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,

#251

Deborah M. Pearsall

#83214
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Deborah M. Pearsall is an American archaeologist who specializes in paleoethnobotany. She maintains an online phytolith database. She is a full professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, where she first began working in 1978. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979, with a dissertation titled The Application of Ethnobotanical Techniques to the Problem of Subsistence in the Ecuadorian Formative.
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#252

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

#63626
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder is an American evolutionary anthropologist. She is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Early life and education Borgerhoff Mulder was born in April 1953 in Den Haag, Holland but was raised in Beirut and Great Britain. She completed her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at the University of Edinburgh and her PhD in anthropology at Northwestern University.
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#253

Niara Sudarkasa

#89251
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Niara Sudarkasa was an American scholar, educator, Africanist and anthropologist who holds thirteen honorary degrees, and is the recipient of nearly 100 civic and professional awards. In 1989 Essence magazine named her "Educator for the '90s", and in 2001 she became the first African American to be installed as a Chief in the historic Ife Kingdom of the Yoruba of Nigeria.
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#254

Caroline Wilkinson

#63656
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Caroline M. Wilkinson is a British anthropologist and academic, who specialises in forensic facial reconstruction. She has been a professor at the Liverpool John Moores University's School of Art and Design since 2014. She is best known for her work in forensic facial reconstruction and has been a contributor to many television programmes on the subject, as well as the creator of reconstructed heads of kings Richard III of England in 2013 and Robert the Bruce of Scotland in 2016.
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#255

S. Lochlann Jain

S. Lochlann Jain
#28638
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
S. Lochlann Jain is an author and artist, in addition to being a professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University, where they teach medical and legal anthropology, and a visiting professor of social medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London.
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#256

Heather McKillop

#83394
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Heather Irene McKillop is a Canadian-American archaeologist, academic, and Maya scholar, noted in particular for her research into ancient Maya coastal trade routes, seafaring, littoral archaeology, and the long-distance exchange of commodities in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
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#257

Sally Engle Merry

#89733
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Sally Starr Engle Merry was an American anthropologist. She was the Silver Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. In the past, Merry had also been president of the American Ethnological Society, the Law and Society Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. She served as a member of the editorial board of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
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#258

Olga F. Linares

#63160
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Olga Francesca Linares was a Panamanian–American academic anthropologist and archaeologist, and senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who supported much of her research throughout her career. She is well known for her work on the cultural ecology of Panama, and more recently in the Casamance region of Southern Senegal. She is also concerned with the social organization of agrarian systems as well as the relationship between "ecology, political economy, migration and the changing dynamics of food production among rural peoples living in tropical r...
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#259

Deborah Fouts

#20825
Overall Influence
Deborah Fouts was the co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute . CHCI was the home of Washoe, the first non-human to acquire a human language, and three other chimpanzees who use the signs of American Sign Language to communicate with each other and their human caregivers. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. She is married to former co-director, now retired Roger Fouts.
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#260

Irene Silverblatt

#90120
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Irene Silverblatt is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her work revolves mainly around race and religion in Peru during the Spanish Inquisition. Silverblatt earned her PhD at the University of Michigan.
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#261

Sharlotte Neely

#72081
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Sharlotte Kathleen Neely is an American anthropologist who is known for her research on Native North Americans, especially the Cherokee Indians. As of 2017, she was Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Northern Kentucky University.
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#262

Janet D. Spector

#79719
Overall Influence
1944 - 2011 (67 years)
Janet D. Spector was an American archaeologist known for her contributions to the archaeology of gender and ethnoarchaeology. Early life Spector was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. The neighborhood she grew up in was called Nakoma and like most other things in her community was rooted in Native American culture. Although she lived on the corner of Shawnee Pass and Cherokee Drive and frequently walked with her grandfather through the Native American mounds situated in Vilas Park, the history of her surroundings was never made explicit to her. She also spent a lot of time as a young girl...
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#263

Lenore Manderson

#71628
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Lenore Hilda Manderson is an Australian medical anthropologist. She is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, at Monash University, Australia.
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#264

