Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Anthropology,

#151

Karin Barber

#36527

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dame Karin Judith Barber, is a British cultural anthropologist and academic, who specialises in the Yoruba-speaking area of Nigeria. From 1999 to 2017, she was Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Before joining the Centre of West African Studies of the University of Birmingham, she was a lecturer at the University of Ife in Nigeria. Since 2018, she has been Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

#152

Leslie C. Aiello

#56409

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Leslie Crum Aiello is an American paleoanthropologist and professor emeritus of University College London. She was the president of Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren donated Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research from 2005 to 2017. In 2014, Aiello was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She is currently president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

#153

Nadia Abu El Haj

Nadia Abu El Haj

#24595

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American anthropologist at Barnard College and Columbia University. The author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology , Abu El-Haj was the subject of dueling online petitions arguing whether she should be tenured during the 2006–07 academic year when she was recommended for tenure. Abu El-Haj received tenure in November 2007.

#154

Maxine Margolis

#59503

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Maxine L. Margolis is an American anthropologist and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and has been with the university since 1970. Margolis holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. Margolis received the BRASA Lifetime Contribution Award in 2014.

#155

Sara Ahmed

#4780

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory.

#156

Rhoda Métraux

#63807

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Rhoda Bubendy Métraux was a prominent anthropologist in the area of cross-cultural studies. She collaborated with Alfred Métraux on mutual studies of Haitian voodoo. She also studied the Iatmul people of the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea and made three fieldwork trips to Tambunum village of 6-7 months each in 1967-1968, 1971, and 1972-1973 that focused on music. During one of her studies, Métraux administered the Lowenfeld Mosaic Test in Tambunum, developed by a Margaret Lowenfeld. Additionally, Métraux did fieldwork in Mexico, Argentina, and Montserrat in the West Indies and enrolled at Yale University to study for her doctorate under the tutelage of Bronisław Malinowski.

#157

Nancy Oestreich Lurie

#48599

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Nancy Oestreich Lurie was an American anthropologist who specialized in the study of North American Indian history and culture. Lurie's research specialties were ethnohistory, action anthropology and museology; her areal focus was on North American Indians, especially the Ho-Chunk and the Dogrib of the Canadian NWT; and the comparative study of territorial minorities.

#158

Marilyn Ivy

#58685

Overall Influence

Marilyn Ivy is an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia University. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University, an M.A. in history from the University of Hawaiʻi, and a B.A. in Asian studies from the University of Oklahoma. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Ivy taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington.

#159

Kath Weston

#72730

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Kath Weston is an American anthropologist, author and academic. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has twice received the Ruth Benedict Prize for anthropological works. Biography Kath Weston was born in Illinois on 2 November 1958. She studied at the University of Chicago and at Stanford University .

#160

Sarah Franklin

#32927

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sarah Franklin is an American anthropologist who has substantially contributed to the fields of feminism, gender studies, cultural studies and the social study of reproductive and genetic technology. She has conducted fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research. Her work combines both ethnographic methods and kinship theory, with more recent approaches from science studies, gender studies and cultural studies. In 2001 she was appointed to a Personal Chair in the Anthropology of Science, the first of its kind in the UK, and a field she has helped to create. She became Professo...

#161

Nancy Dupree

#13341

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Nancy Hatch Dupree was an American historian whose work primarily focused on the history of modern Afghanistan. She was the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University and author of five books that she compiled while studying the history of Afghanistan from 1962 until the late 1970s, writing about tourism and history of Bamyan, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and so on. She was fondly called the "grandmother of Afghanistan", having spent more of her life there or with Afghans abroad.

#162

Pranė Dundulienė

#44444

Overall Influence

1910 - 1991 (81 years)

Pranė Dundulienė , was a Lithuanian ethnographer. Academic career In 1935-1938 she studied ethnology at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. In 1938-1940 she was an active member of the Lithuanian Science Society. In 1941 she was a researcher in the Institute of Ethnology of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, in 1942-1943 - in the Ethnographic Museum of the Vilnius University, in 1944-1950 - in the Institute of History of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. She was one of the organizers of the Department of Ethnography in Vilnius University in 1951 where she spent all her future scientific and educational activity.

#163

Carol Delaney

#68448

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Carol Lowery Delaney is an American anthropologist and author. Delaney earned an A.B. in philosophy from Boston University in 1962, an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School in 1976, and her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1984.

#164

Marimba Ani

#17038

Overall Influence

1994 - Present (30 years)

Marimba Ani is an anthropologist and African Studies scholar best known for her work Yurugu, a comprehensive critique of European thought and culture, and her coining of the term "Maafa" for the African holocaust.

#165

Marina Butovskaya

#50925

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Marina Butovskaya is a Russian ethologist and cultural anthropologist. Life She was born in the Soviet Union in the city of Cherkassy , she earned a Master of Arts degree from Moscow State University in 1982. She was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1986, and a Doctor of Science degree by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1994.

#166

Muhibbe Darga

#54131

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Muhibbe Darga was a Turkish archaeologist. She was the granddaughter of Darugazade Mehmet Emin Bey, Sultan Abdülhamid's first chamberlain, the poet and translator of Jules Verne’s novels from French into Turkish.

#167

Madawi al-Rasheed

Madawi al-Rasheed

#24533

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Madawi al-Rasheed, is a British citizen of Saudi origin and a professor of social anthropology. Al-Rasheed has held a position at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in King's College London and as a Visiting Professor at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She gives occasional lectures in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. She is the granddaughter of Muhammad bin Talāl al-Rashid, the last prince of the Emirate of Ha'il, which was conquered by the Al-Saud in the early 20th century. She has written several books and articl...

#168

Erin Kimmerle

#46774

Overall Influence

Erin H. Kimmerle is an American forensic anthropologist, artist, and executive director of the Institute of Forensic Anthropology & Applied Science at the University of South Florida. She was awarded the 2020 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

#169

Mariko Hasegawa

#54782

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mariko Hiraiwa Hasegawa is a zoologist and anthropologist who studies behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and physical anthropology. Hasegawa is president of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. She is "among the rare Japanese women primatologists to have gained international recognition."

#170

Smadar Lavie

#35053

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and spent nine years as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The P...

#171

Ulla Vuorela

#43971

Overall Influence

1945 - 2011 (66 years)

Ulla Vuorela was a Finnish professor of social anthropology. Early years and education Ulla Vuorela was born on 30 August 1945 in Helsinki. She graduated from the University of Helsinki with a major in Finno-Ugric ethnology. At the same time as studying folklore, Vuorela studied at the Sibelius Academy to become a teacher. During her studies, she taught piano at the Helsinki Conservatory between 1973 and 1976.

#172

Ifi Amadiume

#27009

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ifi Amadiume is a Nigerian poet, anthropologist and essayist. She joined the Religion Department of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, US, in 1993. Biography Born in Kaduna to Igbo parents, Ife Amadiume was educated in Nigeria before moving to Britain in 1971. She studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, gaining a BA and PhD in social anthropology respectively. She was a research fellow for a year at the University of Nigeria, Enugu, and taught and lectured in the UK, Canada, US and Senegal. Her fieldwork in Africa resulted in two ethnographic monographs ...

#173

Marina Elliott

#85191

Overall Influence

Marina Elliott is a Canadian biological anthropologist, who is known for being one of the six Underground Astronauts of the Rising Star Expedition. Eliott has a Master's degree and PhD in biological anthropology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Elliott has participated in excavations at Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, and at the northernmost archaeological site in the USA: Nuvuk on Point Barrow, Alaska.

#174

Marie-Claire Foblets

#55054

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Marie-Claire, Baroness Foblets is a Belgian lawyer and anthropologist, who is currently Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her research interests are interculturalism, migration and minorities.

#175

Caroline Moser

#21839

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Caroline Olivia Nonesi Moser is an academic specializing in social policy and urban social anthropology. She is primarily known for her field-based approach to research on the informal sector generally - but particularly aspects such as poverty, violence, asset vulnerability and strategies for accumulation in the urban setting. Gender analysis is central to her approach. She has looked at many countries, but the Americas have been her main interest. Countries studied closely include Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Jamaica.

#176

Virginia Abernethy

#19655

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Virginia Deane Abernethy is an American anthropologist and activist. She is professor emerita of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She has published research on population demography and immigration. She ran for Vice President of the United States in 2012 alongside Merlin Miller for the American Third Position, a party that promotes white nationalism.

#177

Erika Bourguignon

#49661

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

Erika Eichhorn Bourguignon was an Austrian-born American anthropologist known primarily for her work on possession trance and other altered states of consciousness. She was “considered the premier anthropological authority on trance, possession, and altered states of consciousness” and "one of the founders of the field of anthropology of consciousness." She was born in Vienna, Austria, but left with her parents in 1938. After receiving a B.A. from Queens College in 1945, she began graduate studies at Northwestern University, working there under Melville J. Herskovits and Alfred Irving Hallowell.

#178

Sylvia M. Broadbent

#53501

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Sylvia Marguerite Broadbent was an American anthropologist and professor, specializing in Amerindian peoples. Early life Broadbent was born in London. She emigrated with her family in the wake of World War II to Carmel, California, in 1947. Broadbent graduated from Carmel High School in 1948 at the age of 16. Broadbent enrolled at University of California, Berkeley, where she was awarded the Horatio Stebbins scholarship as a junior and earned her Associate of Arts degree in anthropology in 1951. She went on to win a Genevieve McEnerny fellowship and receive her bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1952.

#179

Alisse Waterston

#59103

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Alisse Waterston is an American professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her work focuses on how systemic violence and inequality influence society.

#180

Felicitas Goodman

Felicitas Goodman

#30348

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

Felicitas D. Goodman was an American linguist and anthropologist. She was a highly regarded expert in linguistics and anthropology and researched and explored Ecstatic Trance Postures for many years. She studied the phenomenon of "speaking in tongues" in Pentecostal congregations in Mexico. She is the author of such well-received books as Speaking in Tongues and Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Her work has been published mostly in the United States and Germany.

#181

Katharine Luomala

#44633

Overall Influence

1907 - 1992 (85 years)

Katharine Luomala was an American anthropologist known for her studies of comparative mythology in Oceania. Born in Cloquet, Minnesota and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Luomala began her anthropological studies there by working with the Navajo people in the 1930s, chronicling their changing lives. She earned her AB in 1931, MA in 1933, and PhD in 1936.

#182

Beverly J. Stoeltje

#75272

Overall Influence

Beverly J. Stoeltje is a professor in both the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University . She also serves as Affiliated Faculty in African Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and at the Russian-East European Institute.

#183

Louise Burkhart

#66918

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Louise M. Burkhart is an American academic ethnohistorian and anthropologist, noted as a scholar of early colonial Mesoamerican literature. In particular, her published research has a focus on aspects of the religious beliefs and practices of Nahuatl-speakers in central Mexico. Her work examines the historical documentation from the time of the Spanish Conquest and the subsequent era of colonial Mexico, and studies the continuities and transformations of indigenous Nahua communities and culture. Burkhart has written extensively on colonial Nahuatl drama, folklore, poetry and catechistic texts...

#184

Marjorie Harness Goodwin

#32891

Overall Influence

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is an American anthropologist, currently Distinguished Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and also a published author of books. Education She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her honorary PhD from Uppsala University.

#185

Zoe Todd

#23306

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Zoe Todd is a Métis anthropologist and scholar of Indigenous studies, human-animal studies, science and technology studies and the Anthropocene. She is an associate professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University and a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University during the 2018–19 academic year.

#186

Patricia Zavella

#63167

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. T...

#187

Cathrine Hasse

#40286

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Cathrine Hasse is a professor of cultural anthropology and learning at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Her research lies in the intersection between culture, learning and technology. Education In 1994, Hasse graduated from anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Here, she was appointed a Ph.D.-scholarship in 1996.

#188

Barbara J. King

#37657

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Barbara J. King is professor emerita, retired from the Department of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary where she taught from 1988 to 2015, and was chair of the department of Anthropology.

#189

Diana Taylor

#22059

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Diana Taylor is an American academic. She is a professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University' s Tisch School of the Arts and the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She is also the president of the Modern Language Association in 2017–2018. Her work focuses on Latin American and U.S. theatre and performance, performance and politics, feminist theatre and performance in the Americas, Hemispheric studies, and trauma studies. She is married to Eric Manheimer, former New York Bellevue Hospital medical director and current producer of...

#190

Khiara Bridges

#40108

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Khiara M. Bridges is an American law professor and anthropologist specializing in the intersectionality of race, reproductive justice, and law. She is best known for her book, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, in which she argues that race and class largely affect the prenatal, childbirth, and postnatal experiences of women.

#191

Vera Tiesler

#82402

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Vera Tiesler is a bioarchaeologist, and a full research professor in the department of Anthroprological Sciences at the Autonomous University of Yucatán in Mexico. She is a specialist in Maya civilization remains.

#192

Hannah Marie Wormington

#74426

Overall Influence

1914 - 1994 (80 years)

Hannah Marie Wormington was an American archaeologist known for her writings and fieldwork on southwestern and Paleo-Indians archaeology over a long career that lasted almost sixty years. Background Marie Wormington was born in Denver, Colorado, to Charles Watkin Wormington and Adrienne Roucolle. As a young child Wormington spent much of her time with her mother and her maternal grandmother who had come to the United States from France. Being fluent in both English and French proved to be a useful asset the summer she went to France to start her archaeology career. Wormington was the first woman to focus on anthropology at Radcliffe.

#193

Joyce Marcus

#40931

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Joyce Marcus is a Latin American archaeologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds the position of Curator of Latin American Archaeology, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Marcus has published extensively in the field of Latin American archaeological research. Her focus has been primarily on the Zapotec, Maya, and coastal Andean civilizations of Central and South America. Much of her fieldwork has been concentrated in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. She i...

#194

Martha Kaplan

#72745

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Martha Kaplan is a cultural anthropologist who has written a number of articles and books from her research conducted in Fiji, India, and Singapore. Dr. Kaplan is currently a professor of anthropology at Vassar College in New York.

#195

Gayatri Reddy

#25822

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Gayatri Reddy is an Indian anthropologist who has also made contributions to queer and gender studies. Reddy received her PhD in Anthropology in 2000 from Emory University after M.A in Anthropology from Columbia University and B.A. in Psychology from Delhi University. She is currently an associate professor in Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Reddy has carried out fieldwork on a community of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh in India. Her current research is on male queer identity among South Asian immigrants to the US.

#196

Montgomery McFate

Montgomery McFate

#58187

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Areas of Specialization: Cultural Anthropology, Military Anthropology Montgomery McFate is the Minerva Chair of Strategic Research at the U.S. Naval War College. She earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, a Ph.D. from Yale University, and a JD from Harvard Law School. After September 11, 2001, she determined that her mission in life was to try to infuse military decision making with the necessary background anthropological and cultural knowledge needed to make appropriate decisions. Over the course of her career, she has worked as a defense consultant for the Office of Naval Research, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Rand Corporation.

#197

Yolanda T. Moses

#42828

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Yolanda Theresa Moses is an anthropologist and college administrator who served as the 10th president of City College of New York and president of the American Association for Higher Education . Early life Moses was born to a family originating from northern Louisiana that relocated to Washington during the Second World War to work in wartime industries. After the war, Moses and her family moved to southern California. Moses received her associate degree in 1966, and bachelor's degree in sociology in 1968, both from San Bernardino Valley College. Inspired by a meeting with Margaret Mead, Mos...

#198

Keewaydinoquay Peschel

#43589

Overall Influence

1919 - 1999 (80 years)

Keewaydinoquay Pakawakuk Peschel was a scholar, ethnobotanist, herbalist, medicine woman, teacher and author. She was an Anishinaabeg Elder of the Crane Clan. She was born in Michigan around 1919 and spent time on Garden Island, a traditional Anishinaabeg homeland.

#199

Olivia Harris

#36948

Overall Influence

1948 - 2009 (61 years)

Olivia Jane Harris was a British social anthropologist whose work focused on the study of the Bolivian highlands. Her writing includes analyses of fertility, gender, money, conceptions of work and of time, the relation between law and custom, as well as the Inca and Spanish colonisation of current-day Bolivia.

#200

Heidi Larson

#43244

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Heidi J. Larson, Lady Piot is an American anthropologist and the founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Larson headed Global Immunisation Communication at UNICEF and she is the author of Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don't Go Away. She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2021.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions