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,

#451

K. Aslihan Yener

#21856
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
K. Aslıhan Yener, often anglicised as K. Aslihan Yener, is a Turkish American archaeologist whose work on Bronze Age tin miness in Anatolia revealed a new possible source of the important metal. Education and career Yener was born in Istanbul to Turkish parents, and moved to the United States, in New Rochelle, New York at the age of six months. In 1964, she entered Adelphi University in Garden City, New York planning to study chemistry. Soon she visited her native Turkey and subsequently transferred to Robert College in Istanbul in 1966, where she studied the humanities. While studying a cou...
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#452

Julie K. Stein

Julie K. Stein
#82789
Overall Influence
Julie K. Stein is an American geoarchaeologist, who is best known for her research on the coastal adaptions of prehistoric humans in the Pacific Northwest. She is executive director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
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#453

Linda Marie Fedigan

#110061
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Linda Marie Fedigan, is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Primatology and Bioanthropology at the University of Calgary, Alberta. In addition, Fedigan is also the Executive Editor of the American Journal of Primatology and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Prior to accepting her current position, Dr. Fedigan was a professor at the University of Alberta, teaching anthropology from 1974 until 2001. She is internationally recognized for over 30 years of contribution to the study of primate life history, reproduction, socioecology and conservation and is considered a major author...
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#454

Kathleen Musante DeWalt

#82482
Overall Influence
Kathleen Musante DeWalt is an American academic who served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies – University of Pittsburgh and a Professor of Anthropology. She became Assistant Professor in the University of Kentucky Department of Behavioural Science in 1978, receiving her PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1979. She was promoted to Associate Professor at Kentucky in 1984, and full Professor in 1992. In September 1993, she moved to the University of Pittsburgh, serving as Chair of the Department of Anthropology from 1995 to 1996 and Associate Dean from 1996 to 1999. In ...
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#455

Monique Scheer

#123750
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Monique Scheer is an American-German historical and cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she also serves as Vice-President for International Affairs and Diversity.
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#456

Barbara Harrell-Bond

#81426
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Barbara Elaine Harrell-Bond was an American-born British social anthropologist in the field of refugee studies. Early life and education Barbara Elaine Moir was born on 7 November 1932, daughter of postman Elmer Edwin Moir and nurse Irene , and raised in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She attended Asbury College in Kentucky where she studied music and later taught music, and met her future husband, Nathan Harrell-Bond. When he won a scholarship to Mansfield College, Oxford for a doctorate in psychology, she began studying anthropology at the Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1965 where she earned an M.Litt.
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#457

Miyako Inoue

#144768
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Miyako Inoue is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. She received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996. She is a prominent linguistic anthropologist who combines a concerted focus on social theory with a rigorous analysis of language in social life. Inoue teaches linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan.
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#458

Katherine Spilde

#102942
Overall Influence
Katherine Ann Spilde is an American anthropologist. She is a professor and endowed chair of the Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming at San Diego State University, specializing in government-owned casino gambling models and Tribal Government Gaming.
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#459

Amy Bogaard

#98950
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Amy Bogaard FBA is a Canadian archaeologist and Professor of Neolithic and Bronze Age Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Education Bogaard earned a PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2002, supervised by Glynis Jones.
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#460

Luisa Accati

Luisa Accati
#32302
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Luisa Accati Levi is an Italian historian, anthropologist and feminist public intellectual. She taught ethnology and modern history at the University of Trieste. She was born in Turin. After finishing her studies at the University of Turin and in Paris, she turned to the research of the historical anthropology of rural societies in Northern Italy. She has published monographs on the rural religiosity and on witch trials in the region of Friuli, and on family relations in urban and semi-urban communities in 19th century Udine. Her major contributions are in the study of the cult of Mary and it...
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#461

Insa Nolte

#112336
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Insa Nolte is an Africanist and Professor of African Studies in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She obtained a first degree in Economics from the Free University of Berlin and graduated from the University of Birmingham with a PhD thesis on the history and politics of Ijebu-Remo , the regional base of the Nigerian Nationalist politician Obafemi Awolowo. After a Kirk-Greene Junior Research Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford, she became Lecturer in African Studies at Birmingham University in 2001. She has been Head of Department since 2018.
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#462

Isabel Crook

Isabel Crook
#79060
Overall Influence
1915 - Present (110 years)
Isabel Crook was a Canadian-British anthropologist, political prisoner, and professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Crook conducted anthropological studies in China and played an instrumental role in foreign language education in China.
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#463

Phyllis Morse

#128952
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Phyllis Morse is an American archaeologist. Biography Anderson was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1934, and attended Crystal Lake Community High, Crystal Lake, Illinois, graduating in June 1952. She became interested in archaeology while studying anthropology at the University of Michigan. In the 1950s there were fewer women at University, let alone any who chose that discipline. She received a BA in anthropology in June 1956 and an MA in anthropology in June 1958 both from Michigan.
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#464

Helene Hagan

#48961
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Helene E. Hagan, born Helene Coll , is an American anthropologist and Amazigh activist. Biography Hagan immigrated to the United States in 1960. She is the mother of three children. After obtaining a License-es-Lettres from the Faculté des Sciences et des Lettres, University of Bordeaux in France in 1969, she obtained a master's degree in French Literature from Stanford University in 1971. She pursued her doctoral studies in anthropology at Stanford University, California. She is of Berber and Catalan ancestries. Her paternal family name Coll is from the Pyrenees Mountain village of Prats-de...
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#465

Gloria Goodwin Raheja

#131301
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Gloria Goodwin Raheja is American anthropologist who specializes in ethnographic history. She is the author of several historical works where she explores the concepts of caste and gender in India, colonialism, politics of representation, blues music, capitalism in the Appalachia and other diverse topics. Raheja argues that caste stratification in India was influenced by British colonialism. Monographs on ethnographic history and India have been considered "acclaimed" by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
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#466

Gretel H. Pelto

#166400
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
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#467

Elizabeth Baldwin Garland

#99018
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Baldwin Garland was an American archaeologist known for her expertise on Great Lakes prehistory and the archaeology of Michigan. She was the author of a number of scholarly publications. Biography Garland earned a BS in geology from Wellesley College, an MA in Anthropology from Radcliffe College, and a PhD from Harvard in anthropology in 1967.
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#468

Linda L. Barnes

#76094
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Linda L. Barnes is an American medical anthropologist, a professor of family medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, and in the Graduate Division of Religious Studies at Boston University. Her research specialties are the social and cultural history of Western responses to Chinese healing traditions, and the interdisciplinary study of cultural, religious, and therapeutic pluralism in the United States. She has been regularly cited as an authority in the use of religiously based therapeutic traditions.
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#469

Maria Wyke

Maria Wyke
#113974
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Maria Wyke is professor of Latin at University College, London. She is a specialist in Latin love poetry, classical reception studies, and the interpretation of the roles of men and women in the ancient world. She has also written widely on the role of the figure of Julius Caesar in Western culture.
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#470

Katherine Hagedorn

#65151
Overall Influence
1961 - 2013 (52 years)
Katherine Johanna Hagedorn was an American ethnomusicologist. Born in Summit, New Jersey to a white family, she became a traditional Cuban drummer and Santería priestess. She spent her career as a Professor of Music at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she directed the Ethnomusicology Program, served as co-coordinator of the Gender & Women’s Studies Program, and became an associate dean. She also served as a "scholar-in-residence at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions and as a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara."
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#471

Louise Steel

#83087
Overall Influence
Louise Steel is Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity St David. Her research focuses on the prehistoric Mediterranean world, in particular Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as on themes of materiality and the human body. She conducts fieldwork in Cyprus at the Late Bronze Age site of Arediou Vouppes.
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#472

Carolyn Rouse

#90548
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Carolyn Moxley Rouse is an American anthropologist, professor and filmmaker. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Biography Rouse grew up in Del Mar, California, the daughter of a physicist and a psychologist . She encountered discrimination at an early age as her family was prevented from buying a home in Rancho Santa Fe because of their race.
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#473

Florence Connolly Shipek

#112055
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Florence C. Shipek professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, was an American anthropologist and ethnohistorian, a leading authority on Southern California Indians. Biography Florence McKeever Connolly was born in North Adams, Massachusetts on December 11, 1918. She started her college years at College of Charleston at the age of 15, and then earned her BA and MA in anthropology at the University of Arizona. There, she served as field assistant to Clara Lee Tanner and Emil Haury in 1935 and 1939-1940, and published on petroglyphs and ceramics based on that field w...
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#474

Lisa Duggan

#11197
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Duggan was president of the American Studies Association from 2014 to 2015, presiding over the annual conference on the theme of "The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century."
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#475

Evelia Edith Oyhenart

#76879
Overall Influence
1955 - 2021 (66 years)
Evelia Edith Oyhenart was an Argentine biological anthropologist, whose research focused on child growth, nutrition, and human adaptation. She served as a full professor, dean, and vice-dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of the National University of La Plata . She was also the director of the Ontogeny and Adaptation Research Laboratory at UNLP.
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#476

Iris Love

#62175
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Iris Cornelia Love was an American classical archaeologist, best known for the rediscovery of the Temple of Aphrodite in Knidos. Early life and education Love was born in New York to Cornelius Love, a diplomat and investment banker descended from Alexander Hamilton and from Captain Cook, and Audrey Josephthal, a great-granddaughter of Meyer Guggenheim. Her parents collected art and antiques, her British governess was a classicist, and she was interested from an early age in archaeology and languages. Her grandmother, Edyth Guggenheim Josephthal, left her a trust fund.
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#477

Valentine Roux

#97711
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Valentine Roux is a French archaeologist specialising in ceramic production in the Levant between the 5th and 2nd millennium BCE with the aim of identifying the "evolutionary trajectories of ceramic traditions."
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#478

Francine Saillant

Francine Saillant
#81041
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Francine Saillant is a Canadian anthropologist and intellectual. Biography Saillant received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 1987. She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Laval University since 1996; and serves as the Director of the Centre interuniversitaire sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions . Saillant has directed the efforts of the journal Anthropologie et sociétés for more ten years. She was appointed in 2008 to be a member of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2013, she was co-chair of the 81st Congress of the Association francophone pour le savoir.
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#479

Katrina Karkazis

Katrina Karkazis
#73336
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Katrina Alicia Karkazis is an American anthropologist and bioethicist. She is a professor of Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. She was previously the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and a senior research fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. She has written widely on testosterone, intersex issues, sex verification in sports, treatment practices, policy and lived experiences, and the interface between medicine and society. In 2016, she was jointly awarded a Guggenheim Fell...
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#480

Rosalind C. Morris

#92484
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Rosalind C. Morris is a Canadian anthropologist and cultural critic. She is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. Biography Morris grew up in Canada and spent her childhood in Kimberley, British Columbia and Vancouver. She completed her BA at the University of British Columbia and received her MA from York University, and PhD from the University of Chicago. She joined the Columbia faculty in 1994.
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#481

Keneiloe Molopyane

#155689
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (38 years)
Keneiloe Molopyane is a South African biological archaeologist and paleoanthropologist. She began studying archeology at the University of Pretoria, and later completed a master 's degree in archeobiology at the University of York. In 2021 she completed a doctoral thesis in biological anthropology at Wits University. In 2021, she was named an "emerging explorer" by the National Geographic Society.
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#482

Nancy Munn

#100824
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Nancy Dorothy Munn was an American anthropologist best known for her work in space and time, value, and world-making. Munn conducted fieldwork principally on the island of Gawa in Papua New Guinea, and amongst the Walbiri in Yuendumu, Australia.
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#483

Emma Kowal

#50381
Overall Influence
Emma Kowal is an Australian cultural and medical anthropologist, physician and scholar of science and technology studies. She is most well known for her books Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, and the co-edited volumes of Force, Movement, Intensity: The Newtonian Imagination in the Humanities and Social Sciences , Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World .
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#484

Diane Bell

#45657
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Diane Robin Bell is an Australian feminist anthropologist, author and activist. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C, USA and Distinguished Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work focuses on the Aboriginal people of Australia, Indigenous land rights, human rights, Indigenous religions, violence against women, and on environmental issues.
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#485

Rebecca Wragg Sykes

#60550
Overall Influence
Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a British paleolithic archaeologist, broadcaster, popular science writer and author who lives in Wales. She is interested in the Middle Palaeolithic, specifically in the lives of Neanderthals; and she is one of the founders of TrowelBlazers, a website set up to celebrate the lives of women in archaeology, palaeontology and geology.
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#486

Deborah Fahy Bryceson

#63571
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Deborah Fahy Bryceson is a British academic currently affiliated to the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh and University of Uppsala. She pioneered research into sectoral change in Africa, looking primarily at 'transnational families' and coining the terms 'de-agrarianisation' and 'mineralized urbanization'. She has published 16 books and over 130 journal articles and book chapters, specialising on livelihood, labour, urbanization and agrarian studies.
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#487

Jennifer Baird

#71877
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Jennifer A. Baird.jpg Jennifer Baird, is a British archaeologist and academic. She is Professor in Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on the archaeology of Rome's eastern provinces, particularly the site of Dura-Europos.
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#488

Nicole-Claude Mathieu

#40617
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Nicole-Claude Mathieu was a French anthropologist, feminist, academic and writer, who is remembered for her contributions to gender studies, including women's rights, the institution of marriage, materialist feminism and women's oppression. An active contributor to feminist journals, from 1971 she served as Chef de travaux at the where she edited the journal L'Homme while contributing many articles of her own. From 1990, she was maîtresse de conférences at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. In June 1996, she received a doctorate honoris causa from the Université Laval.
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#489

Janette Deacon

#89003
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Janette Deacon is a South African archaeologist specialising in heritage management and rock art conservation. She has studied the changes in stone tools from sites in the southern Cape in relation to climate change over the past 20,000 years. From 1985, she located rock engravings at places where the /Xam informants of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd lived in the nineteenth century. She served as a member of the SAHRA Council and was first chairperson of Heritage Western Cape.
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#490

Alison Betts

#90712
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Alison Venetia Graham Betts is a Scottish archaeologist and academic, who specialises in the "archaeology of the lands along the Silk Roads" and the nomadic peoples of the Near East. Since 2012, she has been Professor of Silk Road Studies at the University of Sydney.
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#491

Anna Melyukova

Anna Melyukova
#63521
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Anna Ivanovna Melyukova was a Russian archaeologist and a pioneer in the field of Scythian archaeology. At her alma mater, Moscow State University, she held the position of professor of archaeology and eventually, became the head of its department of Scythology.
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#492

Zakia Zouanat

#125537
Overall Influence
1957 - 2012 (55 years)
Zakia Zouanat was a Moroccan anthropologist. A researcher at the Institute of African Studies at Mohammed V University, she was an expert in Moroccan Sufism. Her research concerned biographic accounts of important Sufi figures in the 12th to 13th centuries. Zouanat sought to bridge Moroccans educated in French who accessed their religions through Arabic texts. As evidenced by her commentary on the Delos Initiative, she actively sought to promulgate the protection of pilgrimage sites important to Moroccan Sufis, as well as provide context for economic and cultural relevance.
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#493

Norma Diamond

#90576
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Norma Diamond was an American anthropologist who specialized in the study of Chinese society, especially in Taiwan, and women's studies. She was Professor of Anthropology at University of Michigan from 1963 to 1996, and named Professor Emerita. She was the first woman to be a tenure track professor in Anthropology at that institution.
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#494

Rotraut Wisskirchen

#102910
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Rotraut Wisskirchen was a German Biblical archaeologist. Wisskirchen was born on 23 June 1936 in Hagen and studied law in Munich and Bonn; then she worked from 1965 to 1967 as a lawyer in the Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. She was married to the lawyer Alfred Wisskirchen, with whom she had two daughters, also lawyers.
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#495

Elizabeth Graham

#137129
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Graham is a professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at UCL. She has worked, for decades, on the Maya civilization, both in prehispanic and colonial times, specifically in Belize. She has recently turned her attention to Maya Dark Earths, and conducts pioneering work in the maya region as dark earths have mostly been studied in the Amazonia. She particularly focuses on how human occupation influences soil formation and production.
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#496

Lyn Wadley

#126519
Overall Influence
Lyn Wadley is an honorary professor of archaeology, and also affiliated jointly with the Archaeology Department and the Institute for Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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#497

Elsa Redmond

#113786
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Elsa Marion Redmond is an American archaeologist at the American Museum of Natural History. She specialises in Latin American archaeology. She is an elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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#498

Daphne Berdahl

#121209
Overall Influence
1964 - 2007 (43 years)
Daphne Berdahl was an anthropologist known for her work on Eastern Germany and Post-socialist Europe. Her work on gender and consumption as well as her writing on post-communist nostalgia has been widely cited by scholars of post-socialism.
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#499

Alice Dewey

#147825
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Alice Greeley Dewey was an American anthropologist who studied Javanese society. She was a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 1962 until her retirement in 2005. Among her doctoral students was Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama.
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#500

Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome

Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome
#61215
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Susan Margaret Black, Baroness Black of Strome, is a Scottish forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic. She was the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University and is past President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. From 2003 to 2018 she was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee. She is President of St John's College, Oxford.
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