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,

#4901

Frank Albo

#81710

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Frank Albo is a Canadian architectural historian. He is the academic inspiration behind The Hermetic Code and the author of Astana: Architecture, Myth, and Destiny . Albo is currently an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg where he specializes in architecture, Freemasonry, and the Western esoteric tradition.

#4902

María Jesús Rubiera Mata

#108313

Overall Influence

1942 - 2009 (67 years)

María Jesús Rubiera Mata was a Spanish historian specialising in the history of Islamic Spain. She started teaching at the University Complutense in 1966. She moved to the University of Alicante in 1982, and in 1985 she became the Chair of Arab and Islamic Studies there. She was married to Míkel de Epalza who was also a historian of Islamic Spain at the same university. They both founded the journal Sharq al-Andalus dealing with Islamic and Arabic History in the West, especially the Iberian Peninsula. She died on 7 June 2009 due to a chronic disease.

#4903

Christopher Phelps

#131909

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Christopher Phelps is an American political and intellectual historian of the twentieth century. The subjects of his research and writing include philosophical pragmatism, class and labor in social thought, the American Left, and race and sexuality in American history. He teaches in the department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham in England.

#4904

Michelle Zancarini-Fournel

Michelle Zancarini-Fournel

#124206

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Michelle Zancarini-Fournel is a French historian. She is professor emeritus of contemporary history at the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, and former co-director of the semi-annual journal, Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire. Her research focuses on the history of popular movements. She has published books and numerous articles in various journals. She is a specialist in the history of women and gender, as well as May 68.

#4905

Martha Settle Putney

Martha Settle Putney

#82284

Overall Influence

1916 - 2008 (92 years)

Martha Settle Putney was an American educator and historian who chronicled the roles of African Americans in the armed forces. After serving as one of the first black members of the Women's Army Corps during World War II, she devoted her life to researching and documenting the military service and achievements of black Americans.

#4906

Anne Brenon

#100753

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Annie Brenon, known as Anne Brenon is a French writer and historian, specialising in Catharism. She is the founder of Heresis, a review on Catharism and other medieval heresies and from 1982 to 1998 was director of the Centre national d'études cathares René-Nelli in Carcassonne.

#4907

Arthur Bourns

#79691

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Arthur Newcombe Bourns, was a professor of chemistry and a university administrator with a long association with McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He was professor emeritus and president emeritus of that institution. He was born in Petitcodiac, New Brunswick and was educated at Acadia University and McGill University, graduating in 1944 with a doctorate in Chemistry.

#4908

Candice Goucher

#158067

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Candice Lee Goucher is Professor of History and co-director of the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University, United States. She specialises in world history, African history, Caribbean history and the history of food. Her previous post was as Chair of the Black Studies department at Portland State University, Oregon.

#4909

Sarah Hamilton

#114307

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Sarah Hamilton is a British historian and the associate dean for education at the University of Exeter. Hamilton's research relates to the religious, social and cultural history of early medieval Europe from c. 900 to c. 1200, medieval liturgy and ritual, bishops, the delivery of pastoral care, penance, excommunication and heresy.

#4910

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

#98281

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch is a French historian and Africanist. She is professor emeritus at Paris Diderot University. Biography She graduated from the École normale supérieure de Sèvres in 1959. She earned her third cycle doctorate from the École pratique des hautes études in 1966. She was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. in 1987, at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University in 1992, and at the Humanities Research Center, University of Canberra at the University of Canberra in 1995.

#4911

Kevin Grant

#120676

Overall Influence

Kevin Patrick Grant is an American academic historian specialising in modern Britain and Ireland, European imperialism, and international humanitarianism. He is the Edgar B. Graves Professor of History at Hamilton College, New York.

#4912

Michael Clarke

#73354

Overall Influence

Michael Clarke is a British academic who specialises in defence studies. He was Director of the Royal United Services Institute from 2007 to 2015. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he serves as Sky News' security and defence analyst.

#4913

Charles Elmore

#93117

Overall Influence

Charles J. Elmore is an American scholar and jazz historian from Savannah, Georgia. Early background Elmore, who was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia. He attended St. Pius X School, earned a BS Degree in biology and chemistry from Savannah State College, an MA degree in journalism and a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

#4914

Elizabeth Lew-Williams

#125300

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Lew-Williams is a historian and professor of Asian American history at Princeton University, the first ever appointed by the school. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University and was a faculty fellow at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on Asian American studies, migration, ethnic studies, violence, and the history of the U.S. West. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America.

#4915

Toivo Paloposki

Toivo Paloposki

#156006

Overall Influence

1928 - 1991 (63 years)

Toivo Johannes Paloposki was a Finnish archivist and historian. Paloposki focused on Finland's 18th-century history and treated also economic-historical issues. Amongst his works are Suomen historian lähteet , which is a basic work on sourcess of Finland's history, and some local historical works. He was director of the National Archives of Finland in 1974–1987.

#4916

Paul A. Varg

#116827

Overall Influence

1912 - 1994 (82 years)

Paul A. Varg was an American historian. He was a leading scholar in the field of U.S. foreign relations. The historical subject of China was one of particular interest to Varg. Biography Varg was from Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Clark University for his bachelor's and master's degrees. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1947 with a dissertation on William Woodville Rockhill, under the influence of Harley F. MacNair. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Varg began teaching at Ohio State University, rising to the rank of associate professor, and moved in 1958 to Michigan State University, where he remained for the rest of his career.

#4917

Allen James Fromherz

#161277

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Allen Fromherz is an American historian specializing in the Middle East and Mediterranean. From 2007 to 2008 he was a professor at Qatar University. He joined the faculty of Georgia State University in 2008. Since 2015, Fromherz has served as President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies , a part of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers .

#4918

Hlonipha Mokoena

#126667

Overall Influence

Hlonipha Mokoena is a South African historian at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a specialist is South African intellectual history. She formerly worked in the anthropology department at Columbia University. She received her PhD from the University of Cape Town in 2005. Her book, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual, is about Magema Magwaza Fuze, the first Zulu-speaker to publish a book in the language.

#4919

Aron Rodrigue

#82137

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Aron Rodrigue is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. Education Ph.D., Harvard University, HistoryA.M., Harvard University, HistoryB.A., First Class Honours, University of Manchester, History

#4920

David B. Ruderman

#146059

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

David B. Ruderman is the Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1994 to 2014 he was the Ella Darivoff Director of Penn's Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where he also held a fellowship from 2017 to 2018. He was trained at the City College of New York, the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and his doctorate in Jewish History from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem....

#4921

Brian McAllister Linn

#138647

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Brian McAllister Linn is an American military historian, who specializes in the 20th century. He serves on the faculty at Texas A&M University. He was born in the territory of Hawaii and graduated from Ohio State University.

#4922

Aileen Ribeiro

#83773

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Aileen Ribeiro is a historian of fashion and author of several books about the history of costume. Biography She was educated at King's College, London and at The Courtauld Institute of Art, also in London, where she later became a professor and lectured on the history of dress. She was Head of the History of Dress section at the Courtauld Institute from 1975 till 2009. In 2000 Ribeiro was appointed professor in the History of Art at the University of London where she is now professor emeritus.

#4923

Conrad Black

#79634

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour , is a Canadian and British former newspaper publisher, businessman, and writer. His father was businessman George Montegu Black II, who had significant holdings in Canadian manufacturing, retail and media businesses through part-ownership of the holding company Ravelston Corporation. In 1978, two years after their father's death, Conrad and his older brother Montegu took majority control of Ravelston. Over the next seven years, Conrad Black sold off most of their non-media holdings in order to focus on newspaper publishing. Black controlled Hol...

#4924

Geoffrey Rice

#102442

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Geoffrey Wayne Rice is a New Zealand historian. He is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. He joined the staff in 1973, and served as head of the School of History from 2006 to 2011, before retiring in 2012.

#4925

Anna-Leena Siikala

#64297

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

Arja Anna-Leena Siikala was a professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki, specialising in folk-belief, mythology, and shamanism, along with oral storytelling and traditionality. Education and career Anna-Leena Siikala graduated as a Master of Philosophy from the University of Helsinki in 1968, took her licenciate degree in 1970, and Ph.D. in 1978. She was a professor of folkloristics at Helsinki 1995–2007. Siikala held the following professorships:1995–2007: Helsingin yliopisto, Professor of Folklore.1999–2004: Suomen Akatemia, Academy Professor.1988–1995: Joensuun yliopisto, Professor of Folklore Studies.1979–1982: Turun yliopiston folkloristiikan ja uskontotieteen vs.

