The Most Influential People Across History

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,

#3701

Purushottama Bilimoria

#25274
Overall Influence
Purushottama Bilimoria is an Australian-American philosopher and Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University. He studied at the University of Auckland and the University of Otago , in New Zealand, and received his PhD in 1983 from La Trobe University in Australia. He is a former Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford . Currently, he is appointed Head of Purushottama Research Center for Philosophy and Culture of India, and Scholar at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, Russia. He is also Principal Fellow with the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies and se...
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#3702

Walter L. Buenger

#62503
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Walter Louis Buenger is a historian of Texas and the American South and, since 2017, is a professor of history at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. Background Buenger received all three of his degrees, Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Ph.D., from Rice University in Houston in 1973, 1977, and 1979, respectively. Immediately thereafter at the age of twenty-eight, he joined the history faculty at Texas A&M University. He became head of the History department in 2002 and remained there until 2017 when he accepted the position of Summerlee Foundation Chair in Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin.
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#3703

Tavia Nyong'o

Tavia Nyong'o
#28895
Overall Influence
Tavia Nyong'o is a critic and scholar of art and performance. He is William Lampson professor of African American studies, American studies and theater and performance studies at Yale University where he teaches courses on black diaspora performance, cultural studies, and critical and aesthetic theory.
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#3704

John Markoff

John Markoff
#56391
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
John Markoff is an American sociologist working as a distinguished professor of sociology and history at the University of Pittsburgh. Education Markoff received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in 1962 and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1972.
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#3705

Ole Jørgen Benedictow

#93671
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Ole Jørgen Benedictow is a Norwegian historian. Having spent his entire professional career at the University of Oslo, he is especially known for his work on plagues, especially the Black Death. Career He was born in Oslo. He graduated from the University of Oslo with a cand.philol. degree in history in 1968, and was immediately hired as a research fellow. From early on he concentrated on the Late Middle Ages. In 1977 he published Fra rike til provins 1448-1536, volume five of the work Cappelens Norgeshistorie, on Norwegian history. He was promoted to associate professor, and from 1990 to 1992 he worked as manager of the Department of Archeology, Conservation and Historical Studies.
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#3706

Birgitta Odén

#34405
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Agnes Birgitta Odén-Dunér was a Swedish historian. She was the first woman to hold a professorship at Lund University, and was also the first female history professor in Sweden. She was a member of several local and international literal and historical academies such as the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters; The Science Society in Lund ; the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities; the Academy of Finland; the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1977; and the Academia Europaea.
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#3707

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh

#64740
Overall Influence
Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh is Professor Emeritus in History and former Dean of Arts and Vice-President of NUI Galway. He was appointed to the Council of State by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins in 2012.
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#3708

Olivette Otele

Olivette Otele
#78675
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Olivette Otele FLSW is a historian and distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. She was previously Professor of the History of Slavery at Bristol University. She was Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, and Chair of Bristol's Race Equality Commission. She is an expert on the links between history, memory, and geopolitics in relation to French and British colonial pasts. She is the first Black woman to be appointed to a professorial chair in History in the United Kingdom.
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#3709

Alfred Lawson Brown

#103683
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Alfred Lawson Brown was titular professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow from 1973 to 1978. In the latter year he succeeded Lionel Stones as the Edwards Professor of Medieval History. Brown was a specialist in English government of the 14th and 15th centuries. He served as vice-principal of the university from 1985 to 1990.
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#3710

C. Gregg Singer

#101999
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Charles Gregg Singer was an American historian and theologian. He was born in Philadelphia, and studied at Haverford College, and the University of Pennsylvania. Singer taught at Wheaton College, Salem College, the University of Pennsylvania, Belhaven College, Catawba College, Furman University, and Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
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#3711

Jan Żaryn

Jan Żaryn
#71669
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Jan Krzysztof Żaryn is a Polish historian, professor and politician, who was a Senator in the Senate of Poland from 2015 to 2019. Born in Warsaw into a family of inteligencja, Żaryn studied history at the University of Warsaw in 1979–1984, as well as in an . As a student, he engaged with anti-Communist movements. After finishing his studies, he taught history in Warsaw high schools and then joined Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1997. Żaryn received a Ph.D. in humanities degree in history in 1996, and in 2004 earned the habilitated doctor degree. I...
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#3712

Benjamin Park

#43418
Overall Influence
Benjamin E. Park is an American historian concentrating on early American political, religious, and intellectual history, history of gender, religious studies, slavery, anti-slavery, and Atlantic history. Park is an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University.
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#3713

C. P. Fitzgerald

#64663
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Charles Patrick Fitzgerald was a British historian and writer whose academic career occurred mostly in Australia. He was a professor of East Asian studies with particular focus on China. Early life and education Fitzgerald was born in London, England. His parents were Hans Sauer, a migrant from Cape Colony. and his Irish-born wife Cecile Josephine, née Fitzpatrick.
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#3714

Gerhard Paul

#113158
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Gerhard Paul is a German historian and retired professor of the University of Flensburg. Awards and recognition 2005: International book award for the year of 2004 in the category "Neueste Geschichte" from H-Soz-u-Kult for Bilder des Krieges − Krieg der Bilder. Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges. 2009: First place in the September 2009 list of recommended books of the humanities, cultural and social sciences for the atlas he edited: Das Jahrhundert der Bilder. Band 1: Bildatlas 1900 bis 1949, Band 2: Bildatlas 1949 bis heute. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
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#3715

Carl A. Brasseaux

#81832
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Carl Anthony Brasseaux is an American historian and educator. He specialized in French Colonial North America, particularly of Louisiana and the Cajun people. He helped to pioneer the field of Cajun history, and his published works on this topic represent the first serious, in-depth examination of the history of the ethnic group.
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#3716

Moses I. Finley

#136584
Overall Influence
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#3717

Glennys Young

#51877
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Glennys Young is a professor of history and the chair of the history department at the University of Washington. She also is a professor of Russian studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and is affiliated with University of Washington's Comparative History of Ideas Department. From 2016 to 2019, she was the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor in History. Her research focuses include Russia, the former Soviet Union, religion in the Soviet Union, Soviet foreign policy, Russian foreign relations, the Cold War, and twentieth-century Spain.
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#3718

Aileen S. Kraditor

#71446
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Aileen S. Kraditor was an American historian who has written a number of works on the history of feminism. Career Aileen Kraditor obtained a B.A. at Brooklyn College and then an M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. She taught at Rhode Island College before obtaining a position at Boston University in 1973, as a teacher of the history of modern US reform movements. She was granted fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. As of 2014 she was Professor Emerita of History at Boston University.
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#3719

Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt

Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt
#40377
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier is a Chilean writer and historian who gained notoriety by his study of the Chilean elite aristocracy and plutocracy and his criticism of traditional state-centered historiography. Jocelyn-Holt has also written several controversial columns, among them one in The Clinic in 2005 where he harshly criticized then presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet.
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#3720

Jaroslav Miller

#46575
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Jaroslav Miller is a Czech historian who is a professor of history and rector at Palacký University in Olomouc. His focus is urban studies, the history of political thought and more recently also issues related to Czech and Slovak exile.
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#3721

Merry Wiesner-Hanks

#50083
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
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#3722

Stanley Kutler

#101247
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Stanley Ira Kutler was an American historian, best known for his lawsuit against the National Archives and Richard Nixon that won the release of tape recordings Nixon made during his White House years, particularly those in relation to the Watergate scandal.
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#3723

José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez

#112253
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez is a Spanish historian, considered an expert in the history of the right-wing extremism in Spain. Biography Born in 1961 in Madrid, he earned a licentiate degree in history at the Complutense University of Madrid; he later obtained a PhD in the same centre in 1992 under the doctoral supervision of Antonio Fernández García reading a thesis dealing with the positions espoused by the Spanish far-right and the further evolution it experienced during the late francoist period and the Spanish transition to democracy. He is professor of Contemporary History at the King Ju...
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#3724

Molly Worthen

#85580
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Molly Worthen is a journalist and historian of American religion. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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#3725

Juan Friede

#57224
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Juan Friede Alter was a Ukrainian-Colombian historian of Jewish descent who is recognised as one of the most important writers about Colombian history, the Spanish conquests and a proponent of indigenism; the defense of the rights and descriptions of the oppression of indigenous people.
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#3726

Birgit Aschmann

#136816
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Birgit Aschmann is a historian, originally from Hamburg in West Germany. Since April 2011 she has held a teaching chair in nineteenth century European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. One focus of her work is on Spanish History in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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#3727

Elbert B. Smith

#93001
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
E. B. Smith was an American historian and author, noted for his works on the history of Antebellum American politics. Early life Elbert Benjamin Smith was born in Benham, Kentucky, on May 1, 1921. In 1940, he received his bachelor's degree from Maryville College in Tennessee. He served in the United States Navy as a deck officer during World War II. After the war, Smith attended the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree in 1947 and his doctorate in 1949. He died on April 30, 2013, in Harwood, Maryland.
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#3728

W. A. B. Douglas

#90076
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
William Alexander Binny "Alec" Douglas is a Canadian naval historian, who was director of Directorate of History, National Defence Headquarters , 1973–1993, then director general history, 1993–94.
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#3729

Gerald J. Toomer

#52900
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Gerald James Toomer is a historian of astronomy and mathematics who has written numerous books and papers on ancient Greek and medieval Islamic astronomy. In particular, he translated Ptolemy's Almagest into English.
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#3730

Richard H. Immerman

#66839
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Richard H. Immerman is an American historian and author. He is currently Marvin Wachman Director Emeritus at the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University, which he co-founded in 1993 with Russell Weigley, and David Rosenberg. Prior to his chair at Temple University, Immerman served as Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Integrity and Standards from 2007 to 2009. Immerman was the 40th president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
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#3731

R. J. W. Evans

#106784
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Robert John Weston Evans is a British historian, whose speciality is the post-medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe. He was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and later at Jesus College, Cambridge. Evans was Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2011 and is a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He works on the post-medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially concerning that of the Habsburg lands from 1526 to 1918.
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#3732

Timothy Messer-Kruse

#64647
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Timothy F. "Tim" Messer-Kruse is an American historian who specializes in American labor history. His research into the 1886 Haymarket affair led him to reappraise the conventional narrative about the evidence presented against those brought to trial. He has also written on banking history and race relations in the United States.
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#3733

Michael Angold

#104482
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Angold was educated at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, where he took his BA and DPhil degrees. He has worked at the University of Edinburgh since 1970, serving as professor of Byzantine history from 1996 until 2005, when he was appointed professor emeritus.
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#3734

John C. Rule

#73624
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
John Corwin Rule, was a widely respected historian of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French history at Ohio State University from 1958 to 1995. Early life and education The son of Corwin Rule and Elaine Rule, John Rule attended Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis, Indiana and went on to graduate from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in history in 1952 with a thesis on "Nicolas de Lamoignon de Basville and the Protestants of the Languedoc, 1685-1702." He went on to Harvard University, where he completed his doctorate in history in 1958 with a thesis ...
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#3735

Lloyd Clark

#47388
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Lloyd Clark FRHS is professorial research fellow in the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Buckingham. As a professor, he teaches Modern War Studies and Contemporary Military History.
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#3736

Renate Dürr

#117141
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Renate Dürr is a German historian and academic. Her research focuses on Lutheran church spaces, religious history, the history of European expansion, the history of translation, Jesuit reductions, reciprocal cultural transfers, confessionalization, and women and gender history of the early modern period.
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#3737

Peter Holt

#110716
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
Peter Malcolm Holt, FBA was a historian of the Middle East and Sudan. He was generally known as P. M. Holt. Biography The son of a Unitarian minister, Holt attended Lord Williams's School in Thame, Oxfordshire, and studied history at University College, Oxford. He then obtained a diploma of education and worked as a secondary school teacher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1941–53 , and then as Government Archivist and part-time lecturer at the University College of Khartoum 1952–55. During these years he became proficient in Arabic.
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#3738

Yakov M. Rabkin

#81143
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Yakov M. Rabkin is a professor emeritus of history at the Université de Montréal, author and public intellectual. His published works include studies of relations between science and technology, research on cultural aspects of science, including studies of Jews in the scientific profession, Science Between the Superpowers , a study of programs for the exchange of U.S and Soviet Union scientists, as well as works on the fate of Soviet science and scientists after the dismemberment of the USSR and, more generally, on science and political freedoms. As a result of his graduate seminar on demoder...
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#3739

William Tsutsui

#60157
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
William M. Tsutsui is an American academic, author, economic historian, Japanologist and university administrator. He was named President and CEO of Ottawa University, May 3, 2021, and took office July 1, 2021.
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#3740

Josef Fleckenstein

#133728
Overall Influence
1919 - 2004 (85 years)
Josef Fleckenstein was a German historian and essayist. His central field of research was the Middle Ages. He did his doctorate and habilitation with Gerd Tellenbach in Freiburg. From 1962 to 1965 he was a professor at the University of Frankfurt, then from 1965 to 1971 at the University of Freiburg as Tellenbach's successor. From 1971 to 1987 he directed the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen.
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#3741

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear

#114171
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Ann Farnsworth-Alvear is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She authored the book Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia's Industrial Experiment that was published by Duke University Press. In the book she identifies two crucial turning points in the history of the factories of Antioquia: the first being the radical unionization of previously unorganized workers, the second being when technological innovations and the rise of newly trained industrial engineers changed the dynamic of worker and management relations. Such issues are ...
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#3742

Aleksander Lasik

Aleksander Lasik
#54630
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Aleksander Lasik is a Polish historian specializing in the history of the Schutzstaffel within German concentration camps. A professor at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, he has worked as an historian for Poland's Institute of National Remembrance.
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#3743

Bratko Kreft

Bratko Kreft
#48543
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Bratko Kreft was a Slovenian playwright, writer, literary and theater historian and director. Biography He grew up in Prlekija. He studied Slavic Studies in Vienna and Ljubljana. In Ljubljana he also studied comparative literature and literary theory. Among other things, he was the editor and secretary of Kosovel's "Mladina", the artistic director and director of "Delavski oder" in Ljubljana, and the director of the National Theater in Ljubljana. He was a professor of contemporary Russian literature at the Faculty of Arts and a corresponding member of Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts . H...
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#3744

George Hilton

#64850
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
George Woodman Hilton was a United States historian and economist, who specialized in social history, transportation economics, regulation by commission, the history of economic thought and labor history.
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#3745

Hatoon al-Fassi

#29036
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi is a Saudi Arabian historian, author and women's rights activist. She is an associate professor of women's history at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, where she has been employed since 1989 and at the International Affairs Department at Qatar University. At the university, al-Fassi carries out historical research. Al-Fassi claims from her research into the pre-Islamic Arabian kingdom of Nabataea that women in the kingdom had more independence than women in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Fassi was active in women's right to vote campaigns for the 2005 and 2011 municipal elections and was active in a similar campaign for the 2015 municipal elections.
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#3746

François Bœspflug

François Bœspflug
#75055
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
François Bœspflug is a French historian of Christianity and Christian art, in particular of the Middle Ages. He specialises in the iconography of the Bible moralisée. Biography Education François Bœspflug undertook a scientific curriculum that led him to the l'École nationale supérieure des mines de Saint-Étienne, where he was a student from 1964 to 1965. From 1969 to 1975, he obtained a degree in scholastic philosophy and a master's degree in theology from the Catholic University of Paris. In 1982, he obtained two postgraduate doctorates after having defended his doctoral thesis on "Dieu dans l’art" , subsequently going on to publish numerous works on Christian iconography.
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#3747

Elliot Neaman

#85469
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Elliot Neaman is a professor of history at the University of San Francisco, where he began teaching in 1993. He won the USF Distinguished Research Award in 1999. He received a BA from the University of British Columbia in 1980, an MA from the Free University of Berlin in 1985 and his Ph.D from UC Berkeley in 1992. He also studied with Paul Feyerabend and Paul Hoyningen-Huene in Zürich in 1981-82. His dissertation advisor in Berlin was Ernst Nolte. At Berkeley he studied with Martin Jay, Gerald Feldman, Hubertus Dreyfus and Martin Malia. Neaman was President of the University of San Francisco Faculty Association from 2005-2018.
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#3748

Wilhelm Heinz Schröder

#87611
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Wilhelm Heinz Schröder is a German historian working at Cologne University. The focus of his research and teaching is on contemporary history. He has led, coordinated and contributed to several major on-line biography projects covering German parliamentarians.
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#3749

Narve Fulsås

#118704
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Narve Fulsås is a Norwegian historian. He was born in Numedal. He took his cand.philol. degree in 1983, and the dr.philos. degree in 1994. In 1998 he was appointed as a professor of modern history at the University of Tromsø. He was selected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2011.
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#3750

N. Gordon Levin Jr.

#127058
Overall Influence
Norman Gordon Levin Jr. is an American historian, and Emeritus Dwight Morrow Professor of History and American Studies at Amherst College. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1956, and graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in 1967. He has taught at Amherst College since 1964, where he specializes in diplomatic history, Israeli history, and the history of nationalism. He was a recipient of the Bancroft Prize in 1969 for his book Woodrow Wilson and World Politics.
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