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,

#3551

Gonzalo Anes

#75091

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Gonzalo Anes Álvarez de Castrillón was a Spanish economist, professor and historian. He was director of the Royal Academy of History. He was born in Trelles, Coaña, Asturias, and died on 31 March 2014 in Madrid.

#3552

Florian Steger

#49744

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Florian Steger is a German medical historian and medical ethicist. Life and impact Steger studied human medicine, classical philology and history at the University of Würzburg and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Steger was a scholarship holder and is now a trust lecturer of the German National Academic Foundation. In 2002, he received his doctorate from the Ruhr University of Bochum with a thesis on ancient medicine. In 2003, he received the Bavarian Habilitation Award. In 2008, he habilitated in the history and ethics of medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and worked as a private lecturer in the history and ethics of medicine.

#3553

Leila J. Rupp

#101292

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Leila J. Rupp is a historian, feminist, and professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an alumna of Bryn Mawr College, a member of the Seven Sisters women's colleges, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1972 as well as Ph.D. in 1976, both in history. Her areas of interest include women's movements, sexuality, and LGBT and women's history.

#3554

Simon J. Bronner

Simon J. Bronner

#56786

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Simon J. Bronner is an American folklorist, ethnologist, historian, sociologist, educator, college dean, and author. Life and career Bronner's parents were Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States from Israel in 1960. His childhood in the U.S. was spent in Chicago and New York City. His undergraduate study was in political science, history, and folklore at Binghamton University and then he received his M.A. in American Folk Culture at the Cooperstown Graduate Programs of the State University of New York , where he also studied social history, ethnology, and museum studies .

#3555

Stephen Ellis

#79298

Overall Influence

1953 - 2015 (62 years)

Stephen Ellis was a British historian and Africanist whose research focused on post-colonial West Africa and South Africa. He was a former editor of Africa Confidential and African Affairs, a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden, and a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

#3556

Madeleine Rebérioux

#34767

Overall Influence

1920 - 2005 (85 years)

Madeleine Rebérioux was a French historian whose specialty was the French Third Republic. She is also a historian of the Labour movement. From 1981 to 1988, she was Vice-president of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. From 1991 to 1995 she was President of the Ligue des droits de l'homme and had been a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121. She was an officer of the Légion d'honneur. Madeleine was an active board member of Le Mouvement Social and later became its editor. Madeleine was against the war in Vietnam. She was president of French league of human rights - la Ligue des droits de l'homme - ...

#3557

Raewyn Dalziel

#84747

Overall Influence

Raewyn Mary Dalziel is a New Zealand historian specialising in New Zealand social history. Career Dalziel was Vice Chancellor of the University of Auckland from 1999 to 2009. She is an emeritus professor of history at the university.

#3558

Joaquim Albareda

Joaquim Albareda

#86448

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Joaquim Albareda Salvadó , is the chairing professor of modern history at Pompeu Fabra University and former director of the Institut Universitari d'Història Jaume Vicens Vives at the same college. He is the head researcher of the research project España y los tratados de Utrecht , of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Grup d’estudi de les institucions i de la societat a la Catalunya moderna . Director of the history collection publication Referències from Eumo Editorial. During last years he has focused his research on the topic of the War of Spanish Succession and the polit...

#3559

Edward Potkowski

Edward Potkowski

#110645

Overall Influence

1934 - 2017 (83 years)

Edward Potkowski was a Polish historian. His specialization includes history of the medieval period and paleography. Edward Potkowski was born on 10 May 1934 in Rybnik. In 1954 he enrolled at the Uniwersytet Wrocławski, but since 1955 he had been studied on the Warsaw University. He graduated in 1960. Potkowski gained PhD in 1967. His supervisor was Tadeusz Manteuffel. In 1979 he passed his habilitation. From 1981 to 1986 he was a director of Central Archives of Historical Records.

#3560

Rudolf Pesch

#55512

Overall Influence

1936 - 2011 (75 years)

Rudolf Johannes Pesch was a German Catholic theologian . Life Rudolf Pesch studied history, German studies and theology at the University of Bonn and the University of Freiburg . In 1962 he passed his state examination. In 1963 he married Ingeborg van Meegen, with whom he had two children: Berthold and Friederike . In 1964 he earned his first doctorate as Dr. phil in Freiburg with the work Die kirchlich-politische Presse der Katholiken in Deutschland vor 1848 . In 1967 followed the promotion to Dr. theol. with the work Naherwartung. Tradition und Redaktion in Markus 13 . After being scientif...

#3561

Ibrahim K. Sundiata

#124556

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Ibrahim K. Sundiata is an American scholar of West African and African-American history. He received his undergraduate education at Ohio Wesleyan University , and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, where he studied under Ivor Wilks. He is currently the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African-American Studies at Brandeis University.

#3562

Serafina Cuomo

#69291

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Serafina Cuomo is an Italian historian and professor at Durham University. Cuomo specialises in the history of ancient mathematics, including the computing practices in ancient Rome and Pappos, and also with the history of technology.

#3563

E. H. H. Green

#84139

Overall Influence

1958 - 2006 (48 years)

Ewen Henry Harvey Green , known as E.H.H. Green or Ewen Green, was a British historian famed for his work on 20th-century Britain and, in particular, the history of the 20th-century Conservative Party.

#3564

Katrina Honeyman

#89275

Overall Influence

1950 - 2011 (61 years)

Katrina Honeyman was a British economic historian and Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Leeds. Much of her work focused on the role of women and children in industrialisation in Britain.

#3565

Roy Starrs

#38765

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Roy Starrs is a British-Canadian scholar of Japanese literature and culture who teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has written critical studies of the major Japanese writers Yasunari Kawabata, Naoya Shiga, Osamu Dazai, and Yukio Mishima, and edited books on Asian nationalism , globalization, pan-Asianism, Japanese modernism, and cultural responses to disaster in Japan. He has also published essays on Japan-related topics such as the Kojiki, Lafcadio Hearn, and Japanese calligraphy.

#3566

Andrzej Nadolski

#75407

Overall Influence

1921 - 1993 (72 years)

Andrzej Nadolski was a Polish historian, specializing in Polish military history, an archaeologist, and professor. During World War II he was a member of Armia Krajowa. Rector of University of Łódź from 1968 to 1969, he resigned in protest over the 1968 Polish political crisis.

#3567

Emerson Baker

#114610

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Emerson "Tad" Baker II is a historical archaeologist and professor of history at Salem State University. He is well known in academic circles for his extensive work on witchcraft in Colonial America, as well as for his work on numerous archaeological sites along the East Coast of the United States. He currently resides in York, Maine.

#3568

Nira Wickramasinghe

Nira Wickramasinghe

#92432

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Nira Konjit Wickramasinghe is professor of modern South Asian studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a well known international academic. She was a professor in the department of history and international relations, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, until 2009. She grew up in Paris and studied at the University of Paris IV - Sorbonne from 1981 to 1984 and at the University of Oxford from 1985 to 1989, where she earned her doctorate in modern history. She joined the University of Colombo in 1990 and taught there until 2009. She has been a World Bank Robert McNamara fellow, a Fulbri...

#3569

Peter Spufford

#82346

Overall Influence

1934 - 2017 (83 years)

Peter Spufford, was a British historian and academic, specialising in the economics of Medieval Europe. He was Professor Emeritus of European History at the University of Cambridge. Early life and education Spufford was born on 18 August 1934. He was educated at Kingswood School, a private school in Bath, Somerset. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1963.

#3570

Nayan Shah

#79936

Overall Influence

Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at University of Southern California. He received his doctoral degree in history at the University of Chicago and previously worked as a professor of history at University of California, San Diego and Binghamton University.

#3571

Doris Bergen

#79608

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Doris Leanna Bergen is a Canadian academic and Holocaust historian. She is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, the only endowed chair in Canada in Holocaust history. Bergen is also a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2018.

#3572

Enzo Collotti

#130545

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Enzo Collotti was an Italian historian and academic. He taught contemporary history at the University of Florence, the University of Bologna, and the University of Trieste. He is considered an important historian of the Italian resistance and in the study of Nazism. He was married to his colleague Enrica Pischel.

#3573

Nicole Bacharan

Nicole Bacharan

#53270

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Nicole Bacharan is a French historian and political scientist specializing in American society and French-American relations. She is a researcher with the National Foundation for Political Science and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California from 2013 to 2014.

#3574

Sheldon Garon

#84019

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies, professor of history, and professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University. He specialized in modern and contemporary Japanese history with interests also in transnational history and the history of ideas between Asia, Europe, and the United States. His prior research has also focused on the relationship between the state and society.

#3575

Dominique Charpin

#45770

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Dominique Charpin is a French Assyriologist, professor at the Collège de France, and corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, specialized in the "Old-Babylonian" period.

#3576

Victoria Johnson

Victoria Johnson

#53844

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Victoria Johnson is an American author and historian. She is a Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. Early life and education Johnson was born and raised in Ithaca, New York. She attended Yale University for her Bachelor of Arts degree and Columbia University for a PhD in Sociology. Her sister, Elizabeth Kostova, is also an author.

#3577

Josefina Muriel

#33081

Overall Influence

1918 - 2008 (90 years)

Josefina Muriel de la Torre was a Mexican writer, historian, researcher, bibliophile, and academic. She specialized in the history of the feminine and religious world of the time of New Spain. She was awarded the Order of Isabella the Catholic by the government of Spain in 1966.

#3578

Deborah Sugg Ryan

#40452

Overall Influence

Deborah Sugg Ryan is a British design historian, Professor of Design History and Theory and Associate Dean at the University of Portsmouth. Sugg Ryan was previously Associate Professor of History and Theory of Design at Falmouth University.

#3579

Igor Yefimov

#43802

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Igor Markovich Yefimov or Igor Efimov was an American philosopher, historian, writer and publisher of Russian origin. Some of his works were published under the pen name Andrei Moscovit. Together with , Sergei Dovlatov, , and , he founded the Leningrad writers' group "Townspeople" , whose works circulated in samizdat. He was also the founder of Hermitage Publishers; a company specializing in Russian writers.

#3580

Zoe Petre

#100529

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

Zoe Petre was a Romanian classical scholar and politician. From 1986 Petre was Dean of the Faculty of History at the University of Bucharest, and from 1996 to 2000 she was a presidential advisor to the Romanian president Emil Constantinescu.

#3581

Kenneth Waltzer

#50884

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Kenneth Alan "Kenny" Waltzer is an American historian and educator, formerly director of the Jewish Studies program at Michigan State University . His research on the Buchenwald concentration camp has focused on the rescue of children and youths inside the camp and has included some notable findings.

#3582

David Cressy

#88854

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

David Cressy is a British-born historian and Humanities Distinguished Professor of History, formerly at The Ohio State University. His specialty is the social history of early modern England, a topic on which he has published a number of monographs including Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England and England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 .

#3583

Vydas Dolinskas

#123054

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Vydas Dolinskas is Lithuanian art critic, art historian, director of Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania. Dolinskas went to Jonava 3rd Middle School from 1977 to 1988. 1988–1993 he studied at the Faculty of History at Vilnius University. In 1992, he studied at the University of Salzburg, Faculty of Humanities and Art History Institute. From 1993 to 1998 he was a doctoral student at Vilnius University. Dolinskas defended his doctoral thesis about Simonas Kosakovskis. Since 1996, he was a lecturer at Vilnius University, Faculty of History. Since 2009, he was director of Palace of the Grand D...

#3584

Lynette Russell

#55316

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Lynette Wendy Russell, is an Australian historian, known for her work on the history of Indigenous Australians; in particular, anthropological history ; archaeology; gender and race, Indigenous oral history, and museum studies.

#3585

Richard A. Long

#39485

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Richard A. Long was an American cultural historian and author, who has been called "one of the great pillars of African-American arts and culture". As an academic, he taught at University of Pennsylvania, University of Paris, University of Poitiers, Atlanta University, Emory University, Morgan State College and West Virginia State College, and had worked as a visiting lecturer at universities in Africa and India.

#3586

Arthur Eckstein

#94709

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Arthur M. Eckstein is an American historian and writer who is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maryland-College Park. Bibliography Senate and General: Individual Decision-Making and Roman Foreign Relations, 264-194 B.C. Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome. University of California Press, 2006.Rome Enters the Greek East: From Anarchy to Hierarchy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, 230-188 B.C. Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution. 2016.

#3587

Paul du Quenoy

#70589

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Paul du Quenoy is an American publisher, critic, historian, and philanthropist. He is President and Publisher of Academica Press, an international non-fiction publisher based in Washington, DC, and London.

#3588

Paul Jankowski

#76574

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Paul Jankowski is an American historian and the Raymond Ginger Professor of History Emeritus at Brandeis University. Raised in Europe and the United States, Jankowski attended Balliol College, Oxford for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees, completing his doctoral dissertation on Simon Sabiani and the rise of fascism and the French Parti Populaire Français in Marseille.

#3589

Harold L. Kahn

#76923

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Harold L. Kahn was an American historian. He was a professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, and the author of a book about Imperial China. Early life Kahn was born on November 15, 1930, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He graduated from Williams College, and he earned a PhD in History from Harvard University.

#3590

Martyn Lyons

#90167

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Martyn Lyons is emeritus professor of history and European studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is a specialist in the history of the book, Australian history and French history.

#3591

Dominik Gross

#58120

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Dominik Gross is a German bioethicist and historian of medicine. He is Professor and Director of the Institute of History, Theory and Ethics in Medicine at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Education Gross studied dentistry and medicine at Saarland University and the University of Ulm as well as history, philosophy and archaeology at Saarland University. After completing his habilitation thesis in history, theory and ethics of medicine at the University of Würzburg, Bavaria, he worked as a lecturer at the Universities of Würzburg, Ratisbon and Ulm.

#3592

Catherine Allgor

#88117

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Catherine Allgor is an American historian focusing on women and early American history; she has written and lectured extensively on Dolley Madison and the founding generation of American women. Since 2017 she has served as the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Previously Allgor was appointed to the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation by President Barack Obama and has served as the Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Formerly she was a Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University o...

#3593

Melvin I. Urofsky

#62478

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Melvin I. Urofsky is an American historian, and professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1961 and doctorate in 1968. He also received his JD from the University of Virginia. He teaches at American University and George Washington University Law School.

#3594

Patricia Herlihy

#116356

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Patricia Herlihy was an American historian and author specializing in Russian and Soviet history. Early life When Herlihy was six months old her recently divorced mother moved to China, where they lived for five years. During this time, she learned Chinese, German and some English.

#3595

Claudio Véliz

#53628

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

Claudio Véliz is an economic historian, sociologist and author from Chile, who has held numerous academic posts in various institutions of higher learning including La Trobe University , Harvard and Boston University.

#3596

Harris Lenowitz

#47107

Overall Influence

Harris Lenowitz is a professor of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah. He specializes in Hebraic studies, particularly the writings of the 18th-century Jewish messiah claimant Jacob Frank and the use of Hebrew in Christian art in the West.

#3597

Sergey Averintsev

Sergey Averintsev

#43555

Overall Influence

1937 - 2004 (67 years)

Sergey Sergeyevich Averintsev was a Russian literary scholar, Byzantinist and Slavist. Biography Averintsev was the son of the biologist Sergey Vasilyevich Averintsev. He studied classical philology in Moscow and received in 1967 with a thesis on Plutarch the title of Candidate of the Sciences. In 1979, he became a Doctor of Sciences with a thesis on Byzantine poetry.

#3598

Robert B. Westbrook

#73498

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Robert Brett Westbrook is an American historian and Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History at the University of Rochester. Life Westbrook graduated from Yale University in 1972, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with exceptional distinction in history. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1981. Westbrook has taught at Scripps College, and Yale University. His first book, a reformulation and expansion of his thesis, John Dewey and American Democracy, is considered the best intellectual biography of the influential pragmatist philosopher. Westbrook has been described by Cheryl ...

#3599

David Bankier

#91617

Overall Influence

1947 - 2010 (63 years)

David Bankier was a Holocaust historian and head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. Biography David Bankier was born on January 19, 1947 , in the Zeckendorf DP camp in the Bamberg district, Oberfranken, Germany, in the then American Occupation Zone. His parents were Holocaust survivors from Ukraine and Poland. From there his family migrated first to Israel and then to Argentina . Bankier grew up in Argentina; he studied at a public school and at a Jewish school where he consolidated his knowledge of the Hebrew language. In his youth he participated in Zionist activity and in 1967 immigrated to Israel.

#3600

Richard Berthold

#103807

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Richard Martin Berthold is an American classical historian, an associate professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of two books on classical history, and is also known for his controversial positions on politics and religion.

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