The Most Influential People Across History
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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in History,
#3151
Levon Abrahamian
#41732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Levon H. Abrahamian is an Armenian anthropologist and historian. Biography and career Abrahamian was born in Yerevan, Soviet Armenia on January 2, 1947. He graduated from Yerevan State University with M.S. in biophysics in 1970 and from the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1978 as Candidate of Sciences in Cultural and Social Anthropology. He joined the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Armenia in 1978, initially working as a junior researcher until 1988 and then as senior researcher. In 2005 he headed t...
Go to Profile#3152
Johannes Kunisch
#108810
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Johannes Kunisch was a German historian. He held chairs of early modern history at the Goethe University Frankfurt. and the University of Cologne . Through his publications Kunisch became one of the leading German early modern historians. His biography Frederick the Great, published in 2004 and widely acclaimed, gave lasting impulses to Prussian research.
Go to Profile#3153
James R. Rush
#90089
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Robert Rush is an American historian and professor of history at Arizona State University. He studied modern Southeast Asian history at Yale University and obtained his PhD in 1977. Rush is a scholar of modern Southeast Asia. He has served as director of Arizona State University's Program for Southeast Asian Studies and as faculty head of history at the university. As a consultant, Rush worked with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Asia Society, and El Colegio de México.
Go to Profile#3154
Louis S. Diggs
#53188
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Louis S. Diggs was an African-American writer and historian specializing in the African-American history of Baltimore County, Maryland. As a chronicler of the county's African-American legacy, his work illuminates the historic past of its Black communities. In addition to social history, Diggs has published on Baltimore African-American military records from the American Civil War and the Maryland Army National Guard.
Go to Profile#3155
Penny Von Eschen
#58077
Overall Influence
Penny Marie Von Eschen is an American historian and Professor of History and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is known for her works on American and African-American history, American diplomacy, the history of music, and their connections with decolonization.
Go to Profile#3156
George S. N. Luckyj
#35664
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
George Stephen Nestor Luckyj was a scholar of Ukrainian literature, who greatly contributed to the awareness of Ukrainian literature in the English-speaking world and to the continuation of legitimate scholarship on the subject during the post-war period.
Go to Profile#3157
Oliver Schmitt
#85857
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Oliver Jens Schmitt is a professor of South-East European history at Vienna University since 2005. He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His book Skanderbeg. Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan, a critical biography of George Castrioti-Skanderbeg, caused a hot debate in Albania. A Swiss national daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger published Schmitt's interview given to Enver Robelli in Tirana on 25 February 2009, in which it is emphasized that Schmitt claims that Skanderbeg's mother Voisava was Serbian, a member of the Branković family and that the Kastrioti surname probably is derived from Greek word kastron .
Go to Profile#3158
David Olusoga
#78584
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and filmmaker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.
Go to Profile#3159
Tetsuo Owada
#117055
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Tetsuo Owada is a Japanese historian and emeritus professor of Shizuoka University. Owada graduated from Waseda University. His work focuses on the studies of history and castles in the Sengoku period of Japan. He is especially famous for his research into the Imagawa clan and Later Hōjō clan. He often works as a historical consultant for the Taiga drama series and makes television appearances on NHK.
Go to Profile#3160
Warren C. Brown
#91891
Overall Influence
Warren C. Brown is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His research relates to the social history of early Medieval Europe, conflict resolution and social and institutional memory. He is the editor of the Medieval World Series published by Routledge.
Go to Profile#3161
Ada Ferrer
#39289
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-American historian. She is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University. She was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History.
Go to Profile#3162
Louis Leprince-Ringuet
#23755
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Louis Leprince-Ringuet was a French physicist, telecommunications engineer, essayist and historian of science. Leprince-Ringuet advocated strongly for the creation of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and remained its indefatigable supporter. He was vice chair and chair of CERN’s scientific policy committee. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#3163
Alfred Rieber
#114356
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Alfred J. Rieber is an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history. Biography He graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He obtained his MA and PhD from the Russian Institute at Columbia University. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Joseph Stalin and the French Communist Party in the 1940s.
Go to Profile#3164
Mariam Lortkipanidze
#123309
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Mariam Lortkipanidze was a Soviet and Georgian historian, specializing in the history of Georgia. Mariam Lortkipanidze was born in Batumi on 28 August 1922. She graduated from Tbilisi State University, Department of History in 1943. Her PhD thesis was "Emirate of Tbilisi" . She became doktor nauk in 1964 and a member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences in 1993.
Go to Profile#3165
John F. Drinkwater
#63642
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John Frederick Drinkwater is a British historian, classicist, and author. He is Emeritus Professor of Roman Imperial History in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#3166
William Brandon
#68883
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
William Edward Brandon was an American writer and historian best known for his work about Native Americans and the American West. Early life Brandon was born in Kokomo, Indiana, but spent his childhood in various locales, including the Yucatán and New Mexico. He held a brief job in a steel mill, before he began working as a professional writer in 1938, although this was interrupted by his service as a photographer for the United States Army Air Forces in the Pacific Theater during World War II.
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Milad Doueihi
#123416
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Milad Doueihi is a Syrian-Lebanese cultural and intellectual historian. He is Professor of Digital Humanities at Paris-Sorbonne University. Life Doueihi was Directeur d'Études Associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 2000 he was a Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Go to Profile#3168
Julio Gil Pecharromán
#93860
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Julio Gil Pecharromán is a Spanish historian, specialising in the political history of 20th-century Spain. Biography Born in Madrid in 1955, he studied both History and Journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid . He earned a PhD in history from the UCM in 1983, reading a dissertation titled Renovación española, una alternativa monárquica a la Segunda República and supervised by Carlos Seco Serrano. The thesis, that dealt with the alfonsine authoritarian Renovación Española party, was re-published in 1985. A lecturer for 8 years at the UCM, Gil Pecharromán was appointed as senior lect...
Go to Profile#3169
Sadeq Kia
#39849
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Sadeq Kia was an Iranian man of letters, distinguished professor of Iranian languages and the president of the second Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Biography Sadeq Kia was born in Tehran, Iran, on 15 May 1920 into one of the oldest families of Mazandaran, which traced its roots to the pre-Islamic dynasties that ruled that province. The family produced a number of prominent government officials, intellectuals, and religious leaders during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Kia studied at Adab and Servat schools before attending Dar ol-Funun. After completing his secondary education, he attended the University of Tehran, where he completed his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#3170
William G. Thomas III
#98662
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
William G. Thomas III is an American historian. He is a Professor of History and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His research focuses on the Southeastern United States, including slavery, the American Civil War and the New South. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.
Go to Profile#3171
Michael Brenner
#64199
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael Brenner is a German historian who researches and publishes on the history of Jews and Israel. Brenner has authored eight books on Jewish history, which were translated into twelve languages and is the editor and co-editor of eighteen books. He holds teaching positions at both the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the American University.
Go to Profile#3172
Pavel Uvarov
#102212
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Pavel Yuryevich Uvarov is a Russian historian, Doctor of Sciences in Historical Sciences , professor , Head of Department of Western Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences. Correspondent Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2006. Professor of National Research University Higher School of Economics .
Go to Profile#3173
David Sehat
#50183
Overall Influence
David Sehat is an American academic. He is a professor of American intellectual and cultural history at Georgia State University. He was the 2017-18 John G. Winant Visiting Professor of American Government at the Rothermere American Institute and Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of three books. He won the Organization of American Historians's 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award for The Myth of American Religious Freedom.
Go to Profile#3174
Steven Casey
#82486
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Steven Casey is a professor of international history at the London School of Economics. He is an expert on 20th-century American history and foreign policy. Biography Casey received his undergraduate degree from the University of East Anglia in 1994 before he moved to Oxford, where he completed an MPhil and a Ph.D. in International Relations as a Truman Scholar. Casey worked as a Junior Research Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Trinity College, Oxford, from 1998 to 2001. Casey has lectured at the London School of Economics since 2001.
Go to Profile#3175
Raoul Girardet
#52123
Overall Influence
1917 - 2013 (96 years)
Raoul Girardet was a French historian who specialized in military societies, colonialism and French nationalism. As a young man he was involved with the right-wing Action Française movement. He was not antisemitic, but was passionately nationalistic. During World War II he supported the French Resistance. Later he supported the OAS struggle against giving independence to Algeria.
Go to Profile#3176
Michel Abitbol
#57561
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michel Abitbol is a Moroccan-Israeli historian. He is considered an expert on the history of Morocco and the history the Jews of North Africa. In the 80s, he gave courses at Université Paris VIII and Yale University. He is currently professor and chair of the Department of African Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the scientific director of the Center for Research on Moroccan Jewry, founded in Jerusalem in 1994.
Go to Profile#3177
Raymond W. Smock
#95835
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Raymond W. Smock is an American historian, who is the director emeritus of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University, and formerly the Historian of the United States House of Representatives .
Go to Profile#3178
Fania Oz-Salzberger
#56338
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli historian and writer, Professor Emerita of history at the University of Haifa School of Law and the Haifa Center for German and European Studies . Biography Oz-Salzberger was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Hulda, the eldest daughter of writer Amos Oz and his wife Nily. She is the great-great-niece of historian and literary scholar Joseph Klausner. Oz-Salzberger was educated in kibbutz schools and served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces. She completed her B.A. in history and philosophy and M.A. in modern history at Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral thesis...
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Jonathan Beecher
#111371
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jonathan French Beecher is a historian who has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz since the early 1970s. He specializes in French history and European intellectual history, including Russian. He received his B.A. and his Ph.D from Harvard University and also was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris for two years.
Go to Profile#3180
Sybille Steinbacher
#94632
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sybille Steinbacher is a German historian. Since May 2017 she has been Professor of Holocaust Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Steinbacher is the author of several works on the Holocaust, including Musterstadt Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien and Auschwitz: A History . She was a residential fellow of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from October 2012 to June 2013, and has served as Professor of Dictatorship, Violence and Genocide Comparative Studies at the University of Vienna. Her appointment by Goethe University Frankfurt in December 2016 made her Germany's first Professor of Holocaust Studies.
Go to Profile#3181
Michael Gannon
#46418
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Michael V. Gannon was a historian, educator, priest, and war correspondent. Early life and education Michael Valentine Gannon was born into a military family in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. His family moved to Florida from Washington, D.C. after the death of his father in 1939.
Go to Profile#3182
J. Victor Koschmann
#69528
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Julian Victor Koschmann is Professor Emeritus of Japanese History at the Department of History at Cornell University. His primary field of expertise is the history of Japan. He earned his B.A. at International Christian University in 1965, his M.A. at Sophia University in 1971, and his Ph.D at the University of Chicago in 1980.
Go to Profile#3183
Milton Sernett
#68423
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Milton C. Sernett is an American historian, author, and professor at Syracuse University. He has published many books, articles and book chapters on African American history. His published works in African-American history focus on abolitionism, religion, biographies and the Underground Railroad. He has spent several years studying the anti-slavery movements in Upstate New York, particularly, the life of Harriet Tubman.
Go to Profile#3184
Kelly Lytle Hernández
#52227
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Kelly Lytle Hernández is an American academic and historian. Hernández is a tenured professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and is the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant". She is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. Since her MacArthur Grant...
Go to Profile#3185
Keijo Virtanen
#113828
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Keijo Aarre Virtanen , is a Finnish historian, PhD 1980. In 1970 Virtanen was affiliated with the University of Turku, where he became professor 1990 in cultural history. He served as the Rector of the University of Turku in 1997–2012.
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Simona Cerutti
#116730
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Simona Cerutti is an Italian historian. Since 2001 she has been Directrice d’Etudes à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and she is also Directrice responsable du Laboratoire de Démographie et Histoire Sociale at EHESS, Paris.
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Dan Ben-Amos
#54164
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Dan Ben-Amos was an Israeli-American folklorist and academic who worked as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he held the Graduate Program Chair for the Department of Folklore and Folklife.
Go to Profile#3188
Christopher J. Lane
#68749
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Christopher J. Lane is a British-American medical writer, researcher and intellectual historian who taught medical humanities and the history of medicine at Northwestern University until his retirement in 2022. A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he has held Northwestern's Pearce Miller Research Professorship and is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Feinberg School of Medicine. Previously, he taught at Emory University, where he was director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program in the Psychiatry Department. A Victorian...
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Michael Stanislawski
#96948
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael F. Stanislawski is the Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University. He obtained his B.A. , M.A. Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been at Columbia since 1980. His dissertation, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855, was published in 1983.
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William G. Hartley
#102635
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
William George Hartley was an American historian and author. He wrote many books primarily on family history research, histories of specific families and 19th-century Latter-day Saint history. Biography Hartley graduated from Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo, California in 1960. He served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Eastern States Mission and the Cumorah Mission from 1962 to 1964.
Go to Profile#3191
Heather Goodall
#99344
Overall Influence
Heather Goodall, is an Australian academic and historian. She is Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research and writing focuses on Indigenous and environmental history and intercolonial networks.
Go to Profile#3192
Don Yoder
#13169
Overall Influence
1921 - 2015 (94 years)
Don Yoder was an American folklorist specializing in the study of Pennsylvania Dutch, Quaker, and Amish and other Anabaptist folklife in Pennsylvania who wrote at least 15 books on these subjects. A professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, he specialized in religious folklife and the study of belief. He is known for his teaching, collecting, field trips, recording, lectures, and books. He also co-founded a folk festival in Pennsylvania, which is the USA's oldest continual annual folklife festival, and is credited with "bringing the idea of "folklife" to the United States".
Go to Profile#3193
Herbert Schwarzwälder
#61801
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Herbert Schwarzwälder was a German historian. With his decades of work and his extensive publications, he has had a major influence on the research and communication of the . Life Schwarzwälder was born in Bremen. His younger brother was the Heimatforscher . He attended the grammar school and graduated in 1938 with his Abitur. He was then called up for Reichsarbeitsdienst, then for military service with an air force and the anti-aircraft artillery. During the Second World War, he was first deployed in the Homeland Security, later in a technical department in the Soviet Union and in the West. Schwarzwälder had to spend several years as prisoner of war in camps in France, the US and England.
Go to Profile#3194
Heinz Gollwitzer
#70168
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Heinz Gollwitzer was a German historian. He held the chair of Modern Political and Social History at the University of Münster. Life Gollwitzer was born in Nuremberg and grew up in Munich. After being severely wounded in World War II he took up his studies at the University of Munich, earning his Ph.D. in 1944. He earned his qualification to teach as a professor in 1950 with a thesis called “The Image of Europe and the European Thought – Contributions to the German History of Ideas”. He subsequently taught at universities in Munich and Münster until retiring in 1982. He died in Munich.
Go to Profile#3195
Megan Vaughan
#55012
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Megan Vaughan, is a British historian and academic, who specialises in the history of East and Central Africa. Since October 2015, she has been Professor of African History and Health at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. From 2002 to 2016 she was Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3196
Wim Blockmans
#53057
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Willem Pieter Blockmans was Professor of Medieval History at Leiden University between 1987 and 2010. He earned a PhD from the University of Ghent. He has been Rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study since September 2002. He has published extensively on late medieval and early modern state power.
Go to Profile#3197
Denis Smyth
#78493
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Denis Smyth is professor of History at the University of Toronto. His doctorate is from the University of Cambridge. While at Cambridge he studied under F.H. Hinsley, a noted scholar of the Second World War. He is a specialist in modern international relations, particularly the period surrounding World War II and the Spanish Civil War. Among his major works is a monumental collected edition of previously classified British documents from the period just after World War II.
Go to Profile#3198
Wayne A. Wiegand
#68170
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Wayne August Wiegand is an American library historian, author, and academic. Wiegand retired as F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University in 2010.
Go to Profile#3199
Ernst Walter Zeeden
#117136
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
Ernst Walter Zeeden was a German medievalist and a scholar of modern history. Life Ernst Walter Zeeden was born in Berlin as the son of regional court director Konrad Zeeden and his wife Marianne. After he earned the Abitur at the Goethe-Gymnasium in Berlin, he studied history, German and Latin at the universities of Leipzig, Heidelberg, Munich and Freiburg. In Leipzig he was a member of student organisation Corps Saxonia Leipzig. In 1939, he earned a doctor's degree with his thesis Hardenberg und der Gedanke einer Volksvertretung in Preußen 1807–1812 under the supervision of Gerhard Ritter.
Go to Profile#3200
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
#90881
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is an American historian of science. She is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and in the Program in History of Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota. Kohlstedt served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1992 to 1993. Her research interests focus on the history of science in American culture and the demographics of scientific practice in institutions such as museums and educational institutions, including gender participation.
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