#4926

Janet Burton

#103306

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Janet Burton is professor of medieval history at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She researches medieval monasticism, religious orders and congregations. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Historical Society, and the Learned Society of Wales. She initiated the Monastic Wales project in July 2007 to research and disseminate knowledge on the medieval monasteries of Wales.

#4927

Claudia Moatti

#84017

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Claudia Moatti is a French historian specialised in ancient Roman Studies. She is currently professor of Roman history at University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and Adjunct Professor of Classics and Law at the University of Southern California .

#4928

Himanshu Prabha Ray

#129251

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Himanshu Prabha Ray is an Indian Sanskrit scholar, historian, and archaeologist. Her interests areas are marine archaeology, history, and culture of South Asia. Ray is a recipient of the Anneliese Maier research award of the Humboldt Foundation for collaborative research with the Distant Worlds Programme and an Honorary Professor of the Distant Worlds Programme, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. She has also served as a professor in the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. Ray was appointed as the Chairperson of the National Monument...

#4929

Lucy Hartley

#48655

Overall Influence

Lucy Hartley is a British professor of English attached to the Department of English Language and Literature of the University of Michigan. Her special interests include nineteenth-century studies, intellectual and cultural history, art and politics, history and philosophy of science and interdisciplinarity theory and practice.

#4930

Emily Thompson

#63267

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Emily Ann Thompson is an American aural historian. She teaches at Princeton University. She graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Physics in 1984, and from Princeton University, with a Ph.D. in the history of science in 1992. She was Associate Professor of History at University of California, San Diego, from 2005 to 2006.

#4931

James Eayrs

#111874

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

James George Eayrs was a Canadian historian. Biography Eayrs won the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction at the 1965 Governor General's Awards for his book In Defence of Canada: From the Great War to the Great Depression. The book, which examined Canadian military and defence policy during the period between the First World War and the Great Depression, was the first in a multi-volume series on Canadian military history and was followed by In Defence of Canada, Vol. 2: Appeasement and Rearmament , In Defence of Canada: Peacemaking and Deterrence , In Defence of Canada: ...

#4932

David F. Holland

David F. Holland

#101065

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

David Frank Holland is an American professor and historian. He is currently the John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History and Interim Dean of Harvard Divinity School. He was previously a director of graduate studies in religion at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

#4933

Matthew Levinger

#124654

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Matthew Levinger is an American historian. He is Research Professor of International Affairs and Director of the National Security Studies Program at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs.

#4934

Isabel V. Hull

#119216

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Isabel Virginia Hull is John Stambaugh Professor Emerita of History and the former chair of the history department at Cornell University. She specializes in German history from 1700 to 1945, with a focus on sociopolitics, political theory, and gender/sexuality. Since January 2006, Hull has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Modern History.

#4935

Manying Ip

#59997

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Manying Ip , known as Bess Ip, is a social historian and emeritus professor in Auckland, New Zealand, who has published on the identity of Chinese New Zealanders. Early life and education Ip was born in 1945 in Guizhou. Her parents had moved to the Guizhou region to escape the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong. She undertook university study in Hong Kong, and then completed a PhD in the History Department of the University of Auckland in 1983, titled From Qing reformer to twentieth-century publisher: the life and times of Zhang Yuanji 1867–1959.

#4936

Hubert Houben

#138875

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Hubert Houben is a German historian who specialized in the medieval history of Southern Italy. Living at Lecce since 1980, he acquired Italian citizenship in 1988. He is corresponding member of the Accademia Pontaniana based in Naples and of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East .

#4937

Eugene F. Irschick

#172491

Overall Influence

Eugene F. Irschick is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley since 1978. Biography Irschick, a 1951 graduate of the Kodaikanal School, earned his B.A. Honors in History with minor in Religion and Greek from Gettysburg College in 1955 and later a M.A. in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959. He subsequently did his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1964.

#4938

Oliver Green

#96997

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Oliver Green is an author and transport historian who has written widely on the history of public transport in London, and in particular on the art and design of London Transport. He is the former head curator and now research fellow at the London Transport Museum. He lectures at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Gresham College.

#4939

Aileen Fyfe

#60837

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Aileen Fyfe is a historian. Academia Fyfe formerly lectured on the history of science and technology, typically nineteenth-century, at NUI Galway, . Since 2011 she has been based at the University of St Andrews and is Director of Research for the School of History. Her research there is focused on the circulation and consumption of knowledge from the late seventeenth century onwards.

#4940

Rolf Torstendahl

#168271

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Rolf Torstendahl is emeritus professor of history at the University of Uppsala where he has spent most of his career. He was Sven Warburg professor of history at the University of Stockholm from 1978 to 1980. Torstendahl has a special interest in bureaucratisation, the professionalism of engineers, and historiography. His book History-Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline describes the evolution of historical professionalism.

#4941

Amy Murrell Taylor

#110229

Overall Influence

Amy Elizabeth Murrell Taylor is an American historian. She is the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. Early life and education Taylor earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University before enrolling at the University of Virginia for her Master's degree and PhD. Her thesis was titled The Divided Family in Civil War America, 1860-1870.

#4942

Gerald Sorin

#126663

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Gerald Sorin is a Distinguished Professor of American and Jewish Studies and the Director of the Louis and Mildred Resnick Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

#4943

James Hershberg

#129030

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

James Hershberg is a professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Columbia University and Tufts University. Hershberg is a leading scholar on Cold War history and a former Director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. His first book was on the life of former Harvard President James Bryant Conant.

#4944

Royden Harrison

#84144

Overall Influence

1927 - 2002 (75 years)

Royden John Harrison was a British labour historian. He was born in London and educated at King Alfred's School, Hampstead, before being evacuated to Canada and Australia because of the Second World War. He attended a progressive school in Australia, where he was tutored in logic and philosophy by an Austrian-Jewish refugee.

#4945

Charles J. Shindo

#146482

Overall Influence

Charles Jogi Shindo is a Professor of United States history at Louisiana State University. Dr. Shindo took his BA at the University of Southern California where he undertook a number of majors before settling on history. He then earned a master's degree at California State University, Fullerton. He undertook his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester. His dissertation, entitled "Voices of the migrant : democracy and culture in the dust bowl works of John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Woody Guthrie" was completed under the direction of historian Robert Westbrook in 1992.

#4946

Akosua Adoma Perbi

#109172

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Akosua Adoma Perbi is a Ghanaian author and a history professor at the University of Ghana. Perbi is the author of A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Century and has written over twenty refereed articles and book chapters. Perbi acts as Ghana's permanent representative on UNESCO's International Scientific and Technical Committee on the Slave Route Project. She is also a council member and the treasurer of the Historical Society of Ghana.

#4947

Marcel Mauri

#78195

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Marcel Mauri de los Rios is a journalist and historian, former vice president and spokesman of Òmnium Cultural. Biography Mauri was born in 1977 in Badalona. As a teenager, he studied in the Escola Jungfrau and in the Institut La Llauna in Badalona.

#4948

Phillip Shriver

#96534

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Phillip Raymond Shriver was an American historian and college administrator who was president of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, from 1965 to 1981. Biography Phillip R. Shriver was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduation in 1940 from John Adams High School, where he was president and valedictorian of his class, he received a four-year Cleveland Alumni Scholarship to Yale University. At Yale, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, served as regimental commander of the Naval V-12 unit, and graduated in 1943 with honors in history. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy ...

#4949

William A. Wilson

#112669

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

William Albert "Bert" Wilson was a scholar of Mormon folklore. The "father of Mormon folklore" helped found and organize folklore archives at both Utah State University and Brigham Young University . He directed the folklore archive at USU from 1978 to 1985, and chaired the English department at BYU from 1985 to 1991. He and his students collected jokes, legends, stories, songs, and other information to add to the Mormon folklore archives.

#4950

Nora Bustamante Luciani

Nora Bustamante Luciani

#107128

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

Nora Bustamante Luciani was a Venezuelan physician, historian, writer and intellectual, who served as the president of the Venezuelan Association of the History of Medicine, the first woman to hold the post. For 16 years she was Director of the Historical Archive of Miraflores, a dependency of the Presidential Palace that preserves the history of the presidents of Venezuela.

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