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,

#4401

Élisabeth Du Réau

#75278

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

Élisabeth du Réau, née de Chateauvieux , was a French historian and professor of international relations and contemporary history, known for her biography of French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier and her work on the construction of the European identity. She had a twenty-year career as a high school history instructor before embarking on an academic career spanning over thirty years.

#4402

Bartolomé Clavero

#92194

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

Bartolomé Clavero Salvador was a Spanish jurist and historian, specialized in legal history. Clavero was a tenured full professor at the University of Seville. His works focus on usury, majorat and the concept of State during the Ancien Régime , with a materialistic point of view and often polemical content. He was a personal friend and biographer of Francisco Tomás y Valiente, who was murdered by ETA just five minutes after they had a conversation on the phone. Clavero died on 30 September 2022, at the age of 75.

#4403

Paul Lawrence Farber

#92774

Overall Influence

1944 - 2021 (77 years)

Paul Lawrence Farber was a professor of the history of science at the Oregon State University. He wrote or edited eight books about the history of science as well as dozens of articles. He was an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#4404

Brenda Elaine Stevenson

#127840

Overall Influence

Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history, particularly slavery, gender, race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles . From Autumn 2021, she will be Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, University of Oxford.

#4405

Joseph Roach

#102126

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Joseph Roach is an American theater historian and scholar, a Sterling Professor emeritus at Yale University, and also a published author. He was also given an honorary Doctor of Letters by University of Warwick.

#4406

Daniel Hobbins

#114634

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Daniel Hobbins is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and an American historian specializing in medieval France. He is the recipient of the Nina Maria Gorrissen Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011.

#4407

István Perczel

#98014

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

István Perczel is a Hungarian scholar of Byzantine history and early Christianity and a hyperpolyglot. He is a professor at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. He holds a doctorate from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is one of the leading experts on Dionysius the Areopagite and the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala. Since 2000 he has led a project to explore and digitalize the Syriac and Malayalam manuscripts of the Saint Thomas Christians in South India. He has initiated the study of Classical Syriac as a modern Indian lingua franca and of Garshuni Malayalam.

#4408

Dafydd Jenkins

#106041

Overall Influence

1911 - 2012 (101 years)

Dafydd Arwyn Jenkins was a Welsh barrister, activist, and legal scholar and historian. He was Professor of Legal History and Welsh Law at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth , from 1975 to 1978.

#4409

Jeffrey Grey

#102839

Overall Influence

1959 - 2016 (57 years)

Jeffrey Guy Grey was an Australian military historian. He wrote two volumes of The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, and several other high-profile works on Australia's military history. He was the first non-American to become the president of the Society for Military History, but is perhaps best known as the author of A Military History of Australia .

#4410

Eva Schlotheuber

#114007

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Eva Schlotheuber is a German historian of Christianity in the Middle Ages. Education and career Eva Schlotheuber studied at the universities of Göttingen and Copenhagen. In 1994, she received her doctorate in Göttingen with a dissertation entitled Die Franziskaner in Göttingen. Die Geschichte des Klosters und seiner Bibliothek , supervised by Hartmut Hoffmann. From 1999 to 2001, she was a research assistant to Claudia Märtl at the Technical University of Braunschweig, and then in 2001, at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich . In 2003, she completed her habilitation there with a thesis ...

#4411

Diane Kunz

#123177

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Diane Bernstein Kunz is an American author, historian, and lawyer from Durham, North Carolina, and executive director of a not-for-profit adoption advocacy group, the Center for Adoption Policy. She is the author of Butter and Guns , an overview of America's Cold War economic diplomacy.

#4412

Paula Findlen

#92906

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Paula Findlen is the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History, the director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the director of the SIMILE Program, all at Stanford University.

#4413

Norman Fiering

#114411

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Norman Fiering is an American historian, and Director and Librarian, Emeritus, of the John Carter Brown Library. Life He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1956, where he was a student of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in 1969.

#4414

Dorothy Schwieder

#108645

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Dorothy Schwieder was an American historian, biographer, and academic. She joined the faculty of Iowa State University in 1966, becoming the first woman to be appointed as a professor in the Department of History. Schwieder authored a memoir and biography the late U.S. Senator George McGovern, her former college professor. A native of South Dakota, much of her research and writings focused on the history of Iowa, including the state's Amish communities.

#4415

Ferenc Miszlivetz

#86940

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Ferenc Miszlivetz is a Hungarian academic. He is full professor at the University of Pannonia, and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg . His research interests include democracy, civil society, Central-European and European Studies, globalization and sustainability.

#4416

Ivo Mattozzi

#75822

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Ivo Mattozzi , is a professor at the University of Bologna. He teaches methodology and teaching of history. He has given lectures in Italy, Spain, Brazil and Argentina and was the president of the history association, "Clio '92". His articles and publications have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Greek.

#4417

Hannah Cotton

#47487

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Hannah M. Cotton-Paltiel is the Shalom Horowitz Professor of Classics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was head of its classics department until 2005. She is a classical texts researcher, and former editor of Scripta Classica Israelica. She teaches Latin language and Roman history. She is married to Ari Paltiel.

#4418

Pat Kirkham

#37120

Overall Influence

Pat Kirkham is an author, professor, and design historian. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of London and is considered a foremost expert on the history of design, film, gender, and class. She is perhaps best known as the author of the first major book about designer Saul Bass, the monograph Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design.

#4419

Steven L. Jacobs

#81238

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Steven Leonard Jacobs is an American historian, Professor of the University of Alabama . He is specialized in Genocide and Holocaust Studies, Religion, History of Judaism, and Politics in the Middle East. Jacobs is a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and has served as First Vice-President and Secretary-Treasurer on the board of the organisation.

#4420

Robert Butow

#71243

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Robert Joseph Charles Butow was a professor emeritus of Japanese history at the University of Washington in Seattle. An author of several books, he was a leading authority on Japan during World War II.

#4421

Margaret Mills

#75419

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Margaret Ann Mills is an American folklorist, and educator. She is a professor emerita of the Department of Near East Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. Early life and education Margaret Mills was born on November 9, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was raised in Seattle, Washington, where her Italian-born mother was raised. Although both of her parents were physicians, Mills's interests carried her in a different direction.

#4422

Giorgio Strukul

#161472

Overall Influence

#4423

Loïc Vadelorge

#66658

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Loïc Vadelorge, born 26 November 1964, graduate from École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, is a French historian, teacher of contemporary history at the Paris 13 University, after having been Senior Lecturer at the Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University from 1998 to 2009 and at the University of Rouen from 1992 to 1994.

#4424

Karl Weintraub

#86450

Overall Influence

1924 - 2004 (80 years)

Karl Joachim "Jock" Weintraub was a longtime professor of history at the University of Chicago, having taught there since 1954. He was a strong proponent of liberal education and wrote and spoke extensively on its value.

#4425

Murad Hasratyan

#46349

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Murad Hasratyan is an Armenian architectural historian. Biography He was born in Yerevan to an educated family. His father, Morus Hasratyan was a renowned historian-philologist, honorary figure of the Armenian SSR, the first student of the Faculty of History at Yerevan State University, later, he was the Director of History Museum of Armenia.

#4426

Eoin McKiernan

#66379

Overall Influence

1915 - 2004 (89 years)

Eoin McKiernan , was teacher and scholar in the interdisciplinary field of Irish Studies in the United States and the founder of the Irish American Cultural Institute. He is credited with leading efforts to revive and preserve Irish culture and language in the United States and he was named to the list of the 100 greatest Irish-Americans of the century by Irish America magazine. The Irish writer and former editor of The Irish Press Tim Pat Coogan praised McKiernan as "the father of Irish studies."

#4427

Elizabeth Zachariadou

#93415

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Elizabeth A. Zachariadou was a Greek scholar on Turkish studies, specializing in the early Ottoman Empire . Biography In 1966, she married the Byzantinist Nikolaos Oikonomides , with whom she went to Canada following the 1967 coup and the establishment of the Regime of the Colonels in Greece.

#4428

Michael Braddick

#117876

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Michael Jonathan Braddick, FBA, FRHistS is a British historian and academic specialising in early modern Britain. Educated at the University of Cambridge , he is now Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2013.

#4429

William Beik

#122645

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

William Humphrey Beik was an American professor of French history, specialising in early modern France. Beik's father, Paul Beik, was a professor of history at Swarthmore College who carried out research on the French Revolution, so that William was partially educated in France. William took degrees from Haverford College and Harvard University . From 1968 to 1990 he taught at Northern Illinois University, and in 1990 became Professor of French History at Emory University, retiring in 2007. His Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France received the American Historical Association's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize.

#4430

Olav Riste

#74071

Overall Influence

1933 - 2015 (82 years)

Olav Riste was a Norwegian historian. He was born in Volda. He took his D.Phil. degree at the University of Oxford with a thesis on Norway's stance in the First World War entitled Norway's relations with belligerent powers in the First World War. A book based on the thesis called The Neutral Ally: Norway's relations with belligerent powers in the First World War was published in 1965. He served as director of the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies from 1980 to 1996, then research director until his retirement. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Bergen from 1980 and the University of Oslo from 1997.

#4431

George Melnyk

#64882

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

George Roman Melnyk is a Canadian cultural historian. Melnyk is Professor Emeritus of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Manitoba, a Master of Arts degree in history from the University of Chicago, and a Master of Arts degree in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is the author or editor of 30 books on Canadian Studies topics, including ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF CANADIAN CINEMA and FILM AND THE CITY . His most recent books are WE ARE ONE: Poems from the Pandemic , FINDING REFUGE IN CANADA: NAR...

#4432

Cynthia Nicoletti

#37167

Overall Influence

Cynthia Lisa Nicoletti is an American legal historian. She is an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Early life and education Nicoletti earned her Bachelor of Arts degree, Master's degree, and PhD from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, which examined the issue of whether secession could have been legally valid, earned the 2011 American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Prize.

#4433

Matthew Frye Jacobson

#104790

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Matthew Frye Jacobson is a historian whose research concerns politics and race in all eras of American history. He is the Sterling Professor of American Studies and History and Professor of African American Studies at Yale University. From 2012 to 2013 he was president of the American Studies Association.

#4434

David Northrup

#130188

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

David Northrup is emeritus professor of history at Boston College. He is the former president of the World History Association and in 2017 received their Pioneers in World History Award. Selected publications Seven Myths of Africa in World History. Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2017 Africa's Discovery of Europe: 1450-1850. New York : Oxford UP, 2014. How English Became the Global Language. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic, 1770-1965: A Brief History with Documents. New York : Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995 The Atlantic Slave Trade.

#4435

Charles K. Armstrong

#62248

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Charles King Armstrong is an American historian of North Korea. From 2005 to 2020, he worked as the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University, spending his last year on sabbatical after the university's determination that he had committed extensive plagiarism. Armstrong's works dealt with revolutions, cultures of socialism, architectural history, and diplomatic history in the contexts of East Asia and modern Korea, with a focus on North Korea.

#4436

Emilia Jamroziak

#150866

Overall Influence

Emilia Jamroziak is professor of medieval religious history at the University of Leeds. Jamroziak is a specialist in medieval British and European religious history of the 12th to the 16th centuries, the Cistercian order, and frontiers and borders in medieval Europe. She was the director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds from 2016 to 2019.

#4437

Ion Negoițescu

#43187

Overall Influence

1921 - 1993 (72 years)

Ion Negoiţescu was a Romanian literary historian, critic, poet, novelist and memoirist, one of the leading members of the Sibiu Literary Circle. A rebellious and eccentric figure, Negoiţescu began his career while still an adolescent, and made himself known as a literary ideologue of the 1940s generation. Moving from a youthful affiliation to the fascist Iron Guard, which he later came to regret, the author became a disciple of modernist doyen Eugen Lovinescu, and, by 1943, rallied the entire Sibiu Circle to the cause of anti-fascism. He was also one of the few openly homosexual intellectuals...

#4438

Silke Ackermann

#88783

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Silke M. Ackermann is a German-born cultural historian and museum professional. She became a British Citizen in 2009 and has since held dual German-British citizenship. Ackermann currently serves as Director of the History of Science Museum at the University of Oxford, having been appointed in 2014 as the first female museum director at Oxford University. She is also co-founding director of the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Linacre College. In 2013 she was the first woman to be elected President of the Scientific Ins...

#4439

Erik Barnouw

#94002

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Erik Barnouw was a U.S. historian of radio and television broadcasting. At the time of his death, Barnouw was widely considered to be America's most distinguished historian of broadcasting. Life According to the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Erik Barnouw was born in The Hague in the Netherlands, the son of Adriaan , and Ann Eliza Barnouw . The Barnouws came to America in 1919, after the end of World War I when his father became one of the editors of the Weekly Review and later was the Queen Wilhelmina Professor at Columbia University. Erik attended Horace Mann School in New York City.

#4440

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud

#43530

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is a Somali politician who has served as the president of Somalia since May 2022. He is the founder and current chairman of the Union for Peace and Development Party. He was indirectly elected as President of the Federal Republic of Somalia on 15 May 2022, defeating the incumbent president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed. He previously served in the same position as the 8th president of Somalia from 2012 to 2017. A civil and political rights activist, Hassan was previously a university professor and dean at SIMAD University, which he co-founded.

#4441

Susan Lederer

#58806

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Susan E. Lederer is an American historian of science. She is the Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Lederer focuses on medicine and American society in the 20th-century. This includes the areas of race, medicine, public health, popular culture, research ethics, and the history of medical ethics. Lederer completed a B.A. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 1977. She completed an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of science at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Lederer's dissertation was titled Human experimentation and antivivisection in turn-of-the-century America.

#4442

Carl Kaestle

#96337

Overall Influence

1940 - 2023 (83 years)

Carl Frederick Kaestle is a Professor of Education, History, and Public Policy emeritus at Brown University. His historical research has focused on the development of American schools, particularly in the 1800s. He has worked at the University of Chicago and University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a former president of the National Academy of Education.

#4443

Françoise Thom

#59046

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Françoise Thom is a French historian and Sovietologist, honorary lecturer in contemporary history at Paris-Sorbonne University. A specialist in post-communist Russia, she is the author of works of political analysis on the country and its leaders.

#4444

Erhard Scholz

#54300

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Erhard Scholz is a German historian of mathematics with interests in the history of mathematics in the 19th and 20th centuries, historical perspective on the philosophy of mathematics and science, and Hermann Weyl's geometrical methods applied to gravitational theory.

#4445

William Burley Lockwood

#34592

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

William Burley Lockwood was a Professor of Germanic and Indo-European Philology at the University of Reading from 1968 until his retirement in 1982. Biography After leaving school and spending some time working and travelling in England, Germany, Austria and the Balkans, he went to Manchester University and obtained First Class Honours in German in 1942, followed by a DipEd and M.A. at Bristol University, where he received a distinction in practical teaching.

#4446

Deng Xiaonan

#104951

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Deng Xiaonan is a Chinese historian and the Boya Chair Professor at Peking University's Centre for Research on Ancient Chinese History. She is known for her research on Song history, Ancient Chinese bureaucratic systems and female history of the Tang and Song. She is currently serving as the director of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of PKU.

#4447

Kerry Trask

#99994

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Kerry A. Trask is an American historian and author. Trask has worked as a history professor at the University of Wisconsin Manitowoc for more than thirty years. Trask was also the Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin State Assembly from the 25th District in the 2010 general election.

#4448

Sasha Handley

#110297

Overall Influence

Sasha Handley is a British historian, specializing in the early modern social and cultural history of the British Isles. She is best known for her research on history of British sleeping habits, and her book, Sleep in Early Modern England, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2017.

#4449

Nicolas Warembourg

#39733

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Nicolas Warembourg is a French jurist, professor of Law at the Sorbonne. He specializes in historic, public and constitutional law. He is regularly interviewed. He is the most highly specialized regarding Guy Coquille.

#4450

Eric Hinderaker

#103598

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Eric A. Hinderaker is an American historian specializing in early America. Education and career Hinderaker graduated from Watertown High School in 1977. He received his B.A. from Augustana College , an M.A. from the University of Colorado Boulder, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. He has spent his subsequent career at the University of Utah, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of History.

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