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,

#301

Martin Duberman

#4936

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Martin Bauml Duberman is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. Duberman is Professor of History Emeritus at Herbert Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City. Early life Duberman was born into a Jewish family. His father, born in Ukraine, was initially a manual laborer but later founded a successful clothing business that sold uniforms to the government during World War II. His family used the money to move to Mount Vernon, New York, and send Martin to the Horace Mann School, an elite private prep school. He would later graduate from Yale College and Harvar...

#302

Walter J. Ong

#1668

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Walter Jackson Ong was an American Jesuit priest, professor of English literature, cultural and religious historian, and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from orality to literacy influenced culture and changed human consciousness. In 1978 he served as elected president of the Modern Language Association.

#303

Ayesha Jalal

#2812

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American historian who serves as the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University, and was the recipient of the 1998 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Family and early life Ayesha Jalal was born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1956, the daughter of Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and his wife Zakia Jalal. She is related in two ways to the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Ayesha's paternal grandmother was the sister of Manto. Secondly, Manto's wife Safia was the sister of Ayesha's mother Zakia Jalal. In other words, the uncle-nephew pair of Manto an...

#304

Avner Offer

#14726

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Avner Offer is an economic historian who held the Chichele Professorship in Economic history at the University of Oxford, England. He is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a fellow of the British Academy. He has published on international political economy, law, the First World War and land tenure. During the 1990s and 2000s, Offer's main interest was in post-war economic growth, particularly in developed societies, and the challenges that affluence presents to well being. His most recent work is on the strife between neoclassical economics and social democracy, each of them vying to shape the post-war decades.

#305

David Starkey

#4353

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

David Robert Starkey is an English historian, radio and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before reading history at Cambridge on a scholarship. There he specialised in Tudor history, writing a thesis on King Henry VIII's household. From Cambridge, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer in history until 1998. He has written several books on the Tudors.

#306

Harbans Mukhia

#19653

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Harbans Mukhia is an Indian political historian whose principal area of study is medieval India. Biography He received his Bachelors in Arts in history in 1958 from Kirori Mal College, Delhi University and then earned his doctorate from Department of History, Delhi University in 1969. Mukhia worked at Jawaharlal Nehru University , New Delhi as Professor of Medieval History at the Centre for Historical Studies. He was rector of JNU from 1999 to 2002 and retired in February 2004..

#307

Ainslie Embree

#9919

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Ainslie Thomas Embree was a Canadian Indologist and historian. He was considered a leading scholar of modern Indian history and played a seminal role in the introduction of South Asian studies into US college and secondary education curricula. In addition to his academic work, Embree made significant contributions to peace efforts between India and Pakistan as a member of the Kashmir Study Group and the Council on Foreign Relations, and acted as a consultant to the US diplomatic and intelligence communities. He has been described as a "tireless advocate for greater understanding between the U...

#308

Walter LaFeber

#8576

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Walter Fredrick LaFeber was an American academic who served as the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. Previous to that he served as the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell.

#309

Raphael Samuel

#10492

Overall Influence

1934 - 1996 (62 years)

Raphael Elkan Samuel was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation". He was professor of history at the University of East London at the time of his death and also taught at Ruskin College from 1962 until his death.

#310

Nicholas Dirks

#5397

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nicholas B. Dirks is an American academic and the former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Dirks is the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture, primarily concerned with the impact of British colonial rule. In June 2020, Dirks was named president and CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.

#311

Michel Serres

#1388

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and writer. His works explore themes of science, time and death, and later incorporated prose. Life and career The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Paris , and began teaching in 1969 at the University of Paris I.

#312

Anita Shapira

#8308

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Anita Shapira is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, professor emerita of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, and former head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University. She received the Israel Prize in 2008.

#313

Melvyn P. Leffler

Melvyn P. Leffler

#13842

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Melvyn Paul Leffler is an American historian and educator, currently Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize for his book A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War, and the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for his book For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.

#314

Zvi Yavetz

#28772

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Zvi Yavetz was an Israeli historian. He was a professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University. Biography Zvi Zucker was born in Czernowitz, Ukraine. When he was five years old, he was diagnosed with polio and his father committed suicide. After the German occupation in 1941, he was sent to a concentration camp. His relatives, including his mother, were murdered, but he survived the Holocaust and escaped in 1944. Arriving in Turkey, he was transferred to Cyprus and eventually reached Mandatory Palestine.

#315

Stanley Elkins

#10667

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Stanley Maurice Elkins was an American historian, best known for his unique and controversial comparison of slavery in the United States to Nazi concentration camps, and for his collaborations with Eric McKitrick regarding the early American Republic. They together wrote The Age of Federalism, on the history of the founding fathers of America. He obtained his BA from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. Elkins first taught at the University of Chicago but spent most of his career as a professor of history at Smith College in Northampton, MA, where he raised ...

#316

Louise A. Tilly

#18451

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Louise Audino Tilly was an American historian known for utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to her scholarly work, fusing sociology with historical research. Biographer Carl Strikwerda, states:Louise Tilly has been one of the leaders in the growth of scholarship on women's history, the history of the family, and social history in the late 20th century, helping to create an interdisciplinary approach to the study of social change that combines anthropology, sociology, economics, and demography with traditional archival and historical research. Her central contributions have been in demons...

#317

Peter Paret

#12285

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Peter Paret was a German-born American cultural and intellectual historian, whose two principal areas of research were war and the interaction of art and politics from 18th to 20th century Europe. He also wrote on related subjects.

#318

George McGovern

George McGovern

#2676

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

George Stanley McGovern was an American historian and South Dakota politician who was a U.S. representative and three-term U.S. senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election.

#319

Irving Howe

#2856

Overall Influence

1920 - 1993 (73 years)

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America. Early years Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. His father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.

#320

Eamon Duffy

#9260

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

#321

Halil Berktay

#12152

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Halil Berktay is a Turkish historian at Ibn Haldun University and was columnist for the daily Taraf. Life and career Berktay was born into an intellectual Turkish communist family. His father, Erdoğan Berktay, was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey. As a result of this influence, Halil Berktay remained a Maoist for two decades before he became "an independent left-intellectual".

#322

Roderick Floud

#11943

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sir Roderick Castle Floud FBA is a British economic historian and a leader in the field of anthropometric history. He has been provost of the London Guildhall University, vice-chancellor and president of the London Metropolitan University, acting dean of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and provost of Gresham College . He is the son of Bernard Floud MP.

#323

Ehsan Yarshater

Ehsan Yarshater

#3316

Overall Influence

1920 - 2018 (98 years)

Ehsan Yarshater was an Iranian historian and linguist who specialized in Iranology. He was the founder and director of The Center for Iranian Studies, and Hagop Kevorkian Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Columbia University.

#324

Richard N. Current

#15803

Overall Influence

1912 - 2012 (100 years)

Richard Nelson Current was an American historian, called "the Dean of Lincoln Scholars", best known for The Lincoln Nobody Knows , and Lincoln and the First Shot . Life Born in Colorado City, Colorado, Current graduated in 1934 from Oberlin College with a B.A., in 1935 from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University with an M.A., and in 1940 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a PhD. At Wisconsin, he studied under William B. Hesseltine. His doctoral dissertation was on "Thaddeus Stevens, the Man and the Politician."

#325

Oliver Rathkolb

#20880

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Oliver Rathkolb is an Austrian historian and professor for contemporary history at the University of Vienna. Career Rathkolb studied history and law at the University of Vienna and achieved his doctorate in 1982 at the same university.

#326

Martin E. Marty

Martin E. Marty

#4809

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Martin Emil Marty is an American Lutheran religious scholar who has written extensively on religion in the United States. Early life and education Marty was born on February 5, 1928, in West Point, Nebraska, and raised in Iowa and Nebraska. He was a member of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and was educated at Concordia College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri. Marty continued with graduate work, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago in 1956. He served as a Lutheran pastor from 1952 to 1967 in the suburbs of Chicago.

#327

Stuart Macintyre

#14073

Overall Influence

1947 - 2021 (74 years)

Stuart Forbes Macintyre was an Australian historian, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1999 to 2008. He was voted one of Australia's most influential historians. Early life and education The son of Forbes Macintyre and Alison Stevens Macintyre, Stuart Macintyre was born in Melbourne on 21 April 1947. His schooling took place at Scotch College, and later at the University of Melbourne. While an undergraduate he specialised in history, and obtained his bachelor's degree in 1968. He also held a Master of Arts degree from Monash University and a PhD from the University of Cambridge , for which he was awarded the Blackwood Prize.

#328

Bernard Slicher van Bath

#19109

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

Bernard Hendrik Slicher, since 1933 calling himself Slicher van Bath was a Dutch social historian, best known internationally for his 1960 work The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500–1850 and regarded as the initiator of quantitative social history in his native country.

#329

Ahmad Hasan Dani

#5550

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Ahmad Hassan Dani FRAS, SI, HI was a Pakistani archaeologist, historian, and linguist. He was among the foremost authorities on Central Asian and South Asian archaeology and history. He introduced archaeology as a discipline in higher education in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Throughout his career, Dani held various academic positions and international fellowships, apart from conducting archaeological excavations and research. He is particularly known for archaeological work on pre-Indus civilization and Gandhara sites in Northern Pakistan.

#330

Renzo De Felice

Renzo De Felice

#14948

Overall Influence

1929 - 1996 (67 years)

Renzo De Felice was an Italian historian, who specialized in the Fascist era, writing, among other works, a 6000-page biography of Mussolini . He argued that Mussolini was a revolutionary modernizer in domestic issues but a pragmatist in foreign policy who continued the Realpolitik policies of Italy from 1861 to 1922. Historian of Italy Philip Morgan has called De Felice's biography of Mussolini "a very controversial, influential and at the same time problematic re-reading of Mussolini and Fascism" and rejected the contention that his work rose above politics to "scientific objectivity", as c...

#331

Paul Robert Magocsi

Paul Robert Magocsi

#13263

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Paul Robert Magocsi is an American professor of history, political science, and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He has been with the university since 1980, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996. He currently acts as Honorary Chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, and has authored many books on Rusyn history.

#332

Jan Vansina

#11886

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Jan Vansina was a Belgian historian and anthropologist regarded as an authority on the history of Central Africa, especially of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. He was a major innovator in the historical methodology of oral history. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he taught several generations of students and, according to a biographer, "set the pace in African historical studies from the 1950s into the 1990s."

#333

Hartmut Lehmann

#15277

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Hartmut Lehmann is a German historian of modern history who specializes in religious and social history. He is known for his research on Pietism, secularization, religion and nationalism, transatlantic studies and Martin Luther. He was the founding director of the German Historical Institute Washington DC and was a director of the Max Planck Institute for History. He is an emeritus honorary professor at Kiel University and the University of Göttingen.

#334

Allen C. Guelzo

Allen C. Guelzo

#15887

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Allen Carl Guelzo is an American historian who serves as the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He formerly was a professor of History at Gettysburg College.

#335

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

#10072

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is an Indian historian who specialises in the early modern period and in connected history. He is the author of several books and publications. He holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA which he joined in 2004.

#336

Lothar Machtan

#21325

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lothar Machtan is a German historian, writer, as well as professor of Modern and Current History at the University of Bremen. Early life Born in Gelsenkirchen, Machtan studied history and political sciences at Heidelberg University from 1968 to 1974. 15 years later he became professor of modern history at the University of Bremen. Furthermore, he worked as a researcher in Konstanz, Berlin, Kassel, Halle and at the Claremont McKenna College in California. The main field of his historical work is the cultural history of politics.

#337

William Leuchtenburg

#9741

Overall Influence

1922 - Present (102 years)

William Edward Leuchtenburg is an American historian. He is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

#338

David Nasaw

#11190

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

David Nasaw is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social and business history of early 20th Century America. Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History.

#339

Harry Hinsley

#7114

Overall Influence

1918 - 1998 (80 years)

Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, was an English historian and intelligence officer. He worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War. He was known as Harry Hinsley.

#340

Alun Munslow

#7912

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alun Munslow was a British historian known for his deconstructionist and postmodernist approach to historiography. He was Professor Emeritus of History and Historical Theory at Staffordshire University. He was also Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester. His argument is that prior to engaging with the past historians need to acknowledge that the past and history do not share the same ontic and epistemic space. He suggests that the past is the time before our perpetual present and 'history' is that range of authored narratives we substitute for it. Munslow suggests that the consequ...

#341

David Cesarani

#7068

Overall Influence

1956 - 2015 (59 years)

David Cesarani was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind . Early life Cesarani was born in London to Henry, a hairdresser, and Sylvia . An only child, he won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School in west London and went to Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1976, where he gained a first in history. A master's degree in Jewish history at Columbia University, New York, working with the scholar of Judaism Arthur Hertzberg, shaped the rest of his career. His doctorate at St Anto...

#342

Friedrich Katz

#8137

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Friedrich Katz was an Austrian-born anthropologist and historian who specialized in 19th- and 20th-century history of Latin America, particularly in the Mexican Revolution. "He was arguably Mexico's most widely regarded historian... The whole of the Mexican press, left, right and center, noted and lamented his passing." He served as co-director of the Mexican Studies Program at the University of Chicago, co-received the 1999 Bolton Prize for the best English-language book on Latin American History by The Conference on Latin American History, and was honored with the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the Government of Mexico.

#343

A. Sreedhara Menon

A. Sreedhara Menon

#15160

Overall Influence

1925 - 2010 (85 years)

Alappat Sreedhara Menon , known as A. Sreedhara Menon, was an Indian historian from Kerala. He is best known as the State Editor of Kerala District Gazetteers . He served as registrar of the Kerala University from 1968 to 1977, before retiring in 1980.

#344

Peter Heather

#13087

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Peter John Heather is a British historian of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Goths, on which he for decades has been considered the world's leading authority.

#345

Robert Dallek

#6453

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles , and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.

#346

Gabriel Kolko

#3203

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Gabriel Morris Kolko was an American historian. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century. One of the best-known revisionist historians to write about the Cold War, he had also been credited as "an incisive critic of the Progressive Era and its relationship to the American empire." U.S. historian Paul Buhle summarized Kolko's career when he described him as "a major theorist of what came to be called Corporate Liberalism...[and] a very major historian of the Vietnam War and its assorted war crime...

#347

David M. Kennedy

#8291

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Michael Kennedy is an American historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the former Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.

#348

Gary Gerstle

#3608

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Gary Gerstle is an American historian and academic. He is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. Early life Gary Gerstle received his BA from Brown University in 1976 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1982.

#349

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

#12919

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of numerous books on Russian history and European intellectual history. Biography Nicolai Valentinovitch Riasanovskiy was born in China on 21 December 1923 in Harbin , the son of lawyer Valentin A. Riasanovsky and Antonina Riasanovsky, a novelist. His father, Valentin, was a Russian professor, who had taught at Moscow University, Yaroslavl, Tomsk and Irkutsk and from 1922 to 1934 was teaching at Harbin Normal University . His mother, Antonia, was a teacher and novelist who wrote under the pen name Nina Fedorova.

#350

Eugene Genovese

#8109

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism. He wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.

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