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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#3101

Joe Bertram Frantz

#65037

Overall Influence

1917 - 1993 (76 years)

Joe Bertram Frantz was a historian from the U.S. state of Texas who specialized in the American West. Early life Joe Bertram Frantz was born on January 16, 1917, in Dallas. He was an adopted son of Ezra A. Frantz and the Mary Frantz who reared him in Weatherford, Texas. In 1934, he graduated from Weatherford High School.

#3102

Richard Lloyd Anderson

#91791

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Richard Lloyd Anderson was an American lawyer and theologist of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University . His book Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses is widely considered the definitive work on this subject. Anderson was the brother of Karl Ricks Anderson.

#3103

Bertram Wyatt-Brown

#52530

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Bertram Wyatt-Brown was a noted historian of the Southern United States. He was the Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he taught from 1983-2004; he also taught at Case Western University for nearly two decades. He studied the role of honor in southern society, in all classes, and wrote a family study of the Percy Family, including twentieth-century authors William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy.

#3104

Jackie Stedall

#40654

Overall Influence

1950 - 2014 (64 years)

Jacqueline Anne "Jackie" Stedall was a British mathematics historian. She wrote nine books, and appeared on radio on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme. Early life Stedall was born in Romford, Essex, and attended Queen Mary's High School in Walsall. Her academic achievements included a BA in mathematics from Girton College, Cambridge, an MSc in statistics from the University of Kent, a PGCE from Bristol Polytechnic , and a PhD in the history of mathematics from the Open University. Her PhD focused upon John Wallis' 1685 work Treatise of Algebra.

#3105

Luisa Accati

#32302

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Luisa Accati Levi is an Italian historian, anthropologist and feminist public intellectual. She taught ethnology and modern history at the University of Trieste. She was born in Turin. After finishing her studies at the University of Turin and in Paris, she turned to the research of the historical anthropology of rural societies in Northern Italy. She has published monographs on the rural religiosity and on witch trials in the region of Friuli, and on family relations in urban and semi-urban communities in 19th century Udine. Her major contributions are in the study of the cult of Mary and it...

#3106

Magne Skodvin

#90843

Overall Influence

1915 - 2004 (89 years)

Magne Skodvin was a Norwegian educator and historian. Biography Skodvin was born at Ullensvang in Hordaland, Norway. He was the son of Anders Skodvin and Karen Marie Haaland . Skodvin attended the Hardanger folkehøgskole from 1930 to 1931. In 1935, he took his final exams from Voss landsgymnas. During the Occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany during World War II, he participated in Norwegian resistance movement. He graduated with a cand.philol. degree at the University of Oslo in 1946 and took his doctorate in 1956 with the paper Striden om okkupasjonsstyret i Norge.

#3107

Michael Sean Mahoney

#63305

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

Michael Sean Mahoney was a historian of science and technology. Mahoney was born in New York City, and did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, graduating in 1960. He earned a Ph.D. in history and history of science from Princeton University in 1967, and immediately took a position as an assistant professor there. He remained at Princeton for over 40 years, until his death in 2008.

#3108

Louis Masur

#86774

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Louis P. Masur is an American historian. Masur is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. He is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians.

#3109

Abraham Udovitch

#72569

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Abraham Labe Udovitch is Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Emeritus, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, both at Princeton University. Early life Abraham Labe Udovitch was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in 1933. He received his B.S. from Columbia University in 1958 and his M.A. in 1959. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965.

#3110

Isabel de Madariaga

#38849

Overall Influence

1919 - 2014 (95 years)

Isabel Margaret de Madariaga was a British historian who specialised on Russia in the 18th century and Catherine the Great. She published six books on Russia and is credited for changing the perception of Catherine the Great amongst Russian and Western scholars. Born to a Spanish diplomat and a Scottish economic historian, she was taught at 16 schools during her childhood and earned a first-class honours degree in Russian language and literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies . De Madariaga worked for BBC Monitoring in the Second World War, and was a civil servant at the Ministry of Information and HM Treasury.

#3111

Peter Brock

#45237

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Peter Brock was an English-born Canadian historian who specialized in the history of pacifism and Eastern Europe. Life Peter Brock was born in 1920 on Guernsey, Channel Islands. Although he came from a military family, he rejected this tradition. While studying at Exeter College, Oxford, he came under the influence of pacifist ideas, particularly those of Bart de Ligt.

#3112

Jane F. Gardner

#49623

Overall Influence

1934 - 2023 (89 years)

Jane F. Gardner was a British Roman historian, academic, and museum curator. She was emerita professor of Roman History at University of Reading, specialising in Roman law and Roman social history. She was a professor at the university from 1993 until her retirement in 1999, having taught there since 1963. She was curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology from 1976 to 1992.

#3113

Lutz Raphael

#28249

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Lutz Raphael is a German historian and historiographer. He is a professor at the University of Trier. Life Lutz Raphael was born in Essen. He studied History, Romance studies, Philosophy and Sociology at Münster and Paris between 1974 and 1984. It was at Münster that he received his doctorate with a doctorate entitled "Partei und Gewerkschaft" on the trades union strategies of the Communist Parties in Italy and France since 1970. Between 1987 and 1996 he was employed as an academic research assistant at TU Darmstadt. In 1994 his habilitation, received from the TU, opened the way to a lifelong academic career.

#3114

W. L. Warren

#69122

Overall Influence

1929 - 1994 (65 years)

Wilfred Lewis Warren was a historian of medieval England. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he worked as a professor of modern history and dean of theology at the Queen's University, Belfast. His field of interest was Norman and Angevin England, on which he published several major works. In 1956 he received a doctorate in 14th-century English church history. He was fascinated by and well versed in Ulster politics.

#3115

Martin Pugh

#70065

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Martin D. Pugh is a British historian who specialises in the women's, political, and social history of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain. Biography Pugh has held professorships at Newcastle University and Liverpool John Moores University, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has written 19 articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Pugh also sits on the board of BBC History magazine.

#3116

Tore Frängsmyr

#86830

Overall Influence

1938 - 2017 (79 years)

Tore Lennart Frängsmyr was a Swedish historian. He was the first holder of the Hans Rausing professorship in the history of science at Uppsala university. According to J.L. Heilbron, Frängsmyr "dominated the history of science in Sweden from his chair at the University of Uppsala for a quarter century."

#3117

Éliane Gubin

#63154

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Éliane Gubin is a Belgian historian, researcher and professor of political and social history, specializing in the history of women and feminism. In the late 1980s, she initiated the introduction of women's history at the Université libre de Bruxelles , where she is professor emerita. She also teaches the history of contemporary Belgium and specializes in social history and political history of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, including a re-reading of the World War I. Since 1995, she has been co-director of the Centre d'archives pour l'histoire des femmes.

#3118

Tessa Rajak

#80464

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Professor Manisha Rajak is a British historian and Emeritus Professor of Ancient history at the University of Reading. She is also a Senior Associate of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her research focuses primarily on Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and she is an expert on the writings of Josephus.

#3119

Hans Beck

#110143

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Hans Beck is a German and Canadian scholar in the field of Classical Studies. Career Hans Beck received his PhD in Ancient History from University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1996 with a thesis on . In 1997 he was hired to the position of Assistant Professor at Cologne University. In 2001-2002 he was a Junior Research Fellow in residence at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. He achieved his Habilitation in Cologne in 2003 with a work entitled and then moved on to Frankfurt University in 2004, where he held a Heisenberg Fellowship, awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

#3120

Enver Redžić

#61367

Overall Influence

1915 - 2009 (94 years)

Enver Redžić was a Bosnian historian, cultural observer, professor, and founder of the publishing company Svjetlost. During World War II, he was a member of anti-fascist groups ZAVNOBiH and AVNOJ.

#3121

Marc David Baer

#42104

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Marc David Baer is an historian and professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Life Baer received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He is a scholar of Middle Eastern and European History, who conducts research utilising Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Turkish. He is the author of six books.

#3122

Marko Attila Hoare

#27571

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Marko Attila Hoare is a British historian of the former Yugoslavia who also writes about current affairs, especially Southeast Europe, including Turkey and the Caucasus. Marko is Associate Professor of History at the University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, in Sarajevo.

#3123

José Orlandis

#56874

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

José Orlandis Rovira was a Spanish Roman Catholic priest and historian who wrote more than 200 works, including 20 books. Orlandis became a university professor of law in 1942, and was ordained a priest of Opus Dei in 1946. Much of his work centered on Visigothic Spain and Western Medieval Church.

#3124

Russell McCormmach

#21263

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Russell Keith McCormmach , the husband of the late Christa Jungnickel, is an American historian of physics. McCormmach grew up in Walla Walla, Washington and studied physics at Washington State College with bachelor's degree in 1955. As a Rhodes scholar, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University with bachelor's degree in 1959. He then worked as an electronics engineer at Bell Laboratories. In 1967 he received a Ph.D. in the history of science from Case Institute of Technology under Martin J. Klein. McCormmach was then a professor of the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins University , and then at the University of Oregon.

#3125

Johan Schot

#39721

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Johannes Willem "Johan" Schot is a Dutch historian working in the field of science and technology policy. A historian of technology and an expert in sustainability transitions, Johan Schot is Professor of Global Comparative History at the Centre for Global Challenges, Utrecht University. He is the Academic Director of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium and former Director of the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. He was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He is the Principal Investigator of the Deep Transitions Lab.

#3126

M'hamed Hassine Fantar

M'hamed Hassine Fantar

#65726

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

M'hamed Hassine Fantar is a professor of Ancient History of Archeology and History of Religion at Tunis University. Biography He was born in Ksar Hellal and received a BA in Classics from University of Strasbourg and a PhD in History from the Pantheon-Sorbonne University.

#3127

Janet Afary

#33364

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Janet Afary is an author, feminist activist and researcher of history, religious studies and women studies. She is a professor and the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion and Modernity at the University of California, Santa Barbara .

#3128

Josef W. Meri

#49000

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Josef Waleed Meri is an American historian of Interfaith Relations in the Middle East and the history of religion. Career He is a visiting faculty member at Georgetown University, Qatar. He is also an Associate of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Meri was a Senior Associate of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations, Merrimack College which closed in 2020.

#3129

Olivier Chaline

#90769

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Olivier Chaline is a contemporary French historian, a specialist of the history of Central Europe. Biography The son of Jean-Pierre Chaline, himself an historian , and Nadine-Josette Chaline, also an historian, Olivier Chaline entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1984. After he obtained his agrégation in history, he taught at the ENS before being appointed at the University of Rennes II then at the Paris-Sorbonne University. He occasionally teaches at Charles University at Prague.

#3130

Guenter B. Risse

Guenter B. Risse

#40916

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Guenter B. Risse is an American medical historian. He has written numerous books, including his most recent "Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence." The American Association for the History of Medicine awarded him the 1988 William H. Welch Medal for his book Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, at the University of California, San Francisco, and currently Affiliate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of W...

#3131

Saburō Ienaga

#60302

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

Saburō Ienaga was a Japanese historian. In 1953, the Japanese Ministry of Education published a textbook by Ienaga, but censored what they said were factual errors and matters of opinion, regarding Japanese war crimes. Ienaga undertook a series of lawsuits against the Ministry for violation of his freedom of speech. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 and 2001 by Noam Chomsky among others. He also recorded the history of the Japanese resistance in World War II in his book The Pacific War, 1931–1945.

#3132

Craig Harline

#122684

Overall Influence

Craig Edward Harline is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and an author of several books. His research has focused on lived religion during the Reformation. Biography Harline was raised in a LDS family with seven siblings in Fresno, California. He served as a missionary in Belgium in the 1970s, where he developed his interests in European history.

#3133

Mary D. Lewis

#77893

Overall Influence

Mary Dewhurst Lewis is the Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. She was co-president of the Society for French Historical Studies in 2012. Early life and education As a native of California, Lewis earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Davis in 1991. Upon earning her undergraduate degree, she spent two years working for the U.S. Department of Education in its Office for Civil Rights. She then attended New York University for her Master's degree and PhD. Growing up, she became interested in French history when her father would re...

#3134

Toby Craig Jones

#70546

Overall Influence

Toby Craig Jones is a historian of the modern Middle East at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Jones received his BA in 1994 and MA in 1998 from Auburn University. From 2004 to 2006 Jones worked as the Persian Gulf political analyst for the International Crisis Group. In 2006, Jones received his PhD in Middle Eastern History from Stanford University. From 2008 to 2009, Jones was a fellow at the Oil, Energy, and Middle East project at Princeton University. Currently an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, his general field of research concerns questions of energy and the history of science & technology in the modern Middle East.

#3135

Andrea Addobbati

#122735

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Andrea Addobbati is an Italian economic historian. He is full professor of early modern history at the University of Pisa. He specializes in documenting the history of the nobility of Pisa and Tuscany and its economic history. He has highlighted the importance and financial significance of Jewish companies in Pisan history and is the author of an essay on the practical consequences of Tuscan trade during the American War of Independence.

#3136

Alexander DeConde

#78522

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Alexander DeConde was a historian of United States diplomatic history. Raised in California, he attended San Francisco State College for his B.A. Following graduation in 1943, he attended the U.S. Naval Reserve Midshipmen School in Chicago, IL. He was assigned to the destroyer tender U.S.S. Whitney , and was released from service in 1946. He received his M.A. and Ph.D from Stanford University, where he worked under the direction of Thomas A. Bailey. He taught at Stanford , Whittier College , and Duke University . From 1957 to 1961, he was a professor of history at the University of Michigan.

#3137

Nina Fishman

#63448

Overall Influence

1946 - 2009 (63 years)

Nina Fishman was an American-born English labour movement historian and political activist. Fishman was born in San Francisco. Her father, Leslie Fishman, was an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. However, he was also a member of the Communist Party of the United States and was forced out of the university in the late 1940s, moving to Idaho State College and then the University of Colorado at Boulder. Fishman attended junior high school and high school in Boulder, although she lived in Britain for a year in 1962 while her father held a visiting fellowship at the University o...

#3138

Robert Erwin Johnson

#78038

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Robert Erwin Johnson was a University of Alabama professor of history and considered "one of the finest scholars of the nineteenth century U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard". Early life and education Johnson was born in Marshfield, Oregon to Franz Oscar Johnson, a farmer, and his wife, Agnes Sandquist. Johnson enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1941 and served until 1946 on After his wartime service at sea as a quartermaster, he attended the Oregon State Agricultural College from 1946 to 1948, then transferred to the University of Oregon, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree and was elected Phi Beta Kappa in 1951.

#3139

Beshara Doumani

#41615

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Beshara Doumani is a Palestinian-American academic currently serving as the president of Birzeit University. Prior to that, he was the Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies at Brown University. His research focuses on groups, places, and time periods marginalized by mainstream scholarship on the early modern and modern Middle East. He is also a public intellectual who writes on the topics of displacement, academic freedom, politics of knowledge production, and the Palestinian condition.

#3140

Jaakko Paavolainen

Jaakko Paavolainen

#81458

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

Jaakko Paavolainen , was a Finnish historian, PhD 1966. He became professor in history at the University of Turku 1986–1989. Jaakko Paavolainen published his much noticed results about the red terror and white terror during the Finnish civil war in three volumes and has also published a biography of Väinö Tanner . His boyhood memories från Carelia he pictures in Lapsuus Kanneljärvellä and the life of his cousin Olavi Paavolainen in a 1992 published volume.

#3141

Elizabeth R. Varon

Elizabeth R. Varon

#85400

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Elizabeth R. Varon is an American historian, and Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. Life Varon graduated from Swarthmore College , and from Yale University, . She was professor of history at Wellesley College, and Temple University.

#3142

Uğur Ümit Üngör

#30823

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Uğur Ümit Üngör is a Dutch–Turkish academic, historian, sociologist, and professor of Genocide studies, specializing as a scholar and researcher of Holocaust studies and studies on mass violence. He served as Professor of History at the Utrecht University and Professor of Sociology at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

#3143

Maria Bucur

#42171

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Maria Bucur is an American-Romanian historian of modern Eastern Europe and gender in the twentieth century. She has written on the history of eugenics in Eastern Europe, memory and war in twentieth-century Romania, gender and modernism, and gender and citizenship. She teaches history and gender studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she holds the John W. Hill Professorship. Between 2011 and 2014 she served as founding Associate Dean of the School of Global and International Studies and helped inaugurate the first SGIS graduating class in 2014.

#3144

Timothy J. G. Harris

#79868

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Timothy J. G. Harris is an historian of Later Stuart Britain. Biography A native of London, Tim Harris was educated at the University of Cambridge, from which he received a BA , MA , and PhD . From 1983 to 1986, he was a fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation was published by Cambridge University Press as London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II in 1987.

#3145

Matthew Pratt Guterl

#74345

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Matthew Pratt Guterl is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University. Prior to his arrival at Brown University, Guterl was the James Rudy Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University and chair of the department of American Studies. He is the author of four books and the co-author of another, and has written for The Guardian, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education. Guterl appeared in the documentary Race: the Power of an Illusion.

#3146

Martin Thomas

#37710

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Professor Martin Thomas is a British historian. Thomas did both his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Oxford University, completing his D.Phil. in 1991. He joined the history department at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in 1992 before leaving to take up a post at the History Department of Exeter University in 2003. He is the director of the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society.

#3147

Patrick Q. Mason

#71281

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Patrick Q. Mason is an American historian specializing in the study of the Latter-day Saint movement. Since 2019, he has held the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University.

#3148

Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg

Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg

#100653

Overall Influence

1944 - 2000 (56 years)

Heleen W.A.M. Sancisi-Weerdenburg , was a Dutch ancient historian, specializing in classical Greek and Achaemenid history. Sancisi-Weerdenburg began her studies in ancient history at the University of Leiden, graduating in 1967 to research under the supervision of Professor W. den Boer, a specialist in Greek history. For her doctoral thesis she set herself the task, which turned into a perennial theme, of trying to disentangle the complex realities of the Achaemenid Empire from the distorting web created by Greek literary conventions. To do this, she studied Old Persian, primarily on her own, and Iranian archaeology with Louis Vanden Berghe in Ghent.

#3149

Juliette Bessis

#61777

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Juliette Bessis was born in 1925 in Gabès, Tunisia, and died 2017 in Paris, France. She was a contemporary Tunisian scholar and historian specializing in the Maghreb region of northern Africa. Life Born Juliette Saada on 16 September 1925, she was part of a Tunisian Jewish upper middle-class family in the southern region of Tunisia, which at the time was under French colonial rule.

#3150

Saurabh Dube

#48100

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, subaltern studies and postcolonial-decolonial perspectives, and social theory and critical thought. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History – elected to the Distinguished Category of Professor-Researcher in 2009 – at the Centre of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube is a member also of the National System of Researchers , Mexico, in which since 2005 he holds the highest rank.

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