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,

#4751

Lauren Benton

#86831

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Lauren Benton is an American historian known for her works on the global history of empires, colonial and imperial law, and the history of international law. She is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University.

#4752

Jan Jansen

#139163

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Dr. Jan Jansen of Leiden University, Netherlands, is a historian and anthropologist specialising in the oral history of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Mali. Jansen is the managing editor of History in Africa, the journal of the African Studies Association. He is also a founding editor of Mande Worlds, published by LIT Verlag, Munster/Hamburg, and African Sources for African History, published by Brill, Leiden.

#4753

Julian Bream

#66103

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Julian Alexander Bream was an English classical guitarist and lutenist. Regarded as one of the most distinguished classical guitarists of the 20th century, he played a significant role in improving the public perception of the classical guitar as a respectable instrument. Over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Bream also helped revive interest in the lute.

#4754

Christian-Georges Schwentzel

#78030

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Christian-Georges Schwentzel, born in 1967, is a French historian specializing in the Hellenistic East. Publications Cléopâtre, Paris, PUF, 1999.L'Égypte hellénistique et romaine , Paris, Nathan, 1999 .Les Pharaons d'Égypte, de Narmer à Cléopâtre, Milan, Les Essentiels Milan, 2002.L'Orient méditerranéen à l'époque hellénistique, Paris, éditions du Temps, 2003.Étrangers dans la cité romaine. Habiter une autre patrie : des incolae de la République aux peuples fédérés du Bas-Empire , Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005.Herod the Great, Juifs et Romains, Salomé et Jean-Baptiste, Titus et Bérénice, Paris, Pygmalion, 2011, 324 pages .La puissance royale.

#4755

Jerome J. Pollitt

#88633

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Jerome Jordan Pollitt is an American art historian and educator. Pollitt is the Sterling Professor of Classical Archeology and History of Art Emeritus at Yale University. Early life Pollitt graduated from the Hotchkiss School in 1953. He then earned a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1957 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University in 1963. Upon graduating from Yale, Pollitt became a Fulbright Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. After returning to the United States, he was drafted and served a term in the United States Army before continuing his educ...

#4756

Claudie Weill

#56682

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

Claudie Weill was a French historian. She worked on the history of the German working world. She was also a specialist on Rosa Luxemburg. Partial publications Claudie Weill, Les cosmopolites - Socialisme et judéité en Russie , Paris, Éditions Syllpse, Collection "Utopie critique", févr. 2004, , Phd Deutsche und russische Sozialdemokratie um die JahrhundertwendeÀ la rencontre de Rosa Luxembourg.Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1844-1914, 1969Deux lettres inédites de Karl Liebknecht, 1969Le Syndicalisme en Allemagne, 1970Le Rôle de la social-démocratie allemande dans la formation de la social-démocratie russe, 1898-1904.

#4757

Maria Mavroudi

#77252

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Maria V. Mavroudi is a Greek-born American Byzantinist, historian, and philologist. She is a history professor at University of California, Berkeley. Education Mavroudi graduated from Anatolia College in Thessaloniki, Greece; from the University of Thessaloniki with a Philology degree; and from Harvard University with a PhD in 1998 Byzantine Studies. Her doctoral advisor was Ihor Ševčenko.

#4758

Étienne Anheim

#98374

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Etienne Anheim, a medieval historian, is professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Biography Etienne Anheim is a graduate of the 'École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, professor of history and former member of the École française de Rome .

#4759

William Chaney

#65052

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

William Albert Chaney was an American historian of Anglo-Saxon England. Chaney spent his career at Lawrence University, where he taught from 1952 until his death; he held the George McKendree Steele endowed chair in history from 1962 until his official retirement in 1999, and was chair of the history department from 1968 to 1971. Chaney's studies focused on the conversion from paganism to Christianity and sacral kingship. His work culminated in his 1970 book, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity.

#4760

Joaquín Fermandois

Joaquín Fermandois

#170334

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

José Joaquín Fermandois Huerta is a Chilean historian and scholar. A disciple of traditionalist thinkers like Mario Góngora and Héctor Herrera Cajas, he has claimed to be a follower of the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee.

#4761

Francisco Veiga

#112946

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Francisco José Veiga Rodríguez is a Spanish historian, journalist and writer. He is a doctor and professor in the Department of Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona , where he has been a professor since 1983, with a focus on Eastern Europe, the countries of the former Soviet Union, the countries of the Balkan Peninsula and Turkey. He is an author of newspaper articles for El Periódico de Catalunya and El País.

#4762

Thomas Malcolm Charlton

#101564

Overall Influence

1923 - 1997 (74 years)

Thomas Malcolm Charlton FRSE was a British civil engineer and historian. He is remembered for several notable textbooks on structural issues. He was a great lover of railways and railway engines. Life He was born on 1 September 1923, in South Normanton, Derbyshire, the son of William Charlton, a mining engineer, and Emily May Wellbank. His early education was at Doncaster Grammar School and then Doncaster Technical College.

#4763

Iain R. Smith

#102891

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Iain Robertson Smith was emeritus reader in history at the University of Warwick. He was a specialist in the history of South Africa and the South African War in particular. Smith was a member of Council of The Historical Association from 1980 to 1995 and editor of the New Appreciations in History series.

#4764

James R. Bartholomew

#115738

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

James Richard Bartholomew is an American historian, who specializes in the modern history of Japan. He studied at Stanford University where he was awarded a B.A. in 1963, an M.A. in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1972.

#4765

Richard Drinnon

#94237

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Richard T. Drinnon was professor emeritus of history at Bucknell University. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught courses on American history. He was denied tenure due to his political activism and was about to be called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Drinnon participated in the Columbia University protests of 1968, and he published several books, including "Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman" and "Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building."

#4766

S. D. Chapman

#154533

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Stanley David Chapman is a British historian. His works have focused primarily on industrial history. Education and career In 1960 he was awarded an MA degree from Nottingham University and his thesis was titled ‘William Felkin, 1795–1874’. He earned his PhD from the University of London in 1966, his thesis being on ‘The Midlands Cotton and Worsted Spinning Industry, 1769–1800’. From 1968 until 1973 he was lecturer at Nottingham University and in 1973 he was appointed Pasold Reader in Textile History at Nottingham.

#4767

Milton M. Klein

#134637

Overall Influence

1917 - 2004 (87 years)

Milton Martin Klein was an American historian. He was born in New York City on 15 August 1917 to Margaret and Edward Klein. Milton Klein earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the City College of New York. While studying for his master's in education, Klein taught high school history. His career as a schoolteacher was broken up by World War II, during which he served with the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1946. After the war, Klein remained a member of the Air Force Reserve, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1977. Klein continued teaching at the high school level as he worked toward a doctorate from Columbia University.

#4768

Alison Winter

#131801

Overall Influence

1965 - 2016 (51 years)

Alison Winter was an American academic. Biography Born on 19 November 1965 in New Haven, Connecticut, Winter spent her early childhood in Bonn, Germany, and attended high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her father taught mathematics at the University of Michigan. His influence led her to study the history of science at the University of Chicago beginning in 1983. Winter moved to the United Kingdom for graduate study, where she met Adrian Johns in 1987. The two married in 1992. Winter completed her M. Phil at the University of Cambridge in 1991, followed by a PhD in 1993. She began teachi...

#4769

Hisashi Inoue

#50403

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Hisashi Inoue is a Japanese historian. His area of expertise is modern Chinese history and Sino-Japanese relations. Since 2001 he has been a professor in the faculty of law at Surugadai University after having served as associate professor at the same university.

#4770

Norbert Schappacher

Norbert Schappacher

#57723

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Norbert Schappacher is a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 in Hyderabad. Education and career After secondary education at Essen's Burggymnasium, Schappacher studied from 1969 to 1971 at the University of Bonn, where he was taught by Günter Harder and Friedrich Hirzebruch. Schappacher obtained his Vordiplom in 1971 at the University of Göttingen, where he studied from 1971 to 1974 and was taught by Hans Grauert, Ulrich Stuhler, and Martin Kneser. For the academic year 1974–1975, Schappacher st...

#4771

John Van Engen

#129534

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

John H. Van Engen is an American historian who focuses on the religious and intellectual culture of the European Middle Ages. He is Andrew V. Tackes Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Notre Dame.

#4772

Frank Broeze

#155746

Overall Influence

1945 - 2001 (56 years)

Frank Broeze was a professor of history at the University of Western Australia. His special area of interest was maritime history. Life and work Born Franklin Jan Aart Broeze in Rijswijk, Netherlands, Broeze was a maritime historian, and one of the founders of the Australian Association for Maritime History. He was also one of the founders of the International Maritime History Association which later became the International Maritime Economic History Association. He published widely on maritime history issues as well as editing The Great Circle, the journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History.

#4773

Mireille Corbier

#112713

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Mireille Corbier is a French historian of Classical history. Currently Research Director Emerita at Centre national de la recherche scientifique , she has published a number of books and articles, and since 1992 has been editor-in-chief of L'Année épigraphique.

#4774

Stephen Constantine

#112456

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Stephen Constantine is professor emeritus of modern British history at Lancaster University. He received his BA from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1968 and his D.Phil from Oxford, in 1984. Constantine joined Lancaster University in 1971 and retired in 2010. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

#4775

Catharine Edwards

#122260

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Catharine Harmon Edwards is a British ancient historian and academic. She is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a specialist in Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature, particularly Seneca the Younger.

#4776

Michael Maaser

#140060

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Michael Maaser is a German historian, archivist of the Goethe University Frankfurt. Life Born in in Hanau, Maaser graduated from the gymnasium. He studied history at the Goethe University Frankfurt. On a scholarship of the , he further studied in Düsseldorf.

#4777

Peter Fraser

#168300

Overall Influence

1918 - 2007 (89 years)

Peter Marshall Fraser, was a classical scholar and historian specialising in the Hellenistic age of Greece. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and acting Warden of the college from 1985 to 1987. He served as Director of the British School at Athens from 1968 to 1971.

#4778

Adrian Cioroianu

#99074

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Adrian Mihai Cioroianu is a Romanian historian, politician, journalist, and essayist. A lecturer for the History Department at the University of Bucharest, he is the author of several books dealing with Romanian history . He is also noted for his contribution as co-author of a high school textbook.

#4779

Catherine Clarke

#83399

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Catherine A. M. Clarke is a British academic. She serves as the Chair in the History of People, Place and Community at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she is Director of the Centre for History of People, Place and Community and Director of the Victoria County History. She is a specialist in the Middle Ages and has published on power, place and identity in medieval Britain.

#4780

Archie Duncan

#114941

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Professor Archibald Alexander McBeth Duncan, FBA, FRHistS, FRSE was a Scottish historian. From 1962 to 1993 he was Professor of Scottish History and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He was also President of the Scottish History Society, and edited the Scottish Historical Review from 1963 to 1970. On giving up his professorship, he became Clerk of Senate and Dean of Faculties, retiring from the university in 2000. From 2001 he was Emeritus Professor of Scottish History and Literature, but continued to publish on the history of Scotland in the Middle Ages.

#4781

Karin Priester

#83680

Overall Influence

1941 - 2020 (79 years)

Karis Priester was a German historian and political scientist. Biography Priester studied romance languages, history, philosophy, and political science at the University of Cologne, Aix-Marseille University, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Florence. She obtained her doctorate in history and her habilitation in political science from the University of Marburg with a thesis on Italian Marxism. After teaching at the University of Giessen and RWTH Aachen University, she was a professor of political sociology at the University of Münster starting in 1980. She retired in February 2007.

#4782

James T. C. Liu

#141854

Overall Influence

1919 - 1993 (74 years)

Liu Zichen , better known as James T. C. Liu, was a Chinese historian and a leading scholar on Song dynasty history. He held academic posts at Stanford University and Princeton University . He was considered "one of the world's pre-eminent specialists" on the Song Dynasty, with a special interest in Ouyang Xiu.

#4783

Mary O. Furner

#85697

Overall Influence

Mary O. Furner is an American historian. Life She graduated from Northwestern University, with a Ph.D., in 1972. Her monograph, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 , won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award in 1973. She is Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara.

#4784

Jacques Sémelin

#88918

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Jacques Sémelin is a French historian and political scientist. He is a professor at Sciences Po Paris and senior researcher at the CNRS . His main fields of study are the Holocaust, mass violence, civil resistance and rescue in genocidal situations, and more recently the survival of Jews in France during the Second World War. In 1998, he created a pioneering course on genocides and massacres at Sciences Po Paris. He is the founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence.

#4785

Robin Law

#88158

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Robin C. C. Law is a British Africanist and since 2009 Emeritus Professor of the History of Africa at the University of Stirling. He obtained a BA degree in Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford in 1967 and a PhD in History at the University of Birmingham in 1972. As a researcher, he worked at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and at the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham . He joined the University of Stirling in 1972, and was subsequently Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader, becoming Professor of African History in 1993. He was a Visiting Fellow at the ...

#4786

Theodora Büttner

#143278

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

Theodora Büttner is a retired East German historian. For many years she was a professor at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. Much of her own research was focused on the precolonial history of Africa and on the anti-colonial liberation movements.

#4787

Sava Vuković

#88805

Overall Influence

1930 - 2001 (71 years)

Sava Vuković was a Serbian Orthodox Bishop and a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Biography He was born as Svetozar Vuković on 13 April 1930 in Senta to father Vasa and mother Milica. He finished elementary school and lower real high school in Senta, then the Theological Seminary of Saint Sava in the Rakovica Monastery in 1950, and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Belgrade in 1954. He was appointed deputy of the Theological Seminary of Saint Sava in Belgrade in 1958. In 1957 and 1958, he spent his postgraduate studies at the Old Catholic Theologica...

#4788

Sarah Rees Jones

#127510

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Sarah Ruth Rees Jones is a British historian. She is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History and a former director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Career Rees Jones received her PhD in 1987 from the University of York with a thesis titled 'Property, Tenure and Rents: Some Aspects of Topogaphy and Economy of Medieval York'.

#4789

Vincent Orange

#74656

Overall Influence

1935 - 2012 (77 years)

George Vincent Orange was a British-born New Zealand historian of military aviation. A lecturer at the University of Canterbury for many years up until his retirement in 2002, he wrote several biographies of senior Royal Air Force officers, including Hugh Dowding and Keith Park. He was also involved in academic controversy through his supervision of a student that produced a master's thesis denying some aspects of the Holocaust.

#4790

Karl Schleunes

#92684

Overall Influence

1937 - 2021 (84 years)

Karl Albert Schleunes was an American historian of the Holocaust and the German Empire. He was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro . Schleunes obtained his Bachelor in 1959 at Lakeland College , and his Master's at the University of Minnesota in 1961, where he also received his Ph.D. in 1966. From 1965 to 1971 he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since then he was at the UNCG. In 1999 he was a guest lecturer at the Kaplan Centre of the University of Cape Town.

#4791

Willi A. Boelcke

#109125

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Willi Alfred Boelcke was a German Economic and Social Historian, journalist, prolific author, essayist and retired university professor. The focus of his research and output has been on Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

#4792

Matthias Asche

#132470

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Matthias Asche is a German historian specialising in the early modern period. Life Born in Hamburg, from 1988 to 1993, Asche studied History, Political Science and German at the University of Osnabrück, the University of Vienna and the University of Rostock. From 1995 to 1997 he was Research Assistant at the University of Tübingen. In 1997, he won his Doctorate there with the work Von 1997 bis 2003 war Asche research assistant, ebenfalls an der University of Tübingen. 2003 wurde er dort mit der Schrift Neusiedler im verheerten Land. Kriegsfolgenbewältigung, Migrationssteuerung und Konfessionspolitik im Zeichen des Landeswiederaufbaus.

#4793

Richard Price

#63379

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Richard Price is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography. Career Price grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and attended the Fieldston School. He received both Bachelors and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University , having conducted fieldwork in Peru, and then with Sally Price in Martinique, Mexico, Spain, and for two years among the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname. A year studying with Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris and another in Amsterdam working with Dutch scholars of Maroons preceded his five years of teaching in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University.

#4794

Hugh C. Brooks

#81032

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Hugh C. Brooks was an American economic geographer, author, educator, and historian who specialized in the history and political economy of Africa. Life and career Brooks was born in Seattle, Washington, on June 19, 1922. He served in the US Army , where he was a member of Regimental HQ Company, 310th Infantry, 78th Division, and received the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Silver Star for his service in the European Theater. He attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where he received the B.A. in 1947, and then the M.A. from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in 1948.

#4795

Antonia Gransden

#96745

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Antonia Gransden , English historian and medievalist, was Reader in Medieval History at the University of Nottingham. She was author of works in medieval historiography, including the massive two-volume study Historical Writing in England, covering a thousand years of historical writing from the 6th to the 16th century.

#4796

Cornelius O'Leary

#68993

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Cornelius O'Leary was an Irish historian and political scientist. O'Leary was born in Limerick but was raised in Cork, where he attended University College Cork, gaining a first-class honours degree in history and Latin in 1949. He subsequently studied for a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford as the first student to be supervised by the psephologist David Butler. While researching his PhD, he worked at a number of secondary schools in London.

#4797

Melvin Patrick Ely

#135333

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Melvin Patrick Ely is an history professor and author in Virginia. He has written books about Amos 'n' Andy and Israel Hill. Life He grew up in Richmond and graduated from Princeton University, and from the University of Texas at Austin with a master's degree in linguistics, and from Princeton University with a master's degree in history in 1982 and with a doctoral degree in 1985. He taught at Yale University, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary.

#4798

Anna Maria Busse Berger

#88770

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Anna Maria Busse Berger is an American musicologist. Busse Berger received her PhD from Boston University in 1986, and since 1989 she has taught at University of California, Davis, where she is now a Distinguished Professor of Music. She is a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance History and Theory and is the former chair of the UC Davis music department. She was born in Hamburg, Germany, and has lived in the United States since 1976. She is married to the musicologist Karol Berger.

#4799

Maria Christina Chatziioannou

#136474

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Maria Christina Chatziioannou is director of Neohellenic research at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She is a specialist in the social and economic history of Greece, diaspora studies, and the history of trade.

#4800

Blanca París de Oddone

#104065

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

Blanca París de Oddone was a Uruguayan historian and academic, who published extensively on Uruguayan and South American history. She was the winner of a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship to further her academic research.

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