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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#401

Zeev Sternhell

#3335

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Zeev Sternhell was a Polish-born Israeli historian, political scientist, commentator on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and writer. He was one of the world's leading theorists of the phenomenon of fascism. Sternhell headed the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote for Haaretz newspaper.

#402

Rajmohan Gandhi

#7171

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Rajmohan Gandhi is an Indian biographer, historian, and research professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US. His paternal grandfather is Mahatma Gandhi, and his maternal grandfather is Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. He is also a scholar in residence at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.

#403

Keith Hopkins

#19603

Overall Influence

1934 - 2004 (70 years)

Morris Keith Hopkins, FBA was a British historian and sociologist. He was professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge from 1985 to 2000. Hopkins had a relatively unconventional route to the Cambridge professorship. After Brentwood School, he graduated in classics at King's College, Cambridge in 1958. He spent time as a graduate student, much influenced by Moses Finley, but left before completing his doctorate for an assistant lectureship in sociology at the University of Leicester .

#404

R. W. Southern

#15613

Overall Influence

1912 - 2001 (89 years)

Sir Richard William Southern , who published under the name R. W. Southern, was a noted English medieval historian based at the University of Oxford. Biography Southern was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 8 February 1912, and educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history. At Oxford, Southern's mentors were Sir Maurice Powicke and Vivian Hunter Galbraith. He was a fellow of Balliol from 1937 to 1961 , Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1961 to 1969, and president of St John's College, Oxford, from 1969 to 1981.

#405

Ramsay MacMullen

#17304

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Ramsay MacMullen was an American historian who was Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1967 to his retirement in 1993 as Dunham Professor of History and Classics. His scholarly interests were in the social history of Rome and the replacement of paganism by Christianity.

#406

Yoshihiko Amino

#11478

Overall Influence

1929 - 2004 (75 years)

Yoshihiko Amino was a Japanese Marxist historian and public intellectual, perhaps most singularly known for his novel examination of medieval Japanese history. Although little of Amino's work has been published in the West, Japanese writers and historians of Japan regard Amino as one of the most important Japanese historians of the twentieth century. Some of Amino's findings are now available in English, in a very lively and personal account of how he came to reverse many conventional ideas about Japanese history.

#407

Michael Burleigh

#13614

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael Burleigh is an English author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects. He has also been active in bringing history to television. Early life Michael Burleigh was born on 3 April 1955. He was awarded a first class honours degree in medieval and modern history from University College London in 1977, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer Prizes.

#408

Simon Schaffer

#6726

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#409

Roy Rosenzweig

#10154

Overall Influence

1950 - 2007 (57 years)

Roy Alan Rosenzweig was an American historian. He was the founder and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University from 1994 until his death in October 2007 from lung cancer, aged 57. After his death, the center was renamed the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media in his honor.

#410

David Henige

#16020

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

David Patrick Henige is an American historian, bibliographer, academic librarian and Africanist scholar. The majority of Henige's academic career has been spent in affiliation with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where for over three decades he held the position of bibliographer in African studies at UW–Madison's Memorial Library.

#411

Linda Gordon

#13951

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Linda Gordon is an American feminist and historian. She lives in New York City and in Madison, Wisconsin. She won the Marfield Prize and the WILLA Literary Award in Historical Nonfiction for Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, and the Antonovych Prize for Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine .

#412

Geoffrey Wawro

#19383

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Geoffrey Wawro is an American Professor of Military History at the University of North Texas, and Director of the UNT Military History Center. His primary area of emphasis is modern and contemporary military history, from the French Revolution to the present.

#413

François Hartog

#15721

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

François Hartog is a French historian. He is noted for his "regimes of historicity" theory as well as his analyses of presentism and the contemporary experience of time. Hartog is also an academic and author of several works including The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History.

#414

John W. Dower

#4272

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

John W. Dower is an American author and historian. His 1999 book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association.

#415

Orest Subtelny

#12568

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Orest Subtelny was a Ukrainian-Canadian historian. Born in Kraków, Poland, he received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1973. From 1982 to 2015, he was a Professor in the Departments of History and Political Science at York University in Toronto.

#416

Gary B. Nash

#29025

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Gary Baring Nash was an American historian. He concentrated on the Revolutionary period, slavery and race, as well as the formation of political communities in Philadelphia and other cities. Life and education Nash was born in Merion, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia, suburb. After graduating from Lower Merion High School, he attended Princeton University, where he earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees . From 1955-58, he served in the U.S. Navy on the John W. Weeks , where he was antisubmarine officer and then gunnery officer.

