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.

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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,

#4801

Kyra T. Inachin

#94636

Overall Influence

1968 - 2012 (44 years)

Kyra T. Inachin was a German historian. Biography Kyra T. Inachin was born in New York City and grew up in Lampertheim, West Germany. From 1987 to 1992 she studied history, anglistics and political sciences at the University of Mannheim. She passed her phD in 1995 and worked as an assistant at the chair of Pomeranian history and regional studies at the University of Greifswald. Inachin habilitated in 2002 and worked as a Privatdozent since 2008, at the University of Greifswald's historic Institute.

#4802

Stanislaus von Moos

#42674

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Stanislaus von Moos is a Swiss art historian and architectural theorist. Early life Stanislaus von Moos was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. Career After first teaching in Harvard, Bern and New York, he became a professor at the Delft University of Technology in 1983. He then worked at the newly created Department of Modern and Contemporary Art in Zurich, where he taught until his retirement in 2005. He then settled in Mendrisio, and currently teaches at Yale.

#4803

Dirk Rupnow

#108003

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Dirk Rupnow is a German historian. Since 2009 he has taught as assistant professor, since 2013 as associate professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, since 2010 he has been head of the institute for contemporary history there.

#4804

Ludwig Petry

#154181

Overall Influence

1908 - 1991 (83 years)

Ludwig Petry was a German historian. Petry was born into lawyer's family and grew up in Darmstadt. After the Matriculation examination he was studying Germans studies, history and history of arts at the University of Freiburg.

#4805

Ludwig Schmugge

#91236

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Ludwig Schmugge is a German historian. Life Born in Berlin, Schmugge completed his dissertation on John of Jandun in 1964 in Paris with the help of a six-month scholarship from the Commission for the Study of the History of Franco-German Relations. He was awarded his doctorate in 1965 at the Freie Universität Berlin with this work supervised by Wilhelm Berges. From 1966 to 1971 he was a research assistant at the . In 1971 he was habilitated at the FU Berlin. Schmugge initially taught as professor of medieval history at the FU Berlin. From 1979 until his retirement in 2004, Schmugge taught as a full professor for medieval history at the University of Zurich.

#4806

Joanna Story

#142818

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Joanna Elizabeth Story is a British historian whose speciality is the history of and relationship between Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia. Biography Story completed her doctorate at Durham University in 1995 with a thesis titled "Charlemagne and Northumbria: The influence of Francia on Northumbrian politics in the later eighth and early ninth centuries".

#4807

Joëlle Rollo-Koster

#38792

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Joëlle Rollo-Koster is a Professor of Medieval History in the University of Rhode Island's History Department. On December 6, 2016, she was knighted by the French government with the medal of Chevalier des Palmes académiques. In 2017-2018 she was a EURIAS Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

#4808

Donald Roden

#162478

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Donald Roden is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University. He is mostly known for his efforts in combating the prison recidivism rate through a means of education. He is the founder of Rutgers' Mountainview Prison Project, a program that recruits and prepares ex-offenders during their incarceration, and supports their pursuit of an undergraduate degree at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, after their release. Since 2005, he is responsible for the admittance of over 30 ex-offenders into Rutgers University, many of which have attained their bachelor's degree. Donald R...

#4809

G. O. Sayles

#105827

Overall Influence

1901 - 1994 (93 years)

George Osborne Sayles was an English historian best known for his work on the medieval English law courts and the early English Parliaments. Early life G. O. Sayles was raised and educated in Derbyshire. He attended Ilkeston Grammar School. He studied at the University of Glasgow and then University College London.

#4810

Auguste Dick

#39077

Overall Influence

1910 - 1993 (83 years)

Auguste Franziska Dick was an Austrian mathematician, historian of mathematics, and handwriting expert, known for her research on the history of mathematics under the Nazis, and for her biography of Emmy Noether.

#4811

Donald H. Pflueger

#151901

Overall Influence

1923 - 1994 (71 years)

Donald H. Pflueger was a historian, educator and author from Glendora, California, known for his work on the history of the Inland Empire. His parents, the G. H. Pflueger, were early citrus ranchers, and their river rock family home is still located on the northeast corner of Pflueger Avenue and Foothill Boulevard, in Glendora.

#4812

Rebecca Earle

#130361

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Rebecca Earle is a historian, specialising in the history of food and colonial and 19th-century Spanish America. She is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She is married to Matt Western, MP for Warwick and Leamington.

#4813

Mary T. Boatwright

#107718

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Mary Taliaferro Boatwright is a professor emerita of classical studies and ancient history at Duke University, specializing in Roman imperial history, Roman women, Roman topography, and Latin historiography.

#4814

Bonny Ibhawoh

#92938

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Bonny Ibhawoh is the Senator William McMaster Chair in Global Human Rights, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Expert-Rapporteur, United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development, UN-OHCHR and Founding Director, Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice

#4815

Tony Collins

#100024

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Tony Collins is a British social historian specialising in the history of sport. He is emeritus professor of history at De Montfort University, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sports Humanities, and in 2018 was a visiting professor at Beijing Sports University. He has written several award-winning books on the history of sport, is the host of the ‘Rugby Reloaded’ history podcast, and is a regular contributor to television and radio programmes.

#4816

Roman Michałowski

#160502

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Roman Michałowski is a Polish historian. He graduated in history at the University of Warsaw. On the same university he gained PhD in 1979 and passed habilitation in 1990. He has been working at the University of Warsaw since 1972. He received the title of professor in 2006.

#4817

Jonathan C. Friedman

#113172

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Jonathan C. Friedman is a history professor and director of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at West Chester University. Books The Lion and the Star: Gentile–Jewish Relations in Three Hessian Communities Rainbow Jews: Gay and Jewish Identity in the Performing Arts

#4818

Peter Carey

#83341

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Peter Carey is a British historian and author who specialises in the modern history of Indonesia, Java in particular, and has also written on East Timor and Myanmar. He was the Laithwaite fellow of Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, from 1979 to 2008. His major early work concentrated on the history of Diponegoro, the British in Java, 1811–16 and the Java War , on which he has published extensively. His biography of Diponegoro, The Power of Prophecy, appeared in 2007, and a succinct version, Destiny; The Life of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, 1785–1855, was published in 2014. He has...

#4819

Stephanie Camp

#162347

Overall Influence

1968 - 2014 (46 years)

Stephanie M. Camp was an American feminist historian. Her book, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South , led to a new understanding of how female slaves resisted their captivity in the 1800s. The book won the Lillian Smith Book Award for New Voices in Non-Fiction and an Honorable Mention by the John Hope Franklin Prize; it was short-listed for the Washington State Book Award.

#4820

Paul Israel

#117271

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Paul B. Israel is an American historian who is a specialist in the history of American invention and innovation. He is the director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University.

#4821

Amir Alexander

#96535

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Amir Alexander is a historian, author, and academic who studies the interconnections between mathematics and its cultural and historical setting. Early life and education Born in Rehovot, Israel, he grew up in Jerusalem where his father, Shlomo Alexander, was a professor of physics at the UCLA and the Hebrew University and his mother, Esther Alexander, was an economist and social activist. He obtained a B.S. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1988 in mathematics and history, before moving to the United States, where he obtained an M.A. in history of science from Stanford University in 1990, and a Ph.D.

#4822

Robin Fisher

#142853

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Robin Fisher is a Canadian historian known for his book on native relations in British Columbia, Contact and Conflict. Fisher is former provost and vice-president academic of Mount Royal University in Calgary.

#4823

Alison Patrick

#91322

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Alison Mary Houston Patrick was an Australian historian and scholar of the French Revolution. In 1977 she was the first woman elected head of the Department of History at the University of Melbourne.

#4824

Scott L. Waugh

#132526

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Scott L. Waugh is an American historian and academic administrator. He is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles , where he also serves as executive vice chancellor and provost. He was an early supporter of Chicano Studies at UCLA. He is the author of two widely reviewed books about the Middle Ages, and the co-editor of a third book.

#4825

Richard D. Poll

#73422

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

Richard Douglas Poll was an American historian, academic, author and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . His liberal religiosity influenced his notable metaphor about "Iron Rod" vs. "Liahona" LDS Church members.

#4826

Shimon Redlich

#148759

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Shimon Redlich is an Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor, professor emeritus at the Ben Gurion University, a specialist in the modern history of Jews in Eastern Europe, Russia and the USSR. Biography Shimon Redlich was born in Lviv in 1935. He and his family moved to Brzezany, located in what is now Ukraine, the same year. In 1943 his father was killed during a round-up, and the family went into hiding with the help of a Polish and a Ukrainian families.

#4827

Roger Keeran

#123334

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Roger Keeran, also Roger Roy Keeran or Roger R. Keeran , is an American historian and university professor who taught successively at Cornell, Princeton, Rutgers and the New York State University . A specialist of Labor and Policy studies, he published, in 1980, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers' Unions and, in 2004, with co-author Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union , as well as various articles in history or sociology journals. He is now Professor Emeritus of the Empire State College at SUNY after retiring in 2013.

#4828

John Buckley

#108879

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

John D. Buckley is Professor of Military History at the University of Wolverhampton. He teaches and publishes on twentieth-century military history and strategic studies, especially on air power and the final year of World War II.

#4829

Tara Nummedal

#98690

Overall Influence

Tara E. Nummedal is a professor of history and Italian studies at Brown University, where she holds the John Nickoll Provost’s Professorship in History. Nummedal is known for her works on Anna Maria Zieglerin and the history of alchemy and natural science in early modern Europe.

#4830

Georges Tate

#106442

Overall Influence

1943 - 2009 (66 years)

Georges Tate was a French historian and professor of ancient history and archaeology at the Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University, Doctor of Arts and correspondent of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He was a specialist on the history of late antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Near East.

#4831

Jacob Landau

#137968

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Jacob M. Landau was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Landau was born on 20 March 1924 in Chișinău, Bessarabia , which he left in 1935, moving to Palestine with his parents, Miriam and Michael Landau. They settled in Tel Aviv, where he studied at the Herzliya Gymnasium, ending his school career in 1942. He took his B.A. and M.A. in 1942–1946 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in history and Arabic studies. His M.A. thesis researched the nationalist movement in modern Egypt. It was supervised by Professor Richard Michael Koebner.

#4832

Bruce Nelson

#90987

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Joseph Bruce Nelson was a professor emeritus of history at Dartmouth College and noted labor historian and scholar of the history of the concepts of race and class in the United States and among Western European immigrants to the U.S.

#4833

Ute Lotz-Heumann

#97758

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Ute Lotz-Heumann is a German-American historian specializing in early modern Irish and German history and the history of the European Reformations and Enlightenment. She is the Heiko A. Oberman Professor of Late Medieval and Reformation History at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

#4834

Leslie M. Harris

#126364

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Leslie Maria Harris is an American historian and scholar of African American Studies. She is a professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Harris studies the history of African Americans in the United States. She has published work on the history of slavery in New York City, on slavery, gender and sexuality in the Antebellum South, and on the historiography of slavery in the United States.

#4835

Muin-ud-din Ahmad Khan

#106405

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

Muin-ud-din Ahmad Khan was a Bangladeshi historian, and professor of Islamic history and culture at the University of Chittagong. He served as the founder Vice-chancellor of Southern University Bangladesh and the first Director General of Islamic Foundation Bangladesh.

#4836

Amy Stanley

#117261

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Amy Stanley is an American historian of early modern Japan. In 2007, Stanley began teaching in the Department of History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japanese history, global history, and women's/gender history. She is best known for her most book Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography, and was a finalist for both the Baillie Gifford Prize and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiograph...

#4837

Susmita Basu Majumdar

#113001

Overall Influence

Susmita Basu Majumdar is an Indian historian, epigraphist and numismatist. She is a professor in the Department of Ancient Indian History at the University of Calcutta. With her nom-de-plume Adaa, she is a poet in the Hindi and Urdu languages, and a musician.

#4838

Ortensio Zecchino

#106105

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Ortensio Zecchino is an Italian academic and politician, former Minister of University and Research. Biography After teaching History of Medieval Institutions at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples, Zecchino joined the Christian Democracy and was elected regional councilor of Campania, holding the seat from 1970 to 1979, until he has been elected to the European Parliament.

#4839

James J. Cooke

#85337

Overall Influence

1939 - 2016 (77 years)

James J. Cooke was an American historian, author, academic and soldier. He is known for his studies of the United States Armed Forces during World War I. Early life Born at St. Mary's Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland on August 2, 1939, and baptized into the Christian Faith at Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania, a month later. He resided in Baltimore until the family moved to Brooklyn Park. In 1956, his junior year of high school, he joined the US Army Reserves. He wrote in his high school year book in 1957 that he wanted to be a "college history teacher". His love of history began in the time he spent with his family in York.

#4840

Hassan Hallak

#109555

Overall Influence

1946 - 2023 (77 years)

Hassan Ali Hallak was a Lebanese historian, academic, and writer, known mostly for his work on the origins of the Beiruti families, and Beirut's history during the Ottoman era. Biography Hallak was born in Beirut in 1946. He obtained his PhD in history from the University of Alexandria in 1981, then went back to Beirut where he taught Islamic and Arab history at the Lebanese University, and later at Beirut Arab University.

#4841

Alison Beach

#66337

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Alison Isdale Beach is an American historian. She is a professor of medieval history at the University of St Andrews. She completed her B.A. in history at Smith College in 1985 and her Ph.D. in religion at Columbia University in 1996. She also holds an M.A. in history and an M.Phil. in religion from Columbia University. From 2011 to 2020 she was a professor of history at the Ohio State University. She has also held regular positions at the College of William and Mary and the University of Cologne, and visiting positions at Union Theological Seminary, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Temple University, and the University of Trier.

#4842

Ernest George Mardon

#129436

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

Ernest George Mardon was an English professor who worked at the University of Lethbridge. He has several dozen books, mostly on the history of Alberta, Canada. Born in Houston, Texas in 1928 to Professor Austin Mardon and Marie Dickey, Dr. Ernest G. Mardon was educated at Gordonstoun, Scotland, before attending Trinity College in Dublin. After that he was called up for military service in the Korean War as an officer with the Gordon Highlanders, serving with that outfit in the Suez Canal Zone, Cyprus, Libya, from 1952 to 1954. He was honorably discharged with the rank of lieutenant. He moved to Canada in 1954 as Bureau Manager for United Press International.

#4843

Carol Braun Pasternack

#70155

Overall Influence

1950 - 2020 (70 years)

Carol Braun Pasternack was a professor of medieval English literature and language at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1988 to 2013. She chaired the Medieval Studies department, and was also Dean of Summer Sessions at UCSB in 2011–2013.

#4844

Anthony Howe

#92392

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Anthony C. Howe is an English historian and Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia, a post he has held since 2003. He has previously taught at the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford.

#4845

Ingrid Semmingsen

#122944

Overall Influence

1910 - 1995 (85 years)

Ingrid Elisabeth Semmingsen was a Norwegian historian. Appointed as a professor at the University of Oslo in 1963, she was the first female professor of history in Norway. Personal life Semmingsen was born in Hamar, as the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel and farmer Peter Thorvald Gaustad and his wife Gudvor, née Todderud . She grew up at a farm in Stange. In 1939 she married Rolf Ingvar Semmingsen, a bureaucrat who served as director of the Norwegian Price Directorate.

#4846

Sue McKemmish

#78841

Overall Influence

Professor Sue McKemmish is an Australian archivist and scholar in the field of archival science. She is currently the Associate Dean Graduate Research for the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Melbourne.

#4847

Ann-Sophie Barwich

#53298

Overall Influence

Ann-Sophie Barwich is a cognitive scientist, an empirical philosopher, and a historian of science. She is an assistant professor with joint positions in the cognitive science program and the department of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University Bloomington. Barwich is best known for her interdisciplinary work on the history, philosophy, and neuroscience of olfaction. Her book, Smellosophy: What the Nose tells the Mind, highlights the importance of thinking about the sense of smell as a model for neuroscience and the senses. She is also noted for her analyses on methodological i...

#4848

Rotraut Wisskirchen

#102910

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Rotraut Wisskirchen was a German Biblical archaeologist. Wisskirchen was born on 23 June 1936 in Hagen and studied law in Munich and Bonn; then she worked from 1965 to 1967 as a lawyer in the Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. She was married to the lawyer Alfred Wisskirchen, with whom she had two daughters, also lawyers.

#4849

Ts'ao Yung-ho

#119452

Overall Influence

1920 - 2014 (94 years)

Ts'ao Yung-ho was a Taiwanese historian known for his work on the early history of Taiwan. An autodidact and polyglot who failed his university entrance examinations, Ts'ao went on to become the preeminent Taiwanese expert on the Dutch and Spanish colonial eras in Taiwan.

#4850

Jacques Berlioz

#82326

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Jacques Berlioz is a French historian. Biography A student at the École Nationale des Chartes, he graduated in 1977 with a thesis devoted to the Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus by Stephen of Bourbon.

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