Larissa Adler Lomnitz

#40761
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Larissa Adler Lomnitz was a French-born Chilean-Mexican social anthropologist, researcher, professor, and academic. After living in France, Colombia, and Israel, she received Chilean nationality by marriage and Mexican nationality by residence. She conducted research and studies regarding the way in which marginalized classes survive in Latin America. She pioneered the study of social networks and the study of the importance of trust for the economy and politics. Her first study in this regard focused on the exchange of favors in the Chilean middle class. Lomnitz completed her doctoral thesis about the importance of exchanging favors and confidence in the informal economy in Mexico City.
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#265

Larissa Bonfante

#45979
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Larissa Bonfante was an Italian-American classicist, Professor of Classics emerita at New York University and an authority on Etruscan language and culture. Biography Bonfante was born in Naples, the daughter of professor Giuliano Bonfante. She grew up in Princeton, NJ. Bonfante would go on to study fine arts and classics at Barnard College, earning her B.A. in 1954; she completed her M.A. in classics from the University of Cincinnati in 1957 and her Ph.D. in art history and archaeology at Columbia University in 1966. She studied at Columbia with Otto Brendel. Bonfante received the Gold Meda...
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#266

Shannon Lee Dawdy

Shannon Lee Dawdy
#60775
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Shannon Lee Dawdy is an American anthropologist, historian, and archaeologist. She is a professor at the University of Chicago and a MacArthur Fellow. Education Dawdy holds a PhD in anthropology and history and an MA in history from the University of Michigan, an MA in anthropology from the College of William and Mary and a BA in anthropology from Reed College.
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#267

Jill Pruetz

#88826
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jill Pruetz is an American anthropologist and primatologist. She currently works in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University. Pruetz is known for her groundbreaking research on savanna-dwelling chimpanzees in Senegal and her uncanny ability to engage public audiences. Pruetz has worked with the National Geographic Society and National Science Foundation. Her research has also been shared by media icons such as the Today Show, BBC, and Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson.
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#268

Lee Ann Newsom

#49774
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Lee Ann Newsom is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University at University Park. She has written numerous books and articles. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.
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#269

Karen B. Strier

Karen B. Strier
#64318
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Karen B. Strier is a primatologist. She is a Vilas Research Professor and Irven DeVore professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and co-editor of Annual Review of Anthropology. The main subject of her research is the Northern Muriqui, a type of spider monkey found in Brazil.
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#270

M. Margaret Clark

#85293
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Mary Margaret Clark was an American medical anthropologist who is credited with founding the sub-discipline of medical anthropology. Life M. Margaret Clark was born on January 9, 1925, in Amarillo, Texas. After receiving a doctorate degree in anthropology from University of California, Berkeley, she was employed by the U.S. Public Health Service as a researcher, where she worked on public health-related projects in Colorado. She also worked as a consultant for various agencies directed towards health and aging. Dr. Clark later earned a Professor Emerita position at University of California, San Francisco where she taught medical anthropology through a joint graduate program she created.
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#271

Lauren Berlant

#7123
Overall Influence
1957 - 2021 (64 years)
Lauren Gail Berlant was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
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#272

Marie-Françoise Guédon

#62649
Overall Influence
Marie-Françoise Guédon is a Canadian anthropologist and professor of religious studies at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. She has done fieldwork among the Inuit, Gitksan, Ahtna, and Tanana peoples of Canada and Alaska.
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#273

Susan D. Gillespie

#73658
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Susan D. Gillespie is an American academic anthropologist and archaeologist, noted for her contributions to archaeological and ethnohistorical research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, in particular the Aztec, Maya and Olmec. Gillespie holds a position as professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Florida, Gainesville, USA, having also been associate chair of the department from 2003 until 2009.
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#274

Peggy Phelan

#18399
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Peggy Phelan is an American feminist scholar. She is one of the founders of Performance Studies International, the former chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies from 1993 to 1996, Stanford's Theatre and Performance Studies Department from 2007 to 2011, and continues as the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of the Arts, Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English, and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. Her research interests while at Stanford University include; American Literature, British Literature, and performance studies with a focus...
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#275

Hannah Morris

#82610
Overall Influence
Hannah Morris is an American anthropologist, known for her contribution to the Rising Star Expedition as one of the six women Underground Astronauts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia, studying "the implications of human actions on vegetative ecosystems".
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#276

