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,

#3751

Barry Coward

#103779

Overall Influence

1941 - 2011 (70 years)

Barry Coward was a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an expert on the Stuart age. Selected publications The Stuart Age. 1980.Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England, 1550-1750. Longman, 1988. Cromwellian Protectorate. 2002.

#3752

Richard Lingenfelter

#112954

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Richard Emery "Rich" Lingenfelter was an American astrophysicist and historian. He is known for his work on the origin of cosmic rays and gamma rays. As a historian, he is recognized for his efforts at chronicling the history of Death Valley.

#3753

Frédéric Bastien

#54638

Overall Influence

1969 - 2023 (54 years)

Frédéric Bastien was a Canadian author, historian, and journalist, best known for the book La Bataille de Londres. Dessous, secrets et coulisses du rapatriement constitutionnel, whose allegations surrounding the 1982 patriation of Canada's constitution caused political controversy in Quebec and led the Supreme Court of Canada to launch an internal probe.

#3754

John Coles

#92809

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

John Morton Coles, FBA, FSA, HonFSAScot was a Canadian–British archaeologist and academic. Life and career Coles was born in Woodstock, Ontario, Canada on 25 March 1930. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1952 before working in commerce for 3 years. He began studying archaeology at the University of Cambridge in 1955 before moving to the University of Edinburgh to complete his PhD in 1957.

#3755

A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed

#93352

Overall Influence

1924 - 2014 (90 years)

A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed was a Bangladeshi historian, humanist and rationalist thinker. Early life and education Ahmed was born in Motihari, Bihar. He came from a Bengali Muslim family. His father Abu Ahmed Faizul Mohi, paternal grandfather Moulvi Ahmed, one of the early Bengali Muslim who was a high-ranking administrator in British India, and his maternal grandfather Azizul Haque, were all students of the renowned Presidency College, Calcutta.

#3756

William D. Griffin

#125376

Overall Influence

1936 - 2011 (75 years)

William Denis Griffin was an American historian, author, and educator who specialized in Modern European History, particularly Anglo-Irish political and social history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish history, and the revolutionary era.

#3757

Thomas Noel

#56406

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Thomas Jacob Noel, often introduced in media interviews as Dr. Colorado, is an American historian specializing in the history of the Rocky Mountain West, and especially of the state of Colorado. He is a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Denver, where he teaches classes in the history of the American West, Colorado, Denver, historic preservation, mining and railroads, national parks, and Western art and architecture. He is the co-author or author of more than fifty books, numerous articles, and newspaper columns. He is the director of the Center for Colorado Studies at the Denver Public Library.

#3758

Christ Klep

#57852

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Christ P. M. Klep is a Dutch military historian. He is a lecturer at Utrecht University and freelance historian and publicist. He has appeared amongst others on Pauw & Witteman, NPO Radio 1 and Knevel & Van de Brink, and has written for de Volkskrant, Trouw and De Groene Amsterdammer - commenting on topics as the Joint Strike Fighter program, the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the recruiting practices of the Armed forces of the Netherlands.

#3759

Stephanie McCurry

#122400

Overall Influence

Stephanie McCurry is an American historian and a professor of history at Columbia University. Her book Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

#3760

Christine Leigh Heyrman

#110841

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Christine Leigh Heyrman is an American historian. Life She graduated from Macalester College in 1971, and from Yale University with a Ph.D. in 1977. She is Grimble Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. Her current research focuses on the first cohort of American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East .

#3761

James C. Thomson Jr.

#76644

Overall Influence

1931 - 2002 (71 years)

James Claude "Jim" Thomson Jr. was an American historian and journalist who served in the government, taught at Harvard and Boston Universities, served as curator of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism.

#3762

Glenn R. Conrad

Glenn R. Conrad

#91916

Overall Influence

1932 - 2003 (71 years)

Glenn Russell Conrad was an American historian, professor, and author. He is known for his research of south Louisiana culture, as well as an expert on archival studies, nineteenth-century European history, and the history of colonial Louisiana. He taught at Southern Colorado State and the University of Southwestern Louisiana from 1958 until 1991, and serving as the director of the Center of Louisiana Studies at University of Southern Louisiana from 1973 until 1993.

#3763

Georgiy Basharin

#67598

Overall Influence

1912 - 1992 (80 years)

Georgiy Prokopyevich Basharin , March 21, 1912 – April 18, 1992Yakutia Biography Basharin was born in Sylan village, in the Yakutsk Oblast of the Russian Empire , in a large poor peasant family. He was introduced to literacy at the age of 17 during the illiteracy eradication campaign initiated by the Soviet state. In 1932 Basharin became a student of the Yakutsk Pedagogical College and then transferred to the History department inside the newly established Yakutsk Pedagogical Institute. In 1937 he continued his education at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. Upon his graduation, in 1938, Basharin returned to his homeland to teach at the Yakutsk Pedagogical Institute.

#3764

Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann

#119715

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Hartmut Johann Otto Pogge von Strandmann is a German historian and academic, who was Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford between 1996 and 2005. Career Born in 1938, Pogge von Strandmann attended the University of Bonn, the University of Berlin and the University of Hamburg, where he studied history, philosophy, geography, politics and economics. He completed the first part of examinations in 1962 and was then a senior scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford, between 1962 and 1966 and a junior research fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, between 1966 and 1970, completing a DP...

#3765

Dariusz Kołodziejczyk

#108352

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Dariusz Włodzimierz Kołodziejczyk is a Polish historian and professor of the University of Warsaw. A student of Marian Małowist, Antoni Mączak and Halil İnalcık, he specializes in the history of diplomacy and history of Poland and Turkey .

#3766

Eleri Cousins

#137988

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (38 years)

Eleri H Cousins is an archaeologist and Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Lancaster. Biography Cousins' undergraduate study, in Archaeology and Classics, was at Stanford University. Subsequently, she studied for a master's degree and PhD at the University of Cambridge. She was a lecturer at the University of St Andrews before moving to her current role at Lancaster in 2019. Cousins was elected as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 17 June 2021.

#3767

John Dizikes

#68545

Overall Influence

1932 - 2018 (86 years)

John Dizikes was Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He served as Cowell College provost and was a recipient of the UCSC Alumni Association's Distinguished Teaching Award. Dizikes was a founding faculty member at UCSC, which he joined in 1965, just before the university opened to students, and taught for 35 years until his retirement in 2000.

#3768

Lucette Valensi

#63801

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Lucette Valensi is a French historian née Lucette Chemla in Tunis. Biography After obtaining her bachelor's degree in history from the Sorbonne in 1958, she became a history and geography agrégée in 1963 then docteur d'État in early modern period in 1974. She joined the French Communist Party for a while, then became involved in the anticolonialism that had moved her from support to the Algerian National Liberation Front to that of the . She began her teaching and research career in Tunisia between 1960 and 1965. After this North African experience, she was successively maître de conférences ...

#3769

Jean-Pierre Mahé

#86655

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Jean-Pierre Mahé is a French orientalist, philologist and historian of Caucasus, and a specialist of Armenian studies. Bibliography 1978: Hermès en Haute-Égypte, t. 1 : Les textes hermétiques de Nag Hammadi et leurs parallèles grecs et latins , Québec , 171 p. in 8°1982: Hermès en Haute-Égypte, t. 2 : Le fragment du Discours parfait et les Définitions hermétiques arméniennes , Québec-Louvain , L + 565 p. in 8°1985: Le livre arménien à travers les âges, with Raymond Haroutioun Kevorkian, Catalogue de l'Exposition Marseille 1985 : Le livre arménien à travers les âges.1986: Catalogue des « incun...

#3770

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis

#89113

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis is an American historian. She is professor of history and director of the public history program at Howard University. She has written about slavery, emancipation and domestic labor among other topics, especially as regards the Washington, DC, area.

#3771

W. Stanford Reid

#69224

Overall Influence

1913 - 1996 (83 years)

William Stanford Reid , usually cited as W. Stanford Reid, was a professor of history at McGill University and the University of Guelph and a Presbyterian Church in Canada minister. He held a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Pennsylvania . He also had a divinity degree from Westminster Theological Seminary, studying under the Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen.

#3772

Laura J. Snyder

Laura J. Snyder

#73326

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Laura J. Snyder is an American historian, philosopher, and writer. She is a Fulbright Scholar, is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, was the first Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow at The Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is the recipient of an NEH Public Scholars grant. She writes narrative-driven non-fiction books including, most recently, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing, which won the Society for the History of Technology's 2016 Sally Hacker Prize. In 2019, Snyder signed a contract with A. A. Knopf to author a biography of Oliver Sacks, based on exclusive access to the Sacks archive.

#3773

H. F. C. Smith

#26690

Overall Influence

Abdullahi Smith was a scholar of West African history and culture. He was particularly interested in Arab influence in Nigeria. Professor Smith was the first Director of Arewa House personally picked by its founder Ahmadu Bello.

#3774

William John Francis Jenner

#55948

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

William John Francis "Bill" Jenner is an English sinologist and translator, specialising in Chinese history and culture, and translator of Chinese literature. Biography From 1958 to 1962, Jenner studied sinology at Oxford and wrote his dissertation about the history of Luoyang in the fifth and sixth century, especially through the work of Yang Xuanzhi. His first wife was the China scholar Delia Davin.

#3775

Martha A. Sandweiss

#51444

Overall Influence

Martha Ann Sandweiss is an American historian, with particular interests in the history of the American West, visual culture, and public history. She is a professor of History at Princeton University, and the author of several books. Sandweiss is the Founder and Project Director of the Princeton & Slavery Project, a large-scale investigation into Princeton University's historical ties to the institution of slavery.

#3776

John L. Loos

#55719

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

John Louis Loos was an American historian best known for his scholarship on the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804 to 1806. A Nebraska native, for 34 years Loos was a faculty member at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

#3777

Sarah Barringer Gordon

#64710

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Sarah Barringer Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the history of American religion and law.

#3778

Pamela H. Smith

#72605

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Pamela H. Smith is an American historian of science specializing in attitudes to nature in early modern Europe , with particular attention to craft knowledge and the role of craftspeople in the Scientific Revolution. She is the Seth Low Professor of History, founding director of the Making and Knowing Project, founding director of the Center for Science and Society, and chair of the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience, all at Columbia University. Smith is serving a two-year term as president of the Renaissance Society of America.

#3779

Michael Hogan

#47080

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Michael J. Hogan is an American historian who served as president of the University of Connecticut and president of the University of Illinois System . He subsequently became a distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

#3780

John Alexander Armstrong

#50257

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

John Alexander Armstrong Jr. was Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born in St. Augustine, Florida on 4 May 1922, he entered the University of Chicago at age 20 where he received both bachelor's and master's degrees. However, the date of his graduation was delayed by his enlistment in the U.S. Army in Belgium during World War II, from 1944 to 1945. Such experience appears to have certain impacts upon the direction of his academic research on nationalism in Europe afterwards.

#3781

Jane Sherron De Hart

#104342

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Jane Sherron De Hart is an American feminist historian and women's studies academic. She is a professor emerita at University of California, Santa Barbara. De Hart has authored and edited several works on the history of women in the United States, the Federal Theatre Project, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. During the 1970s, she founded the women's studies program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

#3782

Rémi Mathis

#43842

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (43 years)

Rémi Mathis is a French historian and curator. He was president of Wikimedia France from 2011 to 2014. Early life Son of the paleontologist , Rémi Mathis graduated from the in 2007. The following year he obtained his degree from the National School of Information Science and Libraries.

#3783

Tomasz Jasiński

Tomasz Jasiński

#69429

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Tomasz Jasiński is a Polish historian, dean of the History Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He specializes in medieval history of Poland. Son of Kazimierz Jasiński, a Polish historian and medievalist.

#3784

John Semple Galbraith

#37239

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

John Semple Galbraith was a British Empire historian concentrating on Canada and South and East Africa. He served as chancellor of the University of California San Diego, from 1964 to 1968. He was a native of Glasgow; his family emigrated to the United States in 1926. He received a BA from Miami University in Ohio in 1938, and Ph.D. in 1943 at the University of Iowa, working under his dissertation adviser, C. W. de Kiewiet. He served as an Army historical officer for the Third Air Force until 1946, and assumed a professorship at UCLA in 1948.

#3785

J. Milton Nance

#108460

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Joseph Milton Nance was an American historian and educator with a focus on the history of Texas. From 1941 until his 1979 retirement, he taught at Texas A&M University, and he was the department chair of the Department of History and Government from 1958 to 1968, and of the successor Department of History until 1973. The J. Milton Nance Lectures in Texas History lecture series at TAMU is named in his honor. During the 1966–1967 year, he served on a program committee of the Texas State Historical Association. For much of his life, he lived in College Station, Texas.

#3786

Resil B. Mojares

#80515

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Resil Buagas Mojares is a Filipino historian and critic of Philippine literature best known as for his books on Philippine history. He is acclaimed by various writers and critics as the Visayan Titan of Letters, due to his immense contribution to Visayan literature. He was recognized in 2018 as a National Artist of the Philippines for Literature - a conferment which represents the Philippine state's highest recognition for artists.

#3787

Giles Scott-Smith

Giles Scott-Smith

#66548

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Giles Scott-Smith is a Dutch-British academic. He is a professor of transnational relations and new diplomatic history at Leiden University and serves as the dean of Leiden University College The Hague.

#3788

Klaus von See

#47911

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

Klaus von See was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Klaus von See was born in the village of Altendorf, Brome, Germany on 10 August 1927. He studied history, German and Scandinavian philology at the University of Hamburg, receiving his doctorate there under the supervision of historian Hermann Aubin in 1953. After completing his legal studies, von See became greatly interested in Germanic and Scandinavian philology, and in 1957 he took up a position as an assistant at the Germanic Seminar the University of Hamburg.

#3789

E. A. Reitan

#93610

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Earl Aaron Reitain was an American historian. He was born in Grove City, Minnesota and served in World War II as a United States Army rifleman. He was awarded both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star Medal for his service. Reitan attended Concordia College after the war and was awarded a doctorate in 1954 from the University of Illinois. Between 1970 and 1973 he was chairman of Illinois State University's department of history.

#3790

D. E. R. Watt

#102052

Overall Influence

1926 - 2004 (78 years)

Donald Elmslie Robertson Watt FRSE was a Scottish historian and Professor Emeritus at St Andrews University. Donald Watt was the son of Theodore Watt, managing director of the Aberdeen University Press. Watt studied at Aberdeen Grammar School, before reading history at University of Aberdeen. He graduated in 1950, and moved to Oriel College, Oxford, receiving his D. Phil in 1957.

#3791

Caroline Barron

#89219

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Caroline Mary Barron is a British retired medieval historian. She is professor emerita in the department of history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Barron's research relates to "late medieval British history, particularly the history of the City of London, the reign of Richard II and the history of women." She studied at Somerville College, Oxford.

#3792

Graeme Dunphy

#111951

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Graeme Dunphy is a British professor of translation. Biography Dunphy was born in Glasgow in 1961. He studied German at the University of Stirling between 1979 and 1984, and Hebrew and the Old Testament at the University of St Andrews between 1984 and 1987. He completed his PhD in medieval German literature in 1998.

#3793

Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

#39515

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou is a political historian and public intellectual. A Harvard University academic, Mohamedou is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. of which he is deputy director. His work focuses on political violence, state-building, racism, and the history of international relations. He is a member of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, and is regarded as a leading international expert on the new forms of transnational terrorism.

#3794

Rosalind Hill

#96408

Overall Influence

1908 - 1997 (89 years)

Rosalind Mary Theodosia Hill was an English historian who for 39 years was a lecturer, Reader and Professor in History at Westfield College, a constituent college of the University of London. Biography Rosalind Hill was born on 14 November 1908 at Leighton House, Neston-cum-Parkgate, Cheshire, the youngest of three daughters and four children of Elen Mary Stratford, née Danson and Sir Norman Hill , a prominent shipping solicitor and notary in Liverpool who acted as secretary of the Liverpool Steamship Owners' Association from 1893 to 1924 and was Chairman of the Board of Trade advisory committee on shipping from 1907 to 1937.

#3795

Jeremy Goldberg

#88745

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Peter Jeremy Piers Goldberg is an English historian. He is Reader in Medieval History at the University of York. Goldberg was educated at the University of York and at the University of Cambridge. His main interest lies within the social and cultural history of late medieval England, in particular women's and gender history. Among his published books are Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy , Women in England c. 1275-1525: Documentary Sources and Medieval England: A Social History 1250-1550 . He has also edited several books, including Women in Medieval English Society and Richa...

#3796

Stephen G. Kurtz

#80929

Overall Influence

1926 - 2008 (82 years)

Stephen Guild Kurtz was an American academic and educator, who served as the eleventh principal of Phillips Exeter Academy. Background and Career Kurtz was born on September 9, 1926, in Buffalo, New York. He graduated with an A.B. in history from Princeton University in 1948 after completing a senior thesis titled "Humanist Ideals of Education in the Renaissance." While an undergraduate student at Princeton, Kurtz was a member of the Princeton Nassoons and the president of the Princeton University Glee Club. He later received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953 afte...

#3797

Helmut Beumann

#90310

Overall Influence

1912 - 1995 (83 years)

Helmut Karl Otto Beumann was a German historian. Biography Beumann was the son of a civil servant and grew up in Bernburg. In 1931 he began studying history, German studies, philosophy, and Latin at Leipzig University. In 1932 he moved to Berlin and studied with Robert Holtzmann; he received his doctorate after a dissertation on the deeds and writs of the bishops of Halberstadt. At the Archiveschule in Berlin he met Carl Erdmann, whom he later praised as the "master of textual criticism and the history of ideas which it founded".

#3798

James Howard-Johnston

#90711

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

James Douglas Howard-Johnston is an English historian of the Byzantine Empire. He was University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His approach to Byzantium follows that of Edward Gibbon and concentrates on comparisons between the Byzantine state and its Western counterparts. Howard-Johnston has also done research on Late Antiquity, especially the Roman-Persian Wars and the early history of Islam.

#3799

Hari Ram Gupta

#81574

Overall Influence

1902 - 1992 (90 years)

Hari Ram Gupta was an Indian historian. The main focus of his work was the Sikh history of 18th century. During 1957 to 1963, he was head of Panjab University's History department. Following his retirement, he was an honorary professor in the History department of University of Delhi from 1964 to 1967.

#3800

Indy Neidell

#103056

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Indiana Neidell is an American-Swedish documentarian, historian, actor, voice actor, musician and YouTube personality, best known for presenting the video series, The Great War on The Great War Channel which documented World War I in real time using modern research, various secondary sources and archival footage. A similar project, World War Two , began in September 2018. Neidell is also a writer and actor with credits that include Metropia and numerous commercials in Europe, as well as video game voice-acting.

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