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,

#3001

Camilla Townsend

#69532

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Camilla Townsend is an American historian and professor of history at Rutgers University. She specializes in the early history of Native Americans in the United States, as well as in the history of Latin America. Her 2019 book, Fifth Sun, won the 2020 Cundill History Prize.

#3002

H. Vinson Synan

#34639

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

Harold Vinson Synan was an American historian, author, and alliance leader within the Pentecostal movement. Synan published a total of 25 books, a majority related to Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic movements. He served as General Secretary of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church and later as Chair of the North American Renewal Service Committee from 1985 to 2001. From 1994 - 2006 he served as Dean of the School of Divinity at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In 2016, Synan moved back to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to re-join the faculty of Oral Roberts University as Interim Dean of the College of Theology and Ministry, where he served for two years.

#3003

Milan Stanislav Ďurica

#87083

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Milan Stanislav Ďurica is a Slovak historian and theologian. Biography Ďurica began his academic career in 1956, as professor of Theology at the Salesian Theological College in Abano Terme. He achieved a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1961 at University of Padua. In 1967 he became professor of political and constitutional history of Eastern European countries at the same university, where he was also Slovak language lecturer. In 1969 he founded the Eastern European Studies Centre in Padua. He founded and edited Il Mondo Slavo, the yearbook of the Institute of Slavic Philology at the Universit...

#3004

Juliusz Bardach

#52856

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

Juliusz Bardach was a Polish legal historian. Professor of the University of Warsaw, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialized in the history of governance and law of Lithuania and Poland.

#3005

Anne Zink

#70570

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Anne Zink is a French historian and honorary professor of modern history. A student of Pierre Goubert, she specializes in the history of the Ancien Régime. Biography She is the daughter of the poet and Marthe Cohn. Her brother is writer Michel Zink and her sister is mathematician Odile Favaron. Anne Zink was a student at the École normale supérieure de Sèvres, studying history and geography, receiving a third-cycle doctorate in 1965 and a State doctorate in 1985.

#3006

Diane Kirkby

#71510

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Diane Elizabeth Kirkby, is an Australian historian. She is Professor of Law and Humanities at the University of Technology Sydney and professor emeritus of History at La Trobe University. Since 2016, Kirkby has been the editor of Labour History, the journal of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.

#3007

Edward M. Coffman

#81351

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Edward M. Coffman was a military historian and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus. Early life He was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and earned his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Kentucky. While an undergraduate member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps , he was a member of the National Society of Pershing Rifles as well as Scabbard and Blade.

#3008

Suzanne Desan

#39648

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Suzanne M. Desan is an American historian. She is the Vilas-Shinner Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author or editor of four books on French history. Early life Suzanne Desan graduated from Princeton University. She earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her sister is Christine Desan, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School .

#3009

Bernard R. Goldstein

#36096

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Bernard Raphael Goldstein is a historian of science and professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. Goldstein published on the history of astronomy in medieval Islamic and Jewish civilization and early modern times.

#3010

Anthony F. Upton

#84064

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Anthony F. Upton was a British professor of Nordic history. Biography Born in Stockton Heath, Cheshire, he graduated B.A. in Modern History from Queen's College, Oxford, with First-Class honours in 1951, subsequently M.A. . After leaving Oxford he travelled to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar and graduated A.M. in history from Duke University, NC, in 1953. On his return from the United States, he was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer in History at the University of Leeds. He moved to the University of St. Andrews in 1956 as a lecturer in history, and was promoted to Reader before b...

#3011

Rod Edmond

#42280

Overall Influence

Rod Edmond is a New Zealand writer and academic, specialising in cultural history and British Empire studies. Edmond was born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and studied at Victoria University and Merton College, Oxford. He was Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History at the University of Kent until his retirement in 2009. His books include Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative , Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin , Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History , and Migrations: Journeys in Time and Place .

#3012

Peter Sahlins

#57678

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Peter Sahlins is an American historian of France and Europe. He was a professor of history at the University of California Berkeley, where he specialized in early modern France. From 2006 to 2008 he was on leave at the Social Science Research Council as its Director of Academic Programs, where he directed the major fellowship programs and led a new environmental programming initiative.

#3013

Leila Fawaz

#60668

Overall Influence

Leila Fawaz is a Lebanese historian and academician. She is the founding director of The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies from 2001 to 2012. Fawaz was born in Sudan to Greek-Orthodox Lebanese parents and raised in Lebanon. She took two degrees at the American University of Beirut between 1967 and 1968 and studied history at Harvard University between 1972 and 1979.

#3014

David Rosner

#20625

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David Rosner is the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and professor of history in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. He is also co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine in 2010.

#3015

Rosalind Mitchison

#83813

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison. Life Rosalind Mary Wrong was born in Manchester. Her father, Edward Murray Wrong, and his father, George MacKinnon Wrong, were both historians. Her brother was Oliver Wrong.

#3016

Bhagwan Singh Josh

Bhagwan Singh Josh

#119485

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Bhagwan Singh Josh is an Indian historian, specialising in social and political history of modern India. He is Professor of Contemporary History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is one of the project committee members of the Europe–South Asia Maritime Heritage Project. He has also been co-director of the Indian Council of Social Science Research project, History of the Indian National Congress, 1885–1947. He has specialized on the Indian national liberation movement and is considered to be one India's foremost scholars on communist movements in India.

#3017

Brian Black

#107665

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Brian Black is an American professor of history and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University at Altoona and head of its department of Arts and Humanities. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1988 from Gettysburg College, a Master of Arts in American Civilization in 1991 from New York University and a Doctor of Education degree in American Studies from the University of Kansas in 1996.

#3018

Robert Zieger

#68813

Overall Influence

1938 - 2013 (75 years)

Robert H. "Bob" Zieger was a labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States. Biography Early years Robert H. Zieger was born August 2, 1938, in Englewood, New Jersey to John and Grace Zieger. He married Gay Pitman in 1962. They had one child, Robert, and a granddaughter Persephone Zieger.

#3019

Paul Sebag

#57844

Overall Influence

1919 - 2004 (85 years)

Paul Sebag , born 26 September 1919 in Tunis and died 5 September 2004 in Paris, was a French-Tunisian sociologist and historian. Biography After having begun studies in law and philosophy in Paris interrupted by World War II and the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime, Paul Sebag in Tunisia took an important part in the action of the Tunisian Communist Party against the partisans of Vichy. Arrested and tortured, he is sentenced by a Bizerte court for life. However, he spent only ten months in prison. Released in the aftermath of the allies' landings in North Africa on 8 November 1942, he re...

#3020

David N. Hempton

#54945

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

David Neil Hempton is a Northern Irish historian of evangelicalism, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

#3021

Leslie Brubaker

#86518

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Leslie Brubaker is an expert in Byzantine illustrated manuscripts. She was appointed Professor of Byzantine Art at the University of Birmingham in 2005, and is now Professor Emerita. Her research interests includes female patronage, icons and the cult of the Virgin Mary. She was formerly the head of Postgraduate Studies in the College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham. Professor Brubaker is the Chair of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Her work is widely stocked in libraries around the world.

#3022

Nicholas Mansergh

#62568

Overall Influence

1910 - 1991 (81 years)

Philip Nicholas Seton Mansergh was a historian. His focus was on Ireland and the British Commonwealth. As the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge University after 1953, he trained many of the specialists in the field of Irish, Indian, and Commonwealth studies. He played the central role in assembling and editing the "monumental" 12-volume edition of historical documents associated with the independence of India.

#3023

Hermann Giliomee

#62880

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Hermann Giliomee is an author of historical and political studies, former Professor of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town , President of the South African Institute of Race Relations and Extraordinary Professor of History at the Stellenbosch University.

#3024

Aleksandar Stipčević

#77990

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Aleksandar Stipčević was a Croatian archeologist, bibliographer, librarian and historian of Albanian origin who specialized in the study of the Illyrians. He was born in the village of Arbanasi near Zadar, Croatia , a member of the local Arbanasi community. He was a full professor at the University of Zagreb from 1987 until his retirement in 1997. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo.

#3025

Pamela Pilbeam

#98611

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Pamela M. Pilbeam is an English historian, lecturer and professor emeritus at the Royal Holloway, University of London. She specializes in the history of France since 1789, especially in the 19th century.

#3026

Sandra Mitchell

#35618

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sandra D. Mitchell is an American philosopher of science and historian of ideas. She holds the position of distinguished professor in the department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the top rated school in the world for the subject according to the 2011 Philosophical Gourmet Report. Her research focuses on the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of social science, and connections between the two.

#3027

Meyer Reinhold

#65614

Overall Influence

1909 - 2002 (93 years)

Meyer Reinhold was an American classical scholar and also a specialist in Jewish studies. He was co-author or editor of 23 books. With his wife Diane he had two children, Helen Reinhold Barrett, later Dean of the Graduate School at Tennessee State University, and, Robert Reinhold, who, until his premature death in 1997, was a reporter for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

#3028

Jay Luvaas

#86121

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Jay Luvaas was an American military historian who was an expert on the American Civil War and the history of military theory. He was the first civilian to hold a visiting professorship of military history at West Point, and was a professor of military history at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was the founder of the modern military staff ride, and was a two-time recipient of the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal of the Department of the Army.

#3029

T. J. Jackson Lears

#39234

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

T. J. Jackson Lears is an American cultural and intellectual historian with interests in comparative religious history, literature and the visual arts, folklore and folk beliefs. "It may seem unlikely that there is still something original to say about deep America; so many brilliant minds, starting with Tocqueville, have been at work deciphering the paradoxes of our all too mythic, all too preponderant country. But if anyone can, it is likely to be the author of Something for Nothing.No one is thinking with more spiritedness and subtlety about the roots of American culture and the distincti...

#3030

Richard Slator Dunn

#78237

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Richard Slator Dunn was an American author and historian. Biography Richard Slator Dunn was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 9, 1928. He completed his B. A. in 1950 at Harvard College, his M. A. from Princeton University in 1952, and received his Ph. D. in history from Princeton University in 1955. He joined Phi Beta Kappa in 1950. Upon retirement from his position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996, he was named the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor Emeritus of American History. He was married to Mary Maples Dunn; together they raised two daughters. He died on January...

#3031

Benjamin A. Elman

#70735

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Benjamin A. Elman is Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies Emeritus, Princeton University. His teaching and research fields include Chinese intellectual and cultural history, history of science and history of education in late imperial China.

#3032

Michael Honey

#45791

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Michael K. Honey is an American historian, Guggenheim Fellow and Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma in the United States, where he teaches African-American, civil rights and labor history.

#3033

Richard Hellie

#82580

Overall Influence

1937 - 2009 (72 years)

Richard Hellie was an American historian. Richard Hellie was born in Waterloo, Iowa, on May 8, 1937, to Ole Hellie and Elizabeth Larsen. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a journalist. Ole worked successively for newspapers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa before joining the Des Moines Register in 1941, where he covered Nazi war crimes. Richard Hellie's interest in Russian history was sparked upon reading a children's book about Soviet partisans. He attended Theodore Roosevelt High School, where he played football. Following completion of the eleventh grade, Hellie enrolled at the University of Chicago.

#3034

Edward Willett Wagner

#73637

Overall Influence

1924 - 2001 (77 years)

Edward Willett Wagner was an American academic and a professor of Korean studies at Harvard University; he was an expert on Korean aristocracy during the Joseon period. Biography Wagner was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Theodore and Gertrude Wagner; Wagner had an older brother Ted, a twin brother Walter, a younger brother John, and a younger sister Rachel.

#3035

Paul Barnett

#58485

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Paul William Barnett is an Australian Anglican bishop, ancient historian and New Testament scholar. He was the Bishop of North Sydney from 1990 to 2001. He is a prominent historical writer on the rise of Christianity and the historical Jesus. He is currently a fellow in ancient history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and a teaching fellow at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

#3036

Hadi Alwai

#53169

Overall Influence

1933 - 1998 (65 years)

Hadi Alwai was an Iraqi Marxist intellectual, Islamic historian, and Arab linguist. He was born in Baghdad and grew up in a poor family of Hashemite descent. He studied at Baghdad University and graduated from the college of Economics in 1956. He left Iraq and travelled to China and then Syria. He lived in exile until he died in Damascus and he was buried there. He is interested in topics of Islam and Chinese philosophy. He has researches and books on Islam, Chinese history, and language.

#3037

Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

#9663

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gershom Gorenberg is an American-born Israeli journalist, and blogger, specializing in Middle Eastern politics and the interaction of religion and politics. He is currently a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a monthly American political magazine. Gorenberg self-identifies as "a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew".

#3038

Michael Swanton

Michael Swanton

#54567

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Michael James Swanton is a British historian, linguist, archaeologist and literary critic, specialising in the Anglo-Saxon period and its Old English literature. Early life Born in Bermondsey, in the East End of London, in childhood Swanton experienced the London blitz; he was an epileptic who suffered from bullying. A specific episode of this is referenced in Keith Richards's autobiography, Life. Disadvantaged, he failed the Eleven-plus, but was educated at a Modern, a Technical and then a Grammar school in South London. At the University of Durham, studying English he became chairman of the students' council and also of the Standing Congress of Northern Student Unions.

#3039

Zviad Gamsakhurdia

#22084

Overall Influence

1939 - 1993 (54 years)

Zviad Konstantines dze Gamsakhurdia was a Georgian politician, dissident, professor of English language studies and American literature at Tbilisi State University, and writer who became the first democratically elected President of Georgia in May 1991.

#3040

Shulamith Shahar

Shulamith Shahar

#50616

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Shulamith Shahar is an Israeli historian. Shahar's 1981 study Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages was the first to specifically examine the role of women in the medieval period. The book is used as a text for gender studies and medieval history classes. This, and her subsequent books, have been published in both Hebrew and English. She has written historical articles in these languages as well as French, and has translated three books from Latin to Hebrew.

#3041

Frank Sysyn

#54818

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Frank E. Sysyn is an American historian of Ukrainian origin. His grandmother was from Ukraine. He graduated from Princeton University , the University of London , and Harvard University , taught at Harvard University , and was an associate director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute . He was appointed the first director of the Petro Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1989, University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, and has served as editor-in-chief of its Hrushevsky Translation Project, which is preparing and publishing an English-language translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s 10-volume Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy.

#3042

Gregory Smits

#46811

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Gregory James Smits is an American historian, academic, writer and Japanologist. He is a professor of Japanese history at Pennsylvania State University. Early life Smits was born in Columbia, Missouri. He earned a BA from the University of Florida in 1983. He was awarded a master's degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The University of Southern California granted his Ph.D.

#3043

Vytautas Merkys

#70573

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Vytautas Merkys was a Lithuanian historian and a professor at Vilnius University. Biography Vytautas Merkys graduated from Vilnius University's department of history and philology in 1951. In 1952 he began working at the Lithuanian SSR Institute of History, but for ideological reasons he was soon fired, along with Mečislovas Jučas. He returned to the Institute in 1953 as a fellow.

#3044

Taddesse Tamrat

#42377

Overall Influence

1935 - 2013 (78 years)

Taddesse Tamrat was an Ethiopian historian and scholar of Ethiopian studies. He is best known as the author of Church and State in Ethiopia 1270–1520 , a book which has dominated the field of Ethiopian studies.

#3045

Mark Leier

#27231

Overall Influence

Mark Leier is a Canadian historian and, since 1994, a professor of working class and left-wing history at Simon Fraser University . From 2000 to 2010, he was the director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser.

#3046

Mary Jo Nye

#77430

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Mary Jo Nye is an American historian of science and Horning Professor in the Humanities emerita of the History Department at Oregon State University. She is known for her work on the relationships between scientific discovery and social and political phenomena.

#3047

Laura Schor

#82755

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Laura Schor is a professor of History at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She served as the Provost of Hunter College for nine years. She also served as the executive director of Hadassah and was the founding dean of the Macaulay Honors College from its inception in 2001 until its first class graduated in 2005. Schor is on the boards of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the Macaulay Honors College Foundation Board, and the Slim Peace Board.

#3048

N. D. B. Connolly

#65317

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Nathan Daniel Beau Connolly is an American historian and professor. He is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and co-host of the U.S. history podcast BackStory. He is also the author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. A self-professed "desegregationist," Connolly, in 2016, became the first African-American U.S. historian tenured at Johns Hopkins University, and the first African American to win either the Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association or the Bennett H. Wall Award ...

#3049

Umberto Bottazzini

#54951

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Umberto Bottazzini is an Italian historian of mathematics, writing on the history of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics. Biography Bottazzini graduated in 1973 with the Laurea degree from the University of Milan. He was an associate professor of matematiche complementari from 1977 to 1979 at the University of Calabria and from 1979 to 1990 at the University of Bologna. From 1990 to 2004 he was a professor ordinarius in the department of mathematics and computer science at the University of Palermo. He was for the academic year 1995–1996 a resident fellow at MIT's Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.

#3050

Thomas L. Sakmyster

#62767

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Thomas L. Sakmyster is an American professor emeritus of history of the University of Cincinnati, known for his studies of early 20th-century Hungary, including the "first full-length scholarly study of Hungary's most controversial figure" of the 20th century and the "most important work on the admiral to date", Miklós Horthy, as well as a meticulously-researched even-handed biography of the Hungarian-Soviet spy J. Peters.

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