Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

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

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List of the most influential people in History,

#3451

Sławomir Dębski

Sławomir Dębski

#45627

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Sławomir Jan Dębski is a Polish historian who has served as director of Polish Institute of International Affairs from 2007 until 2010 and again since 2016. He previously headed The Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding , and was a member of the Polish-Russian Group for Difficult Matters. He was assistant professor of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw and Warsaw University .

#3452

Donald Nicholl

#78883

Overall Influence

1923 - 1997 (74 years)

Donald Nicholl was a British historian and theologian. A speaker of medieval Welsh, Irish and Russian, he published books on medieval and modern history, religion and a biography of Thurstan. He has been regarded as "one of the most influential of modern Christian thinkers".

#3453

Stuart Ball

#76991

Overall Influence

Stuart Ryan Ball, CBE, FRHistS, is a political historian who retired in 2016 as professor of Modern British History at the University of Leicester, having taught there for 37 years; he is now emeritus professor of Modern History there. He specialises in the history of the Conservative Party.

#3454

Zachar Šybieka

#105081

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Dr. Prof. Zachar Vasiljevič Šybieka is a Belarusian historian and professor. Biography Šybieka was born on July 30, 1948, in the village of Asinauka, Belitskiy Rural Council of the Sennenskiy Region in the Vitebsk Region of the Byelorussian SSR.

#3455

Thomas L. Hankins

#104690

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Thomas Leroy Hankins is an American historian of science. Education and career Hankins studied physics at Yale University with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and at Harvard University with an M.A.T. in 1958. From 1958 to 1962 he taught high school physics and worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute during the summers. In 1962 he matriculated in the history department of Cornell University, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1964. In the history department of the University of Washington , he was an assistant professor from 1964 to 1969, an associate professor from 1969 to 1975, and a full professor from 1975 to 2000, when he retired as professor emeritus.

#3456

Max Oidtmann

#95568

Overall Influence

Max Gordon Oidtmann is an American historian of Late Imperial China and Inner Asia . He also has interest in modern China and the affairs of Chinese ethnic minorities. He was an assistant professor at Georgetown University in Qatar from 2013 to 2021. Oidtmann is currently a faculty member at the Institute for Sinology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.

#3457

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

#32935

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz is a Brazilian historian and anthropologist. She is a doctor in social anthropology at the University of São Paulo, full professor at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas in the same institution, and visiting professor at Princeton University.

#3458

Robert M. Warner

Robert M. Warner

#87014

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Robert Mark Warner was an American historian who served as the Sixth Archivist of the United States at the National Archives, from July 24, 1980, to April 15, 1985. Early life Born in Montrose, Colorado, he graduated from South High School in Denver, Colorado, in 1945. He then earned a bachelor's degree at Muskingum College in 1949 and a Ph.D. in American history in 1958 from the University of Michigan.

#3459

Richard Crawford

#85792

Overall Influence

Richard Crawford is an American music historian, formerly a professor of music at the University of Michigan. His American Musical Landscape is one of the seminal works of American music history, published in 2001. He has published a number of other books, and edited a series of books on American music. He is an honorary member and past president of the American Musicological Society, one of the founding members of the Society for American Music, and is the founder and former editor-in-chief of MUSA .

#3460

R. H. C. Davis

#103941

Overall Influence

1918 - 1991 (73 years)

Ralph Henry Carless Davis was a British historian and educator specialising in the European Middle Ages. Davis was born and died in Oxford. He was a leading exponent of strict documentary analysis and interpretation, was keenly interested in architecture and art in history, and was successful at communicating to the public and as a teacher.

#3461

Glenn Branch

#23669

Overall Influence

Glenn Branch is the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design and an activist against campaigns of suppressing teaching of evolution and climate change in school education. He is also a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

#3462

Sophie Wahnich

#60696

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Sophie Wahnich is a French historian. She is director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a specialist in the French Revolution. Biography Sophie Wahnich holds an agrégation and a doctorate in history , and is qualified to direct research .

#3463

A. J. H. Latham

#105983

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Anthony John Heaton Latham is an economic historian at University College of Swansea. He has specialised in the economic history of the developing world during the establishment of the global economy, and the trading of commodities within that economy.

#3464

Gene Brucker

#106117

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Gene Adam Brucker was an American historian and the Shepard Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Brucker studied at Oxford and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1954. He was immediately appointed to the faculty at Berkeley. He received several academic awards, including the Rhodes Scholarship, Fulbright Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. In 1979, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#3465

Michael F. Scholz

#120323

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Michael F. Scholz is a German university professor in modern and contemporary history, currently based in Sweden. One of his research interests involves the insights available from comics and comic strips, especially in the field of propaganda, into popular culture and political history.

#3466

William Wright Abbot

#89667

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

William Wright Abbot III was an American archivist and historian, widely noted for his work compiling and editing The Washington Papers. After his undergraduate study, he joined the U.S. Navy and served in the Pacific theater during World War II. He then earned advanced degrees and became a professor and historian. In undertaking the editing and publishing of the papers of George Washington, Abbot examined some 135,000 letters and documents from and to Washington. Abbot's career as a teacher and historian lasted nearly 50 years.

#3467

Albert E. Castel

#71513

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Albert E. Castel was an American historian and author. He specialized in Civil War history and historiography. Life He was born on November 11, 1928, in Wichita, Kansas. He died on November, 14th 2014 in Columbus, Ohio.

#3468

P. Djèlí Clark

#79197

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Dexter Gabriel , better known by his pen name Phenderson Djèlí Clark, is an American speculative fiction writer and historian, who is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Connecticut. He uses a pen name to differentiate his literary work from his academic work, and has also published under the name A. Phenderson Clark. His pen name "Djèlí", makes reference to the griots – traditional Western African storytellers, historians and poets.

#3469

Roy MacLeod

#65285

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Roy Malcolm MacLeod is an American-born historian who has spent his career working in the United Kingdom and Australia. He is a specialist on the history and social studies of science and knowledge.

#3470

Michael Matheus

#81792

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Michael Matheus is a German historian. Life Michael Matheus graduated from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in 1971. He studied history, political science and German at the universities of Trier, Bonn and Münster. After passing the state examination for secondary school teachers, he received his doctorate in Trier in 1981 under Alfred Haverkamp with the thesis “Trier at the End of the Middle Ages”. He was then a research assistant for medieval history at the University of Trier.

#3471

Anna Whitelock

#130548

Overall Influence

Anna Whitelock, , is a British historian and academic, specialising in the History of Monarchy. She is Professor of the History of Monarchy at City, University of London and Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern Monarchy.

#3472

Iraj Afshar

#24899

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Iraj Afshar was a bibliographer, historian, scholar, professor, and a figure in the field of Persian studies. Afshar was a professor emeritus of the University of Tehran. He was a consulting editor of Encyclopædia Iranica at Columbia University.

#3473

Martin McCauley

#80915

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Martin McCauley is an Irish historian and former senior lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, at University College London. He is a member of the Limehouse Group of Analysts and a regular commentator in the media on Russian affairs.

#3474

Barry Jean Ancelet

Barry Jean Ancelet

#27730

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Barry Jean Ancelet is a Cajun folklorist in Louisiana French and ethnomusicologist in Cajun music. He has written several books, and under his pseudonym Jean Arceneaux, including poetry and lyrics to songs.

#3475

Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida

#74387

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida is a Spanish historian. He has been referred to as the leading Spanish expert in the study of antisemitism in Spain. Biography Born in 1958 in San Sebastián. He earned a PhD at the Autonomous University of Madrid . —his dissertation was titled José María Pemán: un contrarrevolucionario en la crisis española del siglo XX. He is tenured professor of the history of Thought and Social and Political Movements at the Complutense University of Madrid .

#3476

Juha Sihvola

#37331

Overall Influence

1957 - 2012 (55 years)

Juha Sihvola was a Finnish philosopher and historian. He was a university professor of general history from 2000, and part of The Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence program upon Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Politics, serving as the Deputy Director of the Centre of Excellence from 2008. In the years 2004–2009, he was the Director of Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

#3477

Cornell Fleischer

#41710

Overall Influence

1950 - 2023 (73 years)

Cornell Fleischer was an American historian and the Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at the University of Chicago. Education and career The son of an American diplomat, Fleischer grew up in Germany, Egypt, Iraq, and California. He also lived in Turkey for nine years. He began his studies at Brown University before transferring to Princeton as a “critical language” undergraduate student to study Arabic. He continued in the Department of Near Eastern Studies for his Ph.D., completing his dissertation, “Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli Efendi, 1541–1600: A Study in Ottoman Historical Consciousness,” in 1982.

#3478

S. Arasaratnam

#78568

Overall Influence

1930 - 1998 (68 years)

Sinnappah Arasaratnam was a Sri Lankan academic, historian and author, born during British colonial rule. Known as 'Arasa', he was a lecturer at the University of Ceylon, University of Malaya and University of New England .

#3479

Susan Weber

#34615

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Susan Weber is an American historian. She is the founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center for studies in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture affiliated with Bard College in Dutchess County, New York. She was previously married to George Soros.

#3480

H. Paul Varley

#85075

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Herbert Paul Varley was an American academic, historian, author, and Japanologist. He was an emeritus professor at Columbia University and Sen Sōshitsu XV Professor of Japanese Cultural History at the University of Hawaii.

#3481

Lee Walter Congdon

#95057

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Lee Walter Congdon is a writer and historian. Congdon is the author of four books. The first three were The Young Lukacs , Exile and Social Thought , and Seeing Red . Taken together, the works represent a trilogy examining the unique contributions of Hungarian intellectuals to 20th century social and political thought. His fourth book was George Kennan: A Writing Life . Congdon also coedited two books on the Hungarian Revolution.

#3482

David Kopf

#35748

Overall Influence

1930 - 2023 (93 years)

David Kopf is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. A research scholar on South Asian history, he has produced several books on the region. He has won the Guggenheim Fellowship at the University.

#3483

Grigory Bongard-Levin

#124549

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Grigory Maksimovich Bongard-Levin was a Russian historian specializing on Ancient India and the history of Central Asia. He also published on the history of Russian emigration. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1988. In 2006 he was awarded India's third highest civilian award Padma Bhushan which ranked below Bharat Ratna and Padma Vibhushan for his contribution in the field of Ancient India history

#3484

Robert Pierce Forbes

#122652

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Robert Pierce Forbes is an American historian specializing in the politics and culture of the early American Republic, and the impact of slavery on the development of American institutions and modern society.

#3485

Eva Helen Ulvros

#100229

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Eva Helen Ulvros is a Swedish historian and author. She is a professor at the University of Lund, where she specializes in the social development of gender identity and cultural aspects of history in Sweden. She is a native of Lund.

#3486

Robert E. Norton

#66160

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Robert Edward Norton is an American cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in European, and especially German, history and thought from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century.

#3487

David Bushnell

#81064

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

David Bushnell was an American academic and Latin American historian who has been called "The Father of the Colombianists." Bushnell, one of the first Americans to study Colombia, was considered one of the world's leading experts on the history of Colombia. He regarded it as one of the least studied countries in Latin America by academic scholars in the United States and Europe, and was considered the first American historian to study and introduce Colombian history as an academic field in the United States.

#3488

Margaret D. Jacobs

#100074

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Margaret Davis Jacob. b. Jan. 31, 1963 Early life and education Jacobs was born on January 31, 1963. She grew up in Colorado but also lived in California and Oregon. Jacobs completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in history at Stanford University in 1986 before enrolling at the University of California, Davis for her graduate degrees.

#3489

Jean-François Berdah

#41255

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Jean-François Berdah is associate professor at the Department of History at the University of Toulouse II - Le Mirail . Biography Jean-François Berdah was born in Paris in 1961. He first studied at the University of Paris X Nanterre , at the University of Göttingen , at the European Institute of High International Studies in Strasbourg and finally at the Casa de Velázquez . He held DAAD scholarships in 1983–1984 and 1988, and promoted in 1996 at Paris 12 Val de Marne University. He was elected at the University of Toulouse II - Le Mirail in 1998. His lectures are focused on Modern European ...

#3490

Augustin Deac

#107311

Overall Influence

1928 - 2004 (76 years)

Augustin Deac was a Romanian author and history professor. Biography Augustin Deac was born in Giurtelecu Şimleului, Transylvania, into a Greek Catholic family. His early school years were at Şimleul Silvaniei and Zalău. He graduated from the Faculty of History and Archaeology, University of Cluj, as assistant to the academician Constantin Daicoviciu. He was awarded his doctorate at the University of Bucharest, where he was a lead researcher in the Institute of History and Political Studies.

#3491

Ken Coates

#36746

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Ken Coates is a Canadian historian focused on the history of the Canadian North and Aboriginal rights and indigenous claims. His other areas of specialization include Arctic sovereignty; science, technology and society, with an emphasis on Japan; world and comparative history; and post-secondary education. Coates is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, and Director, International Centre for Northern Governance and Development at the University of Saskatchewan. In 2015, Coates was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Societ...

#3492

Cynthia Eagle Russett

#67764

Overall Influence

1937 - 2013 (76 years)

Cynthia Eagle Russett was an American historian, noted for her studies of 19th century American intellectual history, and women and gender. Russett was born Cynthia Eagle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 1, 1937. She studied history as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., earning a bachelor's degree, and then did graduate work at Yale University, earning a Master's from Yale in 1959 and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1964. Her dissertation was awarded Yale's highest honor for American history dissertations, the George Washington Eggleston Prize.

#3493

Tim Lewens

#40095

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Tim Lewens is a professor in the history and philosophy of biology, medicine, and bioethics at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Lewens is a Fellow of Clare College, where he serves as Director of Studies in Philosophy and he is a member of the academic staff and lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science .

#3494

Philippa Levine

#90017

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Philippa Judith Amanda Levine, FRAI, FRHistS, is a historian of the British Empire, gender, race, science and technology. She has spent most of her career in the United States and has been Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Walter Prescott Webb Professor in History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin.

#3495

Carole Shammas

#113142

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Carole Shammas is an American historian, academic and author. She holds the John R. Hubbard Chair Emeritus in history at the University of Southern California and previously served as the department chair from 2000–03. Her work has explored socioeconomic history of North America, Great Britain and the Atlantic World prior to the mid-nineteenth century. She has written books and articles on the subjects of inheritance, consumption, and household government. Her daughter is the musician Julia Holter.

#3496

Marie-Françoise Baslez

#98535

Overall Influence

1946 - 2022 (76 years)

Marie-Françoise Baslez was a French historian and academic. She specialized in Hellenistic Judaism and primitive Christianity and the persecution faced by the two religious groups. Biography Baslez was born on 5 May 1946 in Angers and took preparatory classes in Versailles before enrolling at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1966. After earning an agrégation in history, she defended her thesis under the direction of the Hellenist André Laronde. She then taught at the École normale supérieure for nearly 15 years and subsequently from Rennes 2 University and Paris-East Créteil University.

#3497

Knight Biggerstaff

#82281

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Knight Biggerstaff was an American historian of China. Education Biggerstaff was born in Berkeley, California and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1927. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1934. He was the first Harvard-Yenching Fellow to study at Yenching University in Beijing, and later a Fulbright Scholar, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

#3498

Alan I. Marcus

#101578

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Alan I. Marcus is the author of the history textbook Building Western Civilization: From the Advent of Writing to the Age of Steam He is also the author of works focusing on the History of Technology, Science, Medicine, Intellectual History, and the History of Agriculture. His most recent work Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875-1915 was published in 2018 by the University of Alabama Press. He was a professor of history at Iowa State University from 1980 to 2005. He started his position as the head of the history department at Mississippi State University in 2005 and is currently in said position.

#3499

Edward D. Ives

#58062

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Edward Dawson Ives was an American folklorist. His work concentrated on the oral traditions of Maine and the Maritime Provinces of Canada, particularly, as he said, "on local songs and their makers but also on cycles of tales about local heroes." He founded the Maine Folklore Center in 1992 and was its director until his retirement in 1998.

#3500

Heather J. Sharkey

Heather J. Sharkey

#50017

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Heather J. Sharkey is an American historian of the Middle East and Africa, and of the modern Christian and Islamic worlds. Her books and articles have covered topics relating to nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial studies, missionary movements, religious communities, and language politics, especially in Egypt and Sudan. She is currently Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

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