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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Anthropology,

#851

Eszter Bánffy

#109702

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Eszter Bánffy, is a Hungarian prehistorian, archaeologist, and academic. Since 2013, she has been Director of the Romano-Germanic Commission at the German Archaeological Institute. She is also a professor at the Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

#852

Maria Fadiman

#71018

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Maria Grace Fadiman is an American ethnobotanist and Professor of Geosciences at Florida Atlantic University. Biography Fadiman is the daughter of documentary filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman and psychologist and author James Fadiman. Clifton Fadiman was her granduncle, She is a distant cousin of Anne Fadiman and of William James Sidis, a child prodigy.

#853

Katharina C. Rebay

#146398

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Dr Katharina Rebay is an archaeologist and researcher in the School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. Presently, Dr. Rebay is part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Tracing Networks: Craft Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond. She is also an associate member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences .

#854

Dawn Hadley

#139197

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Dawn Marie Hadley is a British historian and archaeologist, who is best known for her research on the Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age periods, the study of childhood, and gender in medieval England. She is a member of the Centre for Medieval Studies and the department of archaeology at the University of York.

#855

Jelena Porsanger

Jelena Porsanger

#54993

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Jelena Porsanger is a Russian-born Norwegian Sami ethnographer who researches Sami culture and history. From 2011 to 2015, she was the rector of the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway.

#856

Lisa-Marie Shillito

#174368

Overall Influence

Lisa-Marie Shillito is a British archaeologist and senior lecturer in landscape archaeology as well as director of the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory and Earthslides at Newcastle University. Her practical work focuses on using soil micromorphology, phytolith analysis and geochemistry in order to understand human behaviour and landscape change. Her work includes the Neolithic settlements of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Ness of Brodgar and Durrington Walls in Britain, but also Crusader castles and medieval settlements in Poland and the Baltic and in the Near East.

#857

Vera Evison

#174509

Overall Influence

1918 - 2018 (100 years)

Vera Ivy Evison was a British archaeologist and professor of archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was a specialist in Post-Roman Britain and early-Medieval England Career Evison attended Lewisham Prendergast school until 1937, following this with a series of evening classes, in subject including archaeology, before studying BA English language and literature. Her studies were supported by working as a secretary for Kathleen Kenyon at the London University Institute of Archaeology. In 1947 she went to study archaeology in Stockholm under Nils Åberg. She also worked as a ...

#858

Chelsea Watego

#47659

Overall Influence

Chelsea Joanne Ruth Watego is an Aboriginal Australian academic and writer. She is a Mununjali Yugambeh and South Sea Islander woman and is currently Professor of Indigenous Health at Queensland University of Technology. Her first book, Another Day in the Colony, was published in 2021.

#859

Sara Goodacre

#67076

Overall Influence

Sara L. Goodacre is a research geneticist and Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Genetics at the University of Nottingham. She is the lead for the Open Air Laboratories, a citizen science project that engages people with the outdoor environment and Deputy Director of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Doctoral Training Programme.

#860

Valentine Rossilli Winsey

#179440

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

Valentine Rossilli Winsey, born Valentina Diane Rossilli was an American speech and drama teacher, historian of immigration, anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist and women's rights activist. After completing a thesis on Italian American migration to New York City, she became a student of Buckminster Fuller, developing his idea of a 'World Game'. She taught anthropology at Pace College. Refused tenure at Pace, she brought a lawsuit against the university for sex discrimination. She later published a genealogical guide, and research on a variety of sociological and psychological topics, in...

#861

Elayne Rapping

#105489

Overall Influence

1938 - 2016 (78 years)

Elayne Antler Rapping was an American critic and analyst of popular culture and social issues. She authored several books covering topics such as media theory, popular culture, women's issues, and the portrayal of the legal system on television. As a regular contributor to such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and The New York Times, she wrote on a wide variety of cultural issues including film and movie reviews.

#862

Nancy Edwards

#91448

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Nancy Margaret Edwards, is a British archaeologist and academic, who specialises in medieval archaeology and ecclesiastical history. Since 2008, she has been Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Bangor University.

#863

Cynthia Damon

#124510

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Cynthia Ellen Murray Damon is a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on Latin literature and Roman historiography, having published translations and commentaries on authors such as Caesar and Tacitus.

#864

Georgina Herrmann

#92142

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Georgina Herrmann, is a British retired archaeologist and academic, specialising in Near Eastern archaeology. Having worked as a civil servant, she later studied archaeology and spent the rest of her career as an active field archaeologist and lecturer. She was Reader in the Archaeology of Western Asia at University College London from 1994 to 2002.

#865

Melissa J. Brown

#111903

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Melissa J. Brown is an American sociocultural anthropologist and historian specializing in China and Taiwan. She earned a bachelor's and a master's degree from Stanford University, and completed doctoral study at the University of Washington.

#866

Elizabeth Grant

#117705

Overall Influence

1963 - 2022 (59 years)

Elizabeth Grant CF was an Australian architectural anthropologist, criminologist and academic working in the field of Indigenous Architecture. She was a Churchill Fellow and held academic positions at The University of Adelaide, as Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University's RMIT School of Architecture and Design, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra and the University of Queensland. She researched, wrote, and was an activist focused on architecture and design with Indigenous peoples as architectural practice and a social movement, and the observance of human rights in institutional architecture .

#867

Meaghan Morris

#29314

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Meaghan Morris is an Australian scholar of cultural studies. She is currently a Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Life Born in Tenterfield, New South Wales, Morris was raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. Morris enrolled in a B.A. program in English and French at the University of Sydney. In Sydney, she met John Flaus, a film theorist and actor famous who would become a significant influence in the development of Australian cultural studies. She also became engaged in the work of British feminist scholar Juliet Mitchell and gave seminars on Mitchell's book...

#868

Janet DeLaine

#89317

Overall Influence

Janet DeLaine is Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is a Roman archaeologist whose research has focused on urban environments, with a particular focus on bath complexes, urban development and the building industry in the Roman world.

#869

Louise Zarmati

#162617

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Louise Zarmati is an Australian archaeologist, educator, and author. She is most notable for pioneering Archaeology education in schools in Australia. Education In 1979, Zarmati received her Bachelors and Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. She resumed her studies in 1992, earning her Masters in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge. Deakin University awarded Zarmati a PhD for her research on the history of pedagogy in Australian museums in 2012.

#870

Teresa Joaquim

#65034

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Teresa Joaquim is a social anthropologist who is the coordinator of the first master's program in women's studies in Portugal. Women's Studies – Gender, Citizenship and Development was launched at the Universidade Aberta in 1995 and Joaquim pressed for it to be expanded to include a PhD platform in 2002. She served as a member of the National Ethics Council for Life Sciences between 1996 and 2001 and as part of the Helsinki Group on Women in Science. She has participated in numerous policy development projects evaluating inclusion and equal opportunity for women for the government of Portugal...

#871

Sarah Scott

#186197

Overall Influence

Sarah A. Scott is an archaeologist and academic. She is professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester. Scott has a BSc degree from Leicester and completed her DPhil at University of Oxford. She taught at the University of Durham before moving to Leicester. In 2015 she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and in 2016 was in receipt of Advance HE's National Teaching Fellowship award. Scott was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 5 May 2002.

#872

Lee Maracle

#77959

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

Bobbi Lee Maracle was an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, she left formal education after grade 8 to travel across North America, attending Simon Fraser University on her return to Canada. Her first book, an autobiography called Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, was published in 1975. She wrote fiction, non-fiction, and criticism and held various academic positions. Maracle's work focused on the lives of Indigenous people, particularly women, in contemporary North America. As an influential writer and speaker, Maracle fought for ...

#873

Willeke Wendrich

#118539

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Willemina Zwanida "Willeke" Wendrich is a Dutch-American Egyptologist and archaeologist. She is Professor and Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology in the Near Eastern Language & Cultures Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2016 she is the Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

#874

Dana Lepofsky

#166648

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Dana Sue Lepofsky is a Canadian archaeologist and ethnobiologist. She is a professor at Simon Fraser University, a former president of the Society of Ethnobiology, and received the Smith-Wintemberg Award in 2018. Her research focuses on the historical ecology of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

#875

Věra Sokolová

#186550

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Věra Sokolová is a Czech academic who specializes in gender studies and specifically focuses on identity policy and the construction of sexuality from a historical and social perspective, evaluating the power, structuring and defining of sexuality to transcend binary boundaries. She is the chair of the Department of Gender Studies at Charles University in Prague. She is the co-managing editor of Gender and Generation, along with Kateřina Kolářová.

#876

Ruth Shaffrey

#120345

Overall Influence

Dr Ruth Shaffrey is an archaeologist. Biography Shaffrey was awarded her PhD in Archaeology and Geology from the University of Reading in 1998. She specialises in the study of quern-stones and millstones and is a worked stone specialist for Oxford Archaeology. Her thesis formed the basis of her 2006 BAR volume on Romano-British quern-stones. In February 2021 she reported on the discovery of a quern-stone decorated with a phallus from excavations on the A14 road in Cambridgeshire.

#877

Catherine Frieman

Catherine Frieman

#172106

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (43 years)

Catherine J. Frieman is an archaeologist and associate professor at the Australian National University. Her research investigates conservatism and innovation, and she is a specialist in material culture and technology.

#878

Anne Feldhaus

#116918

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Anne Feldhaus is Distinguished Foundation Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus Professor, at Arizona State University. Her field of specialty is Maharashtra, India, combining philological and ethnographic approaches to study religious traditions of Maharashtra, the Marathi-language region of western India.

#879

Gail Falkingham

#169211

Overall Influence

Gail Falkingham is a British archaeologist, archivist, and curator. Biography Falkingham worked for North Yorkshire County Council as County Archaeologist and is currently employed by the Yorkshire Museum as Assistant Curator of Archaeological Archives. She is also an archivist for the North Yorkshire County Record Office.

#880

Brenda Dickinson

#184563

Overall Influence

Brenda Dickinson is a British archaeologist. She is a leading scholar in the study of Roman pottery, and a specialist in Roman potter's stamps. Career Dickinson collaborated with Brian Hartley at the University of Leeds. Together they catalogued samian stamps over a 40-year period from central and western Europe. The catalogue was published in a nine-part volume in 2008 entitled Names on Terra Sigillata. An Index of Makers' Stamps & Signatures on Gallo-Roman Terra Sigillata ', containing around 300,000 stamps from 5,000 potters. Dickinson is credited with turning "Brian Hartley's vision of an...

#881

Edna Ahgeak MacLean

#43431

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Edna Ahgeak MacLean or Paniattaaq is an Iñupiaq academic administrator, linguist, anthropologist and educator from Alaska, who has specialized in the preservation and revitalization of the Iñupiaq language.

#882

Diane Atnally Conlin

#173398

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Diane Atnally Conlin is an American classicist and archaeologist specializing in the art in architecture of ancient Rome. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and directs its excavations at the Villa of Maxentius.

#883

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Mimi Thi Nguyen

#47327

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Mimi Thi Nguyen is a Vietnamese-born American scholar, punk and zine author. Biography Born in 1974 in Ho Chi Minh City to Hiep and Lien Nguyen, Nguyen earned a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies and a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Her master's degree was in American Studies from New York University. She grew up in Minnesota and relocated to San Diego, California, where she was drawn to the D.I.Y. punk scene.

#884

Tanaya Winder

#98510

Overall Influence

Tanaya Winder is a performance poet, writer, motivational speaker, and educator. She was raised on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colorado and is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe. Her background includes Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Dine, and Black heritages. With fellow Indigenous writer Casandra Lopez, she founded , an online literary magazine to "showcase the creative literary expressions and scholarly work of both emerging and established women writers from around the world." With Lakota rap artist Frank Waln and other collaborators, she runs Dream Warriors Management, an organization to promote Indigenous artists and support young Native students.

#885

Fariba Adelkhah

#35841

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Fariba Adelkhah is a French-Iranian anthropologist and academic at Sciences Po who was detained in Iran from 2019 until 2023. Early life and career Born in Tehran, Adelkhah studied in France, first at Université Strasbourg II and then at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. In 1990, she obtained a "very honourable" mention for her Ph.D. thesis on women in Iran, "an anthropological approach of post-revolutionary Iran: the case of Islamic women" , with Jean-Pierre Digard as her advisor. Since 2004, she has been a Research Director at the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

#886

Maria Tumarkin

#105148

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Maria Tumarkin is an Australian cultural historian, essayist and novelist., and is senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, teaching creative writing.

#887

Annalisa Marzano

#170819

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Annalisa Marzano, FRHistS FSA, MAE is an Italian-American archaeologist and academic. She is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Bologna and has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading in England. She specializes in Roman social and economic history.

#888

Catherine Ellis

#181928

Overall Influence

1935 - 1996 (61 years)

Catherine Joan Ellis was an Australian ethnomusicologist. She co-founded the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide in 1972. Early life and education Catherine Joan Caughie was born on 19 May 1935 at Birregurra in Victoria.

#889

Sara Anderson Immerwahr

#129731

Overall Influence

1914 - 2008 (94 years)

Sara Anderson Immerwahr was an American Classical archaeologist. Life Immerwahr earned her bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1935. One of her tutors at Mount Holyoke was archaeologist Caroline Morris Galt. She gained her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1943 with a dissertation entitled "The Mycenaean Pictorial Style of Vase Painting in the Thirteenth Century B.C."

#890

Gillian Carr

#139793

Overall Influence

Gillian "Gilly" Carr is a British archaeologist and academic. She currently specialises in the Holocaust and conflict archaeology, while her early career research focused on the Iron Age and Roman Archaeology. She is an associate professor and academic director in archaeology at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Continuing Education, and a fellow and director of studies in archaeology at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Royal Historical Society. In 2020, she won the EAA European Heritage Prize for ...

#891

Barbara Barletta

#131947

Overall Influence

1952 - 2015 (63 years)

Barbara A. Barletta was a prominent American Classical archaeologist and architectural historian. Barletta earned a B.A. in Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. From the American Academy in Rome Barletta received the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Classical Studies in 1990. She received a series of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including an award to support research on the Temple of Athena at Suonion in 2009.

#892

Jenifer Neils

#47474

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Jenifer Neils is an American classical archaeologist and was from July 2017 to June 2022 director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Formerly she was the Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts in the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University.

#893

Françoise Dussart

#178936

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Françoise Dussart is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Trained in France and Australia, her specialties in social anthropology include Australian Aboriginal society and culture , iconography and visual systems, various expressions of gender, ritual and social organization, health and citizenship.

#894

Corinna Rossi

#99798

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Corinna Rossi is an Italian Egyptologist known for her works on Ancient Egyptian mathematics and Ancient Egyptian architecture, on the archaeology of the Kharga Oasis, and on related topics in the history of Egypt and the Levant.

#895

Donna Yates

#190290

Overall Influence

Donna Yates is an archaeologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Maastricht University. Her research considers transnational illicit trade in cultural objects, art and heritage crime including Looted art and the Antiquities trade, and white collar crime.

#896

Alexandra Sanmark

#140297

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Alexandra Sanmark is an archaeologist specialising in Iron Age Scandinavia and the Viking Age. Career Sanmark took undergraduate and postgraduate study at the University of London before gaining her PhD in 2006 on the Christianisation of Scandinavia from University College London. Sanmark is a Reader in Medieval Archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands and associate professor of archaeology at Uppsala University.

#897

Roberta Tomber

#97336

Overall Influence

1954 - 2022 (68 years)

Roberta S. Tomber was a British archaeologist. Biography Tomber had worked for the Museum of London Archaeology Service and the University of Southampton before joining the British Museum as an Honorary Visiting Researcher in the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research. Her ceramic research focussed on ancient Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean contacts.

#898

Irene Lemos

#156194

Overall Influence

Irene S. Lemos is a British classical archaeologist and academic, specialising in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Greece. She is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

#899

Marie Meade

#107369

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Marie Arnaq Meade is a Yup'ik professor in the humanities and also a Yup'ik tradition bearer. Meade's Yup'ik name is Arnaq which means "woman." She also works and travels with the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. Meade is also part of the Nunamta Yup'ik Dance Group. Meade has been documenting the cultural knowledge of Yup'ik elders, including the values, language and beliefs of the Yup'ik people for over twenty years. She is currently an instructor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

#900

Lyuba Ognenova-Marinova

Lyuba Ognenova-Marinova

#139558

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Lyuba Ognenova-Marinova was a pioneering Bulgarian archaeologist. She was the first underwater archaeologist in the country and headed the investigations of the ancient Thracian city of Nesebar. She became one of the leading Bulgarian researchers specializing in ancient and Thracian archeology, authoring over 100 scientific publications. She served on the faculty of Sofia University and as a senior researcher at the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia.

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