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,

#4851

Philippa Mein Smith

#125064

Overall Influence

Philippa Mein Smith is a New Zealand-Australian academic and historian who specialises in Australian history, New Zealand history, the history of Australia-New Zealand relations and health history. Education Mein Smith completed a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Canterbury in 1977 and worked briefly as an accountant before returning to the university for a postgraduate study. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree in History in 1983. Her thesis was titled The State and Maternity in New Zealand. Mein Smith completed her Ph.D. at the Australian National University in Canberr...

#4852

Wendy Mitchinson

#117472

Overall Influence

1947 - 2021 (74 years)

Wendy Mitchinson was a Canadian historian at the University of Waterloo and a Canada Research Chair in Gender and Medical history. Mitchinson trained at York University and quickly became a major figure in the field of Canadian women's history. With Ramsay Cook, she co-edited her first book "The Proper Sphere: Woman's Place in Canadian Society", a collection of writing on the then new field of Canadian women's history. In 1988, she co-authored "Canadian Women: A History" the first textbook on Canadian women. She joined the University of Waterloo with tenure in 1985, and continued as a profess...

#4853

Carman Miller

#111838

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Carman Irwin Miller is a military historian and former Dean of Arts at McGill University in Montreal. Born in Moser River, Nova Scotia, Miller received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960 and a Bachelor of Education degree in 1961 from Acadia University. He received a Master of Arts degree in 1964 from Dalhousie University and a Ph.D. in 1970 from University of London. He started teaching at McGill University in 1967 as a lecturer in the Department of History. He became an assistant professor in 1971 and associate professor in 1977. He was chairman of the department from 1978 to 1981.

#4854

Timothy Larsen

#82261

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Timothy Larsen is an historian and the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. Larsen completed a bachelor's and master's degree at Wheaton College and obtained a doctorate in history at the University of Stirling. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

#4855

Mike Seeger

#80385

Overall Influence

1933 - 2009 (76 years)

Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings. He desired to make known the caretakers of culture that inspired and taught him.

#4856

Wallace T. MacCaffrey

#115651

Overall Influence

1920 - 2013 (93 years)

Wallace T. MacCaffrey was Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University. He was a graduate of Reed College and Harvard University. He also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and Haverford College. Among his awards is a Guggenheim fellowship. He was a leading scholar of Elizabethan England, best known for his trilogy of books, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime , Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588 and Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 .

#4857

Jerzy Lukowski

#107714

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Jerzy Tadeusz Lukowski is a Polish-British historian at University of Birmingham. He specializes in studies of the 18th century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Selected publications A Concise History of Poland, with Hubert Zawadzki, Cambridge University Press, 1st edition 2001, 2nd edition 2006, Liberty's Folly: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697-1795, Routledge, 1991, The Partitions of Poland 1772, 1793, 1795, Longman Publishing Group, 1999, The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003,

#4858

Stephen C. Spiteri

#73343

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Stephen C. Spiteri is a Maltese military historian, author, lecturer and preservationist. His work mainly deals with the military history of Malta, particularly military architecture, and he is regarded as the "leading expert on Malta's fortifications."

#4859

Claire Mouradian

#145011

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Claire Mouradian is a French historian of Armenian origin who specializes in the history and geopolitics of Caucasus and, more specifically, in the history of Armenia and Armenian diaspora. She explores in her works inter-ethnic relations in the Caucasus region, migration and the position of minorities.

#4860

P. J. Honey

#84504

Overall Influence

1922 - 2005 (83 years)

Patrick James Honey was an Irish-born Vietnamese language scholar and historian. Biography Early life and education Honey was born in Navan, County Meath, Ireland. He went to Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in London before entering Birkbeck, University of London in 1940 to read Classics. In 1941 he enlisted in the Royal Navy, seeing active service on the Atlantic convoys, on the Russian convoys, in the Italian campaign, and finally the Far East. In 1945, when the Japanese surrendered in Saigon, the young lieutenant was sent with a small British force under General Douglas Gracey to maintain civil order in Saigon.

#4861

Oleg Łatyszonek

#171360

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Oleg Łatyszonek is a historian from Białystok, Poland, of Belarusian ancestry. His interests and his Ph.D. are the research of early cultural identity of Belarusians and the building of the Belarusian nation. He is with the Department of Belarusian Culture, University of Białystok.

#4862

Esther Benbassa

#92098

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Esther Benbassa is a French-Turkish-Israeli historian and politician. She specializes in the history of Jews and other minorities. Since 2011, Benbassa has served as a French senator, representing Paris from 2017 onwards and Val-de-Marne from 2011 to 2017.

#4863

Xavier Accart

#118537

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Xavier Accart is an historian of ideas, specializing in René Guénon. His field of research lies at the crossroads of the history of spirituality, anthropology of religion and literary creation. Biography Having graduated from the Institut d'études politiques d'Aix-en-Provence, he earned a doctorate from the section of religious sciences at the École pratique des hautes études. His dissertation was published under the title Guénon ou le renversement des clartés : influence d'un métaphysicien sur la vie littéraire et intellectuelle française, 1920-1970 . By the same publisher he directed, with...

#4864

Ari Kelman

#145209

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Ari Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History at University of California, Davis. Until 2016, he was the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University. His fields of specialization are the U.S. Civil War, Western, Native American, and environmental history. Kelman's book, A Misplaced Massacre, won the 2014 Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Award, Tom Watson Brown Book Award, and Robert M. Utley Prize.

#4865

Urszula Augustyniak

#171899

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Urszula Augustyniak is a Polish historian and academic, who specializes in cultural history of the early modern period. She graduated in history from the University of Warsaw in 1973. She holds a PhD and habilitation from the same university. She has been full professor since 2000. Urszula Augustyniak is a member of editorial board of "Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce".

#4866

Yossi Katz

#68544

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Yossi Katz is professor emeritus at the Bar-Ilan University, an expert in historical geography. His main research interests include Jewish settlement in towns and villages in the new era, settlemental, economic, political and cultural aspects of the history of Palestine and Israel, including Zionism, land laws, kibbutzim, and communal settlements in Canada.

#4867

Marcel Hamelin

#121210

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Marcel Hamelin is a Canadian historian and a former president of University of Ottawa. Education In 1961, Hemelin earned his Doctor of Letters in History from Laval University. Hemelin attended Séminaire Sainte-Marie in Shawinigan, Quebec.

#4868

Michael Brown

#66273

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Michael Hunter Brown is a Scottish medievalist lecturing at the University of St Andrews. In 1991 he was the recipient of the Royal Historical Society's David Berry Prize. His volume on the reign of King James I of Scotland led to the award of the Agnes Mure prize for Scottish history. Brown's work is concentrated on late Medieval Scotland and its nobility. He is married to Margaret Connolly who also works at the University of St Andrews as a medievalist.

#4869

Tristram Hunt

#72938

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Tristram Julian William Hunt, is a British historian, broadcast journalist and former politician who has been Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2017. He served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017, and Shadow Secretary of State for Education from 2013 to 2015.

#4870

Sue Peabody

#104878

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Sue Peabody is a historian and Meyer Distinguished Professor of history at Washington State University Vancouver. She is the author of "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime . She is the co-editor, with Tyler Stovall, of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France and, with Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World .

#4871

Robert Earl Roeder

#127025

Overall Influence

1931 - 1998 (67 years)

Robert Earl Roeder was a historian and academic administrator who was one of the founders of the World History Association. He was also a founder of the American Issues Forum of the American Bicentennial. Roeder held positions at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Denver.

#4872

Mohammad Mohammadi-Malayeri

#88469

Overall Influence

1911 - 2002 (91 years)

Mohammad Mohammadi-Malayeri was an Iranian historian, linguist, and literary scholar. He authored numerous books and articles on comparative Persian and Arabic languages and literature as well as Iranian history specifically the period of transition between the Sassanid Empire and the Islamic era. He taught at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese University, as well as the University of Tehran, where he was the Dean of the Faculty of Theological Sciences. He is best known for his 5-volume work titled “Iranian Culture and History during the Period of Transition between the Sassanid ...

#4873

Catherine Goldstein

Catherine Goldstein

#39410

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Catherine Goldstein is a French number theorist and historian of mathematics who works as a director of research at the . She was president of L'association femmes et mathématiques in 1991. Education and career Goldstein studied at the Ecole normale supérieure from 1976 to 1980, earning an agrégation in mathematics in 1978. She completed a doctorate of the third cycle in 1981, with a dissertation on p-adic L-functions and Iwasawa theory supervised by John H. Coates.

#4874

S. Frederick Starr

#77701

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Stephen Frederick Starr is an American expert on Russian and Eurasian affairs, a musician, and a former president of Oberlin College. Founder and chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, he is fluent in Russian and is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 articles on Russian and Eurasian affairs. Starr's expertise is in Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and the rest of the former Soviet Union. He focuses on developing nations, energy and environment issues, Islamic faith, culture and law, and oil politics.

#4875

Barbara Brookes

Barbara Brookes

#113498

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Barbara Lesley Brookes is a New Zealand historian and academic. She specialises in women's history and medical history. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2022. Biography Brookes completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Otago in 1976, then won scholarships to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she completed a master's degree and a PhD . Her PhD thesis topic was abortion in England during the inter-war period. Brookes was offered a post-doctoral scholarship at Otago and a permanent position in the university's Department of History in 1983.

#4876

Sevim Tekeli

#72533

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Sevim Tekeli was a prominent Turkish history of science professor. Early life and education Sevim Tekeli was born in Izmir in 1924. She received primary education in different cities of Turkey, since her father Osman Nuri Tekeli was working as a governor in various provinces. She is a graduate of American Girls' High School of Üsküdar.

#4877

J. Richard Chase

#33981

Overall Influence

1930 - 2010 (80 years)

J. Richard Chase was the sixth president of Biola University in California from 1970 to 1982 and the sixth President of Wheaton College in Illinois from 1982 to 1993. Early life and education J. Richard Chase grew up on a dairy farm in Oxnard, California and graduated from Biola University. Biola President Samuel Sutherland mentored Chase, and Chase married Sutherland's daughter in 1950. He graduated from Biola in 1951 with a degree in theology, and then attended Pepperdine University, where he received a bachelor's and master's degree. Chase graduated with a Ph.D. in speech from Cornell Univ...

#4878

Nadia Bouras

#168821

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (44 years)

Nadia Bouras is a Dutch historian of Moroccan descent. She graduated in history at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 2012 she published her Ph.D.-thesis, Het Land van Herkomst, Perspectieven op verbondenheid met Marokko, 1960-2010, . She is one of four Moroccan Dutch members of the "Conseil de la Communauté Marocaine à l'Étranger" or CCME. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the treaty allowing mass-recruitment of Moroccans for Dutch industries, Bouras has written a book entitled "Marokkanen in Nederland: de pioniers vertellen" . The book deals with the history of arrival, settleme...

#4879

Pamela Nadell

#89630

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Pamela S. Nadell is an American historian, researcher, author, and lecturer focusing on Jewish history. Former President of the Association for Jewish Studies, she currently holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women's and Gender history at American University. Nadell has focused her research on Jewish women and their role within Jewish history as well as in shaping the history of the United States through their role in various social and political movements.

#4880

Catrien Santing

#138520

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Catharina Geertruida Santing , commonly going by Catrien Santing is a Dutch medievalist. Her research focuses on cultural history and medical history in the late-medieval and early-modern Low Countries.

#4881

Henrike Lähnemann

Henrike Lähnemann

#91019

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Henrike Lähnemann is a German medievalist and holds the Chair of Medieval German, University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Career Lähnemann is the daughter of the theologian , and the granddaughter of the German medievalist and the archeologist Friedrich Karl Dörner; she grew up in Lüneburg and Nuremberg, Germany. She studied German literature, History of Art and Theology at the University of Bamberg, the University of Edinburgh, Free University of Berlin and University of Göttingen. She completed a PhD at the Universität Bamberg on late medieval didactic literature.

#4882

Oleg Sokolov

#124755

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Oleg Valeryevich Sokolov is a Russian convicted murderer and former historian who specialized in the Napoleonic era. In November 2019, he murdered, then subsequently dismembered and decapitated his 24-year-old mistress and former student Anastasia Yeshchenko. In December 2020, he was found guilty of intentional murder and sentenced to 12.5 years in high-security prison. He was an associate professor in history at Saint Petersburg State University until his dismissal.

#4883

Huw Lewis-Jones

#75347

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Huw Lewis-Jones is a British historian, editor, broadcaster and art director. Formerly a historian and Curator of Art at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Lewis-Jones left Cambridge in June 2010 to pursue book and broadcasting projects. He is the Editorial Director of the independent publishing company Polarworld.

#4884

Orit Rozin

#158194

Overall Influence

Orit Rozin is an Israeli historian. She is a professor of Jewish history at the University of Tel Aviv. Donna Robinson Divine, writing in The New Rambler in 2016, described Rozin as "one of a new generation of scholars building their careers around an exploration of Israel's social, cultural and political history."

#4885

Gunhild Kyle

#96257

Overall Influence

1921 - 2016 (95 years)

Gunhild Kyle was a Swedish historian. She was Sweden's first professor of women's history at the University of Gothenburg. Early life and education Gunhild Karlson was born on 28 August 1921 in Gothenburg, the daughter of sales manager Gunnar Karlson and his wife, Karin . She completed a master's degree in Gothenburg in 1950, became a Licentiate of Philosophy in 1970, earned her Doctor of Philosophy in 1972, and became a docent in 1979.

#4886

John Barlow Jarvis

#72020

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

John Barlow Jarvis is an American songwriter, composer, session pianist and recording artist. Before moving to Lake Tahoe in 2014, he had lived in Nashville, Tennessee since 1982. Early career As a child, Jarvis was trained in classical music under Evelyn Hood in San Marino, California and won both the Southern California Bach Festival and first place in the California Music Teachers Composition Contest. He first began his professional musical career at the age of 14 when he was signed as a staff songwriter for Edwin H. Morris Music. By age 17, he was a staff piano player for Motown Records.

#4887

Silvia Álvarez Curbelo

#113378

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Silvia Álvarez Curbelo is a Puerto Rican historian, and writer. She is best known for her book Un país del porvenir: el afán de modernidad en Puerto Rico . Early years Álvarez Curbelo was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. She was a fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in 2004/2005.

#4888

Herrick Chapman

#87106

Overall Influence

Herrick Chapman is a prominent historian of France. Since 1992 he has been employed at New York University, where he is Professor of History in the Department of History and Institute of French Studies. Professor Chapman was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University.

#4889

Amy Bentley

#78409

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Amy Bentley is Professor of Food Studies in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and is co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab and the Experimental Cuisine Collective.

#4890

Paul Brand

#92933

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Paul Anthony Brand, FBA, FRHistS is a British legal historian. He was Professor of Legal History at the University of Oxford from 2010 to 2014 and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, from 1999 to 2014.

#4891

Frederick Gutheim

#90403

Overall Influence

1908 - 1993 (85 years)

Frederick Albert Gutheim was an urban planner and historian, architect, and author. He is noted for writing The Potomac, a history of the Potomac River and the 40th volume in the Rivers of America Series, and Worthy of the Nation a history of the development of Washington, D.C.

#4892

Eric R. Dursteler

#159395

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Eric R. Dursteler is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and chair of the BYU history department. He is a lecturer and seminar presenter, and has specialized in the history of early modern Italy, the history of the Mediterranean including the early modern Mediterranean, and the history of food. He has authored, edited or reviewed multiple published works, including scholarly books about medieval and early modern Mediterranean, Venetian history, has authored encyclopedic entries, numerous book chapters, and journal reviews.

#4893

Alexander Stephan

Alexander Stephan

#75031

Overall Influence

1946 - 2009 (63 years)

Alexander Stephan was a specialist in German literature and area studies. He was a professor, Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Senior Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University .

#4894

Andy Wood

#121360

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Andy Wood, is a British social historian and academic. Mostly, he works on the early modern period , but his work on folklore has taken him into the mid-twentieth century. His research interests include popular politics, rebellion, popular memory, belief, popular culture, local identity, folklore, migration patterns, urban and rural society, the mid-Tudor crisis, the English Revolution, popular understandings of Renaissance drama, class identities, and local traditions. With his friend John H. Arnold, he co-authored a critique of Ken MacLeod's science-fiction writing. He also has an interest in the history of the British Left in the late twentieth century.

#4895

Kate Tiller

#86925

Overall Influence

Kate Tiller is an academic in the History Faculty at Oxford University, Reader emerita in English local history and a founding Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Her academic fields are British social and local history, with particular research interests in English rural change post-1750, and in religion and community in Britain since 1730. She also writes on the academic practice of local history, with current interests in local histories of the 20th century and of remembrance and community. She continues to teach on graduate and outreach programmes and to supervise Master's an...

#4896

John A. English

#92059

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Lt.Col.-Dr. John A. English is a Canadian Army veteran and a writer on historical and military topics. Life and career English was educated at Royal Roads and the Royal Military College , he went on leave without pay to attain an MA in history from Duke University in 1963-64. He passed final promotion exams in 1966 and graduated from Canadian Forces Staff College in 1972. He first joined the King's Own Calgary Regiment and from 1962 served in the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada until 1970, when he moved to Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.

#4897

Tomo Virk

#125299

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Tomo Virk is a Slovene literary historian and essayist. Virk was born in Ljubljana in 1960. He studied Comparative literature and German language at the University of Ljubljana and works as a lecturer at the University. He was head of the Jury for the Kresnik Award between 2004 and 2007. In 1996 he received the Rožanc Award for his book of literary essays Ujetniki bolečine .

#4898

James E. Bunce

#170166

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

James Edward Bunce was an American historian, author, and educator who specialized in British and American colonial history. Born on August 18, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, Bunce attended St. John's University , and then Fordham University in Bronx, New York, where he received the M.A. , and Ph.D. in history. His doctoral dissertation was prepared under Professor Ross J. S. Hoffman.

#4899

Bobby Lovett

#138172

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Bobby Lovett is an American historian. He is an emeritus professor of history at Tennessee State University, where he served as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1999 to 2009. He is the author of several books about African-American history.

#4900

Russell Jacoby

#172452

Overall Influence

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