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,
#1001
Suzanne Frey-Kupper
#179642
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Suzanne Frey-Kupper is a classical archaeologist and numismatist from Switzerland, who is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. She specialises in the study of Greek, Roman and Punic coinage, in particular examining their role in historical processes and as social agents.
Go to Profile#1002
Paola Pruneti
#177754
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Paola Pruneti , Italian papyrologist and palaeographer. Pruneti worked at the University of Florence. She is a member of the Editor Committee of Analecta Papyrologica, a journal edited by the Department of Philology and Linguistic of the University of Messina.
Go to Profile#1003
Anne Rasmussen
#120117
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Anne K. Rasmussen is an American educator and ethnomusicologist. Much of her research focuses on Arab music in the US and Islamic ritual and performance. She has been the director of the William & Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble since 1994. Rasmussen was named the William M. and Annie B. Bickers Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in 2014.
Go to Profile#1004
Consuelo Mata Parreño
#187908
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Consuelo Mata Parreño is a Spanish Teacher who specialises in Iberian material culture. She is currently the head teacher of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Valencia. Notable work Mata, along with Helena Bonet Rosado and Joan Bernabeu Auban, published early work on the organisation of Iberian polities in the Valencian Community, arguing for hierarchical relationships between oppida in region.
Go to Profile#1005
Céline Bon
#192243
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
#1006
Zeynep Ahunbay
#83302
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Zeynep Ahunbay is a leading Turkish scholar of antiquities. Biography Dr. Ahunbay was born in Ünye, Ordu Province, a small town in the Black Sea region of Turkey. She received her PhD in architectural history in 1976 from Istanbul Technical University, where in 1988 she became a professor of Architectural History and Preservation.
Go to Profile#1007
Froma Zeitlin
#41198
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Froma I. Zeitlin is an American Classics scholar. She specializes in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in epic, drama and prose fiction, along with work in gender criticism, and the relationship between art and text in the context of the visual culture of antiquity. Zeitlin's work on establishing new approaches to Greek tragedy has been considered particularly influential.
Go to Profile#1008
Inés Talamantez
#110119
Overall Influence
Inés M. Talamantez was an ethnographer and scholar of religion. She was professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara . She was an expert on Native American religion and philosophy.
Go to Profile#1009
Friederike Fless
#79792
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Friederike Fless is a German classical scholar and archaeologist. In 2003, she was appointed professor of classical archaeology at the Free University of Berlin. In March 2011, she became the first woman to be appointed president of the German Archaeological Institute where she is responsible for up to 300 digs and other projects per year. For her outstanding contribution to science and science management, in November 2014 she received an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#1010
Gertrud Pätsch
#69568
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Gertrud Pätsch was a German ethnologist and philologist, who rendered service in the area of Kartvelian studies. In 1937 she graduated in Munster with a degree in the Old Georgian language. After the Second World War she left the western sector of Germany for East Berlin, where she earned a habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin in Indonesian linguistics. She taught in Berlin until she moved to the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 1960, where she founded the Kartvelologian faculty. After her retirement she worked for two years at the Tbilisi State University in Georgia. She published books and many articles in journals, such as Bedi Kartlisa.
Go to Profile#1011
Antonia Syson
#136696
Overall Influence
1973 - 2018 (45 years)
Antonia Jane Reobone Syson was a British-American classical scholar specialising in the study of Virgil's Aeneid. Early life Antonia was born in Botswana whilst her father, John, was private secretary to the president, Sir Seretse Khama and her mother, Lucy, was undertaking research on rural development for the United Nations. The Sysons returned to the UK in 1973 where Antonia attended Hungerford primary school and Camden School for Girls. In 1991 Antonia went to Magdalen College, Oxford to study Classics under Oliver Taplin before, in 1995, taking her PhD in Classics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1012
Victoria Whitworth
#136079
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Victoria Whitworth is a British writer, archaeologist and art historian. Her published writings, which focus on Britain in the later first millennium AD, include novels, academic works and a memoir.
Go to Profile#1013
Sunhild Kleingärtner
#172985
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Sunhild Kleingärtner is a German historian and archaeologist, specialising in maritime history and maritime archaeology. Career Kleingärtner was born in Wolfsburg, and began her studies at the University of Kiel in 1994. Her research focused on prehistoric archaeology, classical archaeology and art history. In 2000 she gained a Master of Arts degree, and thereafter worked as a research assistant at the Kiel Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology , where she took over the management of terrestrial and subaquatic excavations. In 2004 Kleingärtner gained her PhD from the University of Kiel, with a study of the archaeological finds at Hedeby harbour .
Go to Profile#1014
Gertrude Eyifa-Dzidzienyo
#188609
Overall Influence
Gertrude Eyifa-Dzidzienyo is the first Ghanaian woman to hold a PhD in archaeology. She currently lectures at department of archaeology and heritage studies at University of Ghana. Her research interest are centered on the interrelationship between archaeological findings and gender subjects, particularly women in Ghana. In 2017, she completed her PhD thesis on Archaeology and Heritage Management Practices in Ghana: Assessment of Tengzug Heritage Preservation and Development.
Go to Profile#1015
Alicia Daneri
#68623
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alicia Daneri Rodrigo is an Argentine Egyptologist who earned a doctorate at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Daneri graduated in History at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. She completed a Master's Degree in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and later a Doctorate at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She was Professor of Ancient Near East history at the Universidad de la Plata and Buenos Aires. She has been a researcher at CONICET, deputy director of the Egyptology Studies Program and director of the Department of Egyptology at the Instituto Multidisciplinario de Historia y Ciencias Humanas .
Go to Profile#1016
Ailsa Mainman
#152991
Overall Influence
Ailsa Jean Mainman is a British archaeologist and pottery specialist. Career Mainman completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield and is now a research associate at the University of York. She is a former assistant director of York Archaeological Trust.
Go to Profile#1017
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
#119356
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku is a New Zealand academic specialising in Māori cultural issues and a lesbian activist. In 1972, she was famously denied a visa to visit the United States on the basis of her sexuality.
Go to Profile#1018
Maria Ludwika Bernhard
#26329
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Maria Ludwika Bernhard was a Polish classical archaeologist and a specialist in Greek Art. During the German Occupation of Poland in World War II, Bernhard was living in Warsaw and was active in the Polish Resistance Movement. After the war, Bernhard was a Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. In 1957 she became the chair of the Department of Classical Archaeology at Jagiellonian University. She was also curator of the Ancient Art gallery at the National Museum in Warsaw from 1945 to 1962.
Go to Profile#1019
Edda Bresciani
#50898
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Edda Bresciani was an Italian Egyptologist. Life Bresciani was born in Lucca, and graduated in 1955 from the University of Pisa. She excavated at several places in Egypt and is mainly known for her work at several sites in the Faiyum, most notably the temple of Medinet Maadi. She also found and excavated a Middle Kingdom cemetery at Khelua.
Go to Profile#1020
Margaret C. Miller
#182053
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Margaret Christina Miller is an archaeologist and the Arthur and Renee George Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Career Miller holds a BA from the University of British Columbia, a MA from Oxford University and an AM from Harvard University. Her 1985 PhD, also from Harvard, was titled "Perserie : the arts of the East in fifth-century Athens". She then continued her studies in the Classics at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Go to Profile#1021
Vivian Wade-Gery
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Vivian Wade-Gery was a British classical archaeologist. Career Whitfield studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Somerville College, Oxford, where she obtained a BA degree in 1924. She was subsequently appointed lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading, and in 1924 to 1925 she received a Gilchrist studentship to study at the British School at Athens to study Greek topgraphy. She spent the period 1927 to 1928 again at the British school at Athens, on leave from Reading and supported by the Bryce studentship, Lady Margaret Hall and the Ireland Trustees, this time studying Spart...
Go to Profile#1022
Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin was an award-winning anthropologist, folklorist, and ethnohistorian. Her research and directorship of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Research Project at Indiana University has been used to backup Native Americans during court cases with the US government over treaty claims.
Go to Profile#1023
Veronica Strang
Veronica Strang is an author and professor of anthropology affiliated to Oxford University. Her work combines cultural anthropology with environmental studies, and focuses on the relationship between human communities and their environments. Strang's publications include the books 'The Meaning of Water' ; Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water' ; 'What Anthropologists Do' , 'Water Nature and Culture' and most recently 'Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis' , which is based on a major comparative study of water deities around the world. Furth...
Go to Profile#1024
Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
Go to Profile#1025
Barbara Myerhoff
1935 - 1985 (50 years)
Barbara Myerhoff was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Throughout her career as an anthropologist, Barbara Myerhoff contributed to major methodological trends which have since become standards of social cultural anthropology. These methods include reflexivity, narrative story telling, and anthropologists' positioning as social activists, commentaries, and critics whose work extends beyond the academy.
Go to Profile#1026
Dorothea Leighton
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Dorothea Cross Leighton was an American social psychiatrist and a founder of the field of medical anthropology. Leighton held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina and she was the founding president of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She and her husband, Alexander Leighton, wrote The Navajo Door, which has been described as the first written work in applied medical anthropology.
Go to Profile#1027
Hortense Powdermaker
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Hortense Powdermaker was an American anthropologist best known for her ethnographic studies of African Americans in rural America and of Hollywood. Early life and education Born to a Jewish family, Powdermaker spent her childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, and in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied history and the humanities at Goucher College, graduating in 1921. She worked as a labor organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers but became dissatisfied with the prospects of the U.S. labor movement amid the repression of the Palmer Raids. She left the United States to study at the London Schoo...
Go to Profile#1028
Hilma Granqvist
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Hilma Natalia Granqvist was a Swedish-speaking Finnish anthropologist who conducted long field studies of Palestinians. She was a student of Edvard Westermarck. Studies In the 1920s Granqvist arrived at the village of Artas, just outside Bethlehem in the then British Mandate of Palestine as part of her research on the women of the Old Testament. She had gone to Palestine "in order to find the Jewish ancestors of Scripture". What she found instead was a Palestinian people with a distinct culture and way of life. She therefore changed the focus of her research to a full investigation of the customs, habits and ways of thinking of the people of that village.
Go to Profile#1029
Michelle Rosaldo
1944 - 1981 (37 years)
Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist Rosaldo was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot people in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.
Go to Profile#1030
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#1031
Olwen Brogan
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Lady Olwen Phillis Frances Brogan was a British archaeologist and expert on Roman Libya. She attended University College London and later taught there. She was the author of two monographs, over thirty articles and was a regular reviewer for Antiquaries Journal, Antiquity and Journal of Roman Studies.
Go to Profile#1032
Erna Gunther
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Erna Gunther was an American anthropologist who taught for many years at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gunther's work on ethnobotany is still extensively consulted today. Biography Gunther graduated from Barnard College in 1919, as a student of Franz Boas, and received her MA in anthropology from Columbia University in 1920, studying under Boas. After graduating, she moved with her husband, Leslie Spier, to the University of Washington in 1921. After leaving for a short period of time with her husband, she returned in 1929. When her husband left in 1930, she stayed at the universi...
Go to Profile#1033
Alison Hingston Quiggin
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Alison Hingston Quiggin was a British anthropologist at the University of Cambridge and the author of the much reprinted A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency . Education and career Hingston studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1899 to 1902. She went on to become a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#1034
Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Katharine Elizabeth Dopp was one of the foremost American educators at the turn of the 20th century, and one of the first to advocate the involvement of business in education. She wrote a series of textbooks on anthropology and economics which were widely used in the public schools of Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, as well as nationally circulated studies on the same subjects, and children's books.
Go to Profile#1035
Dorothy Keur
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Dorothy L. Keur was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in Navajo and Netherlands cultures. She was a professor at Hunter College and was the president of the American Ethnological Society from 1974 to 1979.
Go to Profile#1036
Winifred Needler
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Winifred Needler DCL was a German-born Canadian Egyptologist at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, where she rose to be keeper of the Near Eastern Collections and later curator of the Egyptian Department. She also taught at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#1037
Vera Mae Green
1928 - 1982 (54 years)
Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to...
Go to Profile#1038
Harriet Boyd Hawes
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes was a pioneering American archaeologist, nurse, relief worker, and professor. She is best known as the discoverer and first director of Gournia, one of the first archaeological excavations to uncover a Minoan settlement and palace on the Aegean island of Crete. She was also the second person to have the honor of the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship bestowed upon her, and the very first female archeologist to speak at the Archaeological Institute of America.
Go to Profile#1039
Alice Braunlich
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Alice Freda Braunlich was an American classical philologist. Life Braunlich was born to parents of German extraction, Emilie Hedwig Hoering Braunlich and the physician Henry Uchtorf Braunlich, in Davenport, Iowa on February 1, 1888. Her father's income made it possible for Alice to study at the University of Chicago, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in 1908 and a master's degree in 1909. From 1912 to 1914 she worked as an assistant for William Gardner Hale, professor of Latin. In 1913 she received her Ph.D., with a dissertation on indirect questions in the indicative mood.
Go to Profile#1040
Mary Belle McElwain
1874 - 1964 (90 years)
Mary Belle McElwain was an American classical scholar. Biography McElwain gained her BA from Wilson College in 1895. She subsequently taught Greek, English, and maths at the college until 1903. After teaching at a finishing school at Bryn Mawr until 1908 McElwain gained a MA from Cornell University in 1909 with a thesis titled "The Life of the Empress Livia Based on Latin and Greek Sources" and her PhD in 1910 on "The use of the imperative in Plautus". In 1936 she was awarded an honorary Litt. D. from Wilson College.
Go to Profile#1041
Zora Neale Hurston
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Go to Profile#1042
Lucy Mair
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Lucy Philip Mair was a British anthropologist. She wrote on the subject of social organization, and contributed to the involvement of anthropological research in governance and politics. Her work on colonial administration was influential.
Go to Profile#1043
Elsie Clews Parsons
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore , president of the American Folklore Society , president of the American Ethnological Society , and was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association right before her death.
Go to Profile#1044
Dorothy D. Lee
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Dorothy Demetracopolou Lee was an American anthropologist, author and philosopher of cultural anthropology. Born in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, she was Greek by birth and was educated, married, and raised her four children in the U.S. Her husband was American philosopher Otis Hamilton Lee . Her children were Anna Maud Lee, Mary H. Lee, Ronald and Sabra.
Go to Profile#1045
Annie Smith Peck
1850 - 1935 (85 years)
Annie Smith Peck was an American mountaineer and adventurer. The northern peak of the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca mountain chain, Huascarán was named Cumbre Aña Peck in Peck's honor. She was an ardent suffragist and noted speaker. She lectured extensively for many years throughout the world, and wrote four books encouraging travel and exploration.
Go to Profile#1046
Gisela Richter
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Gisela Marie Augusta Richter was a British-American classical archaeologist and art historian. She was a prominent figure and an authority in her field. Early life Gisela Richter was born in London, England, the daughter of Jean Paul and Louise Richter. Both of her parents and her sister, Irma, were art historians specialised in Italian Renaissance. Richter was educated at Maida Vale School, one of the finest schools for women at the time. She decided to become a classical archaeologist while attending Emmanuel Loewy's lectures at the University of Rome around 1896. In 1901, she began attending Girton College at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#1047
Johanna Mestorf
1828 - 1909 (81 years)
Johanna Mestorf was a German prehistoric archaeologist, the first female museum director in the Kingdom of Prussia and usually said to be the first female professor in Germany. Life and career Johanna was the youngest of four surviving children of the physician and antiquarian Jacob Heinrich Mestorf and his wife Sophia Katharina Georgine, née Körner. When he died in 1837, she moved with her mother to Itzehoe, where she attended the Blöcker Institute upper school for girls. In 1849 she went to Sweden as a governess to the family of Count Piper at Ängsö Castle, and there also studied Scandinavian languages.
Go to Profile#1048
Martha Warren Beckwith
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Martha Warren Beckwith was an American folklorist and ethnographer who was the first chair in folklore at any university or college in the U.S. Early life and education Beckwith was born in Wellesley Heights, Massachusetts to George Ely and Harriet Winslow Beckwith, both schoolteachers, before the family moved to Maui, Hawaii, where they had relatives descended from early missionaries. There, Beckwith made friends with many locals including members of the wealthy Alexander family who later sponsored her folklore work, and she developed an early interest in Hawaiian folk dancing.
Go to Profile#1049
Barbara E. Ward
1919 - 1983 (64 years)
Barbara E. Ward was a British social anthropologist and academic, who specialised in Chinese society. Life Ward was born in 1919. She studied history at Newnham College, an all-women's college of the University of Cambridge. She then attended the University of London, where she gained a diploma in education in 1942. For the next five years she taught in England and West Africa. While teaching in Ghana, she became interested in social anthropology. In 1949, she completed a master's degree from the London School of Economics having studied the Ewe speaking people of Ghana.
Go to Profile#1050
Hilda Petrie
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie , was an Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Having studied geology, she was hired by Flinders Petrie at age 25 as an artist, which led to their marriage and a working partnership that endured for their lifetimes.
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