#417

Gareth Stedman Jones

#11629

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gareth Stedman Jones is an English academic and historian. As Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, he deals particularly with working-class history and Marxism. Career Educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated in history in 1964, Stedman Jones went on to Nuffield College, Oxford to take a DPhil in 1970.

#418

Michael Kammen

#14380

Overall Influence

1936 - 2013 (77 years)

Michael Gedaliah Kammen was an American professor of American cultural history in the Department of History at Cornell University. At the time of his death, he held the title "Newton C. Farr professor emeritus of American history and culture".

#419

Melvin Kranzberg

Melvin Kranzberg

#30058

Overall Influence

1917 - 1995 (78 years)

Melvin Kranzberg was an American historian, and professor of history at Case Western Reserve University from 1952 until 1971. He was a Callaway professor of the history of technology at Georgia Tech from 1972 to 1988.

#420

Peter Galison

#5219

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Peter Louis Galison is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. Biography Galison received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., in both physics and history of science, at Harvard University. His publications include How Experiments End , Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , and Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps . His most recent book, co-authored with Lorraine Daston, is titled Objectivity .

#421

Sven Beckert

#15980

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

#422

John Saville

#7982

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

John Saville was a Greek-British Marxist historian, long associated with University of Hull. He was an influential writer on British labour history in the second half of the twentieth century, and also known for his multi-volume work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography, edited in collaboration with others.

#423

Patrick Collinson

#18592

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Patrick "Pat" Collinson, was an English historian, known as a writer on the Elizabethan era, particularly Elizabethan Puritanism. He was emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996. He once described himself as "an early modernist with a prime interest in the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

#424

Richard Carwardine

Richard Carwardine

#33106

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Richard John Carwardine is a Welsh historian and academic. He specialises in American politics and religion in the era of the American Civil War. The professor is best known for his work on President Abraham Lincoln and was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 2010 to 2016.

#425

Hugh N. Kennedy

#23032

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Hugh Nigel Kennedy is a British medieval historian and academic. He specialises in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, Muslim Iberia and the Crusades. From 1997 to 2007, he was Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London.

#426

H. W. Brands

#10108

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Henry William Brands Jr. is an American historian. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his PhD in history in 1985. He has authored more than thirty books on U.S. history. His works have twice been selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

#427

David Christian

David Christian

#15498

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

#428

Ping-ti Ho

#18970

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

Ping-ti Ho or Bingdi He , who also wrote under the name P.T. Ho, was a Chinese-American historian. He wrote widely on China's history, including works on demography, plant history, ancient archaeology, and contemporary events. He taught at University of Chicago for most of his career, and was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1975, the first scholar of East Asian descent to have that honor.

#429

Michael Marrus

#9659

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Michael Robert Marrus was a Canadian historian of the Holocaust, modern European and Jewish history and international humanitarian law. He is the author of eight books on the Holocaust and related subjects.

#430

Elizabeth Eisenstein

Elizabeth Eisenstein

#13158

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein was an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th-century France. She is well known for her work on the history of early printing, writing on the transition in media between the era of 'manuscript culture' and that of 'print culture', as well as the role of the printing press in effecting broad cultural change in Western civilization.

#431

Seymour Drescher

#13984

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Seymour Drescher is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville and slavery and his published work Econocide. Career Seymour Drescher has been publishing since 1959. He initially focused his research on Tocqueville. He was the first to attract scholarly attention to Tocqueville's views of problems of poverty, colonial slavery, and race. Of his work in this field, Tocqueville scholar Matthew Mancini, calls Seymour Drescher "arguably the finest Tocqueville scholar writing in English..."

#432

Robert Middlekauff

#16036

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Robert Lawrence Middlekauff was a professor of colonial and early United States history at the University of California, Berkeley. Career In 1983, Middlekauff became the President of Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, until 1987. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. In 1987, Middlekauff became a professor at UC Berkeley.

#433

Wouter Hanegraaff

Wouter Hanegraaff

#1828

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff is professor of the History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He served as the first president of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism from 2005 to 2013.

#434

Maxine Berg

#17953

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Maxine Louise Berg, is a British historian and academic. Since 1998, she has been a professor of history at the University of Warwick. She has taught at Warwick since 1978, joining the Department of Economics, before transferring to History. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

#435

Ira Katznelson

#6589

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ira I. Katznelson is an American political scientist and historian, noted for his research on the liberal state, inequality, social knowledge, and institutions, primarily focused on the United States. His work has been characterized as an "interrogation of political liberalism in the United States and Europe—asking for definition of its many forms, their origins, their strengths and weaknesses, and what kinds there can be".

#436

Barry S. Strauss

#21031

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Barry S. Strauss is an American historian. He is a professor of history and humanistic studies at Cornell University, and a visiting Corliss Page Dean Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Life and work Strauss is an expert on ancient military history and has written or edited numerous books, including The Battle of Salamis , The Trojan War , The Spartacus War , Masters of Command , The Death of Caesar , Ten Caesars , and The War That Made The Roman Empire . His books have been translated into nineteen languages.

#437

Peter Kenez

#10929

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Peter Kenez is a historian specializing in Russian and Eastern European history and politics. Life Kenez was born and grew up in Pesterzsébet, Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary. His father was arrested in March 1944 after Operation Margarethe and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and killed. His mother fled to Budapest with him, where they survived the persecution of the Jews by the Eichmann-Kommando and the Arrow Cross Party.

#438

Morton Smith

#14153

Overall Influence

1915 - 1991 (76 years)

Morton Smith was an American professor of ancient history at Columbia University. He is best known for his reported discovery of the Mar Saba letter, a letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a Secret Gospel of Mark, during a visit to the monastery at Mar Saba in 1958. This letter fragment has had many names, from The Secret Gospel through The Mar Saba Fragment and the Theodoros.

#439

Wolfgang Benz

#15385

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Wolfgang Benz is a German historian from Ellwangen. He was the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische Universität Berlin between 1990 and 2011. Personal life Benz studied history, political science and art history in Frankfurt am Main, Kiel and Munich. In 1968 he completed his doctoral thesis on under the supervision of Karl Bosl at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. From 1969 till 1990, Benz worked at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

#440

David C. Lindberg

#9519

Overall Influence

1935 - 2015 (80 years)

David Charles Lindberg was an American historian of science. His main focus was in the history of medieval and early modern science, especially physical science and the relationship between religion and science. Lindberg was the author or editor of many books and received numerous grants and awards. He also served as president of the History of Science Society and in 1999 was the recipient of its Sarton medal.

#441

Jeremy Adelman

#12698

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA, where he is also the director of the Global History Lab. Previously, he served as the director of the Council for International Teaching and Research, the director of the Program in Latin American Studies and chair of the History Department at Princeton. His areas of scholarship include Latin American and global history.

#442

Joan Martinez Alier

Joan Martinez Alier

#3991

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Joan Martinez Alier is a Catalan economist, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and researcher at ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has made important contributions in ecological economics and political ecology, which he synthesised in his work on environmentalism of the poor.

#443

Dan Diner

#39428

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dan Diner is an Israeli-German historian and political writer. He is emeritus professor of modern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Diner is Chair of the Alfred Landecker Foundation and its Governing Council. Formerly he served as Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish history and Jewish culture, and professor at the historical seminary of the University of Leipzig. He is also a full member of the philological-historical class of the Saxon Academy of Sciences.

#444

Peter Hennessy

#5545

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Peter John Hennessy, Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield, is an English historian and academic specialising in the history of government. Since 1992, he has been Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London.

#445

Clayborne Carson

Clayborne Carson

#6291

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Clayborne Carson is an American academic who is a professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985, he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King Jr.

#446

David Wallechinsky

#11452

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David Wallechinsky is an American popular historian and television commentator, the president of the International Society of Olympic Historians and the founder and editor-in-chief of AllGov.com and worldfilmreviews.us.

#447

Roland Oliver

#35172

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Roland Anthony Oliver FBA was an Indian-born English academic and Emeritus Professor of African history at the University of London. Throughout a long career he was an eminent researcher, writer, teacher, administrator and organiser, who had a profound effect on the development of African Studies in the United Kingdom.

#448

John Fage

#34612

Overall Influence

1921 - 2002 (81 years)

John Donnelly Fage was a British historian who was among the first academics to specialise in African history, especially of the pre-colonial period, in the United Kingdom and West Africa. He published a number of influential studies on West African history including Introduction to the History of West Africa . He subsequently co-founded the Journal of African History, the first specialist academic journal in the field, with Roland Oliver in 1960.

#449

Serhii Plokhy

#18542

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

<onlyinclude> </onlyinclude> Personal background Serhii Plokhy was born in Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia, to Ukrainian parents. He spent his childhood and school years in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, where his family returned soon after his birth.

#450

Richard Wolin

#1896

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Richard Wolin is an American intellectual historian who writes on 20th Century European philosophy, particularly German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the group of thinkers known collectively as the Frankfurt School.

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