scientific excavations and reports. A Marxist philosophically, his studies thus take a very class-centric view and reasoning. Born a son of a Hui merchant in Kaifeng, he became literate in Arabic from his mother and aunt.

#2764

Garrett G. Fagan

#26907

Overall Influence

1963 - 2017 (54 years)

Garrett George Fagan was an Irish American historian, singer and writer known for his research in the various areas of Roman history, as well as his critique of pseudoarchaeology. He was Professor of Ancient History at Penn State University.Fagan earned a BA with honors in Ancient History and Archaeology and Biblical Studies and an MLitt in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin, and a PhD from McMaster University . He was a visiting professor at Davidson College in 1993-94 and held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in 1995-96. He began teaching on a visi...

#2765

Maria Dzielska

#55573

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

Maria Celina Dzielska was a Polish classical philologist, historian, translator, biographer of Hypatia, and political activist. She was a Professor of Ancient Roman History at Jagiellonian University.

#2766

Lawrence B. Glickman

#77732

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Lawrence B. Glickman is an American history professor and author or editor of four books and several articles on consumerism. He has taught at Cornell University since 2014, where he is Stephen and Evalyn Milman Professor in American Studies. Previously he taught at the University of South Carolina. Glickman earned a Princeton University B.A. in history magna cum laude in 1985, a M.A. in 1989 and his Ph.D. in 1992 both from University of California, Berkeley. He has written three books, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Ac...

#2767

Wolfram Kaiser

#94806

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Wolfram Kaiser is a professor of European studies at University of Portsmouth and visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. Kaiser's areas of interest include the history and politics of the European Union and transnational dimensions of European and global history since the mid-nineteenth century.

#2768

Vicki L. Ruiz

#64272

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Vicki Lynn Ruiz is an American historian who has written or edited 14 books and published over 60 essays. Her work focuses on Mexican-American women in the twentieth century. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

#2769

Rotem Kowner

#49439

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Rotem Kowner is an Israeli historian and psychologist specializing in the history of modern Japan, and a full professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Haifa. Early life Rotem Kowner was born in Mikhmoret and lived his early years in the Kibbutz of Ma'ayan Tzvi. At the age of three, his family moved to Haifa, where he grew up and went to the Hebrew Reali School. Upon graduation, he entered the Israeli Navy and subsequently served as an officer on a missile boat.

#2770

Mirfatyh Zakiev

#51060

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Mirfatyh Zakievich Zakiev was a Soviet and Russian controversial academic in the domain of Turkology scholar. Education and career Mirfatyh held a doctorate, and served in a number of higher schools and institutes as a rector, director and department head .

#2771

Joanna Waley-Cohen

#51361

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Joanna Waley-Cohen is the Provost for New York University Shanghai and Silver Professor of History at New York University, where she has taught Chinese history since 1992. As Provost, she serves as NYU Shanghai's chief academic officer, setting the university's academic strategy and priorities, and overseeing academic appointments, research, and faculty affairs.

#2772

Andrew Moore

#54809

Overall Influence

Andrew Moore is an Australian historian and academic, a specialist in Australian right-wing politics. He has taught at the University of Sydney, The University of New South Wales, England's University of Lincoln and the University of Western Sydney. His areas of expertise include Twentieth Century Australian History, Irish-Australian history and social history of sport, especially rugby league football. Moore is a leading expert on both the New Guard and the Old Guard.

#2773

Edward L. Dreyer

#41206

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

Edward L. Dreyer was an American historian known for his work and expertise on the history of China's Ming dynasty. Early life and education Dreyer was born in 1940 in San Diego. He earned his BA in history from Harvard University in 1961 and his Ph.D. from Harvard with a thesis on "The Emergence of Chu Yuan-chang, 1360–65." His thesis advisors were John Fairbank and Lien-sheng Yang.

#2774

Mott T. Greene

#45626

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Mott T. Greene is an American historian of science, and is John B. Magee Professor of Science and Values Emeritus, at the University of Puget Sound, from which he retired in 2012. He is currently Affiliate Professor of Earth & Space Sciences at the University of Washington.

#2775

David R. Wrone

#54780

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

David R. Wrone is an American academic, author and historian. He is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a specialist in the fields of Native American history and political assassinations, writing books and articles on the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

#2776

Paul Magdalino

#91768

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Paul Magdalino is a British Byzantinist who is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Byzantine History at the University of St Andrews. He received the 1993 Runciman Award for his monograph on the reign of Manuel I Komnenos , which challenged Niketas Choniates' negative appraisal of the ruler.

#2777

Friedhelm Hardy

#47666

Overall Influence

1943 - 2004 (61 years)

Friedhelm Ernst Hardy , also known as Fred Hardy, was Professor of Indian Religions, teaching at King's College London. He was a linguist familiar with both classical and modern Indian languages, described in his obituary as "unrivalled in this country and possibly anywhere in the world today". He is the author of two prominent works, The Religious Culture of India: Power, Love and Wisdom and Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India.

#2778

Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan

#83733

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan or Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan is a French historian and teacher. She is a professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She is known for her knowledge of Venice in the late Middle Ages.

#2779

Nancy Springer

#34381

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Nancy Springer is an American author of fantasy, young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction. Her novel Larque on the Wing won the Tiptree Award in 1994. She also received the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for her novels Toughing It in 1995 and Looking for Jamie Bridger in 1996. Additionally, she received the Carolyn W. Field Award from the Pennsylvania Library Association in 1999 for her novel I am Mordred. She has written more than fifty books over a career that has spanned nearly four decades.

#2780

Richard B. Bernstein

#45101

Overall Influence

1956 - 2023 (67 years)

Richard B. Bernstein was an American constitutional historian, a distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, and lecturer in law and political science at the City College of New York's Skadden, Arps Honors Program in Legal Studies in its Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.

#2781

Ellen DuBois

#61627

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ellen Carol DuBois is a professor of history and gender studies. She has taught at the University at Buffalo and ended her career at the University of California, Los Angeles . DuBois retired from UCLA in 2017. She is known for her pioneering work in women's history and for her history books.

#2782

J. F. C. Harrison

#45025

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

John Fletcher Clews Harrison , usually cited as J. F. C. Harrison, was a British academic who was Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of books on history, particularly relating to Victorian Britain.

#2783

W. Hudson Kensel

#56086

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

W. Hudson Kensel was a historian and author of the American West. He is professor emeritus from California State University at Fresno. At Fresno, he was the chairman of the Department of History. His early childhood was spent at Pahaska Tepee and Cody, Wyoming. He thereafter moved to the state of Washington where he completed his education. He is the author of Pahaska Tepee, Buffalo Bill's Old Hunting Lodge and Hotel, A History, 1901-1946 and Dude Ranching in Yellowstone Country: Larry Larom and Valley Ranch, 1915-1969, published in 2010 by the University of Oklahoma Press at Norman, Oklahoma.

#2784

Peter Hayes

#51089

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Peter F. Hayes is professor emeritus of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, and chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

#2785

W. Jeffrey Bolster

#111432

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

W. Jeffrey Bolster is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire in the United States, and the author of The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, which won the 2013 Bancroft Prize in history of the Americas, and the 2013 Albert J. Beveridge Award. He also wrote Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail which won the 1997 Wesley Logan Prize of the American Historical Association.

#2786

Joy Damousi

#74143

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Joy Damousi, is an Australian historian and Professor and Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She was Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for most of her career, and retains a fractional appointment. She was the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2017 to 2020.

#2787

Alvin Coox

#58458

Overall Influence

1924 - 1999 (75 years)

Alvin David Coox, was an American military historian and author known for his award-winning book, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia. Coox studied at New York University with a bachelor's degree in accounting and achieved his doctorate in history at Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University in the 1940s and at Johns Hopkins University, before working as an analyst for the United States Air Force after they went to Japan. From 1964 to 1995, he taught at San Diego State University.

#2788

James Campbell

#96402

Overall Influence

1935 - 2016 (81 years)

James Campbell, was a British historian, specialising in the medieval period and the Anglo-Saxons. He was a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, from 1957 until his retirement in 2002, and Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2002.

