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,

#301

Elen Feuerriegel

#96424

Overall Influence

Elen Feuerriegel is an Australian palaeoanthropologist, known for being one of the "underground astronauts" of the Rising Star Expedition. She is also a clinical research scientist at the University of Colorado Denver where she specialises in COVID-19 AND HIV clincial trials.

#302

Sarah Kendzior

#33395

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Sarah J. Kendzior is an American author, anthropologist, researcher, and scholar. Kendzior is the author of The View from Flyover Country – a collection of essays first published by Al Jazeera – and is a former co-host of the Gaslit Nation podcast. In 2020, she published her second book, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, which was a New York Times bestseller. In September 2022, she published her third book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

#303

Tina Campt

#53704

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Campt previously held faculty positions as Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities at Brown University, Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women's Studies at Barnard College, Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Campt is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, Image Matters: Archive...

#304

Tarisi Vunidilo

#10823

Overall Influence

Tarisi Vunidilo is a Fijian archaeologist and curator who specialises in indigenous museology and heritage management. Biography Vunidilo was born in Suva, Fiji. Her parents are from the southern Fijian island of Kadavu. She also studied for a degree in Pacific Geography and Sociology at the University of the South Pacific from 1991 to 1994. In 1993 she spent a year at the University of Hawaii as a Cultural Exchange Student. In 1996 she graduated from the Australian National University with a postgraduate diploma in archaeology. After graduation she worked as Head of Archaeology at the Fiji Mu...

#305

Karla Poewe

#50880

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Karla Poewe is an anthropologist and historian. She is the author of ten academic books and fifty peer reviewed articles in international journals. Currently Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, England. She is married to Irving Hexham.

#306

Nita Kumar

#53962

Overall Influence

Nita Kumar completed her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in History and has taught at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and the University of Michigan among other places. She presently holds the Brown Family Chair of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California. Kumar studied Anthropology alongside History and has been productive in research and publishing in both fields. She has further moved on to include women's and gender studies, literary criticism, education and performance studies in her approach.

#307

Caroline Malone

#58024

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Caroline Ann Tuke Malone is a British academic and archaeologist. She was Professor of Prehistory at Queen's University, Belfast from 2013 and is now emeritus professor. Education and personal life Malone graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1980 , and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in archaeology by Cambridge in 1986. Her doctoral thesis was titled "Exchange systems and style in the central Mediterranean".

#308

Jane Renfrew

#90008

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Jane Renfrew, Lady Renfrew of Kaimsthorn is a British archaeologist and paleoethnobotanist noted for her studies on the use of plants in prehistory, the origin and development of agriculture, food and wine in antiquity, and the origin of the vine and wine in the Mediterranean.

#309

Paula Reimer

#116679

Overall Influence

Paula Jo Reimer is a radiocarbon and archaeological scientist. Reimer is the former director of the 14Chrono Centre for Climate, the Environment, and Chronology at Queen's University Belfast. Biography Reimer has a BSc in Physics and MSc in Biophysics from Iowa State University. She was awarded her PhD in Geological Sciences, working with Minze Stuiver, from University of Washington in 1998. She worked at the Quaternary Isotope Lab at Washington from 1977 to 1998, after which she moved to Queen's University Belfast for a Postdoctoral fellowship in 1998–2001. This was followed by a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2001 to 2004.

#310

Suad Joseph

#32256

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Suad Joseph received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1975. Dr. Joseph is Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis and in 2009 was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her research addresses issues of gender; families, children, and youth; sociology of the family; and selfhood, citizenship, and the state in the Middle East, with a focus on her native Lebanon. Her earlier work focused on the politicization of religion in Lebanon. Joseph is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in...

#311

Christiane Timmerman

Christiane Timmerman

#88679

Overall Influence

1959 - 2019 (60 years)

Christiane Timmerman was a Belgian psychologist, anthropologist and migration expert. In 2006 she became the director of the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies , an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Antwerp that conducts research and education relating to migration, social integration and intercultural themes in various social fields, including education, the labour market, welfare, family, health and law. She was also a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp where she taught courses related to migration and integration.

#312

Sharika Thiranagama

#95669

Overall Influence

Sharika Thiranagama is a political anthropologist at Stanford University. She is the daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil human rights activist and feminist Rajani Thiranagama, who was murdered by LTTE in 1989. She was the president of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies from 2017-2020. Her first book In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011.

#313

Jessica Greenberg

#95410

Overall Influence

Jessica Greenberg is a social anthropologist who is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As a political anthropologist, Greenberg's research has focused on questions of democracy, post-socialism, protest, citizenship, state, and revolution as well as her regional interests in Eastern Europe, the Former Yugoslavia and Europe.

#314

Nancy Bonvillain

#53025

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Nancy Bonvillain is a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Bard College at Simon's Rock. She is author of over twenty books on language, culture, and gender, including a series on Native American peoples. In her field work she worked with the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka and Diné peoples, and she has published a grammar and dictionary of the Akwesasne dialect of Kanyenʼkéha . She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1972 and has taught at Columbia University, The New School, SUNY Purchase, Stony Brook University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She now teaches at Bard College at Simon's Roc...

#315

Saddeka Arebi

#48352

Overall Influence

1950 - 2007 (57 years)

Saddeka Mohammed Arebi was an American/Arab American social anthropologist and author. Born in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, she immigrated with her family to the United States during the late 1970s, eventually settling in Northern California. After obtaining her doctorate, she subsequently served as a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and Saint Mary's College of California. She was also an active member of the Muslim World League , one of the largest in the world consisting of Muslim religious figures from twenty-two countries.

#316

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

#52431

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Joanna Sabina Tokarska-Bakir is a Polish cultural anthropologist, literary scholar, and religious studies scholar. She is a full professor and chair of the ethnic and national relations study at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Slavic Studies. She specializes in blood libel, historical anthropology and in particular violence, and Holocaust ethnography.

#317

Mona Bhan

#101568

Overall Influence

Mona Bhan is the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and associate professor of Anthropology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. At Maxwell school, she is the senior research associate at the South Asia Center and serves as the director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

#318

Catherine L. Besteman

#86295

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Catherine Lowe Besteman is an Italian American abolitionist educator at Colby College, where she holds the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Chair in Anthropology. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994.

#319

Jeanne Arnold

#110128

Overall Influence

1955 - 2022 (67 years)

Jeanne E. Arnold was an American archaeologist who taught in the anthropology department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her fields of research covered many topics, but she specialized in the prehistoric and early contact era of the Pacific Coast of North America, in California and British Columbia. Her work in these areas was directed to resolving the economies and political evolutionary trajectories of complex hunter-gatherer groups. She died on November 27, 2022, following a long illness.

#320

Marcella Frangipane

#99275

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Marcella Frangipane is a professor of archaeology at the Sapienza University of Rome. She works on the prehistory and protohistory of the Near East and Middle East. She was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

#321

Katerina Harvati

#44876

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Katerina Harvati is a Greek paleoanthropologist and expert in human evolution. She specializes in the broad application of 3-D geometric morphometric and virtual anthropology methods to paleoanthropology. Since 2009, she is full professor and director of Paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. From 2020-2023 she was Director of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences and since 2023 she is Director of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen.

#322

Ana Celia Zentella

#29378

Overall Influence

Ana Celia Zentella is an American linguist known for her "anthro-political" approach to linguistic research and expertise on multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and language intolerance, especially in relation to U.S. Latino languages and communities. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

#323

Jeanne Guillemin

#25278

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

Jeanne Harley Guillemin was an American medical anthropologist and author, who for 25 years taught at Boston College as a professor of Sociology and for over ten years was a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was an authority on biological weapons and published four books on the topic.

#324

Lynne Hume

#76185

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Lynne Hume is an Australian anthropologist of religion whose research interests include Australian Aboriginal spirituality, paganism, consciousness studies and religious dress. She is an Honorary Associate Professor in Studies in Religion at the University of Queensland.

#325

Cynthia Beall

#86254

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Cynthia Beall is an American physical anthropologist at the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. Four decades of her research on people living in extremely high mountains became the frontier in understanding human evolution and high-altitude adaptation. Her groundbreaking works among the Andean, Tibetan and East African highlanders are the basis of our knowledge on adaptation to hypoxic condition and how it influences the evolutionary selection in modern humans. She is currently the Distinguished University Professor, and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Ame...

#326

Adia Benton

#96662

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Adia Benton is an American cultural and medical anthropologist whose research concerns how care is provided in humanitarian emergencies and development projects. Benton is currently an associate professor of anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University.

#327

Kim TallBear

#36893

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Kim TallBear (born 1968) is a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science. Holding the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, TallBear has published on DNA testing, race science and Indigenous identities, as well as on polyamory as a decolonization practice. TallBear is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, as well as a descendant from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. TallBear pursued post-secondary education at the University of Massachusetts Boston obtaining an undergraduate degree in community planning.

#328

Christina Riggs

#58439

Overall Influence

Christina Riggs is a British-American historian, academic, and former museum curator. She specializes in the history of archaeology, history of photography, and ancient Egyptian art, and her recent work has concentrated on the history, politics, and contemporary legacy of the 1922 discovery of Tutankahmun's tomb. Since 2019, she has been Professor of the History of Visual Culture at Durham University. She is also a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. The author of several academic books, Riggs also writes on ancient Egyptian themes for a wider audience. Her most recent books include An...

#329

Jodi Magness

#51852

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Jodi Magness is an archaeologist, orientalist and scholar of religion. She serves as the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously taught at Tufts University.

#330

Elspeth Probyn

#45124

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Elspeth Probyn is an Australian academic. She is currently professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

#331

Melinda A. Zeder

#44179

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Melinda A. Zeder is an American archaeologist and Curator Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Her zooarchaeological research has revolutionized understandings of animal domestication.

#332

Caroline Brettell

#78605

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Zoe Caroline Brettell is a Canadian cultural anthropologist known for her scholarship on migration and gender. Brettell is the University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, where she was previously the Dedman Professor and Ruth Collins Altshuler Professor. At SMU, Brettell has served as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology and the interim Dean of the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. She has also been president of both the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and the Social Science History Association .

#333

Rose Oldfield Hayes

#13098

Overall Influence

Rose Oldfield Hayes was an American anthropologist at the State University of New York, Buffalo. After doing fieldwork in Sudan in 1970 interviewing women who had been infibulated, Hayes wrote the first scholarly paper on female genital mutilation that used that term, and the first to incorporate information from the women themselves. Published in American Ethnologist in 1975, the paper represented an important step forward in understanding the practice.

#334

Carmel Schrire

#38111

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Carmel Schrire is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University whose research focuses on historical archaeology, particularly in South Africa and Europe. Education and research Schrire was born in Cape Town, South Africa and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town , going on to attend the University of Cambridge . Her early research interests were in prehistoric archaeology, and she did her doctoral research in Australia's Northern Territory on the way in which modern Aboriginal behaviour can help interpret prehistoric remains. She received her PhD in 1968 from...

#335

Helena Wulff

#108781

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Helena Wulff is professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research is in the anthropology of communication and aesthetics based on a wide range of studies of the social worlds of literary production, dance, and the visual arts.

#336

Jorja Leap

#45015

Overall Influence

Jorja Leap is an American anthropologist and adjunct professor in the social welfare department at the University of California, Los Angeles . She is also Director of the Health and Social Justice Partnership at UCLA and is a nationally recognized gang expert.

#337

Gail M. Kelly

#113948

Overall Influence

1933 - 2005 (72 years)

Gail M. Kelly was an American anthropologist known for training generations of anthropologists at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She was born February 9, 1933, in Deer Park, Washington and after her mother's death was raised by relatives in Portland. She attended Reed as an undergraduate, studying under Morris Opler and David H. French, graduating in 1955. Her B.A. thesis, Themes in Wasco Culture, was based on fieldwork on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation under French's supervision. She pursued a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where she was strongly influenced by Edward Shils and Fred Eggan.

#338

Aud Talle

#102044

Overall Influence

1944 - 2011 (67 years)

Aud Talle was a Norwegian social anthropologist. She graduated as mag.art. from the University of Oslo and as fil. dr. from Stockholm University. She was a research assistant at the University of Bergen from 1975 to 1977, lector at Stockholm University from 1990 to 1995 and professor at the University of Oslo from 1995. She conducted her field work in Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania and London.

#339

Dolores Piperno

#85596

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Dolores Rita Piperno is an American archaeologist specializing in archaeobotany. She is a senior scientist emeritus of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington.

#340

Bryony Coles

#69193

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Bryony Jean Coles, is a prehistoric archaeologist and academic. She is best known for her work studying Doggerland, an area of land now submerged beneath the North Sea. Early life and education Coles was born on 12 August 1946 to John Samuel Orme and Jean Esther Orme . She studied at Bristol University before completing her postgraduate degree at the London Institute of Archaeology and completing an MPhil in Anthropology at University College London.

#341

Heather Levi

#101912

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Heather Levi is an American anthropologist best known for her research in lucha libre. Levi was born in Massachusetts and became an Assistant professor of Anthropology at Temple University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts in 1990 and went on to receive a PhD in Anthropology in 2001 from New York University. She currently lives in Philadelphia.

#342

Daria Khaltourina

Daria Khaltourina

#29023

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Daria Andreyevna Khaltourina is a Russian sociologist, anthropologist, demographer, and a public figure. She is the head of the Group of the Monitoring of Global and Regional Risks of the Russian Academy of Sciences, co-chairperson of the Russian Coalition for Alcohol Control, as well as the Russian Coalition for Tobacco Control. She is a laureate of the Russian Science Support Foundation Award in "The Best Economists of the Russian Academy of Sciences" nomination .

#343

Pauline Wiessner

#99525

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Pauline Wiessner is an American anthropologist who focused on cultural Anthropology. She is currently a professor at University of Utah. Wiessner has held various professor positions at Universities in the United States, Denmark, and France and various positions in Universities and communities across the world. During her research she work with Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari in South Africa to learn about the social networks and Enga of Papua New Guinea to learn about their customs of exchange, ritual and warfare.

#344

Laurajane Smith

#29918

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Laurajane Smith is a Heritage and Museum Studies scholar. Among Smith's publications that examine the politics of heritage, she edited the book Uses of Heritage. She published the book Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. In 2016, Smith was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

#345

Signithia Fordham

#59614

Overall Influence

Signithia Fordham is a prominent Anthropologist who studies how race influences Black students in the classroom. She began her career working with John Ogbu on their research "Acting White" and has done similar research since. Most of her research is done in the DC area, which she gives the pseudonym Capital High.

#346

Nina Etkin

#74040

Overall Influence

1948 - 2009 (61 years)

Nina Lilian Etkin was an anthropologist and biologist. Etkin was noted for her work in medical anthropology, ethnobiology, and ethnopharmacology. She studied the relation between food and health for over thirty years. Her work involved complementary and alternative medicines for prevention and treatment in Hawai‘i; the use of ethnomedicines in Indonesia; and health issues in Nigeria. She won numerous grants and awards from national and international agencies and published several books as well as over 80 professional articles in peer reviewed journals.

#347

Heather Paxson

#122300

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Heather Paxson is an American cultural anthropologist and science and technology studies scholar. She is an expert on the anthropology of reproduction, and on the anthropology of food, including in particular cheese and commonplace family food practices. She is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#348

Nancy Abelmann

#70015

Overall Influence

1959 - 2016 (57 years)

Nancy Abelmann was an American anthropologist and Harry E. Preble Professor of anthropology, Asian American studies, and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. where she'd also served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research from 2009 to 2016, and as Director of the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies from 2005 to 2008.

#349

María Dolores Juliano

#88220

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

María Dolores Juliano Corregido was an Argentine cultural and social anthropologist based in Spain. Biography María Dolores Juliano was born in Necochea in 1932. She trained as a teacher, studied pedagogy, and earned a licentiate in anthropology at the University of Mar del Plata, graduating in 1975. After the 1976 coup that led to the civic-military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, she was forced into exile.

#350

Carmen Bernand

#60814

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Carmen Bernand is a French anthropologist, historian and Latin Americanist. Biography Carmen Bernand was born in France to Spanish refugee parents, she lived in Argentina for 25 years, where she studied Ethnology at University of Buenos Aires. At the end of 1964, she moved to Paris and prepared a postgraduate thesis under the direction of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 1966, she married the epigraphist .

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions