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).

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

Clear Form

List of the most influential female people in Anthropology,

#401

Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Denise Schmandt-Besserat
#23386
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Denise Schmandt-Besserat is a French-American archaeologist and retired professor of art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. She spent much of her professional career as a professor at the University of Texas. She is best known for her work on the history and invention of writing. While her research is highly cited, it has been controversial among scholars. The controversies, as detailed below, concern the interpretation of early tokens, particularly the complex ones; however, the idea that writing emerged out of the counting, cataloging, management, and transactions of agricultural pro...
Go to Profile
#402

Salima Ikram

Salima Ikram
#29032
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Salima Ikram is a Pakistani professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, a participant in many Egyptian archaeological projects, the author of several books on Egyptian archaeology, a contributor to various magazines and a guest on pertinent television programs.
Go to Profile
#403

Catherine S. Fowler

#120050
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Catherine "Kay" S. Fowler is an anthropologist whose work has focused on preserving the cultures of the native people of the Great Basin. She earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and from 1964 to 2007 taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she is now Professor Emerita.
Go to Profile
#404

Iris López

#110739
Overall Influence
Iris López is a contemporary professor, anthropologist, sociologist, and author, whose work focuses on feminist, Latino, and Latin American studies. She has one full-length book published, an ethnography about sterilization within female Puerto Rican populations, titled Matters of Choice. She received both her Masters and Doctoral degrees in Anthropology from Columbia University. Currently, López teaches sociology at the City College of New York, part of the City University of New York , where she has been the Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program since 2016.
Go to Profile
#405

Jane Hubert

#119708
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Jane Hubert was a social anthropologist, known in particular for her work in mental health and intellectual disability. She was also known for her work in the field of cultural memory studies and archaeology.
Go to Profile
#406

Mercedes Fernández-Martorell

Mercedes Fernández-Martorell
#112514
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Mercedes Fernández-Martorell is a Spanish writer and anthropologist. Fernández-Martorell received a degree in modern history and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Barcelona. Since 1980, she has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. She teaches courses on urban anthropology, as well as Anthropology and Feminism. On both issues, she has published several works. She has given lectures and courses in Spain at the University of Information Sciences in Seville, University of Law in the Basque Country, Bar of Granada, University of Granada, University o...
Go to Profile
#407

Caterina Magni

#48559
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Caterina Magni is an Italian-born French archaeologist and anthropologist, who specialises in the study of pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, and in particular the iconography, art and mythology and religion of the Olmec civilization. From 2001 Magni has held a Maître de conférences position in Mesoamerican archaeology at the University of Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne, Paris.
Go to Profile
#408

Julie Cruikshank

#117875
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Julie Cruikshank is a Canadian anthropologist known for her research collaboration with Indigenous peoples of the Yukon. She is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. She has lived and worked for over a decade in the Yukon Territory, creating an oral history of the region, through her work with people including Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. Her work focuses mainly on the practical and theoretical developments in oral tradition studies.
Go to Profile
#409

Madeline Kneberg Lewis

#103775
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Madeline Kneberg Lewis was an American archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee. She is most famous for her work on excavations in the Tennessee Valley, beginning in the 1930s. She was instrumental in establishing the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee as well as the Frank H. McClung Museum. She was the first female full professor at Tennessee outside of home economics and among the first prominent female archaeologists in the United States.
Go to Profile
#410

Ien Ang

#31409
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
May Ien Ang is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney , Australia, where she was the founding director and is currently an ARC Professorial Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Go to Profile
#411

Sylvia Wynter

#7214
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Sylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.
Go to Profile
#412

Susan E. Alcock

#49595
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Susan Ellen Alcock is an American archaeologist specializing in survey archaeology and the archaeology of memory in the provinces of the Roman Empire. Alcock grew up in Massachusetts and was educated at Yale and the University of Cambridge. She is currently Special Counsel for Institutional Outreach and Engagement and Professor of Classical Archaeology and Classics at the University of Michigan and became the Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan - Flint in July 2018.
Go to Profile
#413

Susanne Küchler

#69389
Overall Influence
Susanne Küchler, FBA is a German anthropologist and academic, who specialises in material culture. Since 2006, she has been a professor at University College London. She previously worked at the University of East Anglia and the Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile
#414

Gina Athena Ulysse

#101956
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Gina Athena Ulysse is a Haitian-American anthropologist, feminist, poet, performance artist and activist. Professor Ulysse earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She worked as a professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, before joining the Feminist Studies department at UC Santa Cruz in fall 2020. Ulysse is most known for her 2015 book Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle.
Go to Profile
#415

Alison S. Brooks

#92099
Overall Influence
Alison S. Brooks is an American paleoanthropologist and archaeologist whose work focuses on the Paleolithic, particularly the Middle Stone Age of Africa. She is one of the most prominent figures in the debate over where Homo sapiens evolved and when.
Go to Profile
#416

Katherine Boyle

#127966
Overall Influence
Katherine Victoria Boyle is a zooarchaeologist. She is a Fellow of, and Director of Studies in Archaeology & Anthropology, at Homerton College, Cambridge. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 6 June 2010.
Go to Profile
#417

Marta Weigle

#69165
Overall Influence
1944 - 2018 (74 years)
Marta Weigle was an American anthropologist and folklorist. Early life and education Weigle was born in Janesville, Wisconsin in 1944. The family moved to Santa Fe in 1961 so her father, Richard Weigle, who was president of St. John's College of Annapolis, could establish a new campus in Santa Fe. Weigle received a BA in Social Relations from Harvard in 1965 and continued with graduate study in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile
#418

Susan Sherratt

#74735
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Susan Sherratt is Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the archaeology of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Aegean, Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, especially trade and interaction within and beyond these regions.
Go to Profile
#419

Helen Hardacre

#31234
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Helen Hardacre is an American Japanologist. She is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society at the Departement of East Asian Languages and Civilization, Harvard University.
Go to Profile
#420

Irina Podgorny

#128112
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Irina Podgorny is an Argentine anthropologist, a historian of science at the National University of La Plata, permanent staff at CONICET, professor ad honorem and Director of the Archive of History and Photographs at the Natural Science Facility and Museum of the National University of La Plata, and winner of the Bernardo Houssay Young Researcher Award. She has held numerous professorships and scholarships and has worked for CONICET since 2013.
Go to Profile
#421

Aparna Rao

Aparna Rao
#99950
Overall Influence
1950 - 2005 (55 years)
Aparna Rao was a German anthropologist who performed studies on social groups in Afghanistan, France, and some regions of India. Her doctorate studies focused on anthropogeography, ethnology, and Islamic studies. Rao taught anthropology at the University of Cologne, serving for a brief time as chair of the Department of Ethnology at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, Germany.
Go to Profile
#422

Helen Groger-Wurm

#100889
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Helen Groger-Wurm, birth name Helene Gröger , was an Austrian-Australian ethnologist, anthropologist and linguist. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1946, she married the Hungarian-born linguist Stefan Wurm. In 1954 the couple moved to Australia where they obtained Australian citizenship. They carried out field research in New Guinea and in northern Australia. From 1962 until her 1974, Groger-Wurm was a research officer at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, lecturing in parallel on the aboriginal way of life at the Australian National University. She went on to take up work a librarian at the Australian National Library until her retirement in 1982.
Go to Profile
#423

Sonia Montecino

#92549
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Sonia Cristina Montecino Aguirre is a Chilean writer and anthropologist. In 2013, she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales Biography She studied Anthropology in Universidad de Chile where she graduated in 1980 and in 2016 she received her doctorate in Leiden University in Holland. She is married to the anthropologist Rolf Foerster González.
Go to Profile
#424

Lissant Bolton

#129340
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Lissant Mary Bolton is an Australian anthropologist and the Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum. She is particularly known for her work on Vanuatu, textiles, and museums and indigenous communities.
Go to Profile
#425

Miriam Stark

#133964
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Miriam T. Stark is an American archaeologist whose field experience and emphasis of studies have included locations in North America, the Near East and Southeast Asia. She is currently a professor of Southeast Asian Archaeology at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, a position she has held since August 1995. Having first received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, she went on to complete her M.A and PhD from the University of Arizona. Stark has co-directed the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project , located in southern Cambodia for the past 12 years. Her research focus not only includes the...
Go to Profile
#426

Marilyn Palmer

#86650
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Marilyn Palmer, is a British historian, archaeologist and academic, who specialises in landscape history and industrial archaeology. Having been a school teacher, she moved into academia and taught at Loughborough College, Loughborough University, and Leicester University. She was the United Kingdom's first Professor of Industrial Archaeology.
Go to Profile
#427

Brenda Farnell

#129582
Overall Influence
Brenda Farnell is a British-American anthropologist and Professor of American Indian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Her areas of focus include dance, movement, performance, language, and Labanotation. Her work is influenced by Sociocultural Theory, Visual Anthropology, Ethnopoetics, and Semiotic Anthropology. Farnell's use of Labanotation as a research tool has developed dance and performance notation in the field of Anthropology. She focuses on the North American Plains culture areas, including the Nakota, Crow, and Comanche nations. Her work includes extensive study ...
Go to Profile
#428

Eve Tuck

#49499
Overall Influence
Eve Tuck is an Unangax̂ scholar in the field of Indigenous studies and educational research. Tuck is the Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile
#429

Ella Shohat

#12264
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Ella Shohat , is an American professor of cultural studies at New York University, where she teaches in the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies. She has written and lectured on the topics of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Diasporic cultures.
Go to Profile
#430

Helen Leach

Helen Leach
#93940
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Helen May Leach is a New Zealand academic specialising in food anthropology. She is currently a professor emerita at the University of Otago. Early life and family Born Helen May Keedwell in Wellington on 3 July 1945, Leach is the daughter of Peggy and Harvey Keedwell. Her older sister, Nancy Tichborne, was a watercolour artist.
Go to Profile
#431

Diana Kirkbride

#60270
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
Diana Victoria Warcup Kirkbride-Helbæk, was a British archaeologist who specialised in the prehistory of south-west Asia. Biography She attended Wycombe Abbey School in High Wycombe and served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War. She completed a postgraduate diploma at University College London in 1950 studying Mesopotamian and Palestinian archaeology under Sir Max Mallowan and Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Kirkbride went to work on the excavations of Jericho from 1952 to 1955. In 1953, she began fieldwork in Jordan, including the restoration of the Jerash Theatre and excavations at Petra in 1956.
Go to Profile
#432

Dori Tunstall

#118994
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Elizabeth "Dori" Tunstall is a design anthropologist, researcher, academic leader, writer, and educator. She is dean of the faculty of design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, and the first black dean of a faculty of design anywhere. Tunstall holds a PhD and an MA in anthropology from Stanford University [1994–1999] and a BA in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College [1990–1994].
Go to Profile
#433

Emily Vermeule

#34720
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Emily Dickinson Townsend Vermeule was an American classical scholar and archaeologist. She was a professor of classical philology and archaeology at Harvard University. Early life and education Emily Dickinson Townsend was born on August 11, 1928, in New York City to Clinton Blake Townsend and Eleanor Mary Meneely. She was named for her grandmother, a relative of the poet Emily Dickinson.
Go to Profile
#434

Katerina Douka

#121311
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Katerina Douka is an archaeological scientist whose work focuses on the spatio-temporal pattern of human dispersals and extinctions across Eurasia, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern Homo sapiens.
Go to Profile
#435

Elisabeth Croll

#113694
Overall Influence
1944 - 2007 (63 years)
Elisabeth Joan "Lisa" Croll, was a New Zealand anthropologist. She is known as the first anthropologist to visit Chinese villages in a period when political actions made access into the country for foreigners difficult. Croll published books on the subject and held several short-term fellowships at various educational institutions. She also worked for United Nations agencies and international non-government organisations.
Go to Profile
#436

Kamari Maxine Clarke

#110727
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Maxine Kamari Clarke is a Canadian-American scholar with family roots in Jamaica. As of 2020, she is a distinguished professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Go to Profile
#437

Virginia Watson

#117851
Overall Influence
Virginia Drew Watson was an American cultural anthropologist who conducted fieldwork among the indigenous Guarani-Kaiowás people of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil and the Tairora and Gadsup tribes in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Watson also conducted archaeological research, analyzing 25,000 artifacts excavated by J. David Cole and publishing her findings with Cole in Prehistory of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea.
Go to Profile
#438

Kate Robson Brown

Kate Robson Brown
#107111
Overall Influence
Katharine A. Robson Brown is a British anthropologist. She is a professor in Mechanical Engineering and Biological Anthropology at the University of Bristol. She is also the Director of the Jean Golding Institute and Turing University Lead.
Go to Profile
#439

Lynne Isbell

#28619
Overall Influence
Lynne A. Isbell is an American ethologist and primatologist, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Isbell has served as president of the American Society of Primatologists and is the originator of the snake detection theory, which suggests that snakes have contributed to the evolution of the visual system of primates.
Go to Profile
#440

Mary Stiner

#112837
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Mary C. Stiner is the Regents' Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson and Curator of Zooarchaeology at the Arizona State Museum. She is known for, among other things, her work studying the death rituals of early hominids.
Go to Profile
#441

Kelly Dixon

#105056
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Dr. Kelly J. Dixon is an Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Montana and a member of the College of Arts And Sciences at UM. Her main area of work is the American West, and she is perhaps best known for her work with the Donner Party site, as well as research into saloonss in Virginia City, Nevada.
Go to Profile
#442

Margaret Jolly

#112723
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Margaret Anne Jolly , born in Sydney, Australia is an historical anthropologist recognized as a world expert on gender in Oceania. She is professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific and Convenor of the Gender Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra. Jolly is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Go to Profile
#443

Julia Lee-Thorp

#151562
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Julia Anne Lee-Thorp, is a South African archaeologist and academic. She is Head of the Stable Light Isotope Laboratory and Professor of Archaeological Science and Bioarchaeology at the University of Oxford. Lee-Thorp is most well known for her work on dietary ecology and human origins, using stable isotope chemistry to study fossil bones and teeth.
Go to Profile
#444

Deborah A. Thomas

#142408
Overall Influence
Deborah A. Thomas is an American anthropologist and filmmaker, and is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published books and articles on the history, culture, and politics of Jamaica; and on human rights, sexuality, and globalization in the Caribbean arena. She has co-produced and co-directed two experimental films, and has co-curated a multimedia exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2016, she began a four-year term as editor-in-chief of the journal American Anthropologist.
Go to Profile
#445

Radhika Govindrajan

#25626
Overall Influence
Radhika Govindrajan is an Indian-American anthropologist, researcher and university professor. She has done research on animal studies especially about leopards, elephants. She is currently serving as an assistant associate professor at the University of Washington. She is well known for her book Animal Intimacies which is about an ethnography of multispecies relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.
Go to Profile
#446

Marianne Ignace

#17779
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Marianne Boelscher Ignace is a Canadian linguist and anthropologist. Married into the Shuswap people, she is a Full professor in the departments of Linguistics and Indigenous Studies at Simon Fraser University , and Director of SFU's Indigenous Languages Program and First Nations Language Centre. In 2020, Ignace was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her work in revitalizing and preserving indigenous languages.
Go to Profile
#447

Tania Li

#153166
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Tania Murray Li is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto who is known for her work on labour, capitalism, development, politics and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. She is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile
#448

Shirin Akiner

#26029
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Shirin Akiner was a scholar of Central Asia and Belarus. She was a research associate at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies . Life Shirin Akiner was born in 1943 in Dacca, British India. She studied at London University, gaining her first degree in Slavonic philology, and Turkish language and literature . She gained her doctorate in 1980 from University College London as a researcher of the heritage of the Belarusian Lipka Tatars, with her dissertation titled "The religious vocabulary of the British Library Tatar-Byelorussian Kitab".
Go to Profile
#449

Mabel Lang

Mabel Lang
#45743
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Mabel Louise Lang was an American archaeologist and scholar of Classical Greek and Mycenaean culture. Biography Lang took her first degree at Cornell University in 1939 and was awarded her PhD at Bryn Mawr College in 1943, when she also joined the faculty of the college. She was a faculty member there until 1991 and professor emerita until her death. She was appointed as Paul Shorey Professor of Greek in 1971. That same year, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1981 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile
#450

Ruth Tringham

Ruth Tringham
#92006
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Ruth Tringham is an anthropologist, focusing on the archaeology of Neolithic Europe and southwest Asia. She is a Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley and Creative Director and President of the Center for Digital Archaeology , a recently established non-profit organization. Before going to Berkeley, she taught at Harvard University and University College London. Tringham is probably best known for her work at Selevac and Opovo , Serbia, at the Eneolithic tell settlement of Podgoritsa, Bulgaria , and at the well-known site of Çatalhöyük , Turkey.
Go to Profile