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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#4251

Jacques Pirenne

#154463

Overall Influence

#4252

Emma Griffin

#121827

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Emma Griffin is professor of modern British history at Queen Mary University of London with particular interests in the industrial revolution and in social and gender history. She is the author of five books. Her second book, Blood Sport, was awarded the Lord Aberdare Prize for Literary History. She is the President of the Royal Historical Society, and joint editor of The Historical Journal. She is part of the Living with Machines research project – a multi-disciplinary digital history project based at The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library, which seeks to rethink the impact of te...

#4253

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

#88387

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Deborah Ascher Barnstone is an author, historian and a professor at the University of Technology Sydney. Biography Barnstone earned an undergraduate degree from Barnard College, a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University, and a PhD in architectural history from the Delft University of Technology.

#4254

Hillel Schwartz

#68312

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Hillel Schwartz is an American cultural historian, translator and poet. Education and teaching Hillel Schwartz was born in Chicago and got his B.A. degree at Brandeis University in 1969. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in European History at Yale University , and the following year he got a master's degree in library science at the University of California, Berkeley.

#4255

Daniel H. Bays

#80457

Overall Influence

1942 - 2019 (77 years)

Daniel H. Bays was an American historian of China, best known for his works on Christianity in China. Biography Bays was born in 1942 in St. Joseph, Michigan, received his B.A. in history from Stanford University in 1964, an M.A. in Far Eastern studies from the University of Michigan in 1967, and a PhD in history of modern China from the University of Michigan in 1971. His PhD dissertation was on the Chinese politician Zhang Zhidong in the midst of China's late-imperial quest for modernity.

#4256

Bruno Laurioux

#90827

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Bruno Laurioux is a French medievalist historian born in 1959 in Loudun. Biography Alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines , Bruno Laurioux passes his History Agrégation and a PhD at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University with a thesis on "The Cookbooks in the West at the end of the Middle Ages" .

#4257

Marceli Kosman

#150233

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Marceli Kosman is a Polish historian. Professor of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He finished secondary school in 1957. Then he studied at the university in Poznań. He gained MA in history in 1962 and PhD in 1966. The title of Kosman's doctoral thesis was Dokumenty i kancelaria wielkiego księcia Witolda. His supervisor was Henryk Łowmiański.

#4258

Lynne Bowen

#72931

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Lynne Bowen is a Canadian non-fiction writer, historian, professor, and journalist, best known for her popular historical books about Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Over the years, Bowen has won awards such as the Eaton's British Columbia Book Award , the Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Writing British Columbia History , and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize .

#4259

Andrew O'Shaughnessy

#85963

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy FRHS is an academic historian and professor of history at the University of Virginia. Between 2003 and 2022, he was Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.

#4260

Francis Eugene Yates

#154741

Overall Influence

#4261

Florin George Călian

#58082

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Florin George Călian is a Romanian historian of religion and philosophy. He is a researcher at the Institute for Ecumenical Research, Lucian Blaga University. Educational background Florin George Călian studied psychology, philosophy and classical languages in Bucharest. He had a MA degree in archeology and Greek-Roman history from the University of Bucharest, and another MA in Medieval studies from Central European University. He obtained his doctoral degree from Central European University, with a dissertation on Plato's ontology of numbers, under the supervision of Gábor Betegh.

#4262

Sherman Cochran

#76469

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Sherman Cochran is Hu Shih Professor Emeritus of Chinese history at Cornell University. Early life Cochran was born in St. Johns, Portland, Oregon in 1940. He is a graduate of Roosevelt High School. He was a football player in college and won three-year football letterman and received All-Ivy League Honorable Mention in his junior year. He completed his B.A. at Yale University in 1962. Cochran became interested in Chinese history when he lived in Hong Kong immediately after graduating from college. At the time, he was teaching English under the Yale-China Association Program at New Asia College in Kowloon.

#4263

Charles Postel

#110780

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Charles Postel is an American historian and professor at San Francisco State University. He studied at Laney College in Oakland before receiving his B.A. in history from UC-Berkeley in 1995, and his Ph.D. in history from UC-Berkeley in 2002. Postel's scholarship focuses on politics and social movements in the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He is best known for his book The Populist Vision, about which the Longview Institute said,Elegantly written, meticulously researched, The Populist Vision is an enthralling history of the movement that created the most pervasive political impulse in American politics.

#4264

Hienadź Sahanovič

Hienadź Sahanovič

#128061

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Hienadź Sahanovič is a Belarusian historian. He specializes in the early modern period of Central European and Belarusian history. Education and academic career In 1984 Sahanovič graduated from the Maxim Tank Belarusian State Pedagogical University in Miensk. Beginning in 1986 he became an active member of the democratic opposition in Soviet Belarus. In 1989 Sahanovič obtained a PhD degree in history from the Institute of History, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, where he worked as a researcher between 1984 and 2005. His employment was terminated, in the course of the politically mot...

