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,

#4001

Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann

#59553

Overall Influence

1918 - 1993 (75 years)

Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann was a German folklorist, anthropologist and ethnologist. She was an academic teacher, from 1946 at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in East Berlin and from 1961 at the University of Marburg.

#4002

Ivan Venedikov

#100223

Overall Influence

1916 - 1997 (81 years)

Ivan Yordanov Venedikov was a Bulgarian archaeologist, historian, thracologist and philologist who studied Thracian and medieval history, archaeology, art and culture; Bulgarian cultural and artistic heritage.

#4003

Asunción Lavrin

#115115

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Asunción Lavrin is a historian and author with more than 100 publications on topics of gender and women's studies in colonial and contemporary Latin America and religion and spirituality in Colonial Mexico. She is professor emerita at Arizona State University. Lavrin is the daughter-in-law of the artist Nora Fry Lavrin. She has two children, Cecilia and Andy, and two grand children, Erik and Nora.

#4004

Hans Renders

#98441

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Hans Renders is a professor of history and biography theory at the University of Groningen. Since 2004, he is also the head of the university's "Biography Institute". Career Currently, Renders is board member of the journals Le Temps des Médias; Quaerendo. A Quarterly Journal from the Low Countries and ZL. Literair-historisch tijdschrift. From 2004 to 2015, he was a critic for OVT, a radio program of Dutch public broadcasting channel VPRO. In addition, since 1988, he has been a critic for Dutch newspapers Het Parool and Vrij Nederland. Furthermore, he supplied until 2017 reviews of biographies...

#4005

Brian Stoddart

#97940

Overall Influence

Emeritus professor Brian Stoddart is an Australian academic who was the vice-chancellor of La Trobe University between 2005 and 2006. He is a well-known commentator on sporting matters, being involved in the foundation of the Australian Institute of Sport and being the author of many books exploring the history and importance of sports in society.

#4006

Christina Goulter

#93458

Overall Influence

Christina Goulter is a New Zealand-born British military historian who is a senior lecturer in the Defence Studies Department of King's College London. Between 1994 and 1997 Goulter served as an Associate Visiting Professor of Strategy at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island.

#4007

Dai Smith

#42725

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

David Burton "Dai" Smith FLSW is a Welsh academic, cultural historian, author, and former BBC programme editor and broadcaster. He was chair of the Arts Council of Wales between 2007 and 2016. Smith was born in the Rhondda. He was educated at Porth County and Barry Grammar School, before studying history and literature at Balliol College, Oxford, and later undertook further studies at Columbia University, New York, and the University of Wales, Swansea. Between 1969 and 1993, he was a lecturer in history in the universities of Lancaster, Swansea, and Cardiff. He was appointed as Professor in the History of Wales at the University of Wales in Cardiff in 1985, holding the post until 1992.

#4008

Luděk Navara

#43369

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Luděk Navara is a Czech non-fictional author, publicist, scenarist and historian. He graduated at Faculty of Civil Engineering of Brno University of Technology and later in history at Faculty of Philosophy of Masaryk University. Since 1995, he has been editor by newspaper MF Dnes. He cooperates also with Česká televize in Brno. His predominant coverage of history and journalism are crimes of Communism and Nazism, and flight and expulsion of Germans during and after WWII. In 2009, together with Miroslav Kasáček, he founded the Civic Association Memory, which maps communist totalitarianism in the Czech Republic, especially in the region of South Moravia.

#4009

Arthur A. Goren

#111173

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Arthur A. Goren was the Russell and Bettina Knapp Professor Emeritus of American Jewish History at Columbia University in New York City. Early life Arthur Aryeh Goren was born Arthur Gorenstein to Saul and Lillian Gorenstein, Jewish Labor Zionists. He was raised in Washington, DC, and New York City, NY, and was an activist in the Habonim , a Labor Zionist youth movement.

#4010

Fay Bound Alberti

#54383

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Fay Bound Alberti is a British cultural historian of gender, emotion and medicine, and Professor of Modern History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at King’s College London, where she is PI of Interface and Director of the Centre for Technology and the Body. She was previously Professor of Modern History at the University of York. Bound Alberti is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and previously foundation future leader at the Foundation for Science and Technology.

#4011

Edmund Campion

#67716

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Edmund Campion is an Australian Catholic priest and historian. He was educated at Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview and the University of Sydney, where he was editor of the student newspaper Honi Soit in 1953. He was appointed a lecturer in history at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, later becoming Professor of History there.

#4012

Robert Knecht

#81650

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (99 years)

Robert Jean Knecht was a British historian, an expert on 16th-century France, and Emeritus Professor of French history at the University of Birmingham, where he taught during 1956–1994. Biography The only child of French parents living in London, Knecht was educated at the French Lycée in London and the Salesian College, Farnborough. He graduated at King's College London in 1948 and qualified as a teacher in 1949. In 1953 he was awarded the M.A. degree of London University for which he submitted a thesis on Cardinal John Morton and his episcopal colleagues. Knecht was then employed by a firm ...

#4013

Knud J. V. Jespersen

#139473

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Knud J. V. Jespersen was a Danish historian . Over his career he has published a number of academic texts on Danish history while a professor at the University of Southern Denmark and has served as the historiographer royal of Denmark.

#4014

Samuel H. Yamashita

#103102

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Samuel Hideo Yamashita is an American historian and Asian studies scholar. His research interests include Confucianism, daily life in wartime Japan, and Japanese cuisine. He is the Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona College.

#4015

Bogumil Hrabak

#84244

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Bogumil Hrabak was a Serbian historian, university professor and pedagogue. With a prolific and versatile career, he was considered "one of the last polyhistorss of Yugoslav historiography." He studied history from 1946 to 1951 at the University of Belgrade and later in Sarajevo, where he received his doctorate in 1957. He worked in Belgrade at the Faculty of Philosophy , the Military History Institute until 1958 and the Institute of Social Sciences until 1965, then at the Faculty of Philosophy in Priština, where he founded the Department of History, and from 1979 until his retirement in 1993 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad.

#4016

Brian Ó Cuív

#63236

Overall Influence

1916 - 1999 (83 years)

Brian Ó Cuív was a Celtic scholar who specialised in Irish history and philology. Life Ó Cuív was professor of Celtic Studies at University College Dublin and later at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His later years were devoted to the compilation of a catalogue of the Irish manuscripts in the University of Oxford. The completed catalogue was published after his death.

#4017

Murray C. Wells

#62697

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Murray Charles Wells is a New Zealand economist, top manager, and Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Sydney, known for his work on the history of accountancy. Life and work Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, Wells attended Christ's College, Christchurch, and obtained his Master of Commerce at the University of Canterbury, and his Ph.D. at the University of Sydney. He also obtained his licence as Certified Public Accountant.

#4018

Mirta Zaida Lobato

Mirta Zaida Lobato

#87836

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Mirta Zaida Lobato is an Argentine historian, essayist, and full professor specializing in the social, cultural and political history of the world of work and gender relations in Argentina and Latin America in the 20th century. Lobato was the founder of "Área Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de la Mujer" . She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

#4019

Velta Ruke-Dravina

#27826

Overall Influence

1917 - 2003 (86 years)

Velta Ruke-Dravina was a Latvian-born Swedish linguist and folklorist, as well as a professor in Baltic languages at Stockholm University. Ruke-Dravina's research interests included children's language, language contact, and dialectology. Her doctoral thesis was about diminutives in Latvian. She held the only professorship in Baltic languages outside the Baltics and had a leading role in developing the teaching program on the subject at Stockholm University. In 1980, she was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

#4020

Simon Walker

#103106

Overall Influence

1958 - 2004 (46 years)

Simon Walker was a British historian of late-medieval England. Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he was educated at Charterhouse School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was awarded a Prize Fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford where he completed his D.Phil thesis on John of Gaunt. In 1984 he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sheffield, and was subsequently promoted to Reader. In 1999 he was appointed a vice-warden of All Souls and gained an Extraordinary Research Fellowship at the College.

#4021

Desanka Kovačević-Kojić

#52239

Overall Influence

1925 - 2022 (97 years)

Desanka Kovačević-Kojić was a Serbian medievalist, specialized in the medieval history of Serbia and Bosnia, and in particular urban history, trade and commercial relations. She left Sarajevo in 1993, after the Siege of Sarajevo had been imposed on her hometown and the Bosnian War was in full swing at that point. She settled in Belgrade, in Serbia, where she continued her work until her death.

#4022

Julio Valdeón Baruque

#131040

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Julio Valdeón Baruque was a historian of Spain. Life and career He studied at the University of Valladolid, earning a degree in History, and subsequently earning a PhD. Enter 1967 and 1971 was associated professor Medieval History of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He became a professor in that subject, serving in 1971 and 1973 in the University of Seville. From 1973 he was professor of Medieval History at the University of Valladolid. Enter 1981 and 1984 was dean of the Faculty of Arts of the University and later served as director of its Department of Medieval History. Under his tutelage...

#4023

John E. Sunder

#116887

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

John E. Sunder was an American historian, specializing in the early American West, and a naturalist and birdwatcher. Personal and professional life John Edward Sunder was born in St. Louis, Missouri on October 10, 1928. He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in 1949, Masters of Arts in 1950 and Ph.D in history in 1954 from Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the United States Army and served in Korea for two years. After returning from Korea, he moved to Austin, Texas in 1956. Sunder started birdwatching in the 1960s. He taught western history at the University of Texas. Sunder's h...

