The Most Influential People Across History

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 female people in Anthropology,

#951

Fleur Kemmers

#180801
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Fleur Kemmers is the Lichtenberg Professor for Coinage and Money in the Graeco-Roman World at Goethe University, Frankfurt. Education Kemmers undertook her undergraduate degree in archaeology in 1996 at the University of Amsterdam, and following her MA moved to Radboud University Nijmegen in 2000 to work on her PhD. Kemmers' doctoral work focused on Roman coins found at the legionary fortress of Nijmegen, examining the use and supply of coins in the Lower Rhine region in the first century AD. Kemmers completed her PhD in 2005 and the work was published as Coins for a legion. An analysis of th...
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#952

Alinah Kelo Segobye

#186045
Overall Influence
Alinah Kelo Segobye is a social development activist and archaeologist, with specialisms in social development and HIV/AIDS and the future of studying the past in Africa and African archaeology. She is Dean of Human Sciences at the Namibia University of Science and Technology and an elected fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.
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#953

Marjeta Šašel Kos

#174007
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Marjeta Šašel Kos is a Slovene archaeologist and classical philologist. Biography Marjeta Šašel Kos was born on 20 April 1954. In 1980, she earned a master's degree in archaeology from the University of Ljubljana, and in 1989 a PhD in classical philology from the same university.
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#954

Casey Dué Hackney

#177584
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Casey Dué Hackney, sometimes cited or referred to as Casey Dué, is a professor of classical studies at the University of Houston, and the Executive Editor for the Center for Hellenic Studies. Her research interests centre around Homeric poetry, Greek tragedy and Greek oral traditions.
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#955

Maïlys Richard

#191755
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Maïlys Richard holds a Ph.D. in Geochronology and Prehistory from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Her dissertation dealt with the chronology of late Middle and early Upper Palaeolithic sites in Western Europe, using electron spin resonance and uranium-series dating methods... Her primary research theme is the chronology of population dynamics in Eurasia and Africa during the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Source
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#956

Else Roesdahl

Else Roesdahl
#52278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Else Roesdahl is a Danish archaeologist, historian and educator. She has mediated the history of the Vikings for most of her life, including coordination of notable exhibitions on the Viking Age and authoring several books on the subject. Roesdahl's books have been translated into several languages.
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#957

Susan Deacy

Susan Deacy
#136838
Overall Influence
Susan Jane Deacy is a classical scholar who has been Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton since January 2018. She researches the history and literature of the ancient Greek world, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality, ancient Greek mythology and religion, and disability studies. She is also an expert on the teaching of subjects which are potentially sensitive, including sexual violence, domestic violence, and infanticide; she was project leader on the initiative 'Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom'. She is also series editor of Routledge's Gods an...
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#958

Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri

#155980
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri was an Italian contemporary archaeologist based at the Università del Salento whose research focused on Italian prehistory. Education and career Bietti Sestieri received her undergraduate degree in Etruscology after studying at Rome under Massimo Pallottino from 1964 to 1966.
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#959

Elizabeth Lyding Will

#145356
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Elizabeth Lyding Will was an American Classical archaeologist and a leading expert on Roman amphorae. She spent her long career teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Amherst College.
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#960

Patricia Wright

#32944
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Patricia Chapple Wright is an American primatologist, anthropologist, and conservationist. Wright is best known for her extensive study of social and family interactions of wild lemurs in Madagascar.
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#961

Amy C. Smith

Amy C. Smith
#135087
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Amy C. Smith is the current Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology and Professor of Classical Archaeology at Reading University. She is known for her work on iconography, the history of collections, and digital museology.
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#962

Helene J. Kantor

Helene J. Kantor
#61480
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Helene J. Kantor was a Near Eastern Archeologist and Art Historian in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, best known for her work at Chogha Mish from 1961 through 1978.
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#963

Nancy Wilkie

#147010
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Nancy Clausen Wilkie was an American archaeologist. She served as president of the Archaeological Institute of America between 1998 and 2002, and worked on archaeological projects in Greece, Egypt, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
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#964

Diana E. Marsh

#191815
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Dr. Marsh is an Assistant Professor of Archives and Digital Curation in the College of Information Studies and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park... Her current research focuses on discovery, use, and access for Native American and Indigenous communities, based on projects undertaken at the American Philosophical Society and the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives. Source
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#965

Chloë Duckworth

#178217
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Chloë N. Duckworth is a British archaeological scientist and reader in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, and a presenter of The Great British Dig. Education After receiving her BA in Archaeology, Duckworth was awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to study for an MSc and subsequently a PhD at the University of Nottingham. Her PhD, awarded in 2011, was supervised by Julian Henderson and was titled The created stone: chemical and archaeological perspectives on the colour and material properties of early Egyptian glass, 1500–1200 B.C....
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#966

Eleri Cousins

#137988
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Eleri H Cousins is an archaeologist and Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Lancaster. Biography Cousins' undergraduate study, in Archaeology and Classics, was at Stanford University. Subsequently, she studied for a master's degree and PhD at the University of Cambridge. She was a lecturer at the University of St Andrews before moving to her current role at Lancaster in 2019. Cousins was elected as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 17 June 2021.
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#967

Franziska Lang

#151596
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Franziska Lang is an archaeologist and professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Education Lang got an M.A. from the Free University of Berlin in 1987, and a doctor of philosophy degree in 1991 from the Free University of Berlin.
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#968

Sally Worrell

#157331
Overall Influence
Sally Ann Worrell is a British archaeologist specialising in Romano-British material culture. Education Worrel studied at Durham University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1994 and a Master of Arts degree in 1997.
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#969

Lutgarde Vandeput

#143966
Overall Influence
Lutgarde Vandeput is the Director of the British Institute at Ankara. Education and early career Vandeput studied classical archaeology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with a Masters thesis on "Splijttechnieken in de Oudheid: een kritische statusquaestionis van het onderzoek in het oostelijke deel van de Middellandse Zee." She completed her doctorate in 1994 with a thesis on "The Architectural Decoration at Sagalassos. Local  Development within the Framework of Anatolian Architecture. The Imperial Period."
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#970

MaryAnn Bin-Sallik

#180404
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
MaryAnn Bin-Sallik is a Djaru Elder and Australian academic, specialising in Indigenous studies and culture. She was the first Indigenous Australian to gain a doctorate from Harvard University. Early life and nursing Bin-Sallik was born in Broome, Western Australia, on 2 November 1940. She moved with her family to Darwin, Northern Territory, at age nine. On leaving school she trained as a nursing sister at Darwin Hospital, where she was the first Indigenous person to graduate in 1961. She then spent 17 years nursing in Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory.
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#971

Elizabeth Caskey

Elizabeth Caskey
#113284
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Elizabeth Gwyn Caskey was a Canadian-American classical scholar, professor, and archaeologist, known for her work in the excavations at Lerna and Kea, which are of importance to Greek prehistory. As an archaeologist she worked with her husband, Jack Caskey, on excavations where she supervised the trenches of every annual dig and their fortifications. She also wrote summaries of the excavations. After her marriage ended she excavated at Pylos. She was a Professor of Classics at Randolph-Macon College who became Professor Emeritus in 1981.
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#972

Suzanne Dixon

#117132
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Suzanne Dixon is an Australian classical scholar, widely recognised as an authority on women's history and particularly marriage and motherhood. Career Dixon's career spans posts at the Australian National University as well as the University of Queensland, where she was first reader, then Professor, in Classics and Ancient History. Her expertise on the position of women in the ancient world was recognised by the BBC History website, by whom she was asked to curate an educational resource on Roman women. Amy Richlin, currently professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles, has cited Dixon as a great influence in shaping her own work on gender politics.
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#973

Tullia Linders

#97370
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Tullia Linders was a Swedish archaeologist. Life Tullia Linders studied Latin and Ancient Greek already at the equivalent of high school and later at university continued her studies in the classical languages and classical studies. She got a licentiate degree in 1954 and thereafter spent several years as a school teacher in Latin and Ancient Greek. At the same time she kept ties to the university, conducted research and spent time travelling and studying in the Mediterranean area. During this time she also published articles on archaeological and art historical issues, notably on ceramics and tombstones.
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#974

Delia Pemberton

#118267
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Delia Pemberton is an author and lecturer in Egyptology, formerly with the British Museum and Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Best known for her work in museum education, she has published a number of popular works on ancient Egypt and related topics for both adults and children.
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#975

Sianne Ngai

#43358
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Sianne Ngai is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. From 2000 to 2007 she was an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, from 2007-2011 an Associate Professor of English at UCLA, and from 2011 to 2017 Professor of English at Stanford University. She joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in fall 2017. Ngai earned her B.A. from Brown University in 1993 and her Ph.D from Harvard in 2000.
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#976

Ronika Power

#183688
Overall Influence
Ronika K. Power is an Australian archaeologist who is a Professor of Bioarchaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology and Director of the Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment at Macquarie University. Power is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Society of New South Wales.
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#977

Taima Moeke-Pickering

#187601
Overall Influence
Taima Moeke-Pickering is a Canadian-New Zealand academic, a Māori, of Ngāti Pūkeko and Tuhoe descent and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Laurentian University. Academic career After years of working as a professor and administrator at the University of Waikato and years at Waikato Institute of Technology, Moeke-Pickering moved to Canada in 2006 to take up a position as an assistant professor in the School of Indigenous Relations at Laurentian University. She completed her PhD in 2010 titled 'Decolonisation as a social change framework and its impact on the development of Indigenous-based curricula for Helping Professionals in mainstream Tertiary Education Organisations'.
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#978

Maria Floriani Squarciapino

#185590
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Maria Floriani Squarciapino was an Italian classical archaeologist and professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, known for her work on the Roman port city of Ostia. Education Maria Floriano Squarciapino studied at La Sapienza University in Rome and was a student of Pietro Romanelli, graduating in 1939 with a thesis on the topic of the school of Aphrodisias. She also developed an interest in the archaeology of North Africa in the Roman period, and underwent training at the Scuola nazionale di Archeologi.
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#979

Ina Isings

#167836
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Clasina Isings was a Dutch archaeologist and classical scholar specialising in Roman glass. In 2009 the city of Utrecht awarded her a silver medal in recognition of the work she had done to help preserve the city's history.
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#980

Kara Cooney

#89468
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Kathlyn M. Cooney is an Egyptologist, archaeologist, professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Language and Cultures at UCLA. As well as for her scholarly work, she is known for hosting television shows on ancient Egypt on the Discovery Channel as well as for writing a popular-press book on the subject. She specialises in craft production, coffin studies, and economies in the ancient world.
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#981

Mary Whitney Kelting

#98158
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mary Whitney Kelting is an American ethnographer and scholar of Jainism who is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University, College of Social Sciences and Humanities
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#982

Annette Imhausen

Annette Imhausen
#71924
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Annette Imhausen is a German historian of mathematics known for her work on Ancient Egyptian mathematics. She is a professor in the Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence at Goethe University Frankfurt.
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#983

Edith Bruder

#77082
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Edith Bruder is a French ethnologist who has specialized in the study of African Judaism and religious diasporas, new religious movements, and marginal religious societies. She is a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London; a research associate at the French National Center for Scientific Research ; and a research fellow at the Faculty of Theology's School of Biblical Studies and Ancient Languages, North-West University, South Africa.
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#984

Ségolène Vandevelde

#191992
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Ségolène Vandevelde is a French prehistoric archeologist currently working as a Post-Doc at ArScAn Laboratory. Vandevelde is best known for inventing fuliginochronology, the study of soot deposits left by prehistoric life at archeological sites to date their occupation of the sites. Her current project is “Fuliginochronology: micro-chronological approach of sooted concretions in caves/rock shelters.”
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#985

Anna Czekanowska-Kuklińska

#191994
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Anna Czekanowska-Kuklińska – Polish musicologist and ethnographer, professor at the University of Warsaw, daughter of anthropologist Jan Czekanowski. She applied statistical-mathematical methods for analysis of folk music.
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#986

Lilly Kahil

#79685
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Lilly Louise Kahil was a Swiss-French archaeologist and classicist of Egyptian-German descent. She was the founder of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, an encyclopedia of ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman mythology.
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#987

Oksana Bulgakowa

#115657
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Oksana Bulgakowa is a professor of film history and film analysis at the University of Mainz. Career Born in Nikopol, Soviet Union, Bulgakowa completed in 1977 a five-year study of film theory and history at Allunionsinstitut of Cinematography in Moscow, and then followed her husband Dietmar Hochmuth in the DDR where a Szenaristenlehrgang at the graduated Academy of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
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#988

Tone Hellesund

#176253
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tone Hellesund is a Norwegian ethnologist who specializes in gender studies. After working at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History , she undertook a four-year doctorate with funding from the Research Council of Norway. As of April 2022, she is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen.
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#989

Nimet Özgüç

Nimet Özgüç
#70390
Overall Influence
1916 - 2015 (99 years)
Nimet Özgüç was a Turkish archaeologist. In her era, she and her husband were the dominant Turkish academics and archaeologists. She was made an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences in 1996 and was awarded the Grand Prize of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2010 for her contributions to archaeology in the country.
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#990

Teresa Porzecanski

#114877
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Teresa Porzecanski is an Uruguayan anthropologist, profesor and writer. From an Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish family , her works have included a focus on the Jewish communities of Uruguay, afrodescendant minorities, prejudice and ethnic issues. She has been is a professor at the Catholic University of Uruguay., Universidad de la Republica, CLAEH, and various universities in Argentina, Brazil, Perú, México, United States, Puerto Rico, Sweden, and Israel.
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#991

Monique Desroches

#35501
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Monique Desroches is a Canadian ethnomusicologist from Quebec who specializes in the music of the West Indies and the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. Early life Desroches was born in Grand-Mère in Quebec on March 18, 1948. From 1968 to 1974, Desroches was part of a folk group, "Les Contretemps" who released two LPs and three 45s and toured in Canada, the United States and Japan.
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#992

Véronique Schiltz

Véronique Schiltz
#114211
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Véronique Schiltz was a French archaeologist, historian of art, and literary translator. She was a specialist in steppes art, in particular that of the Scythians, concentrating on the history and culture of steppe peoples between the first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE. She was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 2011, and an Officer of the Legion of Honour.
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#993

Annie Nicolette Zadoks-Josephus Jitta

#185113
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Annie Nicolette Zadoks-Josephus Jitta was a Dutch numismatist and archaeologist. Early life and education Annie Nicolette Josephus Jitta was born in Amsterdam in 1904. Her Jewish family originated in Bamberg in Bavaria, but moved to Amsterdam in 1812, where her ancestor Nathan Joseph adopted the surname Jitta in response to Louis Bonaparte's edict that all inhabitants of the Low Countries should be registered with a family name. She attended schools in Amsterdam , Utrecht and The Hague, before taking an art history degree at the University of Leiden. She gained her PhD in 1932 under the supervision of Professor G.
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#994

Jean Le Patourel

#168428
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Hilda Elizabeth Jean Le Patourel was a British archaeologist. She specialised in the ceramics and pottery of Yorkshire. She later expanded her field of research to include moated sites and the archaeological remains of dog collars.
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#995

Susan G. Lindstrom

#192143
Overall Influence
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#996

Ingeborg Scheibler

#169595
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Ingeborg Scheibler is a German classical archaeologist. Ingeborg Scheibler was granted her doctorate at the University of Tübingen on 17 April 1956 by Bernhard Schweitzer for her thesis Studien zur Komposition der frühgriechischen Flächenkunst. Die symmetrische Bildform und ihre Geschichte . In 1956/7 she received the Reisestipendium des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts. Subsequently, she was active in the Kerameikos excavation. She achieved her habilitation in 1971 at the University of Munich with her work Griechische Lampen . In Munich she was head conservator at the Museum für Abgüsse ...
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#997

Charlotte Blindheim

Charlotte Blindheim
#99079
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Charlotte Blindheim was a Norwegian archaeologist. She was the first female member of the scientific staff at the University of Oslo to be permanently employed when she hired as the museum curator in 1946.
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#998

Tiziana Terranova

Tiziana Terranova
#66614
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tiziana Terranova is an Italian theorist and activist whose work focuses on the effects of information technology on society through concepts such as digital labor and commons. Terranova has published the monograph Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches, and appeared as a keynote speaker in several conferences. She lectures on the digital media cultures and politics in the Department of Human and Social Sciences, at the University of Naples, 'L'Orientale'.
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#999

Jadwiga Lipińska

#109679
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Jadwiga Lipińska née Freyer was a Polish Egyptologist. Biography Lipińska was the daughter of Edward Freyer and Zofia Kodis, an artist. She graduated from the University of Warsaw with her masters and her doctorate as a student of Prof. Kazimierz Michalowski. Following her studies, she went on to work at the National Museum, Warsaw from 1958. She began as an assistant in the Gallery of Ancient Art and by 1991, she became curator of the Gallery of Ancient Art, a position she held until she retired in 2002. She also lectured at University of Warsaw, and Akademii Teologii Katolickiej in Warsaw and the University of Lodz.
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#1000

Maria Paula Survilla

#144034
Overall Influence
1964 - 2020 (56 years)
Maria Paula Survilla , also known as Paŭlina Survilla, was an American professor of ethnomusicology and an ethnocultural activist of Belarusian descent. Biography Survilla was born in Madrid, Spain to Janka and Ivonka Survilla, anti-communist activists who had left Belarus because of conflicts caused by World War II. They moved to France for a few years and then to Spain. Paula inherited her mother's natural affinity for learning new languages and became fluent in French, Spanish and Belarusian as a child.
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