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,

#4351

Stephen Banfield

#67036

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Stephen David Banfield is a musicologist, music historian and retired academic. He was Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham from 1992 to 2003, and then Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol from 2003 to his retirement at the end of 2012; he has since been an emeritus professor at Bristol.

#4352

Khosrow Shakeri Zand

#71923

Overall Influence

1938 - 2015 (77 years)

Khosrow Shakeri Zand , also known under his pen name Cosroe Chaqueri was a historian, researcher, writer and activist of the Human Rights movement of Iran. Biography Khosrow Shakeri Zand was born in Tehran on July 3, 1938. He was the second child from a family of six children. His father was the first Persian rug exporter to Europe and his mother was one of the first women to have higher education, and was a school teacher. He finished his early education at Alborz College in Tehran. He then decided to move to California and study at the San Francisco State University where he obtained his B.A.

#4353

Kristin Mann

#93278

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Kristin Mann is an American historian and author renowned for her works on the history of slavery in Africa. in 2002, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowships award. She is currently a Professor of History at Emory University in Druid Hills, Georgia, United States.

#4354

Charles Hucker

#90586

Overall Influence

1919 - 1994 (75 years)

Charles O. Hucker was a professor of Chinese language and history at the University of Michigan. He was regarded as one of the foremost historians of Ming dynasty China and a leading figure in the promotion of academic programs in Asian Studies during the 1950s and 1960s.

#4355

Michał Tymowski

#115733

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Michał Tymowski is a Polish historian, professor of the humanities and an academic at the University of Warsaw. He specialises in the history of Africa. Life He was born in Warsaw. Works Les domaines des princes du Songhay. Comparaison avec la grande propriété foncière en Europe au début de l'époque féodale Le développement et la régression chez les peuples de la boucle du Niger a l'époque précoloniale Samori – bohater Czarnej Afryki Dzieje Timbuktu Historia Mali Karabin i władza w Afryce XIX wieku: państwa i armie Samoriego i Kenedugu oraz ich analogie europejskie Historia Polski – razem z...

#4356

Reginald C. Stuart

#74394

Overall Influence

1943 - 2018 (75 years)

Reginald Charles Stuart was a Canadian historian. The main focus of his work is on two major topics: the American experience with war as an instrument of policy and the relations of Canadians and Americans in what he terms Upper North America. He retired in 2013 and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

#4357

Mary Nash

#123721

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Mary Josephine Nash Baldwin is an Irish historian living in Catalonia. She has specialized in the study of the history of women and feminism in Spain. Biography In 1967, she graduated from the National University of Ireland, and in 1975 she obtained a licentiate in philosophy and letters at the University of Barcelona. She received her doctorate there in 1977 in the specialty of modern history, with the thesis La mujer en las organizaciones políticas de izquierdas en España, 1931-1939. In 1982, she was one of the founders of the Women's Historical Research Center at the University of Barcelon...

#4358

Tillmann Lohse

#158797

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Tillmann Lohse is a German author, editor, academic, and scholar of Medieval History. In 2003 he was honoured with the "Goslarer Geschichtspreis" for his research on the Salian emperor Henry III. In 2009 he obtained his doctoral degree from Humboldt-University of Berlin. His dissertation dealt with the collegiate church SS. Simon and Jude in Goslar whose manuscripts and files have been stored in various German and Austrian archives since its secularization at the beginning of the 19th century. From these sources Lohse edited a 12th-century urbarium, a 13th-century chronicle and a 15th-century ordinal, all of which were once composed by members of the chapter.

#4359

F. Donald Logan

#99572

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Francis Donald Logan was an American historian who was Professor of History at Emmanuel College. Biography Francis Donald Logan was born in Boston on March 9, 1930, the son of Joseph and Laura . Educated at St. John's Seminary, the University of Toronto and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Logan has served as Professor Emeritus of History of Emmanuel College since 1993. He is the author of several notable works on the Vikings and religious history. Logan is a Fulbright Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a fellow of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the Royal Histor...

#4360

Mart Kuldkepp

#115434

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (42 years)

Mart Kuldkepp is an Estonian historian and Scandinavianist. He is Professor of Estonian and Nordic History at University College London. Between 2011 and 2015, he worked in various positions in the Tartu University Scandinavian languages department, including as head of department and programme director.

#4361

Kim H. Veltman

#81922

Overall Influence

1948 - 2020 (72 years)

Kim Henry Veltman was a Dutch/Canadian historian of science and art, director of the Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute , consultant and author, known for his contributions in the fields of "linear perspective and the visual dimensions of science and art," new media, culture and society.

#4362

Ursula Lamb

#62088

Overall Influence

1914 - 1996 (82 years)

Ursula Schäfer Lamb was a distinguished American historian specializing in Latin American history, who published works on the age of exploration and the history of science. She was a pioneering woman academic in Latin American history, whose interdisciplinary works on history of science and globalization antedate the boom in such studies.

#4363

Giusto Traina

#138516

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Giusto Traina is a prominent Italian ancient historian and Byzantinist. Since 2011 he has been professor of Roman history at Sorbonne Université and, since 2023, also at the Università del Salento. He is a former senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France . He is the author of numerous books and articles. Formerly interested in ancient landscapes and techniques, he is currently involved in a long-term research about ancient Armenia.

#4364

Kazuhiro Tatsumi

#120772

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

is a Japanese archaeologist, history scholar and museum curator. He was a lecturer at Doshisha University until his retirement in 2011. He is knowledgeable about the domestic practices of early Japanese peoples. and has been referenced in numerous books. Tatsumi has authored many books and papers. In 1981 he published his findings on research in the Kitaoka Otsuka tumulus in Inasa, Shizuoka, which was printed by the Inasa-cho Board of Education.

#4365

Josef Polišenský

#121237

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Josef Vincent Polišenský was a Czech academic historian and Latin Americanist. He is best known in the English-speaking world for his book Tragic Triangle: The Netherlands, Spain and Bohemia, 1617–1621 , a study of the international political context of the Bohemian Revolt.

#4366

Gerhard Brandt Naeseth

#76472

Overall Influence

1913 - 1994 (81 years)

Gerhard Brandt Naeseth was an American librarian and genealogist who specialized in the field of Norwegian-American immigration. Background and career Naeseth was born in Valley City, North Dakota, in 1913, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. As a young boy, he sought to follow in his father's footsteps, but an uncle recognized early on that Naeseth had more of the traits of a librarian. The uncle turned out to be right and Naeseth eventually received degrees in history and library science. Naeseth received a bachelor's degree from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan.

#4367

Janusz Jasiński

#99273

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (97 years)

Janusz Jasiński is a Polish historian. He finished an undergraduate degree in history at the Catholic University of Lublin in 1954. He obtained his PhD, under the supervision of Stefan Kieniewicz in 1964 from the University of Warsaw with the dissertation on agrarian reforms in Warmia at the turn of the 19th century . He was habilitated in 1982 at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń on the basis of his work on national identity and consciousness in 19th century Warmia .

#4368

Allen Frantzen

#83722

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Allen J. Frantzen is an American medievalist with a specialization in Old English literature. Since retiring from Loyola University Chicago, he has been an emeritus professor. Education and career Frantzen grew up in rural Iowa and earned a degree in English from Loras College and a PhD from the University of Virginia with a dissertation on the literature of penance in the Anglo-Saxon period. He was a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago from 1978 until his retirement in 2014, when he was named an emeritus professor. While there he headed the graduate programs in English from 1984 to 1...

#4369

John C. Weaver

#84316

Overall Influence

John C. Weaver FRSC is a Canadian historian, currently Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University. The son of Catherine , a shop clerk, and Owen Adam Weaver, a school teacher. A graduate of Queen's University, he received a James B. Duke Commonwealth Fellowship to study at Duke University where he met and married Joan . Except for a two year period teaching at Queen's, his career has been entirely at McMaster University, with visiting Professorships at Australian National University and Griffith University in Brisbane. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World , ...

#4370

Elizaveta I. Gnevusheva

Elizaveta I. Gnevusheva

#107056

Overall Influence

1916 - 1994 (78 years)

Elizaveta Ivanovna Gnevusheva was a Soviet historian - orientalist, university lecturer, publicist. In 1994, she was a recipient of the Prima Comexindo Prize. Biography She was the daughter of an Orthodox priest. In 1941, she graduated from the Faculty of History of V.Potemkin Moscow City Pedagogical Institute and later she completed a postgraduate course there too. In 1948, she defended her Ph.D. thesis on the emergence of the Indian National Congress and then went to Kursk, where she taught history at Kursk Pedagogical Institute. Upon returning to Moscow , she worked at Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies , at the history department of Moscow State University .

#4371

David Beach

#103088

Overall Influence

1943 - 1999 (56 years)

David Norman Beach was a Zimbabwean historian. He worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the University of Zimbabwe and pioneered the documentation of oral traditions in Zimbabwe. In his work on Great Zimbabwe, Beach has promoted the interpretation of the different complexes as dwellings of successive rulers, opposing the structuralist tradition favoured by historians such as Huffman. When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980 Beach took up Zimbabwean citizenship. When asked about his work, Nolan Chipo Makombe said "he is a comrade." In 1983 when an interviewer from London referred to ...

#4372

Barbara Caine

#93641

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Barbara Caine is an Australian feminist historian. Biography She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, then her family settled in Australia in 1960. Since 2015 she has been the Head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. She has written extensively on British and Australian women's history, and has written biographies of a number of historical figures, including the Strachey family and the Webb family.

#4373

Daniel Szechi

#144353

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Daniel Szechi is an historian and Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. Szechi was educated at the University of Sheffield from 1976 to 1979 and St Antony's College, Oxford, where he did his D.Phil. He was then a University Research Fellow at Sheffield for three years and taught for a year at the University of Hull and then at St John's College, Oxford for nearly three years. Afterwards, he moved to America where he taught at Auburn University for eighteen years. In August 2006 he became Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester.

#4374

Lin Man-houng

#145468

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Lin Man-houng is an economic historian and the first female president of the Academia Historica . She is also one of few female historians to boldly argue in public about Taiwan's sovereignty and international status.

#4375

Geoffrey Cantor

#80293

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Geoffrey N. Cantor is Emeritus Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds and Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He has written about Michael Faraday, the wave theory of light and the responses of the Quaker and Jewish religions to science. With John Hedley Brooke he delivered the 1995–1996 Gifford Lecture at the University of Glasgow, which were subsequently published as Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion in 1998. He contributed to the SciPer Projec...

#4376

James Sterling Young

#90170

Overall Influence

1927 - 2013 (86 years)

James Sterling Young was an American political scientist, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Professor of Government and Randolph P. Compton Scholar at the University of Virginia. Biography A native of Savannah, Georgia, Young attended the Savannah public schools through high school. Following United States Army service in China and Japan he received an A. B. degree from Princeton University. He pursued graduate study at Columbia University in political science, history, and anthropology. In 1964 he received a Ph.D. from Columbia and was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Public Law and Government.

#4377

Andrew Winston

#74595

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Andrew Spencer Winston is a psychologist and historian who is an emeritus professor at the University of Guelph in Canada. He is known for his research on the history of scientific racism and eugenics in psychology. He was president of the Society for the History of Psychology in 2012, and served as Executive Officer to Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences from 2002 to 2008.

#4378

Aydogdy Kurbanov

#91401

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Aydogdy Kurbanov is a Turkmen archaeologist and historian whose main area of research is prehistoric and late antiquity of Central Asia. Born in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, he graduated from the Turkmen State University named after Magtymguly and he did a Ph.D. at the Free University of Berlin and has been a postdoctoral researcher in archaeology and history at the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan. He has been the head of department of archaeology of the Academy's Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography.

#4379

Robert Aldrich

#112880

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Robert Aldrich is an Australian historian and writer. Aldrich is a Professor of European History, he teaches and researches modern European and colonial history, including the history of France since the Revolution, the history of the French and British overseas empires, the history of 'sites of memory' and the history of gender and sexuality.

#4380

Judith Binney

#56388

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Dame Judith Mary Caroline Binney was a New Zealand historian, writer and Emerita Professor of History at the University of Auckland. Her work focussed on religion in New Zealand, especially the Māori Ringatū religion founded by Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and continued by Rua Kenana. She also wrote extensively on the history of Ngāi Tūhoe.

#4381

Amalie Kass

#90657

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Amalie Moses Kass was an American historian at Harvard Medical School. She wrote about obstetrics and midwifery. Biography Amalie Moses was born to Leslie and Helene Moses and reared in Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended Forest Park High School. She attended Wellesley College and graduated in 1949, with high honors in history, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received her master's degree in education in 1963 from Boston University. She had two younger siblings, a brother Alfred H. Moses and a sister Claire Moses Lovett. She had lived in Cambridge, Lincoln, and Belmont, Massachus...

#4382

Gerald N. Grob

#159606

Overall Influence

#4383

Alejandro de la Fuente

#66052

Overall Influence

Alejandro de la Fuente is an academic and art curator. He is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University. He is also Director of Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. His research focuses on specializes in the study of comparative study of slavery and race relations.

#4384

Witold Rodziński

#94470

Overall Influence

1918 - 1997 (79 years)

Witold Rodziński was a Polish historian, sinologist and diplomat. He was born in 1918 in Lemberg, son of the conductor Artur Rodziński. He studied at the Columbia University, was an official at the United Nations 1945–47, and adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1947–48, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences and the Central Committee of the Higher School of Pedagogy in Warsaw.

#4385

John Radzilowski

#128105

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

John Radzilowski is an American historian, and author of numerous books and articles in the modern history of Poland and in the history of Polish-Americans. He is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast.

#4386

Jackie Lomax

#56006

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

John Richard Lomax was an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. He is best known for his association with George Harrison, who produced Lomax's recordings for the Beatles' Apple record label in the late 1960s.

#4387

Evgeniya Gutnova

#138585

Overall Influence

1914 - 1992 (78 years)

Evgeniya Vladimirovna Gutnova was a Soviet Russian historian and medievalist, Doctor of Sciences in Historical Sciences . She was a professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University . Julius Martov is her uncle. Lydia Dan is her aunt.

#4388

Winfried Scharlau

Winfried Scharlau

#10699

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Winfried Scharlau was a German mathematician. Biography Scharlau received his doctorate in 1967 from the University of Bonn. His doctoral thesis Quadratische Formen und Galois-Cohomologie was supervised by Friedrich Hirzebruch. Scharlau was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1969–1970 and in spring 1972. From 1970 he was a professor at the University of Münster, where he has now retired.

#4389

Ernest P. Young

#88053

Overall Influence

Ernest P. Young is an American historian who focused his research on the politics and international relations of China in the late 19th and early 20th century China. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1968 to 2002, and became the Richard Hudson Professor of History in 1998.

#4390

Michel Poivert

#106626

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Career Student at the school of the Louvre Museum, Poivert holds a Ph.D. in Art History about pictorialism in France from La Sorbonne University in 1992, headed by José Voyelle. In 2002, he received his post-doctoral Ph.D. on the relation between avant-gardes and photography in the 20th century. Since 2006, he has been a professor at La Sorbonne University.

#4391

Jimena Canales

#56535

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Jimena Canales is a Mexican-American historian of science and author with a background in physics and engineering. Career Jimena Canales is the author of Simply Einstein , Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science , The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time and A Tenth of a Second: A History as well as numerous articles on the history of modernity; specializing in art, science and technology . Canales obtained a B.S. in engineering physics at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in 1995, a master...

#4392

Barbara Keys

#81283

Overall Influence

Barbara J. Keys is a historian of U.S. and international history and professor of history at Durham University. She was born in Albany, New York, and grew up in San Francisco. She served as the 2019 president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

#4393

Liba Taub

#53630

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Liba Taub is an American historian of science, now Curator of the Whipple Museum in Cambridge, UK. Taub completed a doctorate in 1987 at the University of Oklahoma. She held the position of Curator at the Adler Planetarium. Much of her research goes into ancient Greek and Roman astronomy, physics and meteorology and researching the history of scientific instruments. She became a Fellow of Newnham College in 1996 and serves as a professor of History and Philosophy of Science. Taub has been an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Excellence Cluster Topoi in Berlin since 2010, in which she has participated in various workshops and workshops on Ancient Greek and Roman scientific writing.

#4394

Hubert Mordek

#70952

Overall Influence

1939 - 2006 (67 years)

Hubert Mordek was a German historian. Biography Mordek studied history, Latin, and philosophy at the University of Kiel, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Tübingen. He received his doctorate in 1969 with Die Rechtssammlungen der Handschrift von Bonnveal - ein Werk der karolingischen Reform, directed by Horst Fuhrmann. In the early 1970s he was an assistant at the German Historical Institute in Rome. His habilitation followed in 1975, with Kirchenrecht und Reform in Frankenreich. Die Collectio Vetus Gallica, die älteste systematische Kanonessammlung des fränkischen Gallien. Stu...

#4395

Gordon C. Bond

#93854

Overall Influence

1939 - 1997 (58 years)

Gordon C. Bond was an American historian who specialized in studies of Napoleon. He was a professor of history and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University. Bond received his bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degrees from Florida State University. He spent a year teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi before joining the Auburn University faculty in 1967. He was a visiting professor at the University of Utah for one year. Bond was chair of the Auburn University Faculty Senate in 1982 when it was often at odds with President Hanley Funderburk. He served as head of the...

#4396

David Rollason

#120028

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

David W. Rollason is an English historian and medievalist. He is a Professor in history at Durham University. He specialises in the cult of saints in Anglo-Saxon England, the history of Northumbria and in the historical writings of Durham, most notably producing a modern edition and translation of the Libellus de exordio and co-operating on an edition of the Durham Liber Vitae.

#4397

Julie Reuben

#64856

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Julie A. Reuben is a historian interested in the role of education in American society and culture. Her teaching and research address broad questions about the purposes of education; the relation between educational institutions and political and social concerns; and the forces that shape educational change.

#4398

Ann Trotter

#81791

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

Alison Ann Trotter was a New Zealand historian. She was the first woman to be appointed pro vice-chancellor of the University of Otago. Early life and education Alison Ann Trotter was born in Hāwera, New Zealand on 23 January 1932, daughter of Pan and Clement George Trotter. She was educated at Hāwera Main Primary School, before undertaking her secondary schooling at St Cuthbert's College in Auckland from 1945 to 1949, where she was head girl in her final year.

#4399

Pierre Chaplais

#74533

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Pierre Théophile Victorien Marie Chaplais was a French historian. He was Reader in Diplomatic at the University of Oxford from 1957 to 1987. Born in Châteaubriant, Loire-Inférieure , France, Chaplais was educated at the Collège Saint-Sauveur in Redon and the University of Rennes, where he studied Law and Classics, with a view of becoming an academic lawyer. His education was interrupted by World War II, during which he served with the French Army until the 1940 Armistice. A member of the French Resistance, Chaplais was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald. For his wartime activitie...

#4400

Stein Tønnesson

#81214

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Stein Dorenfeldt Tønnesson , is a Norwegian historian. Career He was the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo from 2001 to 2009, when he was replaced by Kristian Berg Harpviken. Stein Tønnesson stays on at PRIO as a Research Professor, while at the United States Institute of Peace as Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow 2010-11.

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