#4024

Alistair John Rowan

#103741

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Alistair John Rowan is an Irish architectural historian, a retired university teacher, a building conservationist and an author of British, Irish and Italian architectural history. Rowan was an architectural writer with Country Life before 1967, when he became lecturer in Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter Rowan became the first professor of the History of Art in University College, Dublin , and later Principal of Edinburgh College of Art. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford for 1988–89.

#4025

Gilles Pécout

#106971

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Gilles Pécout is a French historian, academic and diplomat. He is currently the French Ambassador to Austria. Biography Pécout was born in Marseille. He graduated from the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he was also professor and director of the History Department.

#4026

Peter Jelavich

#117794

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Peter Jelavich is an author and Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the son of historians Barbara and Charles Jelavich. Previously, Jelavich was professor of history and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1982. Jelavich specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe since the Enlightenment, with emphasis on Germany. His areas of interest include the interaction of elite and popular culture; the ...

#4027

Isabella Bashmakova

Isabella Bashmakova

#72349

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Isabella Grigoryevna Bashmakova was a Russian historian of mathematics. In 2001, she was a recipient of the Alexander Koyré́ Medal of the International Academy of the History of Science. Education and career Bashmakova was born on January 3, 1921, in Rostov-on-Don, to a family of Armenian descent. Her father, Grigory Georgiyevich Bashmakov, was a lawyer. Her family moved to Moscow in 1932. She began studies in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1938, but was evacuated from Moscow during World War II, during which she served as a nurse in Samarkand. She completed a Ph.D.

#4028

Alexander Rubel

#118370

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Alexander Rubel is a German-Romanian historian of the Antiquity. Alexander Rubel studied History, Germanistics and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz. He was a researcher at the Department of Ancient History of the University of Konstanz. In 2000 he relocated to Iași, Romania, as Director of the Iași branch of the Goethe-Institut. He became a DAAD lecturer at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University. He is presently the director of the German Cultural Center in Iași., researcher at and Director of the Iași Institute of Archaeology.

#4029

Ronnie Hsia

#91444

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia is an American historian and the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches history and religious studies. His research interests are Catholic Renewal, anti-Semitism and Protestant Reformation.

#4030

Sarah Davies

#95487

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Sarah Davies is a historian specializing in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. She is a professor of history at Durham University in Durham, England, United Kingdom, and currently serves as chair of the History Department.

#4031

Russell Stone

#60316

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (102 years)

Russell Cyril James Stone is a New Zealand historian, author and professor emeritus at the University of Auckland. In 2012, the New Zealand Herald called him the leading authority on the history of Auckland, having written nine books on early Auckland history.

#4032

Joseph Mélèze-Modrzejewski

#98795

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Joseph Mélèze-Modrzejewski was a Polish-French historian and professor of ancient history at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. Career Joseph Mélèze-Modrzejewski began his scientific career in Poland as a student of Rafał Taubenschlag. After his arrival in France in 1958,he taught for thirty years the legal and social history of the Hellenistic world at the Faculty of Law of Paris and at the Sorbonne. Then following his retirement from the University in 1999, Mélèze-Modrzejewski continued for 5 years to lead a seminar on papyrology and history of rights from ancient times at the École pratique...

#4033

Mario Keßler

#99423

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Mario Keßler is a German historian. He was born in what was then the German Democratic Republic . He was 34, and about to finish his habilitation by the time the wall was breached. German reunification thesis, in 1990, transformed the historiographical context on both sides of the former inner German border, but the changes were particularly stark for scholars who had learned their profession in the east. By the mid-1990s only around 40 East German professional historians were still in academic employment and by 2017 only around ten East German trained historians were employed by universities.

#4034

Robert Meyer

#90565

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Robert Meyer is a Norwegian art photographer, professor, photo historian, collector, writer and publicist. He is the son of journalist Robert Castberg Meyer and homemaker Edel Nielsen; and brother of the industrial designer Terje Meyer.

#4035

Timothy Mowl

#68127

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Professor Timothy Mowl FSA is an architectural and landscape historian. He is Emeritus Professor of History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes at the University of Bristol, and Honorary Professor at the Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester. He is also Director of AHC Consultants. He was awarded the Hawksmoor Medal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1987, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1993, and served as a member of Council of the Garden History Society between 2002 and 2007. He is currently President of the Avon Gardens ...

#4036

Arnold A. Offner

Arnold A. Offner

#45813

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Arnold A. Offner is an American historian, and Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College. He is a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

#4037

Michele R. Salzman

#105235

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Michele Renee Salzman is a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She is an expert on the religious and social history of late antiquity. She is married to sociologist Steven Brint - also distinguished professor at University of California, Riverside.

