Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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List of the most influential people in History,

#3501

Étienne Fouilloux

#61168

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Etienne Fouilloux is a French university teacher primarily interested in the history of tensions within the twentieth century French Roman Catholic Church and the contemporary publication of works of Christian antiquity.

#3502

Ronald W. Zweig

#112298

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Ronald W. Zweig is an Australian-Israeli historian specializing in Hebrew and Judaic studies, with particular reference to the British Mandate in Palestine. He is currently the Marilyn and Henry Taub Professor of Israel Studies at New York University .

#3503

Elías Pino Iturrieta

Elías Pino Iturrieta

#91316

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Elías Pino Iturrieta is a Venezuelan writer and historian. He served as Director of the Venezuelan Academy of History, which he joined on 27 February 1997. Is Director of the Institute for Historical Research at Andrés Bello Catholic University, since 1999. He graduated from UCV in 1962, and obtained a doctorate from El Colegio de México in 1969.

#3504

Fernando Picó

#42721

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Fernando Picó Bauermeister, S.J. was a Puerto Rican Jesuit, historian and academic. Picó was a leading expert on the history of Puerto Rico and was considered an authority on the island's 20th century history. One of his best known works, Historia General de Puerto Rico, is widely utilized in Puerto Rican history curricula. He was a professor of history at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, from 1972 until his death in 2017.

#3505

W. Taylor Reveley III

W. Taylor Reveley III

#35405

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Walter Taylor Reveley III is an American legal scholar and former lawyer. He served as the twenty-seventh president of the College of William & Mary. Formerly Dean of its law school from August 1998 to February 2008, Reveley was appointed interim president of William & Mary on February 12, 2008, following Gene Nichol's resignation earlier that day, and was elected the university's 27th president by the Board of Visitors on September 5, 2008. While president, Reveley continued his service as the John Stewart Bryan Professor of Jurisprudence at the law school.

#3506

Maurice Vaïsse

#65432

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Maurice Vaïsse is a French historian specialised in international relations and Defence. He is an editorial board member on Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies. Biography Vaïsse graduated with a History Agrégation in 1967. He has been a professor of contemporary history at Reims university, and is now a professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, where he teaches history of international relations. Since 2008, he has headed the scientific council for historical research at the Ministry of Defence.

#3507

Michael Engh

#68489

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Michael Eric Engh is an American Jesuit priest, academic and historian. He was the 28th President of Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California from January 5, 2009 to June 30, 2019. Biography Engh is a third generation Californian. He is a historian specializing in the history of California and the American West and previously was a professor of history at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He was also the dean of Loyola Marymount's Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts before becoming president of Santa Clara University.

#3508

Gerald Steinacher

#69335

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Gerald Steinacher is Professor of History and Hymen Rosenberg Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After serving at the South Tyrolean Regional Archives in Bozen, he was a Joseph A. Schumpeter Research Fellow at Harvard University during 2010-2011 and in 2009 a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He lectured at the Universities of Innsbruck , Luzern and Munich . In 2006 he was a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

#3509

Sulev Vahtre

#78993

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

Sulev Vahtre was an eminent Estonian historian. Vahtre was born in Laiuse Parish . He ended his studyings in University of Tartu in 1955 and worked there until 1993. He studied Estonian agrarian history, medieval chronicles, cultural history, Estonia's Christianization in the 13th century and St. George's Night Uprising. In 1973 he received a PhD. In 1989 Vahtre reestablished the chair of Estonian history University of Tartu and was its chairman until his retirement in 1993. Until his death in Tartu he was the most important historian in Estonia, the chief editor of the sequence of Estonian ...

#3510

Rolena Adorno

#52979

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Rolena Adorno is an American humanities scholar, the Spanish Sterling Professor at Yale University and bestselling author. Writing in 2001, and in the context of a favorable review of a "magnificent study" that she coauthored, James Axtell called her "perhaps the preeminent student of colonial Latin American literature".

#3511

Robert W. Scribner

#92595

Overall Influence

1941 - 1998 (57 years)

Robert William Scribner was an Australian historian. Scribner held bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Sydney. After writing his Ph.D. in 1970, he completed a study on the Reformation in Erfurt, published in Past & Present . His first teaching assignment followed at the Portsmouth Polytechnic. From 1979 to 1981 he taught at King's College London. Subsequently, Scribner taught as a fellow at Clare College, where he became one of the founders of early modern research, along with Patrick Collinson and Peter Burke. In 1996, he was appointed to the Department of Religious History at Harvard University.

#3512

Jean Richard

#49067

Overall Influence

1921 - 2021 (100 years)

Jean Barthélémy Richard was a French historian, who specialized in medieval history. He was an authority on the Crusades, and his work on the Latin missions in Asia has been qualified as "unsurpassed". Richard was a member of the Institut de France. He was President of the prestigious Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 2002. He was born in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France in February 1921. Richard died in January 2021, two weeks shy of his 100th birthday.

#3513

Kate Larson

#80007

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Kate Clifford Larson is an American historian and Harriet Tubman scholar. Her 2003 biography of Harriet Tubman, Bound for the Promised Land was one of the first non-juvenile Tubman biographies published in six decades. Larson is the consultant for the Harriet Tubman Special Resource Study of the National Park Service and serves on the advisory board of the Historic Context on the Underground Railroad in Delaware, Underground Railroad Coalition of Delaware.

#3514

Alexander H. Joffe

#66241

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Alexander H. Joffe Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian of the Near East. Joffe graduated from Cornell University in 1981 with a B.A in History and received a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona in 1991.

#3515

T. M. Devine

#46938

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Sir Thomas Martin Devine is a Scottish academic and author, who specializes in the history of Scotland. He is known for his overviews of modern Scottish history. He is an advocate of the total history approach to the history of Scotland. Before his retirement, he was a professor at the University of Strathclyde, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh.

#3516

Dan Healey

#54264

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Dan Healey is a Canadian and English historian and Slavist. He is a pioneer of the study of the history of homosexuality in Russia. In 1981 he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Russian Language and Literature at the University of Toronto. In the 1980s he worked in the tourism industry in Canada, Great Britain, and the USSR. In the 1990s, he returned to academia and in 1998 completed the Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.

#3517

Xavier Casals

#24824

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Xavier Casals Meseguer is a Spanish historian specialized in the field of the far-right. Biography Born in 1963 in Barcelona, he has authored several works about the Far right, featuring studies both about the Spanish Neo-nazi and far right scene, as about an international comparative context. He has co-authored a biography of Miguel Primo de Rivera. He also has studied the phenomenon of populism.

#3518

Julio Crespo MacLennan

#111280

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Julio Crespo MacLennan is a Spanish academic, historian and published author. He holds a senior fellowship at the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies in the London School of Economics.

#3519

Krzysztof Buchowski

#123387

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Krzysztof Buchowski is a Polish historian at Institute of History at University of Białystok. He specializes in Central and Eastern European history in 19th-20th century and Polish-Lithuanian relations.

#3520

John F. Sweets

#56454

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

John F. Sweets is an American historian of modern French history specializing in the Vichy France era, the French Resistance, and occupied France. Early life John F. Sweets graduated from Florida State University. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1972.

#3521

Cécile Morrisson

#103876

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Cécile Morrisson is a French historian and numismatist. She is Director of Research emeritus at the French National Center for Scientific Research and specializes in the study of the Byzantine Empire.

#3522

Zbigniew Karpus

#70190

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Zbigniew Klemens Karpus is a Polish historian. Professor of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, where he is the director of Institute of International Relations, he is the author of several books and dozens of articles. He specialized in the relations between Poland and her eastern neighbours .

#3523

Kathryn M. Daynes

#95770

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Kathryn M. "Kathy" Daynes is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and a historian of Mormonism, specializing in Mormon polygamy. She was president of the Mormon History Association in 2008 and 2009.

#3524

Charles Royster

#78972

Overall Influence

1944 - 2020 (76 years)

Charles William Royster was an American historian and a Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University. Life He was born in Nashville, Tennessee on November 27, 1944, the only son of Ferd Neuman Royster of Robards, Kentucky, a United Methodist minister, and Laura Jean Royster of Carthage, Tennessee, an elementary school teacher . He moved with his parents and younger sister from Atlanta, Georgia to California in 1954, where, with the exception of his military duty, he continued to maintain residence until accepting a post-doctoral fellowship at College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, revising his dissertation for publication as his first book, A Revolutionary People at War.

#3525

Ana Ribeiro

#66354

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Ana María del Carmen Ribeiro Gutiérrez , known as Ana Ribeiro, is a Uruguayan historian, writer, and professor. Her works are based on essays and novels that relate historical events of the country.

#3526

Rod Kedward

#87516

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Harry Roderick Kedward was a British historian at the University of Sussex, known for his study of the French Resistance. Personal life Born in 1937 at Hawkhurst, Kent, Kedward spent his early life in Goldthorpe , Tenterden and in Bath, where he obtained a scholarship to attend Kingswood School. He then studied at Worcester College and St Antony's College, Oxford, before being recruited as a lecturer at the University of Sussex in 1962. He became professor of history in 1991.

#3527

Richard W. Lariviere

Richard W. Lariviere

#51406

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Richard W. Lariviere is a Sanskrit scholar and academic administrator. He served as the president of the University of Oregon from July 2009 until November 2011. From October 2012 until August 2020 he was the president of the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

#3528

Paul Garelli

#59243

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Paul Garelli was a French Assyriologist, directeur de recherche au CNRS, professor at the Sorbonne and the l'EPHE, a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and professor at the Collège de France.

#3529

Michael Brock

#49323

Overall Influence

1920 - 2014 (94 years)

Michael George Brock was a British historian who was associated with several Oxford colleges during his academic career. He was Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1978 to 1988. Youth and education Michael Brock was born in Bromley, Kent, England. His parents were Sir Laurence Brock, a civil servant for the British government, and Margery . He had an older brother, Patrick, and younger sister, Janet.

#3530

Harry L. Watson

#104728

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Harry L. Watson is an American historian of the antebellum American South, Jacksonian America, and the history of North Carolina. He is formerly the Director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. He also holds the title of the Atlanta Distinguished Professor in Southern Culture in the Department of History at UNC-Chapel Hill.

#3531

June Barrow-Green

June Barrow-Green

#39420

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

June Barrow-Green is a professor of History of Mathematics at the Open University and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Education Barrow-Green obtained a BSc Hons in Mathematics in 1986 and an MSc in Mathematical Physics in 1989, both from King's College London. In 1993 she gained a PhD in mathematics from the Open University, under supervision of Jeremy Gray, on Poincaré and the Three Body Problem.

#3532

Beverly Gage

#50196

Overall Influence

Beverly Gage is an American academic who is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. She was the director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, and also wrote The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror in 2009. In 2021, Gage was nominated to the National Council on the Humanities, and she was formerly a National Fellow for the Jefferson Scholars Foundation.

#3533

Laurie Fitzhardinge

#71008

Overall Influence

1908 - 1993 (85 years)

Laurence Frederic Fitzhardinge was an Australian historian and librarian. He was known as a pioneer of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and also as the official biographer of Billy Hughes . Biography Fitzhardinge was born in Chatswood, New South Wales. He was educated at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School before going on to the University of Sydney, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1930. He specialised in Classics, and continued his studies at New College, Oxford, where he was awarded a B.A. in 1932 and a B.Litt in 1933. Returning to Australia, in 1934 Fitzhardinge began wor...

#3534

Richard Graham

#89346

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Richard Graham is a Brazilian/American historian specializing in nineteenth-century Brazil. He was formerly Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin, and is now professor emeritus there. He served as president of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians.

#3535

Päivi Setälä

#72171

Overall Influence

1943 - 2014 (71 years)

Päivi Setälä was a Finnish historian and professor who influenced different areas of Finnish cultural life. She was one of the best advocates of Finnish women's research. In 1991, she became the first female professor of Women's Studies in Finland. She received the State Disclosure Award, Finnish Writers' Association's Warelius Award, and JV Snellman Award.

#3536

Joan D. Hedrick

#84894

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Joan Doran Hedrick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jack London. Early life and career Hedrick was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Paul Thomas Doran and Jane Connorton Doran.

#3537

Jan-Werner Müller

#67337

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Jan-Werner Müller is a German political philosopher and historian of political ideas working at Princeton University. Biography Born in Bad Honnef in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in 1970, Jan-Werner Müller studied at Free University of Berlin, University College London, the University of Oxford's St Antony’s College and Princeton University. He was Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford from 1996 to 2003 and a Fellow of St Antony’s College's European Studies Centre from 2003 to 2005. He has taught political theory and the history of political ideas at Princeton since 2005.

#3538

Keith David Watenpaugh

#32537

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Keith David Watenpaugh is an American academic. He is Professor of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis. A leading American historian of the contemporary Middle East, human rights, and modern humanitarianism, he is an expert on the Armenian genocide and its denial, and the role of the refugee in world history.

#3539

Yoneo Ishii

#55188

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

was a Japanese historian who specialized in the study of Thailand. Biography Ishii was born in Tokyo, Japan. After excepting a recommendation by his teacher in learning a Thai language, he went to Thailand. There, he was enrolled into the Chulalongkorn University and joined Ministry of Foreign Affairs shortly after. In 1958, due to his knowledge in history and religion of the region, he spent three months as a Buddhist priest at the Wat Bowonniwet temple in Bangkok. Later on, as a professor he joined Japanese Society of Ethnology and Osaka City University. From there, he traveled to such count...

#3540

Earl S. Pomeroy

#95132

Overall Influence

1915 - 2005 (90 years)

Earl Spencer Pomeroy was an American historian whose work focused on the Western United States. Pomeroy was born in Capitola, California. He received his B.A. from San Jose State College in 1936, and subsequently attended the University of California, Berkeley for graduate work, where he received his Ph.D. in 1940 under the direction of Frederic L. Paxson.

#3541

Deepak Kumar

#67678

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (39 years)

Deepak Kumar was a professor of History of Science and Education, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Kumar lectured at numerous universities within India and abroad, held visiting fellowships at the universities of Cambridge, London, Leiden, The Smithsonian Institution, etc. and has also taught at Wisconsin University, Madison, USA, and York University in Toronto, Canada.

#3542

John Ramsden

#97417

Overall Influence

1947 - 2009 (62 years)

John Ramsden was Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London until his retirement in 2008. He was an authority on the history of the Conservative Party. Biography Ramsden was born in Sheffield, the son of Cyril Ramsden, who worked for the National Coal Board, and his wife Mary Ramsden. He attended King Edward VII School in 1959–1966, followed by Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in modern history.

#3543

Graham Russell Gao Hodges

#106081

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Graham Russell Gao Hodges was born to Reverend Graham Rushing Hodges and Elsie Russell . His siblings include Janet, Mary and Judy. Hodges is the George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History and Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University and in 2006–07 was a Distinguished Fulbright Professor of History at Beijing University. He received a BA in 1973 and an MA in 1974 from City College of the City University of New York and a Ph.D. in early American history from New York University in 1982. Hodges, who once worked as a cab driver in New York City, has published works such as T...

#3544

Jeremy Smith

#76020

Overall Influence

Jeremy Smith is a historian whose research has focused on the non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union. Smith's work has challenged some of the Cold War views of Richard Pipes. Works

#3545

Kerstin von Lingen

#92167

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Kerstin von Lingen is a German military historian who specialises in the study of war crimes. She is best known for her works on Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and SS Obergruppenfuehrer Karl Wolff.

#3546

Olivier Picard

#71623

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Olivier Picard was a French archeologist. He was director of the French School at Athens and a member of the Institut de France. Biography Olivier Picard was born on 4 March 1940, as the eldest son of Gilbert Charles-Picard and Colette Picard, both historians and archaeologists, and the grandson of Hellenist Charles Picard. A student at the École normale supérieure , Olivier Picard obtained his agrégation of history in 1964 and became a member of the French School at Athens . He immediately began his academic career at the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense where he was appointed a pr...

#3547

Ernst Peter Fischer

#36074

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Ernst Peter Fischer is a German Historian of Science and Publicist. Life and work Ernst Peter Fischer studied mathematics, physics, and biology and graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. In 1987, he qualified as a university lecturer in the history of science, and taught as a professor at the University of Konstanz. Between 1989 and 1999 he was the publisher of the Mannheimer Forum. This position was previously held by Hoimar von Ditfurth.

#3548

Jerzy Linderski

#101928

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Jerzy Sever Linderski is a contemporary Polish scholar of ancient history and Roman religion and law. Currently George L. Paddison Professor of Latin Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jerzy Linderski is one of the foremost classical philologists and Roman historians of the modern era. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kraków in Poland in 1960. He has served on the faculties of the University of Oregon and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His scholarship has concentrated, in particular, on topics of Roman religion and augury, Roman law and Latin epigraphy.

#3549

Ago Pajur

#128640

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Ago Pajur is an Estonian historian. His principal fields of interest are the political history of Estonia in the first half of the 20th century, and the military history of Estonia in the 20th century.

#3550

Arthur Patrick

#38177

Overall Influence

1934 - 2013 (79 years)

Arthur Nelson Patrick was a Seventh-day Adventist theologian and historian. At the time of death, he was an honorary senior research fellow at Avondale College in New South Wales, Australia. He also worked in pastoral ministry, evangelism, religion teaching, academic administration, and hospital chaplaincy for the Seventh-day Adventist church.

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