#4265

Edward Ezell

#116269

Overall Influence

1939 - 1993 (54 years)

Edward Clinton Ezell was an American author and professor who served as National Firearms Collection curator at the National Museum of American History, administered by the Smithsonian Institution. He was also founding Director of the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security.

#4266

Herbert Rosenkranz

#69933

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

Herbert Rosenkranz was a Jewish historian. Life Herbert Rosenkranz grew up in the Viennese district of Brigittenau. His Jewish parents, Michael and Mircia, , and his grandparents had immigrated from Eastern Europe. The family emigrated to Riga, Latvia after the Anschluss of Austria into Nazi Germany. After the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, from 1941 to 1947 Herbert Rosenkranz was interned in several Soviet prison camps. From 1947 to 1953 he studied history and English at the University of Vienna. When he had finished his thesis on Chazaro-Judaism Herbert Rosenkranz emigrated to Israel....

#4267

Marcus Junkelmann

Marcus Junkelmann

#71737

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Marcus Junkelmann is a German historian and experimental archeologist. Life and work Junkelmann started to study history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1971 and in 1979 he received a PhD for a thesis on the military achievements of Maximilian II . After that he worked as an associate member of staff at the university and for a military museum in Ingolstadt.

#4268

Nils Roll-Hansen

#105259

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Nils Roll-Hansen is a historian and philosopher of 19th and 20th century biology at University of Oslo. He is the author of four books and many academic articles. His book The Lysenko Effect was praised in Nature. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

#4269

Benjamin Brown

#45123

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Benjamin Brown is an Israeli professor, researcher of Judaism and Jewish thought, lecturer at the Department of Jewish thought at Hebrew University and a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute. Brown is known for his studies on Orthodox Judaism, especially the ultra-Orthodox community, from the theological, Jewish-legal and historical perspectives. Among other topics, he was the first to trace the development of the concept Daas Torah and its various usages in the Haredi world. In addition, he published many papers about the Jewish legal ruling system , the Musar movement and the Hasidic movement.

#4270

Michael Bess

#106701

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Michael D. Bess is Chancellor's Professor of History, as well as Professor of the Communication of Science and Technology, and Professor of European Studies, at Vanderbilt University, where he has been teaching since 1989. He is a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first century Europe, with a particular interest in the interactions between social and cultural processes and technological change.

#4271

Vladimir Morozan

#126509

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Vladimir Vasilevich Morozan is a distinguished Russian historian, genealogist, and a Doctor of Historical Sciences. He currently holds the position of Professor at the Faculty of History in St. Petersburg State University.

#4272

Irma Tam Soong

#110004

Overall Influence

1912 - 2001 (89 years)

Irma Tam Soong was a historian specializing in Hawaiian-Chinese history, and was notable for writing about her experiences during World War II in China during Japanese occupation. She founded the Hawaiʻi Chinese History Center.

#4273

John McGreevy

#82115

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

John T. McGreevy is an American historian who has been serving as Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of the University of Notre Dame since July 1, 2022. He was formerly the dean of the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Notre Dame from 2008 until 2018. McGreevy earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Notre Dame and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in history from Stanford University. He has been on the Notre Dame faculty since 1997. He is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom.

#4274

Edward Ingram

#96275

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Edward Roger Ingram Ellis was an Anglo-Canadian historian of the British Empire, long-time former editor of the International History Review, and emeritus professor at Simon Fraser University. Having obtained his BA and MA degrees from Balliol College, Oxford, Ingram went on to receive his PhD in international history from the London School of Economics, completing his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Hilda Lee and Elie Kedourie. Most of Ingram's scholarly publishing focused on the so-called Great Game, the imperial rivalry between the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia. In 1966 he joined the faculty of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

#4275

Charles Belfoure

#61723

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Charles Belfoure is an American writer, architect and historian specializing in historic preservation, author of several histories and fiction works, including The New York Times best-selling novel The Paris Architect.

#4276

Evelyn Hu-DeHart

Evelyn Hu-DeHart

#77534

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Evelyn Hu-DeHart is a Professor of History and a Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Biography Hu-DeHart was born in Chongqing, China in 1947. Her family fled to Hong Kong in 1949 and then to the United States in 1959. She received a full scholarship to attend Stanford University in 1965 at the age of 17 and graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in Political Science with Honors, and was recognized with the Dinkelspiel Award. Her encounter with the Civil Rights Movement and Third World activism was particularly influential during those years. After a Fulbright to Brazil, she proceeded to receive her Ph.D.