#4038

Amy Knight

#34146

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Amy W. Knight is an American historian of the Soviet Union and Russia. She has been described by The New York Times as "the West's foremost scholar" of the KGB. Life and career Amy Knight was born in Chicago in 1946. She gained a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan. She went on to gain a Doctor of Philosophy in Russian politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1977. She taught at the LSE, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University and at Carleton University. She also worked for eighteen years at the U.S.

#4039

Robert Edward Mitchell

#139355

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Robert Edward Mitchell is an American historian, currently the Marcello Lotti Professor of English at Duke University.

#4040

Nigel Wilson

#93880

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Nigel Guy Wilson is a British scholar, emeritus fellow and tutor in Classics, Lincoln College, Oxford. His field of research is ancient Greek history, language and literature, and culture, art and archaeology of the Byzantine world. Since retiring in 2002 he has continued his researches into Greek palaeography, textual criticism and the history of classical scholarship. In the series of Oxford Classical Texts his edition of Aristophanes appeared in 2007, and a new edition of Herodotus for the same series appeared in 2015. Another substantial piece of work was a contribution to the study of t...

#4041

Hervé Leuwers

#75516

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Hervé Leuwers is a French historian. He is a specialist on Maximilien Robespierre, the history of the French Revolution, and the history of justice and judicial professions. Biography Hervé was born in Rosendaël. In 1994 he defended his thesis, devoted to Merlin de Douai . Since 2008 Leuwers teaches at the University of Artois, and then at Lille-III . His works are mainly devoted to the history of justice and legal professions, as well as to that of men and the political and judicial branches of the French Revolution. Leuwers was influenced by Gérard Walter, Henri Guillemin, and Norman Hamps...

#4042

Gastón Antonio Zapata Velasco

Gastón Antonio Zapata Velasco

#83508

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Gastón Antonio Zapata Velasco is a Peruvian historian, professor and columnist, known for his investigations and articles about the history and sociopolitical reality of Peru. Biography Son of the director of the Civil Guard, Gastón Zapata de la Flor.

#4043

R. Scott Appleby

#53832

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Robert Scott Appleby is an American historian, focusing in global religion and its relationship to peace and conflict, integral human development, and comparative modern religion. He is a Professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, and currently the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs.

#4044

Henry Cord Meyer

#100228

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Henry Cord Meyer was an American historian specializing in modern European and Central European history. He was an expert on the politics and economics of airships in the post-World War I period . Biography The only child of German immigrants Henry H. and Sophie Meyer, Henry Cord Meyer was born on 12 February 1913 in Chicago, Illinois. After his father died in 1920, Meyer and his mother moved first to Eldora, Colorado; Meyer grew up in Colorado Springs. Meyer earned his B.A. degree at the University of Colorado in 1935; he spent one year as a student at the Konsular Academy in Vienna b...

#4045

Yves Rees

#101087

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (37 years)

Yves Rees is an Australian researcher in Australian history, best known for their work on gender, transnational and economic history, as well as writings on contemporary transgender identity, and politics.

#4046

Alan Colquhoun

#41500

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Alan Harold Colquhoun was an English architect, historian, critic and teacher. Biography Colquhoun was born in Eton, Buckinghamshire on 27 June 1921 and attended Bradfield School. He went on to study architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and the Architectural Association in London. In the Second World War Colquhoun was a captain in the Bengal Sappers and Miners, at Roorkee, India, where he first met future friend and architectural colleague Robert Maxwell. Colquhoun started his career as an architect at London County Council , and then in the practice of Lyons Israel Ellis where he des...

#4047

Ramya Sreenivasan

#101870

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Ramya Sreenivasan is an Indian scholar of English and early modern Indian history. She is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She was originally appointed in the Department of South Asian Studies in 2009. Best known for her book The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, she is a winner of the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize.

#4048

Caroline Winterer

Caroline Winterer

#146604

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Caroline Winterer is an American historian. She is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University. She is also Professor, by courtesy, of Classics. From 2013 to 2019, she was Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. She received her B.A. from Pomona College and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

#4049

Gabriela Soto Laveaga

#26546

Overall Influence

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is a historian of science specializing in Latin America. She is currently a professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Background She received her B.A. from California State University, Dominguez Hills; her M.A. and doctorate in history from University of California, San Diego, with Eric Van Young as her mentor. Before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2016, she earned tenure in the history department at the University of California, Santa Barbara ; and was assistant professor of history at Michigan State University . From 2019 to 2020, she was member a...

#4050

Ballard C. Campbell

#104941

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Ballard C. Campbell is an American historian. Campbell is a 1962 graduate of Northwestern University. He holds an M.A. in history from Northeastern University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is Professor in the Department of History and Professor of Public Policy, the Law, and Society Program at Northeastern University.

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