Alice Stevenson

#73559
Overall Influence
Alice Stevenson is a British archaeologist and museum curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies at UCL's Institute of Archaeology and a specialist in Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian archaeology.
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#277

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
#32935
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz is a Brazilian historian and anthropologist. She is a doctor in social anthropology at the University of São Paulo, full professor at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas in the same institution, and visiting professor at Princeton University.
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#278

Maria Eugenia Bozzoli

#42884
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
María Eugenia Bozzoli is a Costa Rican anthropologist, sociologist and human rights activist. She is one of the founders of anthropology in Costa Rica, as well as the country's first woman anthropologist.
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#279

Ziba Mir-Hosseini

#32641
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Ziba Mir-Hosseini is an Iranian-born legal anthropologist, specialising in Islamic law, gender and development. She received her PhD in anthropology from Cambridge University and is the author of several books on Islam, gender, and the family.
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#280

Sonia Guillén

Sonia Guillén
#61042
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Sonia Elizabeth Guillén is a Peruvian anthropologist and the President of the Centro Mallqui, who is the current Minister of Culture of Peru. She was elected a foreign associate the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
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#281

Erdmute Alber

#53624
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Erdmute Alber is a German ethnologist with research focus in political and kinship anthropology. Since 2010 she has held the chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. Education From 1983 to 1990, Erdmute Alber studied literature, Spanish and history at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and the Freie Universität Berlin. After completing her master's degree, she worked from 1993 to 2000 as a research assistant at the Institute for Ethnology at the Freie Universität Berlin supervised by Georg Elwert. During this time she received her doctorate in 1997 on Transformations of power and rule among the Baatombu in northern Benin .
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#282

Ellen Gruenbaum

#33511
Overall Influence
2000 - 1999 (-1 years)
Ellen Gruenbaum is an American anthropologist. A specialist in researching medical practices that are based on a society's culture. Personal life Gruenbaum was born in St. Louis, Missouri, US, and received her A.B. in anthropology at Stanford University in 1974. She went on to the University of Connecticut to earn her M.A. in 1974 and her Ph.D. in 1982 in anthropology. Her doctoral thesis was "Health services, health, and development in Sudan : the impact of the Gezira irrigated scheme".
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#283

Joan Silk

#112709
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Joan B. Silk is an American primatologist, Regents Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University . Her research interests include evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and primatology. Together with her anthropologist husband, Robert T. Boyd , she wrote the textbook How Humans Evolved.
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#284

Pat Caplan

#77423
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Ann Patricia Bailey "Pat" Caplan, is a retired British anthropologist and academic. From 1989 to 2003, she was Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She was also the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies between 1998 and 2000.
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#285

Shirley Brice Heath

#29772
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Shirley Brice Heath is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Professor Emerita, Margery Bailey Professorship in English, at Stanford University. She graduated from Lynchburg College, Ball State University, and Columbia University, with a Ph.D. in 1970. She is a Brown University professor-at-large, and a visiting research professor at the Watson Institute.
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#286

JoAllyn Archambault

JoAllyn Archambault
#88527
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
JoAllyn Archambault is a cultural anthropologist with an expertise in Native American people. She is the director of the Smithsonian Institution's American Indian Program. Born to a Sioux father and Creek mother, Archambault was raised in Sioux traditions and is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota. Archambault has made a great contribution to anthropology by providing an insider's perspective to her research on Native American people.
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#287

Patricia Sutherland

#58508
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Patricia D. Sutherland is a Canadian archaeologist, specialising in the Arctic. She is an adjunct professor at Carleton University, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, and sole proprietor of Northlands Research. Much of her recent research has focused on evidence of a lengthy Norse presence on Baffin Island in the 11th to 13th centuries CE and trade between them and the now-extinct Dorset people of the region. Sutherland's theory that there were Europeans on Baffin Island hundreds of years before the Norse settled Greenland at the start of the 11th century is controvers...
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#288

Judith Lynne Hanna

#79718
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Judith Lynne Hanna is an anthropologist, scholar, and author. She is an affiliate research professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses the relationship between dance and society in African villages and places of social interaction in America, such as schools and entertainment clubs. She has also conducted research on African cities, urban studies, and at-risk youth. She is the grandmother of YouTuber Merrick Hanna
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#289

Signe Howell

#93689
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Signe Lise Howell is a Norwegian social anthropologist. Personal life Howell was born in Tinn to physician Finn Oddvar Lie and Lise Thomassen. She was married to performance artist Anthony Howell from 1970 to 1977, and to Desmond James McNeill from 1986.
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#290

Janine R. Wedel

#78548
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Janine R. Wedel is an American anthropologist and university professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a senior research fellow of the New America Foundation. She is the author of several books and many articles on some key systemic processes of the day. She is the first anthropologist to win the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
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#291

Beatriz Góis Dantas

#119426
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Beatriz Góis Dantas is a Brazilian anthropologist, folklorist, sociologist, writer, and professor emeritus of Anthropology at the Federal University of Sergipe. Bibliography Citations
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#292

Charlotte Roberts

#81237
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Charlotte Ann Roberts, FBA is a British archaeologist, academic and former nurse. She is a bioarchaeologist and palaeopathologist, whose research focuses on health and the evolution of infectious disease in humans. From 2004 to 2020, she was Professor of Archaeology at Durham University: she is now professor emeritus.
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#293

Marcia Herndon

#74816
Overall Influence
1941 - 1997 (56 years)
Marcia Alice Herndon was an American ethnomusicologist and anthropologist. She specialized in the ways culture and music reflect each other. Herndon grew up in a family of country music performers in North Carolina. After completing her master's degree in 1964 at Tulane University, she performed classical music for several years. Earning a PhD in anthropology and ethnomusicology in 1971, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. She is widely known for her contributions to Native American music studies with books s...
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#294

Carol Stack

#78742
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Carol B. Stack is an Urban American anthropologist who specialized in studies of African American networks, minority women, and youth. Stack has taken a strong role in several social sciences, and is Professor Emerita of Education in the Graduate School of Education at University of California, Berkeley.
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#295

Paulette Steeves

Paulette Steeves
#100975
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Paulette F. C. Steeves is the Canada Research Chair in Healing and Reconciliation at Algoma University. Education and career Steeves is Cree-Métis and was born in Whitehorse, Yukon. She spent her formative years in Lillooet, British Columbia, Canada. Steeves holds an BA in Anthropology degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She holds a Master in Anthropology from the State University of New York at Binghamton , Her masters thesis was titled "Archaeology, CRM, Academia, and Ethics, and, Akimel O'odham, Type 2 Diabetes: Links to Traditional Food Loss."
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#296

Martha Sharp Joukowsky

#68924
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Martha Sharp Joukowsky was a Near Eastern archaeologist and a retired member of the faculty of Brown University known for her fieldwork at the ancient site of Petra in Jordan. Early life and education Martha Sharp Joukowsky was the daughter of Waitstill Hastings Sharp and Martha Ingham Dickie, noted for aiding Jews escaping Nazi persecution in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Joukowsky was educated at Pembroke College American University of Beirut and Paris I-Sorbonne .
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#297

Myra Shackley

#59078
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Myra Lesley Shackley was formerly Professor of Culture Resource Management and Head of the Centre for Tourism and Visitor Management at Nottingham Trent University Business School. She retired in summer 2011. She has written 15 books
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#298

Catherine Panter-Brick

#84424
Overall Influence
Catherine Panter-Brick is the Bruce A. and Davi-Ellen Chabner Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University, where she directs the Program on Conflict, Resilience, and Health and the Program on Stress and Family Resilience. She is also the senior editor of the interdisciplinary journal Social Science & Medicine and the President-Elect of the Human Biology Association. She serves as Head of Morse College, one of Yale’s 14 residential colleges, and is Chair of the Council of Heads.
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#299

Carola Lentz

#34356
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Carola Lentz is a German social anthropologist and, since November 2020, president of the Goethe-Institut. She is senior research professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.
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#300

Audrey Butt Colson

#101456
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
Audrey Joan Butt Colson , is a social anthropologist with a particular interest in the Amerindian peoples of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela. She was, together with Peter Rivière, one of the pioneers of Amazonian anthropology at the University of Oxford.
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