#4277

James Holt

#94897

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Sir James Clarke Holt , also known as J. C. Holt and Jim Holt, was an English medieval historian, known particularly for his work on Magna Carta. He was the third Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, serving between 1981 and 1988.

#4278

Keith Jeffery

#96788

Overall Influence

1952 - 2016 (64 years)

Keith John Jeffery MRIA was a Northern Irish historian specialising in modern British, British Imperial, and Irish history. Early life Keith John Jeffrey was born in Belfast in 1952. He attended Methodist College Belfast, where his father was vice principal. He obtained his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from St. John's College, Cambridge, the latter under the supervision of John Andrew Gallagher.

#4279

Edith Derby Williams

#74097

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Edith Roosevelt Derby Williams was an American historian, conservationist, and granddaughter of the 26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. Biography Williams was born as Edith Roosevelt Derby in New York City to Dr. Richard Derby and Ethel Carow Roosevelt. She was the second child of Dr. and Mrs. Derby and the eldest daughter. President Theodore Roosevelt was her grandfather. She was named for her grandmother Edith Roosevelt. She was actively involved in Republican politics and addressed the 1960 Republican National Convention, seconding the nomination of Richard Nixon. Later she founded the Vashon Island Health Center.

#4280

Francisco Bethencourt

#127294

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Francisco Bethencourt is Charles Boxer professor at King's College London. He taught at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Brown University. Bethencourt’s research centres on the history of racism, Portuguese and European expansion from the 15th to the 19th centuries, missions and religious history in the Catholic world, and identities and cultural exchange in Iberia. Bethencourt's Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century was described as the first worldwide history of racism. It was described by Ekow Eshun in The Independent as "an unlovely history. But a necessary one".

#4281

Andrew R. Heinze

Andrew R. Heinze

#40933

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Andrew R. Heinze is an American playwright, non-fiction author, and scholar of American history. Growing up in New Jersey in a close-knit Jewish family, he left home at fourteen to attend Blair Academy, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and moved to California. He did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, training in American history, with an emphasis on the history of race, immigration and the history of American Jews. During his academic career he taught both American and Jewish history at several American universities and was a tenured professor of his...

#4282

Trond Berg Eriksen

#69399

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Trond Berg Eriksen is a Norwegian historian of ideas, non-fiction writer and magazine editor. He was born in Øvre Eiker in Buskerud. His thesis, from 1975, was on the ethics of Aristoteles. He was appointed professor at the University of Oslo from 1990. He edited the magazine Samtiden from 1989 to 1993, and has published a number of books.

#4283

Alain Ducellier

#55932

Overall Influence

1934 - 2018 (84 years)

Alain Ducellier was a French historian and professor emeritus at Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail who specialized in Byzantine studies and Christianity in the middle east. He was the author or editor of more than 40 books.

#4284

Merid Wolde Aregay

#47579

Overall Influence

1927 - 2008 (81 years)

Merid Wolde Aregay was an Ethiopian historian and a scholar of Ethiopian studies. Merid Wolde Aregay was born in Adwa in 1927 according to the Ethiopian calendar. He earned his BA in 1956 from what was called University College of Addis Ababa, now Addis Ababa University. From there, he was sent to earn an MA in education from Harvard University , then a Master's in history from the University of Chicago . He completed his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London .

#4285

Frank-Rutger Hausmann

#86359

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Frank-Rutger Hausmann is a German Romanist and historian. Life and career Hausmann was born in Hanover in 1943, the son of the military doctor Hans Hausmann. After graduating from the neo-linguistic Städtisches Gymnasium Gummersbach in 1962, he studied law, Romance languages and literature, history and Medieval Latin Philology in Göttingen and Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1968 under Vito Rocco Giustiniani with a thesis on the Italian humanist and bishop Giovanni Antonio Campano. In 1974, he also completed his habilitation in Freiburg. In 1976 he was appointed to a position as Scientific Council.

#4286

Alan L. Gropman

Alan L. Gropman

#96315

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Alan Louis Gropman is an American retired military officer, college professor, and author. Gropman served 27 years on active duty in the United States Air Force, finishing his career as a colonel. After retiring from the Air Force, he became a professor of history and grand strategy at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, an institution that is part of the National Defense University. He later became an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and George Mason University. Over the years, Gropman has written four books and over 600 articles. He has also made six appearances on C-...

#4287

James Davidson

#71238

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

James Davidson is a professor of ancient history at the University of Warwick. Davidson specialises in the social history of ancient Greece and has made significant contributions to the study of ancient homosexuality. He was educated at Columbia and Oxford University, where he received a DPhil. From 2001 to 2004 he was a member of the Council for the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and from 2000 to 2010 a member of the Classical Association Journals Board. His book The Greeks and Greek Love: a Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece was awarded the Mark Lynton His...

