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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Anthropology,

#601

Susan Keefe

#149915

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Susan Elaine Emley Keefe is an American anthropologist and author. She is a professor emerita at Appalachian State University. Keefe has published books on Mexican-American culture and Appalachian health issues.

#602

Carmen Guarini

#173816

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Aurelia Del Carmen Guarini is an Argentine anthropologist, teacher, film director, and film producer specializing in anthropological documentary films. She teaches visual anthropology and directs documentaries in Argentina and in Cuba. She serves on the documentary projects' evaluation committee at the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts and participates in Cine Ojo projects.

#603

Uzma Z. Rizvi

#80662

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an archaeologist and associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies, Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute and a visiting scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her research focuses on Ancient Pakistan and United Arab Emirates, during the third millennium BCE and ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of...

#604

Georgina Born

#106166

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Georgina Emma Mary Born, is a British academic, anthropologist, musicologist and musician. As a musician she is known as Georgie Born and for her work in Henry Cow and with Lindsay Cooper. Background Born was born in Wheatley, Oxfordshire, the granddaughter of the physicist and Nobel laureate Max Born, daughter of the pharmacologist Gustav Born, and cousin of the pop singer Olivia Newton-John.

#605

Anna Belfer-Cohen

#111803

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Anna Belfer-Cohen is an Israeli archaeologist and paleoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Belfer-Cohen excavated and studied many important prehistoric sites in Israel including Hayonim and Kebara Caves and open-air sites such as Nahal Ein Gev I and Nahal Neqarot. She has also worked for many years in the Republic of Georgia, where she made important contributions to the study of the Paleolithic sequence of the Caucasus following her work at the cave sites of Dzoudzuana, Kotias and Satsrublia. She is a specialist in biolo...

#606

Nathalie Beaux-Grimal

#121649

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Nathalie Beaux-Grimal is a French Egyptologist, a research associate at the Collège de France and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo . She was educated at Yale University and obtained a Ph.D. in Egyptology under Jean-Claude Goyon in Lumière University Lyon 2 with a thesis on the Botanical Garden of the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak . From 1997 to 2005, she was French coordinator of Egyptology in the Faculty of Archeology at Cairo University in Giza. As part of the excavations of the IFAO, she participated in an expedition to the site of Deir el-Bahari, in collaboration with Janusz Karkowski of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw .

#607

Susan Kane

#93578

Overall Influence

Susan Kane is an American art historian and a pioneer of field archaeology. Her work to preserve Libyan archaeological sites during Operation Unified Protector earned her the Society for American Archaeology Presidential Award in 2013. She currently directs the Cyrenaica Archaeological Project and the Sangro Valley Project in Tornareccio, Italy. Since 1977, Kane has served as the chair of the Curricular Committee on Archaeology at Oberlin College.

#608

Janet Montgomery

#176092

Overall Influence

Janet Montgomery is a British archaeological scientist and academic. Having studied at the University of Bradford, she is now Professor of Bioarchaeology at Durham University. She specialises in the study of diet and migration via tooth enamel biomineralization and isotope analysis.

#609

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

#93374

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is an Australian academic, Indigenous feminist, author and activist for Indigenous rights. She is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people from Minjerribah in Queensland. She completed a PhD at Griffith University in 1998, her thesis titled Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism in Australia. The thesis was published as a book in 1999 and short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the Stanner Award. A 20th Anniversary Edition was released in 2020 by University of Queensland Press. Her 2015 monograph The White Possessive: ...

#610

Sandra Bowdler

#96253

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Sandra Bowdler is an Australian archaeologist, emeritus professor of archaeology and former head of the Archaeology Department at the University of Western Australia. Education Bowdler completed an Honours degree in archaeology at the University of Sydney in 1971 and received her PhD from the Australian National University in 1979. Bowdler's PhD thesis was on the Aboriginal archaeology of Hunter Island in the Bass Strait near Tasmania, which was later published in 1984.

#611

Carol van Driel-Murray

#119013

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Carol van Driel-Murray is a Roman archaeologist who specialises in the role of women and studying leather. After studying at the University of Liverpool, van Driel-Murray worked at the University of Amsterdam for 37 years and the University of Leiden for three before she retired in 2015.

#612

Barbara J. Heath

#146008

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Barbara J. Heath is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville who specializes in historical archaeology of eastern North America and the Caribbean. Her research and teaching focus on the archaeology of the African diaspora, colonialism, historic landscapes, material culture, public archaeology and interpretation, and Thomas Jefferson.

#613

Brenna Hassett

#125641

Overall Influence

Brenna R. Hassett is an American British bioarchaeologist at University College London , author, public speaker and one of the founders of TrowelBlazers, which celebrates women archaeologists, paleontologists and geologists.

#614

Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi

#73563

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (94 years)

Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi is an Italian anthropologist and dravidologist who has done field studies in India, mainly in the Tamil Nadu state. Born in 1931 in Germany, she studied modern languages at the University of Mainz and did a Ph.D. at the University of Rome in 1968. Between 1985 and 1991, she worked briefly at the University of Venice, University of Bologna, and University of Rome. She taught Tamil language and literature at the University of Naples "L'Orientale" and also worked as a professor of Asian Studies at the university.

#615

Gillian Cowlishaw

#113105

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (91 years)

Gillian Cowlishaw is a New Zealand-born anthropologist whose ethnographic research with Aboriginal Australians, investigates local cultures, histories and the relationship between settler colonialists and Indigenous people.

#616

Chilla Bulbeck

#75621

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Margaret Chilla Bulbeck was the emeritus professor of women's studies at Adelaide University from 1997 until 2008, and has published widely on issues of gender and difference. Education Bulbeck gained a degree in economics from the University of Adelaide , a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in sociology from the Australian National University, and an LL.B. from the University of Queensland .

#617

Lisa Lowe

#98880

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and ...

#618

Janet Johnson

#113537

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Janet Helen Johnson is an American Egyptologist and academic, specializing in Egyptian language and the Late Period of ancient Egypt. Since 2003, she has been Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago. She was Director of Chicago's Oriental Institute from 1983 to 1989.

#619

Shelley Haley

#50741

Overall Influence

Shelley P. Haley is the Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College, New York, and President of the Society for Classical Studies. She is an expert in applying Black feminist and critical race approaches to the study and teaching of Classics.

#620

Renya K. Ramirez

#129136

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Renya Katarine Ramirez is a Ho-Chunk American anthropologist, author, and Native feminist. She is a professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. Ramirez has written 2 books on Native American culture.

#621

Zahra Kamalkhani

#176908

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Zahra Kamalkhani is an Iranian anthropologist. Zahra Kamalkhani was educated at the University of Tehran, University of Bergen and SOAS. She started teaching the anthropology of gender and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Bergen in 1986, completing her PhD there in 1996. She has lived in Bergen since 1981. She subsequently conducted post-doctoral research at Edith Cowan University and the University of Western Australia.

#622

Katherine McAuliffe

#161315

Overall Influence

Katherine Jane McAuliffe is a Canadian psychologist who is a professor of psychology at Boston College, studying evolutionary anthropology and how children develop a sense of fairness. McAuliffe has conducted studies with children at a range of international sites in an effort to characterize cross-cultural similarities and variations.

#623

Betty Jane Belanus

#102122

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Betty Jane Belanus is an American writer and folklorist. Belanus completed her graduate work in folklore at Indiana University and has been with the Smithsonian Institution since 1987, ultimately working with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage as an education specialist. Part of her work with the Smithsonian has been the curating of programs for the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival, including the 2009 Wales program. She has worked on "Smithsonian Inside Out", on the occupational life of the Smithsonian.

#624

Elise Andaya

#158127

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Elise L. Andaya is a cultural anthropologist who is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Anthropology by the University of Albany which is the state university of New York. Andaya studies Medical anthropology and gender anthropology and focuses on the effects of gender and citizenship on reproduction and access to healthcare in Cuba and the United States. She attended New York University in New York City, New York. She previously was on the Research Development Committee for the American Anthropological Association, and was a member at large for them from 2014–2017.

#625

Kathleen A. Deagan

#78873

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Kathleen A. Deagan is an American archaeologist who primarily focuses on excavations in Florida and the Caribbean. Known for her historic archaeology which uncovered the colonial past of La Florida, and work in St. Augustine, she has received multiple awards and honors, including the Award of Merit in 1992 and the J. C. Harrington Award in 2004, both bestowed by the Society for Historical Archaeology.

#626

Debora Diniz

#57377

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Debora Diniz Rodrigues , is an anthropologist and law professor at the University of Brasilia, and a co-founder and researcher at Anis: Institute for Bioethics. She is also a researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker. Her research projects focus on bioethics, feminism, human rights and health. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Leeds, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, among other institutions.

#627

Camilla Speller

Camilla Speller

#120592

Overall Influence

Camilla F. Speller is a biomolecular archaeologist, Assistant Professor in Anthropological Archaeology at the University of British Columbia Department of Anthropology. Education Speller obtained her BA from the University of Calgary with a double major in archaeology and biological anthropology. She completed her MA at Simon Fraser University in 2005, using aDNA analysis to examine the distribution of salmon species at the Northwest Plateau site of Keatley Creek in British Columbia Canada. She completed her PhD, completed at Simon Fraser in 2009 with a dissertation that applied ancient DNA te...

#628

Sahana Udupa

#168282

Overall Influence

Sahana Udupa is a media anthropologist and professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany, with a research focus on digital global cultures, AI assisted content moderation, online extreme speech, and digital media politics. She serves on several editorial and advisory boards and regularly takes part in popular media and policy debates around online abuse and disinformation.

#629

Hinematau McNeill

#65700

Overall Influence

Hinematau Naomi McNeill is a New Zealand academic and treaty negotiator. She is of Tapuika Māori descent. As of 2019, she is a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology. Early life and education McNeill was born in Rotorua. She studied her B.A. and M.A. in social anthropology at Auckland University and Waikato University. She is currently principal lecturer in Māori Studies at Auckland Institute of Technology.

#630

Angelique Corthals

#174403

Overall Influence

Angelique Corthals is a biomedical researcher and forensic anthropologist. She is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York . Her focus in biomedicine is the etiology of autoimmune diseases; as of 2020 she has been studying whether or not COVID-19 originated zoonotically in bats.

#631

Barbro Klein

#87515

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

Barbro Klein was a Swedish professor of ethnology. After a bachelor's degree at the University of Stockholm in 1961, she obtained a scholarship to study at Indiana University where she received her Ph.D. in folklore studies and anthropology in 1970 under the direction of Richard Dorson. She returned to Scandinavia in 1983, to take a position at the University of Stockholm. Klein was Director emerita of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study , and a member of the executive board of the American Folklore Society. In 2017, she was awarded the H. M. The King's Medal for “significant contributio...

#632

Phyllis Williams Lehmann

#82897

Overall Influence

1912 - 2004 (92 years)

Phyllis Williams Lehmann, was an American classical archaeologist who specialised in the Samothrace temple complex, where she discovered a third statue of Winged Victory , which is kept today at the Archaeological Museum of Samothrace and recovered missing fingers of the hand of the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre.

#633

Carol Laderman

#115065

Overall Influence

1932 - 2010 (78 years)

Carol Laderman was a groundbreaking medical anthropologist, specializing in the study of pregnancy and childbirth practices, shamanism, and Southeast Asian cultures, particularly Malayss in rural Terengganu, Malaysia. She was also a critically acclaimed writer and a longtime professor and lecturer who had just been re-elevated to Chairmanship of the Department of Anthropology at City College at the time of her death.

#634

Miranda Aldhouse-Green

#23786

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Miranda Jane Aldhouse-Green, is a British archaeologist and academic, known for her research on the Iron Age and the Celts. She was Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University from 2006 to 2013. Until about 2000 she published as Miranda Green or Miranda J. Green.

#635

Patricia Sawin

#158790

Overall Influence

Patricia Elizabeth Sawin is an American folklorist who focuses her research and teaching on informal narrative, festival, folklore theory, and the culture of adoptive families. She is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she coordinates the MA program in Folklore. She is a member of the executive board of the American Folklore Society.

#636

Cynthia Ling Lee

#61970

Overall Influence

Cynthia Ling Lee is an American dancer, choreographer, and scholar. She performs in contemporary, postmodern, and classical Indian dance techniques. Her research focuses on queer and postcolonial experiences in Asian diasporic performance.

#637

Ellen Lewin

#177151

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Ellen Lewin is an American author, anthropologist, and academic. Lewin, a lesbian, focuses her work on areas of motherhood, sexuality, and reproduction. Lewin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the Ruth Benedict Prize.

#638

Norma Goldman

#76372

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Norma Wynick Goldman was an American classics scholar, author, professor at Wayne State University, and president of the Detroit Classical Association. Her works include textbooks of the Latin language as well as studies of Roman lamps, the architecture of the Janiculum Hill in Rome, and Roman costumes.

#639

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen

#159466

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen is a Danish archaeologist and academic. She is Professor of European Prehistory and Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Bronze Age Archaeology at the University of Leiden. Her research focuses on Bronze Age Europe, heritage, and archaeological theory.

#640

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez

#117607

Overall Influence

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez is an American archaeologist who specializes in the field of zooarchaeology. Her research has included fieldwork near Lake Turkana, northwestern Kenya, and her research often touches on the question of animal domestication and the origins and development of African pastoralism.

#641

Elaine Salo

#128925

Overall Influence

1962 - 2016 (54 years)

Elaine Rosa Salo was a South African anthropologist, scholar and activist, who specialised in gender studies and African feminism. She taught at the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria, and, until her death from cancer, at the University of Delaware.

#642

Carolina Mallol

#109660

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Carolina Mallol was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1973, and is a professor and researcher of archaeological science at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, Spain. Education Mallol graduated from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain with her BA and MA in Geography and History, followed by an MA in 1999 then PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University in 2004. She was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for her PhD research, comprising a geoarchaeological study of three Lower Paleolithic sites.

#643

Joanna Bruck

#148033

Overall Influence

Joanna Bruck is an archaeologist and academic, who is a specialist on Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. Since 2020, she has been Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin. She was previously Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bristol between 2013 and 2020.

#644

Andrea Abrams

#160229

Overall Influence

Dr. Andrea Abrams is an American anthropologist, Associate Professor, President of the Association of Black Anthropologists and Author of God and Blackness: Race, Gender and Identity in a Middle Class Afrocentric Church. Andrea is currently an associate professor of Anthropology, Gender Studies and African American Studies at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, as well as the Chair of the Gender Studies Program. In 2018, she was named associate vice president for diversity affairs & special assistant to the president, and in 2021 was named vice president for diversity, inclusion, and equity.

#645

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado

#176405

Overall Influence

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado is a Brazilian anthropologist, currently a professor at the School of Geography at University College Dublin. She has been a lecturer at the Department of Social & Policy Sciences at the University of Bath and studies the economic and political effects of trade in the Global South, particularly in Brazil and China. She is also a columnist for The Intercept.

#646

Brita Malmer

#114769

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Brita Ingrid Maria Malmer , was a Swedish numismatist who specialized in the Viking Age. She was Sweden's first professor of numismatics. Biography Malmer was born in Malmö, where her father, Svante Alenstam, was a schoolteacher. Having graduated from high school in 1945, she studied history, archaeology, classical studies, art history and pedagogy at Lund University, and earned her bachelor's degree 1949. She received her licentiate degree in 1953 and her PhD in 1966 with a dissertation on the oldest Hedeby coins, Nordiska mynt före år 1000.

#647

Mary Harlow

#127166

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Mary Harlow, is an English archaeologist and classical scholar. Her research focuses on various aspects of Roman social history―such as age, family, dress and textiles―and their impact on the formation of ancient identity. Her approach strongly promotes interdisciplinary methods, using source materials to accompany the study of Roman dress.

#648

Josephine Flood

#41737

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Josephine Mary Flood, is an English-born Australian archaeologist, mountaineer, and author. Early life and education Josephine Flood was born Josephine Scarr in Yorkshire, England. She took a BA in Classics at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1959, later receiving an MA and a PhD from the Australian National University. Her PhD thesis was published as: The Moth Hunters: Aboriginal prehistory of the Australian Alps in 1980.

#649

Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka

#177589

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka is a university professor in the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University, Germany. She is a former Pro-Vice-Rector at Bielefeld University and former Dean of the Faculty of Sociology at the University.

#650

Martha Ellen Davis

Martha Ellen Davis

#74572

Overall Influence

Martha Ellen Davis is an emeritus professor from the University of Florida, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist known for her multifarious work on African diasporic religion and music. Professor Davis' research has defied conventional tenets about Haitian and Dominican folk music, and her cultural preservation projects has raised awareness of the significance of the Samaná Americanos' enclave.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions