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,

#3651

Halima Ferhat

#83625

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Halima Ferhat is a Moroccan historian, specialist in the Middle Ages of the Maghreb and professor at the Mohammed V University. She was also Director of the Institute of African Studies in Rabat. Works

#3652

John B. Duff

#56218

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

John Bernard Duff was an American historian born in South Orange, New Jersey, on July 1, 1931, to John Bernard Duff, Sr. and Mary Cunningham Duff. He was the oldest of four brothers: Thomas, Joseph and Peter Duff. He graduated from Our Lady of the Valley High School in 1949.

#3653

Janet Oppenheim

#13683

Overall Influence

1948 - 1994 (46 years)

Janet Oppenheim was an American historian. Oppenheim was born in Manhattan. In 1975, she received her PhD in history from Columbia University. She worked as a professor of history at American University.

#3654

JaHyun Kim Haboush

#64676

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

JaHyun Kim Haboush was a Korean American scholar of Korean history and literature. Haboush was the King Sejong Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University when she died in New York City in 2011.

#3655

Robert Soucy

#45655

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Robert Soucy is an American historian, specializing in French fascist movements between 1924 and 1939, French fascist intellectuals Maurice Barrès and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, European fascism, twentieth-century European intellectual history, and Marcel Proust's aesthetics of reading.

#3656

James N. Green

#78112

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

James Naylor Green is the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and Professor of Brazilian History and Culture at Brown University. Early life and education Green was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Earlham College from 1968–72, where he studied political science and German. In 1992, he received a Master's degree with honors in Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. In 1996 he received a doctorate in Latin American history from University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus on Brazil.

#3657

Margalit Finkelberg

Margalit Finkelberg

#20900

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Margalit Finkelberg is an Israeli historian and linguist. She is the professor emerita of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2005 and served as president of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies from 2011 to 2016.In 2021, she was elected Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

#3658

Anson Rabinbach

Anson Rabinbach

#87456

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Anson Gilbert Rabinbach is a historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University. He is best known for his writings on labor, Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1973 he co-founded the journal New German Critique, which he continues to co-edit.

#3659

Thomas Dublin

#90940

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Thomas Dublin is an American historian, editor and professor at Binghamton University. He is a social historian specialized in the working-class experience in the United States, particularly throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic states.

#3660

Charles Webster

#44772

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Charles Webster, FBA, is a historian and retired academic specialising in the history of medicine and science. He was Reader in the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 1988 , and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, from 1988 to 2004. Webster was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1982.

#3661

Eric J. Evans

#47243

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Eric J. Evans was a British historian who was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Lancaster and was Chair and vice-president of the Social History Society. Education His first degree was from the University of Oxford and his PhD was from the University of Warwick . His specialist research interests included: British political history since the eighteenth century; the history of social policy; how social change affects the political process; British national identities.

#3662

Anna Geifman

#85546

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Anna Geifman is an American historian. Her fields of interest include political extremism, terrorism, and the history of Russian revolutionary movements. Biography Geifman was born in 1962 in Leningrad, Soviet Union, and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, with her parents in 1976. She received her BA from Boston University in 1984 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1990 under Professor Richard Pipes.

#3663

Eduardo Obregón Pagán

#126961

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Eduardo Obregón Pagán is the Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History at Arizona State University, and one of the hosts of the PBS popular series History Detectives since 2008. Biography A native of Mesa, Arizona, Eduardo Pagán received his BA from Arizona State University in 1987, an M.A. from the University of Arizona in 1989, another MA from Princeton University in 1991, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1996. While at Princeton he was an exchange scholar at Yale University.

#3664

Marvin Gettleman

#75203

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Marvin E. Gettleman , was an American professor emeritus of leftist history, best known for the anthology Vietnam and America . Background Gettleman was born on September 12, 1933, in New York City. His parents were Arthur A. Gettleman and Pauline Antipol. In 1957, he graduated from the City College of New York and, in 1972, he earned a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University.

#3665

William Kilbourn

#76171

Overall Influence

1926 - 1995 (69 years)

William Morley Kilbourn was a Canadian author, historian, professor, and politician. Kilbourn wrote on various topics in Canadian history, including economics, religion, and biography. After studying at Oxford and Harvard during the 1950s, in 1962 Kilbourn joined the faculty at York University. From 1962 to 1967 he served as the chairman of its humanities division. In 1969, Kilbourn was elected to Toronto City Council and remained an alderman until 1976. Along with his academic activities, Kilbourn was an active member of the Liberal Party of Canada.

#3666

Peter Duus

#88523

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Peter Duus was an American Japanologist, historian, and translator. He was emeritus professor of history at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2000–2001.

#3667

Claire Langhamer

#85842

Overall Influence

Claire Louise Langhamer, FRHistS , is a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Since 2021, Professor Langhamer serves as director of the Institute of Historical Research. Career After growing up in North Humberside, she attended the University of Manchester, graduating with a history degree in 1991. She subsequently completed her doctorate under the supervision of Dave Russell at the University of Central Lancashire; she was awarded her PhD in 1996 for her thesis and leisure in Manchester, 1920–c.1960. In 1998, Langhamer started working as an academic at the University of Sussex as a...

#3668

Nancy Langston

#17626

Overall Influence

Nancy Langston is an American environmental historian, currently working as a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. She was the President of the American Society of Environmental History from 2007 to 2009. Her initial research on the historical and spatial migrations of toxic contaminants within the Lake Superior basin was supported by the National Science Foundation, and has informed her most recent publication titled Toxic Bodies. Langston is a Marshall Scholar.

#3669

Gunnar Broberg

#87079

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Gunnar Broberg was professor in History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden, appointed in 1990. Broberg has written about the compulsory sterilization activities in Sweden and extensively about the scientist Carl Linnaeus. In 2005 he was elected Chair of the Royal Humanistic Scientific Society in Lund . He was the editor of the book Gyllene äpplen , which won the August Prize in 1992.

#3670

Neal Wood

#38882

Overall Influence

1922 - 2003 (81 years)

Neal Norman Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist scholar of the history of political thought. He located political ideas within social relations, property forms, and popular struggles, writing on topics as variant as the British Communist Party, John Locke, Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Augustine of Hippo.

#3671

Ben Shephard

#38617

Overall Influence

1948 - 2017 (69 years)

Ben Shephard was an English historian, author, and television producer. He was educated at Diocesan College, Cape Town, and Westminster School. He graduated in history from Oxford University and made many historical documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, including producer of The World at War and The Nuclear Age. He died on 25 October 2017 at the age of 69.

#3672

Ute Deichmann

#39043

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Ute Deichmann is an historian of modern life sciences. She is adjunct full professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where she was the founding director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences in 2007 and continues to be the director. She has also been an associate professor at the University of Cologne, Germany since 2011.

#3673

Edvard Beyer

#75481

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

Edvard Freydar Beyer was a Norwegian literary historian, literary critic, and professor at the University of Oslo from 1958 to 1990. Early and personal life Beyer was born in Haugesund and grew up in Bergen, as a son of literary historian, later professor Harald Beyer , and Eidis Johannessen . He was married to nurse Aslaug Ryssdal from 1946.

#3674

Paul Moorcraft

#23117

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Paul Leslie Moorcraft is the director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis in London and a visiting professor at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. Biography

#3675

Jordan Sand

#44381

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Jordan Sand is an American Japanologist. He is a professor of Japanese history and culture at Georgetown University with a focus on the architectural and cultural history of Japan. Biography Sand received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and a M.E. from the University of Tokyo in architectural history. His specialization is the urban and architectural history of Japan. He is also an affiliated researcher at Waseda University.

#3676

Mart Laar

#49369

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Mart Laar is an Estonian politician and historian. He served as the Prime Minister of Estonia from 1992 to 1994 and from 1999 to 2002. Laar is credited with having helped bring about Estonia's rapid economic development during the 1990s. He is a member of the centre-right Isamaa party.

#3677

Deian Hopkin

#33702

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Sir Deian Rhys Hopkin is an academic and historian, former vice chancellor and former President of the National Library of Wales. From 2013 to 2020, he served as Chair of Wales Remembers 1914-1918 and was expert adviser to the First Minister of Wales for the Centenary of the First World War. Hopkin was from 2001 until 2009 vice-chancellor and chief executive of London South Bank University, England. From 2011 to 2015, he was president of the National Library of Wales. He is a historian, originally from Wales and a fluent Welsh speaker.

#3678

Sabine G. MacCormack

#59581

Overall Influence

1941 - 2012 (71 years)

Sabine MacCormack was a German-American historian of Late Antiquity and Colonial Latin America. Life Born Sabine Oswalt in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1941, she grew up seeing the turmoil and violence of World War II. After receiving her Abitur from a Classical Gymnasium, she studied Classical Philology and History at the Goethe University Frankfurt from 1960-1961, but then switched to studying Modern History at the University of Oxford. After graduating from Oxford with her B.A. in 1964, she earned a diploma in archives from the University of Liverpool in 1965 and then worked as a Teaching Fellow in Classics and Legal History at the University of Sydney until 1967.

#3679

Don H. Doyle

#69350

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Don H. Doyle is an American historian author. He specializes in Civil War history and historiography. He is well known for his books Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha and The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War.

#3680

Gary D. Solis

#32076

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Gary Dean Solis is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and an adjunct professor of law who teaches the laws of war at the Georgetown University Law Center and the George Washington University Law School.

#3681

Michel Vergé-Franceschi

#100938

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Michel Vergé-Franceschi is a French naval historian. Biography Michel Vergé-Franceschi started teaching History in secondary education at Le Havre at collège Viviani, at the Lycée polyvalent Claude Monet, at the Lycée régional François 1er and at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, Normandy, where he was also responsible for the academic plan for teaching History. He earned a PhD in History in 1980 with a dissertation l'École Royale de Marine du Havre and a second PhD in 1987 at Paris X Nanterre with Les officiers généraux de la marine royale. He then went on to head the Maritime History Laborato...

#3682

Bruce Chadwick

#84180

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Bruce Chadwick spent 23 years as a journalist with the New York Daily News before earning a doctorate in American history in 1994 at Rutgers University, where he now teaches part-time. Writing career Chadwick is a professor, historian, lecturer and author of over 28 books, including works on the American Civil War and a lengthy series on the general history of baseball in the United States, as well as books on some individual professional teams, such as the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs. In addition to his baseball publications on Major League topics, Chadwick has written a...

#3683

Thomas Ernst Josef Wiedemann

#76516

Overall Influence

1950 - 2001 (51 years)

Thomas Ernst Josef Wiedemann was a German-British historian. Life Thomas Wiedemann was born in Karlsruhe on 14 May 1950. His grandmother was Jewish and his father Heinrich had the luck that he wasn't sent to a concentration camp in the East. He was able to hide with a Catholic priest and thereby survive the second World War. After the war the family lived in Baden, but moved to London in 1953. Wiedemann was educated at the Finchley Catholic Grammar School , whereupon he started a study at the Hertford College of the University of Oxford. After successfully completing his studies, he would continue researching for two more years as a postgraduate.

#3684

Bernard Vogler

#86586

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Bernard Vogler was a French academic and historian. A professor at the University of Strasbourg, he was a specialist in the History of Alsace from the 15th to the 20th Centuries. Biography Bernard was the son of carpenter Georges Vogler and Catherine Merckling. He married Chantal Fischer in 1960, an honorary lecturer in Roman history at the Lumière University Lyon 2. The couple would have six children.

#3685

Douglas Greenberg

#112552

Overall Influence

Douglas Greenberg is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Previously, he was executive dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers. In the past, he served as a professor of history at the University of Southern California, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, and president of the Chicago Historical Society.

#3686

Nancy Nichols Barker

#79016

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

Nancy Nichols Barker was a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. Early life Barker was born on December 26, 1925, in Mt. Vernon, New York. She received a bachelor's degree at Vassar College in 1946 and master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 and 1955, respectively.

#3687

Leonid Vasilyev

Leonid Vasilyev

#112737

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Leonid Sergeyevich Vasilyev was a Soviet and Russian historian, social scientist, religious scholar, sociologist, orientalist and Doctor of Historical Sciences. Vailyev was Head of the Laboratory of Historical Research and HSE and until 2011, Head of the Department of General and National History and a professor. He began his tenure as the head of the sector of Theoretical Problems of the History of the East, then the Department of Oriental History of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and finally, the Institute's chief research officer.

#3688

Gábor Klaniczay

#103709

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Gábor Klaniczay is professor of Medieval Studies at the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University, Budapest/Vienna. He is also titulary professor at the Department of Medieval History at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He is corresponding fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#3689

Daniel Beer

#122411

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Daniel Beer is a British historian and Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His book, The House of the Dead, won the 2017 Cundill History Prize and was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.

#3690

Anti Selart

#112610

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Anti Selart is an Estonian historian and philosopher. Selart is professor of middle ages in University of Tartu . He studies history of medieval Livonia, especially Russo-Livonian relationships. In 2002 he got PhD in history.

#3691

Cindy Patton

#54229

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Cindy Patton is an American sociologist and historian specializing in the history of the AIDS epidemic. A former faculty member at Temple University and Emory University, she currently teaches at Simon Fraser University, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture, and Health from 2003 to 2014. Her work has appeared in Criticism, the Feminist Review, and the International Review of Qualitative Research, and she co-edited a special edition of Cultural Studies on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

#3692

John G. Reid

#79585

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

John G. Reid is a Canadian historian. The principal focus of his work is on the history of early modern northeastern North America , the history of Atlantic Canada, and the history of higher education. According to historian Geoffrey Plank, "No active historian studying the 17th and 18th century Maritime region has produced a richer or more varied body of scholarship than John G. Reid." He was also an expert witness in a number of court cases, including the Mi’kmaw and Wulstukwiuk treaty rights case R. v. Donald Marshall Junior .

#3693

Francis R. Nicosia

#76313

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Francis R. Nicosia was an American historian at the University of Vermont with a focus on modern history and Holocaust research. Life Francis R. Nicosia was born in Philadelphia on October 29, 1944. He worked for the Peace Corps in Libya in 1968/69. In Germany, he was employed in 1971/72 as a “Teacher Assistant” at the Peter Dörfler School in Marktoberdorf. He then studied history at Pennsylvania State University and Georgetown University and did his PhD in 1978 at McGill University in German History and Middle East History.

#3694

Victor Ovcharenko

Victor Ovcharenko

#50757

Overall Influence

1943 - 2009 (66 years)

Victor Ovcharenko was a Russian philosopher, sociologist, historian and psychologist. He also was a PhD., professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences , academician of the Academy for Humanities Research and academician of the Academy of Pedagogical and Social Sciences . He co-edited the journals "The Psychoanalytical Bulletin", "The Bulletin of Psychoanalysis", etc. He was a forerunner of the Minsk philosophical school "Humanities Encyclopedia". He is considered one of the founders of modern Belarusian sociology.

#3695

Michael Leggiere

#113506

Overall Influence

Michael V. Leggiere is a professor of history who works at the University of North Texas as deputy-director for the Barsanti Center for Military History. Leggiere's emphasis is on the Napoleonic era, and he deals most specifically with Prussian operations in Germany and France during 1813-14. According to his university profile, Leggiere is "one of the leading historians in the world of the Napoleonic Wars." This is supported by the fact that Leggiere has received the International Napoleonic Society Literary Award two times, once in 2002 and again in 2007. Leggiere also serves on the program ...

#3696

Nicholas A. M. Rodger

Nicholas A. M. Rodger

#80843

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Nicholas Andrew Martin Rodger FSA FRHistS FBA is a historian of the Royal Navy and senior research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Life and academia The son of Lieutenant Commander Ian Alexander Rodger, Royal Navy, of Arundel, Sussex, and Sara Mary, née Perceval, Rodger was educated at Ampleforth College and University College, Oxford, where he earned his D.Phil. degree in 1974 with a thesis titled Naval policy and cruiser design, 1865–1890. He served for seventeen years at the Public Record Office as an assistant keeper of public records, 1974–1991. After resigning from the public servi...

#3697

Philip Daileader

#102471

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Philip Daileader is a professor of history at The College of William & Mary in Virginia. He was born in Queens, New York, on October 25, 1968, and grew up in Central Islip, New York. He attended St. Anthony's High School in Smithtown and then South Huntington, New York. He received his B.A. in history from Johns Hopkins University and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Prior to taking his position at William & Mary, he taught at the University of Alabama and the State University of New York at New Paltz. From 2008 to 2011, he served as the chairman of the Department of History at William & Mary.

#3698

Minoru Kitamura

#50137

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Minoru Kitamura is a Japanese historian. He is a professor at Ritsumeikan University whose academic speciality is modern Chinese history. Life and career He was born in Kyoto Prefecture. He completed his bachelor's degree with a major in modern history at the Department of Humanities at Kyoto University in 1973. He initially dropped out of a doctorate program at the same university but in 1999 finally attained his doctorate in law. He worked as an assistant professor at Mie University before taking up his current post at the humanities department of Ritsumeikan University. He is also a member ...

#3699

Victoria F. Nourse

#38288

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Victoria Frances Nourse is a Ralph V. Whitworth Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the executive director of the Center on Congressional Studies at Georgetown Law. A nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, pursuant to the rules of the Senate, her nomination was returned to the president on December 17, 2011, after the Senate adjourned for more than 30 days. Her nomination was not resubmitted by the president. From 2014 to 2015, she served as counsel to Vice President Joe Biden.

#3700

Suliman Bashear

#68260

Overall Influence

1947 - 1991 (44 years)

Suliman Bashear PhD was a leading Druze Arab scholar and professor, who taught at Birzeit University, An-Najah National University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Bashear was noted for his work on the early historiography of Islam.

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