#4288

Barbara Ramusack

#110111

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Barbara Nelle Ramusack is a historian and Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History Emerita at the University of Cincinnati. Her focus was on Indian and Chinese History. She obtained her Ph.D in 1969 from the University of Michigan.

#4289

Max Engman

#108014

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Max Robert Engman was a Finnish historian and translator. Engman was born in Helsinki. Engman, who from 1968–1973 was an official at the Finnish national archivess in Helsinki, published in 1983 a much-noticed dissertation about St. Petersburg and Finland. In 1985, he was appointed professor in general history at Åbo Akademi.

#4290

G. C. Peden

#83264

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

George C. Peden is an emeritus professor of history at Stirling University, Scotland. Career Peden was born in Dundee and educated at Grove Academy, Broughty Ferry. He has written about the British Treasury; Keynesian economics; economic aspects of defence and foreign policy; the welfare state, and some recent Scottish economic history.

#4291

Skënder Rizaj

#97459

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Skënder Rizaj was a Kosovar Albanian scholar and historian born in Peja, Kingdom of Yugoslavia Career Rizaj earned his BA in History from Skopje University in 1956 and his doctorate from Sarajevo University in 1965. He was one of the founders of the Department of History at the University of Pristina, where he taught from 1965 until he retired in 1987. Additionally, he also worked as a Special Consultant for Turkish State Archives in Istanbul from 1989 to 1990. In 2010, Rizaj was awarded the title of as "Educator Emeritus" by the Kosovan government.

#4292

Ramnarayan Rawat

#56550

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Ramnarayan Rawat is a professor at the University of Delaware and a historian of the Indian subcontinent and has also had appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Washington. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Delhi. He has conducted research on the Chamar caste in India, and displayed that their work centered on agriculture and not tanning as previously thought. His work was banned in parts of India for some time due to usage of the word "Chamar."

#4293

Wendy Z. Goldman

#82713

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Wendy Z. Goldman is an American historian, currently the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Her current works involve the history of Joseph Stalin. She is currently married to pirate historian Marcus Rediker.

#4294

Richard Wetzell

#94825

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Richard Friedrich Wetzell is an American historian specializing in German criminology and research fellow at the German Historical Institute. He graduated from Swarthmore College and specialized in European history at Columbia University and Stanford University, where he earned a master's degree and doctorate, respectively.

#4295

Knut Kjeldstadli

#101790

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Knut Kjeldstadli is a Norwegian historian. Kjeldstadli completed his examen artium at Oslo Cathedral School in 1967 before studying English and social economics at the University of Oslo, where he completed his master in history in 1977. He took his doctorate in 1989 with the paper Jerntid. Fabrikksystem og arbeidere ved Christiania Spigerverk og Kværner Brug fra om lag 1890 til 1940. He became adjunct professor at the University of Bergen in 1992, and then professor at the University of Oslo in 1996. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Kjeldstadli is also involved in politics, in the Socialist Left Party as well as ATTAC.

#4296

Susan Broomhall

#91312

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Susan Broomhall is an Australian historian and academic. She is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of History at The University of Western Australia, and from 2018 Co-Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions . She was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the 'Shaping the Modern' Program of the Centre, before commencing her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship within CHE in October 2014, and the Acting Director in 2011. She is a specialist in gender history and the history of emotions.

#4297

Jonathan Dewald

#106194

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Jonathan Stewart Dewald is an American historian focusing on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, as well as the intellectual history and political history of France. He is currently the SUNY Distinguished Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

#4298

Maris Vinovskis

#81057

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Maris A. Vinovskis is an American academic and historian at the University of Michigan and a leading authority on U.S. social and family history. He is the A. M. and H. P. Bentley Professor of History and a Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Vinovskis acts as a senior research scientist in the Institute of Social Research. He is a former chairman of the department of history.

#4299

Wout van Bekkum

#93922

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Wouter Jacques "Wout" van Bekkum is a Dutch professor emeritus of Middle East Studies at the University of Groningen. His expertise lies in the field of Semitic languages and cultures, especially the different varieties of the Hebrew language and Hebrew poetry from Late Antiquity until pre-modern times.

#4300

Jacalyn Duffin

#56274

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Jacalyn M. Duffin is a Canadian medical historian and hematologist. She held the Hannah Chair, History of Medicine at Queen's University from 1988 until 2017. Formerly, she was president of the American Association for the History of Medicine and Canadian Society for the History of Medicine. From 1993 to 1995 she was Associate Dean Undergraduate Studies and Education at Queen's University. She is most well known for her testimony which led to the canonization of Marie-Marguerite d'Youville. As of 2010, she has published eight books on the history of medicine and has written numerous articles on various subjects relating to the history of medicine, miracles, and hematology.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions