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,
#101
Kirin Narayan
#41113
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kirin Narayan is an Indian-born American anthropologist, folklorist and writer. Early life, education, and career Narayan is the daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a civil engineer from Nashik, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American "artist, decorator, and builder of sustainable housing". Narayan was born in Bombay, attended school in India and came to the United States in 1976.
Go to Profile#102
Susan Gal
#42317
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Susan Gal is the Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago She is the author or co-author of several books and numerous articles on linguistic anthropology, gender and politics, and the social history of Eastern Europe.
Go to Profile#103
Tomomi Yamaguchi
#68120
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Tomomi Yamaguchi is a Japanese anthropologist. Her specialist areas are feminism, popular culture, nationalism, and social movements in contemporary Japan. Biography Yamaguchi completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2004. She is a professor of anthropology at Montana State University.
Go to Profile#104
Germaine Tillion
#6204
Overall Influence
1907 - 2008 (101 years)
Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist, best known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the French government. A member of the French resistance, she spent time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Go to Profile#105
Frederica de Laguna
#33638
Overall Influence
1906 - 2004 (98 years)
Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna was an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist influential for her work on Paleoindian and Alaska Native art and archaeology in the American northwest and Alaska.
Go to Profile#106
Shalini Randeria
#14341
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Shalini Randeria is an American-born Indian anthropologist. Education She was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, and brought up in Mumbai and New Delhi, Randeria is an alumna of the University of Delhi, the University of Oxford and Heidelberg University, and earned her PhD at the Free University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#107
Alice Beck Kehoe
#22903
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Alice Beck Kehoe is a feminist anthropologist and archaeologist. She has done considerable field research among Native American peoples in the upper plains of the US and Canada, and has authored research volumes on Native American archaeology and Native American history. She is also the author of several general anthropology and archaeology textbooks.
Go to Profile#108
Annemarie Mol
#12127
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Annemarie Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher. She is the Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Winner of the Constantijn & Christiaan Huijgens Grant from the NWO in 1990 to study 'Differences in Medicine', she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2010 to study 'The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory'. She has helped to develop post-ANT/feminist understandings of science, technology and medicine. In her earlier work she explored the performativity of health care practices, argued that realities are generated within those practices, and noted that since practices differ, so too do realities.
Go to Profile#109
Aihwa Ong
#24022
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.
Go to Profile#110
Rita Laura Segato
#19604
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Rita Laura Segato is an Argentine-Brazilian academic, who has been called "one of Latin America's most celebrated feminist anthropologists" and "one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this era". She is specially known for her research oriented towards gender in indigenous villages and Latin American communities, violence against women and the relationships between gender, racism and colonialism. One of her specialist areas is the study of gender violence.
Go to Profile#111
Birgit Meyer
#35809
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Birgit Meyer is a German professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. Career Meyer was born on 21 March 1960 in Emden, Germany. She studied comparative religion, pedagogy, and cultural anthropology at the University of Bremen and the University of Amsterdam. She earned her PhD at the latter university in 1995 under doctoral advisors J. Fabian and H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen, with a thesis titled: Translating the Devil. An African Appropriation of Pietist Protestantism. The Case of the Peki Ewe, 1847–1992. She was appointed as professor of religious studies at Utrecht University in 2011....
Go to Profile#112
Barbara Smuts
#10512
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Barbara Boardman Smuts is an American anthropologist and psychologist noted for her research into baboons, dolphins, and chimpanzees, and a Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Smuts received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard University and a Ph.D in neurological and biological behavioral science from Stanford Medical School. In the 1970s she began studying animal behaviour at the University of Michigan, including research with Jane Goodall on chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, where she had a violent introduction to field research, being among four field researchers kidnapped and beaten by a Marxist revolutionary group.
Go to Profile#113
Emily Martin
#27141
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Emily Martin is a sinologist, anthropologist, and feminist. Currently, she is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at New York University. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her PhD degree from Cornell University in 1971. Before 1984, she published works under the name of Emily Martin Ahern.
Go to Profile#114
Margaret Conkey
#34212
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Margaret W. Conkey is an American archaeologist and academic, who specializes in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic in the French Pyrénées. Her research focuses on cave art produced during this period. Conkey is noted as one of the first archaeologists to explore the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies, using feminist theory to reinterpret images and objects from the Paleolithic Era or the late Ice Age. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was named by Discover magazine in their ...
Go to Profile#115
Wendy James
#26355
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Wendy Rosalind James, is a British retired social anthropologist and academic. She was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2007, and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2001 to 2004.
Go to Profile#116
Mary Lee Jensvold
#22673
Overall Influence
Mary Lee Jensvold is a senior lecturer at Central Washington University. She was the Director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute located on the campus of Central Washington University. CHCI was the home of the chimpanzee Washoe and four other chimpanzees who use the signs of American Sign Language to communicate with one another and their human caregivers.
Go to Profile#117
Brackette Williams
#39313
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Brackette F. Williams is an American anthropologist, and Senior Justice Advocate, Open Society Institute. She is currently an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona.
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Pauline Turner Strong
#41604
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Pauline Turner Strong is an American anthropologist specializing in literary, historical, ethnographic, media, and popular representations of Native Americans. Theoretically her work has considered colonial and postcolonial representation, identity and alterity, and hybridity. She has also researched intercultural captivity narratives, intercultural adoption practices, and the appropriation of Native American symbols and practices in U.S. sports and youth organizations.
Go to Profile#119
Ilse Schwidetzky
#36292
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Ilse Schwidetzky was a German anthropologist. Biography She was the daughter of Georg and Susanne Schwidetzky. Susanne Schwidetzky, who studied math at the University of Berlin around 1900, died in 1911 of tuberculosis. Georg Schwidetzky studied law and had a successful political career which ended with World War I. The family moved to Leipzig, where Georg Schwidetzky worked for Die Deutsche Bücherei, roughly equivalent to the Library of Congress. Ilse Schwidetzky had three siblings, Eva , Walter , and Georg . She is related to Oscar Schwidetzky, who invented the ace bandage and was the fi...
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Heather Horst
#50920
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Heather A. Horst is a social anthropologist and media studies academic and author who writes on material culture, mobility, and the mediation of social relations. In 2020 she became the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University where she is a Professor and is also a lead investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Prior to this she was a professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney from 2017 and Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia from 2011.
Go to Profile#121
Sharon Traweek
#20889
Overall Influence
Sharon Jean Traweek is associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies and History at University of California, Los Angeles. Her book Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, which explores the social world of particle physicists, has been cited in thousands of books and articles relating to the sociology of science and translated into Chinese in 2003.
Go to Profile#122
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha
#42905
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha is a Portuguese-Brazilian anthropologist, who is known for her studies of indigenous people in Brazil. Early life and training Maria Manuela Ligeti Carneiro da Cunha was born in Cascais, Portugal on 16 July 1943. Her parents were Hungarian Jews who had left Hungary following the rise of Nazi Germany. Her family moved to São Paulo in Brazil when she was 11 years old. After completing high school, she entered the University of São Paulo to study physics but almost immediately moved to Paris, where she graduated in pure mathematics in 1967 at the Paris-Saclay Faculty of Sciences.
Go to Profile#123
Tassadit Yacine
#50824
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Tassadit Yacine-Titouh is an Algerian anthropologist specialising in Berber culture. Early life Yacine was born on 14 November 1949, in Boudjellil, in the wilaya Bejaia. Her mother was a housewife and her father an immigrant who was tortured and executed in 1956. She completed her primary, secondary and higher studies in Algeria, where she also worked before leaving for France in 1987.
Go to Profile#124
Joyce White
#15278
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Joyce C. White is an American archaeologist, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and executive director of the new Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology. Her research primarily concerns decades-long multidisciplinary archaeological investigations in Thailand and Laos covering the prehistoric human occupation of the middle reaches of the Mekong River Basin. She is considered the world's leading expert on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ban Chiang, Thailand, and directs an archaeological fieldwork program in the Luang Prabang Province of Laos. She has be...
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Marcia C. Inhorn
#58170
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University. She earned her MPH and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a recognized expert in gender, fertility, and women’s health. Her research into the social impacts of infertility in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon made her the first anthropologist to conduct such a study in the Middle East. She found the stigmatization of infertility for Egyptian women and the social pressures faced by childless women. S...
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Ann Chowning
#50493
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Martha Ann Chowning was an anthropologist, ethnographer, archaeologist and linguist known for her work on the peoples, languages, cultures and histories of Oceania. Biography Born and raised in Arkansas, Chowning studied Spanish at Bryn Mawr College and anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia, before beginning her PhD in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952. There she was taught by Ward Goodenough, who engaged her in a project on the Lakalai people of Papua New Guinea. After finishing her PhD in 1957, Chowning subsequently revisited the Lakalai many times between the 1960s...
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Johnnetta Cole
#20665
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art. Cole served as the national chair and 7th president for the National Council of Negro Women from 2018 to 2022.
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Hranush Kharatyan
#52160
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Hranush Kharatyan is an Armenian ethnographer. She also specialises in Caucasus studies, minority groups and Armenian studies. She has been a member of the Pre-Parliament civil initiative since November 2012.
Go to Profile#129
Dean Falk
#19732
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Dean Falk is an American academic neuroanthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates. She is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University.
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Jane C. Goodale
#57942
Overall Influence
1926 - 2008 (82 years)
Jane Carter Goodale was an American anthropologist, author, photographer, and professor who worked to bring attention to the roles of women in Oceania and Australia through her extensive research in the field of ethnography. Having written and co-written numerous books and articles, the most notable being Tiwi Wives , To Sing with Pigs Is Human , The Two-Party Line , Goodale's achievements and contributions to her field continue to have major importance in the sociological role of women as well as in continuing the field of ethnography today. Goodale received her BA and MA from Radcliffe College and later her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#131
Carol J. Greenhouse
#55000
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carol J. Greenhouse is an American anthropologist. She is currently professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, where she previously served as Arthur W. Marks Professor of Anthropology and Chair. She is also the former president of the American Ethnological Society, former editor of its peer-review journal, American Ethnologist, and former president of the Law and Society Association.
Go to Profile#132
Melissa Leach
#29031
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Melissa Leach, is a British geographer and social anthropologist. She studies sustainability and development concerns in policy-making and has a focus on the politics of science and technology of Africa. As of 2017 she was the Director of the Institute of Development Studies located on the University of Sussex campus.
Go to Profile#133
Jane I. Guyer
#36963
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jane I. Guyer is the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Biography Before coming to Hopkins, Guyer taught at Northwestern University, Harvard University, and Boston University. She has published extensively on economic development in West Africa, on the productive economy, the division of labor, and the management of money. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and serves on several international and national committees, including the International Advisory Group to the World Bank and the governments of Chad and...
Go to Profile#134
Sheila Kitzinger
#19995
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Sheila Helena Elizabeth Kitzinger MBE was a British natural childbirth activist and author on childbirth and pregnancy. She wrote more than 20 books and had a worldwide reputation as a passionate and committed advocate for change.
Go to Profile#135
Sandra Morgen
#54350
Overall Influence
1950 - 2016 (66 years)
Sandra Lynn Morgen was an American feminist anthropologist. At the end of her career, she was a professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon, and previously served as vice provost for graduate studies and associate dean of the Graduate School, and director of the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society.
Go to Profile#136
Carol R. Ember
#41573
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Carol R. Ember is an American cultural anthropologist, cross-cultural researcher and a writer of books on anthropology. She is now the President of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University.
Go to Profile#137
Kirsten Hastrup
#57328
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kirsten Blinkenberg Hastrup is a Danish anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has taken a special interest in the conjunction between the history and culture of both Iceland and Greenland, publishing widely on both, while also examining the relationship between the theatre and anthropology. Hastrup was president of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters from 2008 to 2016.
Go to Profile#138
Alison Richard
#6133
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Dame Alison Fettes Richard, is an English anthropologist, conservationist and university administrator. She was the 344th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the third Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge since the post became full-time, and the second woman. Before arriving at Cambridge, she served as the provost of Yale University from 1994 to 2002.
Go to Profile#139
Leith Mullings
#51709
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
Go to Profile#140
Marta Mirazón Lahr
#46202
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr is a palaeoanthropologist and Director of the Duckworth Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Academic career Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mirazon Lahr graduated in Biology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She later earned a Masters and PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, following which she was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Clare College. She was then an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology of University of São Paulo , before returning to Cambridge in 1999 as a lecturer in Biological Anthropology and Fellow of Clare College.
Go to Profile#141
Fatimah Jackson
#44133
Overall Influence
Fatimah Linda Collier Jackson is an American biologist and anthropologist. She is a professor of biology at Howard University and Director of its Cobb Research Laboratory. Early life, family and education Jackson was raised in Denver, Colorado. Her mother was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fatimah's father was a mechanic who died when she was six years old. One of her great-grandmothers was descended from Choctaw people and was an herbalist. She attended elementary school, junior high school, and high school which were predominantly African-American.
Go to Profile#142
Zainab Bahrani
#36731
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Zainab Bahrani is an Iraqi Assyriologist and professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. Career A native of Baghdad, Iraq, she was educated in Europe and the United States. She received her Master of Arts and doctoral degrees in art history and archeology from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#143
Faye Ginsburg
#33777
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Faye Ginsburg is an American anthropologist who has devoted her life to the exploration of different cultures and individuals’ styles of life. Ginsburg has published ethnographies about her fieldwork experiences in the U.S., Canada and Australia. The intercultural connections in her ethnographies have contributed to the fields of anthropology and sociology because they allow readers to understand other cultures through her narratives. Currently, she is an anthropology professor at New York University and the director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU.
Go to Profile#144
Margherita Guarducci
#26430
Overall Influence
1902 - 1999 (97 years)
Margherita Guarducci, also spelled Guarduci, was an Italian archaeologist, classical scholar, and epigrapher. She was a major figure in several crucial moments of the 20th-century academic community. A student of Federico Halbherr, she edited his works after his death. She was the first woman to lead archaeological excavations at the Vatican, succeeding Ludwig Kaas, and completed the excavations on Saint Peter's tomb, identifying finds as relics of Saint Peter. She has also engaged in discussions on the authenticity of the Praeneste fibula, arguing that its inscription is a forgery.
Go to Profile#145
Serena Nanda
#29374
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Serena Nanda is an American author, anthropologist, and professor emeritus. She received the Ruth Benedict Prize in 1990 for her monograph, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Biography Serena Nanda was born on August 13, 1938, in New York City and received her PhD in anthropology from New York University. She is the co-author of two anthropology textbooks: Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology . Among her areas of specialty was the topic of gender diversity, having written the major reference book on the hijras of India. As of Augu...
Go to Profile#146
Joan Gero
#55929
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Joan Margaret Gero was an American archaeologist and pioneer of feminist archaeology. Her research focused on gender and power issues in prehistory, particularly in the Andean regions of Argentina and Peru.
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Rey Chow
#12328
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Rey Chow is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Go to Profile#148
Kathryn Woolard
#63733
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kathryn Ann Woolard is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in linguistic anthropology and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#149
Ruth Mace
#44193
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ruth Mace FBA is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.
Go to Profile#150
Lesley Gill
#38225
Overall Influence
1922 - Present (102 years)
Lesley Gill is an author and a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. Her research focusses on political violence, gender, free market reforms and human rights in Latin America, especially Bolivia. She also writes about the military training that takes place at the School of the Americas and has campaigned for its closure. She has campaigned with Witness for Peace.
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