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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#3251

Diana Kleiner

#54572

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Diana Elizabeth Edelman Kleiner was an American art historian and educator. A scholar of Ancient Roman art and architecture, Kleiner was the Dunham Professor of the History of Art Emerita at Yale University.

#3252

Alfred Dupont Chandler

#125691

Overall Influence

#3253

Hugh Kearney

#73036

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Hugh Francis Kearney was a British historian, and Amundson Professor Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. He was the author of several articles on early modern economic history, a biography on Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, and the acclaimed book British Isles: A History of Four Nations, which advocated a multi-national "Britannic" approach, rather than an Anglo-centric approach to their history, historiography and sociology.

#3254

Charles Ingrao

#84022

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Charles W. Ingrao is an historian and public intellectual focused on early modern Central Europe and the contemporary Balkans. Born and raised in New York City, he attended Richmond Hill High School. He received his BA from Wesleyan in 1969 and his PhD from Brown in 1974, studying under Norman Rich and William F. Church. He is a professor of history at Purdue University and has held visiting positions around the world. In 2001, he founded and still directs “The Scholars' Initiative." This project seeks to use the work of scholars to undermine nationalist interpretations of the recent past that have made peace in the Balkans difficult.

#3255

Lloyd Ultan

#40915

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Lloyd Ultan is a historian and author. A native of The Bronx in New York City, he was the borough's historian from 1996 to 2023. He is a professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University's and a member of the adjunct faculty at Lehman College. Ultan received a B.A. in history from Hunter College in 1959 and an M.A. in history from Columbia University in 1960.

#3256

Vasily Zhukov

#95584

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Vasily Ivanovich Zhukov is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has a Ph.D. in history. Professor Zhukov is the rector of the Russian State Social University . See also Education in RussiaList of universities in Russia

#3257

Barbara Winslow

#73378

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Barbara Winslow is an American historian. Life She was born and raised in New York City. Education Winslow attended Antioch College where she majored in Women Studies. She spent her junior year abroad at the University of Leeds, and subsequently returned to the UK in 1969 to attend the University of Warwick, where she studied under E. P. Thompson, who she has described as "the most important academic influence on my life". She obtained her Ph.D in Women's History from the University of Washington.

#3258

Craig K. Manscill

#108498

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Craig K. Manscill is a religion professor at Brigham Young University and a historian who specializes in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , especially during the 1830s. Among other things he has edited the journal of the part of Zion's Camp that started in Pontiac, Michigan under the direction of Hyrum Smith. He is also a sociologist who has done studies on the family in Utah.

#3259

Glenn Dynner

#38661

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Glenn Davis Dynner is an American author and historian specializing in religion and history of East European Jewry. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies and a Professor and Chair of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College .

#3260

Ferenc Szabadváry

#14236

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Ferenc Szabadváry was a Hungarian chemist and historian. From 1971 he was director at the Hungarian National Museum for Science and Technology. In 1960 he published a history of analytical chemistry in Hungarian. A translation was made by Gyula Svehla in 1966, first published with Pergamon Press and later Gordon and Breach.

#3261

Fabrice d'Almeida

Fabrice d'Almeida

#71293

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Fabrice d'Almeida is a French historian, whose work focuses on the history of the media, image propaganda and manipulation. Biography d'Almeida was born in November 1963 in Ajaccio, the son of academic Hélène d'Almeida-Topor.

#3262

Catherine Ceniza Choy

#75032

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Catherine Ceniza Choy is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to working at UC Berkeley, she taught at the University of Minnesota in American Studies. Biography Choy received her Bachelor of Arts in History from Pomona College in 1991, where she graduated cum laude. Choy proceeded to finish her Master of Arts from UCLA in 1993, and then a Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1998.

#3263

Svante Nordin

#28699

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Per Svante Gudmund Nordin is a Swedish historian of ideas and author. He is a professor of history of ideas at Lund University. With his dissertation Interpretation and method. Studies in the explication of nature Nordin became a PhD in theoretical philosophy. In 1981 he became an associate professor in history of ideas and in 1999 a full professor in the same discipline.

#3264

Patrick Vaughan

#74961

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Patrick Vaughan is a professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He was the co-founder of the MA program in Transatlantic Studies, Jagiellonian University Early life Vaughan was born in Seattle, Washington. Vaughan's father was a member of Al Brightman's Seattle University nationally ranked basketball teams led by the “Gold Dust Twins” of Johnny and Ed O’Brien. In 1952 that team defeated the Harlem Globetrotters in what has been called the most memorable event in Seattle sports history. Vaughan's father missed that game due to military service and heard the news while serving on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean.

#3265

David Carpenter

#68133

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

David A. Carpenter is an English historian and writer, and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London where he has been working since 1988. Carpenter specialises in the life and reign of Henry III. Historian Dan Jones described him as "one of Britain's foremost medievalists".

#3266

Moshe Rosman

#65318

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Moshe Rosman is an Israeli historian specializing in the history of Polish Jews. He is a professor emeritus at the Department of Jewish History in Bar-Ilan University. Awards 1996: National Jewish Book Award in the Jewish History category for Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov

#3267

Ole Feldbæk

#122678

Overall Influence

1936 - 2015 (79 years)

Ole Feldbæk was a Danish historian. He held the dr.philos. degree with the thesis India Trade under the Danish Flag 1772–1808 from 1969, and was professor of economic history at the University of Copenhagen from 1981 to 2006.

#3268

Eduardo Cavieres

Eduardo Cavieres

#112942

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Eduardo Lincoyán Cavieres Figueroa was a Chilean historian and academic who won the Chilean National History Award in 2008. His greatest contributions were in the field of Social and Economic history of Chile during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Likewise, he had collaborated in the social history of the Andean region shared by Bolivia, Peru and his country.

#3269

Xiao Chua

#57109

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (41 years)

Michael Charleston "Xiao" Briones Chua is a Filipino historian, academic, and television personality. He is best known for his academic works on Philippine history and his numerous appearances as a commentator on historical topics on Philippine television, including a regular appearance on a news segment called "Xiao Time" on the public television station People's Television Network. He has also served as a historical consultant for shows such as Katipunan, its companion show Ilustrado, as well as the TV documentary series History with Lourd.

#3270

Julio Aróstegui

#83340

Overall Influence

1939 - 2013 (74 years)

Julio Aróstegui Sánchez was a Spanish historian. Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid , some of his research lines included the study of political violence in Modern Spanish history, Carlism, the Spanish Transition, the Spanish Civil War, the history of the workers' movement and collective memory. His scholar production also intertwined with the theoretical problems of history and the methodology of research.

#3271

Charles van Onselen

#67863

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Charles van Onselen is a researcher and historian based at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Education Van Onselen holds a B.Sc. and U.E.D. from Rhodes University, a B.A. Hons. from the University of the Witwatersrand, a D.Phil. from Oxford University and a D.Lit. from Rhodes.

#3272

Shula Marks

#51327

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Shula Eta Marks, OBE, FBA is emeritus professor of history at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. She has written at least seven books and a WHO monograph on Health and Apartheid, concerning experiences and public health issues in South Africa. Some of her current public health work involves the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS in contemporary South Africa.

#3273

Robert Étienne

#56217

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Robert Étienne was a 20th-century French historian of ancient Rome. Career A student of the École Normale Supérieure and agrégé of history, Robert Étienne was member of the École française de Rome from 1947 to 1949. In 1958, he defended a doctoral thesis on the imperial cult in the Iberian Peninsula from Augustus to Diocletian.

#3274

Joel A. Tarr

#79317

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Joel A. Tarr is an American historian, currently the Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor of History and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. His research includes environmental and urban development and systems and their effects.

#3275

Eiichiro Azuma

#102848

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Eiichiro Azuma is a Japanese-born American historian, writer, and professor. He has served as a Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The focus of his work is Japanese Americans in relationship to migration, Japanese colonialism, and U.S. and Japan relations.

#3276

John Adair

#36084

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

John Eric Adair is a British academic who is a leadership theorist and author of more than forty books on business, military and other leadership. Life Adair was born in Luton and educated at St Paul's School before undertaking his national service as a second lieutenant in the Scots Guards from 1953 to 1955. Unusually, he served as adjutant of a Bedouin regiment in the Arab Legion and was briefly in command of the garrison of Jerusalem in the front line. He also studied at Hull Nautical College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959. He later obtained ...

#3277

Thomas Schneider

#109590

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Thomas Schneider is a German Egyptologist. Life and career Thomas Schneider began his studies in 1984 at the University of Zurich, focusing on history, Egyptology and Hebrew. He transferred to the University of Basel in 1986, where he achieved a MA in Egyptology, Ancient History and Old Testament Studies in 1990. He carried out further study at the Collège de France in Paris before completing his PhD in Egyptology at the University of Basel in 1996. In 1999 he completed his habilitation at the same university.

#3278

Keith Michael Baker

#76178

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Keith Michael Baker is a British-born historian. Baker received his bachelor's and master's degrees at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and completed a doctorate at University College London. He began his academic career in the United States as a history instructor at Reed College and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1965. While at Chicago, Baker was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. He left Chicago for Stanford University in 1988, the same year the government of France named him a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms. Baker was elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society in 1991 and 1997 respectively.

#3279

Nicholas Wahl

#64457

Overall Influence

1928 - 1996 (68 years)

Anthony Nicholas Maria Wahl was an American historian. Born in New York to Jewish Hungarian immigrant parents, he had an academic career encompassing Harvard, Princeton and New York University, focusing on French politics, particularly those of the Fifth French Republic, and on the political career of Charles de Gaulle.

#3280

William Beinart

#90452

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

William Beinart is a South African historian and Africanist. He was educated at the University of Cape Town and School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He taught at the University of Bristol from 1983 to 1997, and is now a professor of race relations and director of graduate studies at the African Studies Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford. His focuses are South Africa and the developments of racism.

#3281

Rolf Danielsen

#120791

Overall Influence

1922 - 2002 (80 years)

Rolf Danielsen was a Norwegian educator, author and historian. He was born in Hammerfest in Finnmark, Norway. He was awarded his cand.philol. from the University of Oslo . Danielsen subsequently worked at the University of Oslo and University of Gothenburg . He was a professor of modern history at the University of Bergen from 1968 to 1991.

#3282

Keith Breckenridge

#100452

Overall Influence

Keith Breckenridge is a South African professor of history at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a specialist in the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, and the development of information systems such as birth, marriage and death registration and identity verification systems.

#3283

Bas van Bavel

#84527

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Balthassar Jozef Paul "Bas" van Bavel is a Dutch historian. He has held the chair of Transitions of Economy and Society at Utrecht University since 2011, and has been professor of Economic and Social History since 2007. His research has mostly focused on pre-industrial Northwestern Europe. He was one of the winners of the 2019 Spinoza Prize, the highest award in Dutch science.

#3284

Vic Gatrell

#53026

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Vic Gatrell is a British historian. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Life Born to working-class immigrant Londoners in South Africa, Gatrell went to state schools in Pietermaritzburg and Port Elizabeth and then to Rhodes University, where he graduated with first-class Honours, and won an Elsie Ballot scholarship to Cambridge. At St John's College he took first-class honours in history and completed his Ph.D. on 'The Commercial Middle Class in Manchester 1820–1857', before becoming a research fellow and then a teaching fellow of Gonville and Caius College.

#3285

S. George Ellsworth

#90138

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

Samuel George Ellsworth was an American historian specializing in Western United States history and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a founding editor of the Western Political Quarterly.

#3286

Anthony Bryer

#77369

Overall Influence

1937 - 2016 (79 years)

Anthony Applemore Mornington Bryer was a British historian of the Byzantine Empire who founded the journal Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies and the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham.

#3287

Mackubin Thomas Owens

#26122

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Mackubin Thomas Owens is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. From 2015 until 2018, he served as dean of academic affairs at the Institute of World Politics. He was previously the associate dean of academics for electives and directed research and professor of strategy and force planning for the Naval War College in the U.S., as well as a contributing editor to National Review.

#3288

Philip K. Lundeberg

#94041

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Philip Karl Lundeberg was an American naval historian and curator emeritus of the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History. At the time of his death in 2019, Lundeberg was the last survivor of the USS Frederick C. Davis sinking.

#3289

Charles Jago

#58577

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Charles Joseph Jago is a Canadian academic and university administrator. He was born and raised in St. Catharines, Ontario. He received his BA in Honours English and History from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario in 1965 and his PhD in History from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1969. His academic field is early-modern Spanish history.

#3290

Patricia Skinner

#89736

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Patricia E. Skinner, FRHistS is a British historian and academic, specialising in Medieval Europe. She was until August 2020 Professor of History at Swansea University. She was previously Reader in Medieval History at the University of Winchester and Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Southampton. She has published extensively on the social history of southern Italy and health and medicine. With Dr Emily Cock, she started the project "Effaced from History: Facial Difference and its Impact from Antiquity to the Present Day" to study the history of facial disfigurement.

#3291

Timothy Cheek

#48952

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Timothy Cheek is a Canadian historian specializing in the study of intellectuals, the history of the Chinese Communist Party, and the political system in modern China. He is Professor, Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research and Director, Centre for Chinese Research, Institute of Asian Research, at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. From 2002 to 2009 he was editor of the journal Pacific Affairs. Before going to the University of British Columbia in 2002, he taught at The Colorado College.

#3292

Stanley Palmer

#82928

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Stanley H. Palmer is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington specializing in Modern British and Irish history, the history of the British Empire, and comparative police history.

#3293

Silvia Berti

#62271

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Silvia Berti is a history professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Her fields of interest are the relationship between Jewish and Christian culture in the Moderna era, issues of history of historiography, European anti-Christian attitudes, Spinoza and Spinozism, the Huguenots, Jansenists, the Enlightenment, and other opposition groups within French history.

#3294

Michael Hill

#51564

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Michael Hill is an American political activist from Alabama. He is a co-founder and the president of the "Southern secession" movement the League of the South, an organization whose stated goal is to create an independent country made up of the former states of the American South.

#3295

Steve Boardman

#90696

Overall Influence

Stephen I. Boardman, FRHistS, is a Scottish medieval historian. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, he held the Glenfiddich Research Fellowship and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship of the British Academy at St Andrews before being appointed Mackie Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen in 1995. He subsequently moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he is now Professor of Medieval Scottish History. Boardman's work focuses on kingship and the nobility in the later Middle Ages, and he has completed work on Scottish kings Robert II and Robert III, as well as Clan Campbell. The fo...

#3296

R. J. B. Bosworth

#44986

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Richard James Boon Bosworth is an Australian historian and author, and a leading expert on Benito Mussolini and Fascist Italy, having written extensively on both topics. Bosworth received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Sydney, before going on to doctoral study at St John's College, Cambridge. He held various teaching positions at the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia and the University of Reading. He has also held various fellowships, including fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, fellow of the Australian Academy of th...

#3297

Derek Hirst

#62948

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Derek Hirst is an English historian of early modern Britain. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and author of five books and over thirty articles, Hirst held a B.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He was the William Eliot Smith Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught from 1975 to 2017, supervising seventeen dissertations and serving as chair of the department for several years. His focus was on 17th-century England and his best known work is England In Conflict 1603-1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth. His other academic books included Rep...

#3298

Richard Alston

#94378

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Richard Alston is professor of Roman history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Alston's research is in the area of "Roman imperialism, the Roman and Byzantine city, issues of individuality in the early Roman empire, and the relationship between modern and ancient political ideologies."

#3299

Christian Delporte

Christian Delporte

#74925

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Christian Delporte , is a French historian specialized in political and cultural history of France in the twentieth century, including the history of media, image and political communication. Biography Delporte earned his PhD from Sciences Po, where he was a student of René Rémond and Serge Berstein. Formerly a lecturer at François Rabelais University, he is, since 1998, professor of contemporary history at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University, where he manages the Centre d'histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines . Director of the Institut d'études culturelles , from 2010 to 2012, he is now vice president of the Scientific Council for research and scientific development.

#3300

D. L. Ashliman

#22411

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Dee L. Ashliman , who writes professionally as D. L. Ashliman, is an American folklorist and writer. He is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Pittsburgh and is considered to be a leading expert on folklore and fairytales. He has published a number of works on the genre.

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