#2789

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

#26830

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu is a Turkish professor of late Ottoman history in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Between 2005 and 2014, he was the department chair. Education He received his B.A. in political science and economics and his Ph.D. in political science from Istanbul University. His thesis was on the political activities and thought of one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress , Dr. Abdullah Cevdet.

#2790

Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy Roberts

#12999

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Dorothy E. Roberts is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvar...

#2791

David A. King

#25430

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David A. King is a British-American historian and author. He was the Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and History of Science at New York University and the director of the Smithsonian Institution project on medieval Islamic astronomy and Director of the Institute for the History of Science in Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.

#2792

William K. Scarborough

#93614

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

William Kauffman Scarborough was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He was the Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor in the Humanities from 1996 to 1998.

#2793

André Miquel

#26211

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

André Miquel was a French Arabist and historian, specialist of Arabic literature and Arabic language. Biography André Miquel was born in Mèze, Hérault on 26 September 1929. He studied literature. A student of the École normale supérieure which he joined in 1950, agrégé de grammaire and docteur ès lettres, from 1976 to 1997, he was holder of the Chair of classical Arabic language and literature at the Collège de France, of which he was general administrator from 1991 to 1997, after being that of the Bibliothèque nationale from 1984 to 1987.

#2794

Pierre Lévêque

#34579

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Pierre Lévêque was a 20th-century French historian of ancient and Hellenistic Greece. Biography Training The son of an engineer, he spent his youth in the port of Bordeaux. Reading Cité grecque by Gustave Glotz, pushed him towards literary studies: he was received in 1940 in the École normale supérieure de la rue d'Ulm then at the agrégation de lettres in 1944. A member of the French School at Athens from 1947 to 1952, he studied in Greece archaic statuary of Delos and excavated the site of Thasos. In 1955, under the direction of André Aymard, he defended his major thesis, dedicated to Pyrrh...

#2795

Alexandru Zub

#69950

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Alexandru Zub is a Romanian historian, biographer, essayist, political activist and academic. A former professor at the University of Iași, noted for his contribution to the study of cultural history and Romanian history, he is currently head of the A.D. Xenopol Institute of History . He was elected a full member of the Romanian Academy in 2004 ; currently, he serves as head of the Academy's History Department.

#2796

Michael D. Biddiss

#101285

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Denis Biddiss is emeritus professor of history at the University of Reading. He specialises in the history of the development of racist ideology, and the history of medicine. Early life Michael Denis Biddiss was born in 1942.

#2797

Jo Fox

#70910

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Joanne Clare Fox , is a British historian specialising in the history of film and propaganda in twentieth-century Europe. Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Study, University of London from 2018 to 2020, Fox was promoted as Dean of London University's School of Advanced Study in 2020.

#2798

Josef Ehmer

#62472

Overall Influence

1948 - 2023 (75 years)

Josef Ehmer was an Austrian historian and professor emeritus at the University of Vienna. Education and academic career Ehmer was born in Gschwandt on 7 November 1948. After attending elementary & secondary school in Upper Austria, Josef Ehmer studied history and German studies at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate in 1976. He then worked as a research assistant at the Department of Social and Economic History at the University of Vienna. In 1989 he habilitated and qualified as a lecturer. In 1993 he received a professorship at the University of Salzburg where he taught modern history.

#2799

Alfredo Alvar

#83343

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra is a Spanish historian, research professor at the Spanish National Research Council and modern history specialist. He is a correspondent academician at the Royal Academy of History and associated professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.

#2800

Hans Jürgen Teuteberg

#97740

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Hans Jürgen Teuteberg was a German historian, who worked as a professor of social and economic history at the University of Münster from 1974 to 1995. Teuteberg's magnum opus was his History of Industrial Codetermination in Germany or Geschichte der Industriellen Mitbestimmung in Deutschland. This exhaustively examined the legal origins of codetermination laws, which are found in a majority of EU countries today, that give workers a right to participate in the management of their companies or organisations. Teuteberg traces the roots of codetermination back to Carl Degenkolb's proposals at t...

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