Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in History,

#3051

Edward H. Bonekemper

#84369

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

Edward Henry Bonekemper III was a military historian, teacher, and writer. Bonekemper wrote frequently about slavery, the American Civil War, and Union and Confederate generals. He was a frequent speaker at Civil War Roundtables as well as a frequent speaker at the Smithsonian Institution.

#3052

James Goldrick

#68327

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Rear Admiral James Vincent Purcell Goldrick, was an Australian naval historian, analyst of contemporary naval and maritime affairs, and a senior officer of the Royal Australian Navy . Following his retirement from the RAN, Goldrick was a fellow at the Sea Power Centre – Australia and an adjunct professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He was also a member of the Naval Studies Group at the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society, an adjunct professor in the Strategic and Defenc...

#3053

Jonathan Brent

#65564

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jonathan Brent is an American academic, author, historian and publisher. As a publisher, he is the director of the Annals of Communism series, which he founded in 1992. He is currently the CEO and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College.

#3054

Ovidiu Pecican

#57145

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ovidiu Coriolan Pecican is a Romanian historian, essayist, novelist, short-story writer, literary critic, poet, playwright, and journalist of partly Serbian origin. He is especially known for his political writings on disputed issues such as regional autonomy for Transylvania, and for his co-authorship of a controversial history textbook for 11th and 12th grade high-school students.

#3055

Ilaria Ramelli

#36918

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Ilaria L. E. Ramelli is an Italian-born historian, academic author, and university professor who specializes in ancient, late antique, and early mediaeval philosophy and theology. Life Ilaria Ramelli was born in Piacenza in 1973. At the age of 8, she was involved in a serious road accident that left her with serious after-effects, forcing her to lie down. In her youth, she enjoyed painting. One of her paintings appears on the cover of one of her books.

#3056

Irina Livezeanu

#57301

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Irina Livezeanu is a Romanian-American historian. Her research interests include Eastern Europe, Eastern European Jewry, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, and modern nationalism. Several of her publications deal with the history of Romania, Moldova, and Bessarabia. Since 1996, she is associate professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh. In 2010–2013 she served as president of the Society for Romanian Studies.

#3057

Ahmad Eghtedari

Ahmad Eghtedari

#72377

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Ahmad Eghtedari was an Iranian teacher, lawyer, writer, historian and geographer who was regarded as a prominent scholar in Persian Gulf studies. Historically, he was a descendant of Gerashi thanes . In his youth, he traveled on foot along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea and began mapping and documenting their topography.

#3058

David M. Crowe

#33352

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David M. Crowe, Jr. is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University and Professor Emeritus of History and Law at Elon University. He is a specialist in international criminal law, the Holocaust, the history of the Romani people in Eastern Europe and Russia, and 20th century China. He has served as an expert witness in court cases in the United States and Canada, and testified before the U.S. Congress’ Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the New York City Council’s Committee on Immigration. His numerous books have been translated into six languages.

#3059

Sergey Nefedov

#96567

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sergey Aleksandrovich Nefedov is a Russian historian, Doctor of Sciences in Historical Sciences , Candidate of Sciences in physico-mathematical sciences , leading researcher at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He also is a professor at the Ural Federal University.

#3060

Aryeh Kasher

#37398

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

Aryeh Kasher was an Israeli academic and writer. He was a professor at Tel Aviv University and winner of the 1990 Bialik Prize for Hebrew literature. His life and his research activity Kasher grew up in Kfar Vitkin, where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In his youth he wrote the radio feuilleton "Hilik Haviv" with his childhood friends and classmates Gad Yaacobi and Micha Gisser . In the Israeli army, he served at the Nahal.

#3061

William B. Pickett

#60635

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

William Beatty Pickett is an American historian and professor emeritus at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. He is known as an authority on President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Indiana Sen. Homer E. Capehart, and is the author of several well-regarded books on U.S. history including Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power and Eisenhower Decides To Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy.

#3062

Robert A. Gross

#74790

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Robert Alan Gross is an American historian, and is an emeritus faculty member at the University of Connecticut. Life Gross graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, and from Columbia University with an M.A. in 1968 and a Ph.D. in 1976. He taught at Amherst College from 1976 to 1988, the University of Sussex from 1981 to 1983 and the College of William and Mary from 1988 to 2003. He was the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut.

#3063

Gunther Barth

#85136

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Gunther Paul Barth was an American historian. Barth joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1962, became a professor of History in 1971, and taught Western American and urban history until his retirement in 1995.

#3064

Geraint H. Jenkins

#89165

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Geraint Huw Jenkins, FBA, FLSW is a historian of Wales and a retired academic. He was Professor of Welsh History at the Aberystwyth University from 1990 to 1993, when he became Director of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. In 2009, he retired from academia and was appointed Professor Emeritus of Welsh History at the University of Wales.

#3065

W. Michael Mathes

W. Michael Mathes

#58461

Overall Influence

1936 - 2012 (76 years)

William Michael Mathes was an American historian and academic who focused on the histories of Mexico and Spain. Mathes was a leading expert on the history of Baja California. His articles can be found in the California Historical Society Quarterly, Southern California Quarterly, Journal of San Diego History, Journal of California Anthropology, Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly, Calafia, Meyibó, and other publications.

#3066

Klaus Düwel

#62557

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Klaus Düwel was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. A professor at the University of Göttingen, he was recognized as one of the world's leading experts on Germanic Antiquity.

#3067

Kenneth J. Hagan

#74725

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Kenneth James Hagan is an American naval historian and retired faculty member of the United States Naval Academy and of the Naval War College's distance education faculty located at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

#3068

Nicholas de Lange

#26185

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nicholas Robert Michael de Lange is a British Reform rabbi and historian. He is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge. Academic and literary career Nicholas de Lange is an emeritus fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has written and edited several books about Judaism and translated numerous works of fiction by Amos Oz, S. Yizhar and A. B. Yehoshua into English. In November 2007, he received the Risa Domb/Porjes Prize for Translation from the Hebrew for his translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.

#3069

James A. Secord

#51814

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

James Andrew Secord is an American-born historian. He is a professor of history and philosophy of science within the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Christ's College. He is also the director of the project to publish the complete Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Secord is especially well known for his award-winning work on the reception of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a pioneering evolutionary book first published in 1844.

#3070

Michael S. Sherry

#70884

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Michael S. Sherry is an American historian, and professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University. Life He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis summa cum laude, and from Yale University with an MA and Ph.D. in 1975.

#3071

D. C. Coleman

#68334

Overall Influence

1920 - 1995 (75 years)

Donald Cuthbert Coleman was a British economic historian. After attending The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent school in Elstree in Hertfordshire, Coleman served in the Royal Artillery in Africa, Italy and Greece during World War II, reaching the rank of major. He gained his first degree and PhD at the London School of Economics and was appointed to a post there of Lecturer in Industrial History in 1951. He stayed at LSE as Reader and Professor of Economic History, and then moved to the University of Cambridge as Professor of Economic History and Fellow of Pembroke College in 1971, taking early retirement in 1981 to concentrate on his scholarly work.

#3072

Barbara H. Rosenwein

#98801

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Barbara H. Rosenwein, née Herstein is an American historian who is professor emerita of history at Loyola University Chicago. Rosenwein is an expert in medieval history, on which she has written a number of influential works.

#3073

Roland Marchand

#81797

Overall Influence

1933 - 1997 (64 years)

Charles Roland Marchand was an American historian who taught at the University of California, Davis, where he co-founded the History Project. Early life and education Marchand received a Bachelor of Arts in journalism summa cum laude from Stanford University in 1955, after which he served as an officer in the United States Navy for three years. He received his Master of Arts in 1961 and his PhD in 1964, also from Stanford.

#3074

Otto Mayr

#48972

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Otto Mayr is a German mechanical engineer, historian of technology, curator, author and former director of the National Museum of History and Technology in Washington DC and the Deutsches Museum in Munich. He is particularly known for his work on "The origins of feedback control" and "Authority, liberty, & automatic machinery in early modern Europe."

#3075

Yuki Tanaka

#39513

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

is a History Professor at Hiroshima University. He has written extensively about forced prostitution under the Japanese Empire, as well as in Japan under US military rule. He also writes about the laws of warfare.

#3076

Ruth Harris

#72258

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ruth Harris is an American historian and academic. She has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford since 2011 and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, since 2016. Previously, she was a junior research fellow at St John's College, Oxford, from 1983 to 1987, an associate professor at Smith College from 1987 to 1990, and a fellow of New College, Oxford, between 1990 and 2016. She was awarded the Wolfson History Prize in 2010 for her book The Man on Devil's Island, a biography on Alfred Dreyfus.

#3077

David H. Burton

#68660

Overall Influence

David Henry Burton was an American historian and professor of history at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Life and education Burton was a World War II combat veteran in the Army's 334th Infantry and was awarded both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.

#3078

Jorge Maíz Chacón

#121058

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Jorge Maiz Chacon is a Spanish medieval historian, specialized in historiography, economic history, and social minorities. Since 2002, Chacón works as a professor at the UNED in the Balearic Islands, as well as a secondary school teacher in Mallorca. He is a member of the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Murcia and an editor of Medievalismo, a Spanish website dedicated to medieval history.

#3079

David Crouch

#91932

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Bruce Crouch, is a British historian and academic. From 2000 until his retirement in 2018 he was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Hull. Academia He graduated in history from the former University College, Cardiff, in 1975, and pursued a career in secondary school teaching in Mountain Ash, South Wales till 1983. While serving as a schoolteacher he completed a doctorate on the Anglo-Norman twin aristocrats, Waleran of Meulan and Robert of Leicester, subsequently published by Cambridge University Press. From 1984 he occupied research posts in the University of London unt...

#3080

Jeffrey Sammons

#95622

Overall Influence

Jeffrey Thomas Sammons is an American historian and professor. His areas of research and interest include African-American history, military history, and sports history. He is the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society and co-author of Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality. He is currently a professor of history at New York University .

#3081

Karin Orth

#52546

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Karin Orth is a German historian, known for her research into the Nazi concentration camps. Works

#3082

Roy Mottahedeh

#25547

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is an American historian who is Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and is an expert on Iranian culture. Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011. He is a follower of the Baha'i faith.

#3083

Murray Phillips

#93495

Overall Influence

Murray Phillips is a Professor in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at the University of Queensland. His research interests lie in sport and its history, examining its ontological, epistemological and methodological aspects. In conjunction with "Paralympic Stories", Phillips is writing a book on the history of Australia's Paralympic movement.

#3084

Edward A. Purcell Jr.

#55252

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Edward A. Purcell Jr. is an American historian. Life Purcell grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He attended Rockhurst College, where he received a B.A. in 1962, then went on to the University of Kansas, earning an M.A. in American history in 1964. He received a Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of Wisconsin, then taught at the University of California, Berkeley and at Wellesley College before attending Harvard Law School, where he received a J.D. in 1979. He is the Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School.

#3085

Allan Chapman

#49706

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Allan Chapman FRAS is a British historian of science. Biography Allan Chapman was born in Swinton, Lancashire, England and grew up in the Pendlebury and Clifton districts of the then Swinton and Pendlebury borough. Having attended the local Cromwell Road Secondary Modern School for Boys, Sefton Road, Pendlebury , he then gained his first degree from the University of Lancaster. Subsequently, he undertook a history of science DPhil at Wadham College, Oxford. He is a historian by training and his special interests are astronomy and scientific biography.

#3086

Josep Lluís Alay

#101736

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Josep Lluís Alay i Rodríguez is a professor of Asian history at the University of Barcelona and chief of staff of Carles Puigdemont. He is the director of the Tibet and Central Asia Observatory and lecturer in Contemporary History of Tibet and Mongolia. He was the first Catalan writer to have translated a text written in Tibetan language and was responsible for the publication of Les poesies d’amor del sisè dalai-lama del Tibet , of which he was the translator as well as author of the Prologue and Notes. In 2002 he recovered the written work of the Jesuit missionary Antoni de Montserrat and r...

#3087

David Montejano

David Montejano

#62762

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David Montejano is an American sociologist and historian. Life He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and from Yale University with a M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of New Mexico. He was the former Chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research at University of California, Berkeley.

#3088

Peter McPhee

#52524

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Peter McPhee is an Australian academic and former provost of the University of Melbourne. He is the first person to have held the position at Melbourne, as it has typically only been in place at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom.

#3089

Clare Wright

#72974

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Clare Alice Wright, is an American Australian historian, author and broadcaster. She is a professor of history at La Trobe University, and was the winner of the 2014 Stella Prize. Wright has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant, and radio and television broadcaster and podcaster.

#3090

Peter Smith

#47317

Overall Influence

Peter Smith helped establish Mahidol University International College in 1987, where he served as university administrator and chair of the Social Science Division until his retirement in 2013. He also teaches courses at the Wilmette Institute, an online Baháʼí educational institution, and is an author of several books specializing in Baháʼí studies.

#3091

William Carr

#70558

Overall Influence

1921 - 1991 (70 years)

William Carr was a British historian of Germany. He was born in Workington, Cumberland. He studied history at the University of Birmingham, where he was awarded a prize for European history, but halted his studies after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Carr volunteered and served in the Royal Corps of Signals and Royal Artillery. After victory, he worked as an interpreter of German internees before joining the Field Security Police. Carr returned to Birmingham University in 1947, where he was awarded a first class degree in 1948.

#3092

Uldis Ģērmanis

#33905

Overall Influence

1915 - 1997 (82 years)

Uldis Ģērmanis was a Latvian historian, writer and publicist born in Novaya Ladoga, Russian Empire. His father was Jānis Ģermanis, and his family returned to the newly independent Latvia in 1919.

#3093

Margaret O'Mara

#27784

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Margaret O'Mara is an American historian and professor at the University of Washington. Background Margaret O'Mara was born Margaret Pugh on November 15, 1970. O'Mara received her B.A. from Northwestern University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

#3094

Floris Cohen

#60140

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Hendrik Floris Cohen is a historian of science. Life Cohen studied history at the University of Leiden, receiving a Ph.D. in 1974. He is a professor in the Comparative History of Science at the University of Utrecht. Cohen is the brother of politician Job Cohen and son of the historian Dolf Cohen.

#3095

Armando de Ramón

#118154

Overall Influence

1927 - 2004 (77 years)

José Armando de Ramón Folch was a Chilean historian mostly known for his study of urban history. In 1954, de Ramón joined the newly founded Instituto de Investigacions Históricas of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile led by Jaime Eyzaguirre. He was part of the editorial committee of the journal Historia since it was established in 1961. In 1998, he was awarded the Chilean National History Award.

#3096

Hans Wussing

#56763

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Hans-Ludwig Wußing was a German historian of mathematics and science. Life Wussing graduated from high school, and from 1947 to 52 studied mathematics and physics at the University of Leipzig. Ernst Hölder was one of his teachers. In 1952 he took the state examination, and received his doctorate in 1957. His dissertation was on embedding finite groups. From 1956 to 1966 he was assistant at the Karl-Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and Science at the University of Leipzig. He qualified as a professor there in 1966 with a ground-breaking work on the genesis of the abstract group concept.

#3097

Norman Housley

#104913

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Norman Housley is a professor emeritus of History at the University of Leicester. Educated at the University of Cambridge, Housley was a research student of Jonathan Riley-Smith. He was research fellow in history at Girton College in 1979 and came to the University of Leicester in 1983. He retired after a long and distinguished career in 2016.

#3098

Akira Hayami

#13321

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Akira Hayami was an emeritus professor of Keio University and the first to introduce historical demography in Japan. Professor Hayami is also famous for coining the concept called "Industrious Revolution",which points out the socio-economic change from capital-intensive to labor-intensive one.

#3099

Joseph Logsdon

#44587

Overall Influence

1938 - 1999 (61 years)

Joseph Logsdon was an American historian. He was a professor at the University of New Orleans. Logsdon is known for his collaboration with Sue Eakin on a 1968 scholarly edition of Twelve Years a Slave.

#3100

Samuel Proctor

#85174

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Samuel Proctor was an American history professor and author. He taught at the University of Florida and wrote about the school and the state's history. Early life and education Proctor was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He was one of six sons of Jack Proctor, a textile salesman who was born in Poland, and Celia Proctor , a housewife. Proctor arrived at the University of Florida as a freshman in 1937 and received his Bachelor of Arts in 1941. As an undergraduate, he was on the staff of the Florida Alligator. He received his Master of Arts from UF in 1942 after only two semesters, in which the...

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