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,
#1
Mary Douglas
#619
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Dame Mary Douglas, was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture, symbolism and risk, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
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Chie Nakane
#4813
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
was a Japanese anthropologist and Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Tokyo. Education and career Nakane was born in Tokyo and spent her teenage years in Beijing. She graduated from Tsuda College in 1947 and then completed her graduate work specializing in China and Tibet at the University of Tokyo in 1952. In 1953–1957, she did fieldwork in India and studied in the London School of Economics. Nakane served as Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago at the invitation of Sol Tax from 1959 to 1960 and as Visiting Lecturer in the...
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Henrietta Moore
#6618
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Dame Henrietta Louise Moore, is a British social anthropologist. She is the director of the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity at University College, London, part of the Bartlett, UCL's Faculty of the Built Environment.
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Marilyn Strathern
#5135
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Areas of Specialization: Social Anthropology Marilyn Strathern was born in 1941 in North Wales. She attended Crofton Lane Primary School and Bromley High School before moving on to study Archaeology and Anthropology at Girton College. She earned her Ph.D. from Girton College in 1968. Strathern has spent her career working with the people of Papua New Guinea. Her approach to feminist anthropology has yielded important scholarship, including Self-Interest and the Social Good: Some Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery and Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond.
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Jane Goodall
#149
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dame Jane Morris Goodall , formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzeess, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.
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Kathy Reichs
#7314
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kathleen Joan Reichs is an American crime writer, forensic anthropologist and academic. She is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is well known for inspiring the television series Bones.
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Fadwa El Guindi
#7770
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Fadwa El Guindi is an Egyptian-American anthropologist and former professor of anthropology at Qatar University. She is the author of several ethnographies, including The Myth of Ritual: A Native's Ethnography of Zapotec Life-Crisis Rituals and By Noon Prayer: The Rhythm of Islam .
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Tanya Luhrmann
#6586
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality, and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
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Anna Tsing
#7054
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
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Laura Nader
#6086
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Laura Nader is an American anthropologist. She has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960. She was the first woman to receive a tenure-track position in the department. She is also the older sister of U.S. activist, consumer advocate, and frequent third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and the younger sister of community advocate Shafeek Nader and social scientist Claire Nader.
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Sherry Ortner
#7352
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sherry Beth Ortner is an American cultural anthropologist and has been a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004. Biography Ortner grew up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Weequahic High School, as did Philip Roth and Richie Roberts. She received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. She then studied anthropology at the University of Chicago with Clifford Geertz and obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1970 for her fieldwork among the Sherpas in Nepal. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Kira Hall
#10614
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kira Hall is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice , at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The majority of Hall's work focuses on language in India and the United States, with special attention to organizations of gender and sexuality. A special focus of her work has been the linguistic and sociocultural practices of Hindi-speaking Hijras in northern India, a transgender group often discussed in the anthropological literature as a "third sex."
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Veena Das
#6986
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Veena Das, FBA in India is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her areas of theoretical specialisation include the anthropology of violence, social suffering, and the state. Das has received multiple international awards including the Ander Retzius Gold Medal, delivered the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture and was named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Madeleine Leininger
#7217
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Madeleine Leininger was a nursing theorist, nursing professor and developer of the concept of transcultural nursing. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care.
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Dorothy E. Smith
#2270
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
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Fiona Graham
#19526
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Fiona Caroline Graham was an Australian anthropologist working as a geisha in Japan. She made her debut as a geisha in 2007 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo under the name Sayuki as a part of her anthropological study, and was working in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo.
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Jean Comaroff
#12363
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean Comaroff is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa. Until 2012, Jean was the Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
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Gayle Rubin
#2277
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, best known for her pioneering work in feminist theory and queer studies. Her essay "The Traffic in Women" had a lasting influence in second-wave feminism and early gender studies, by arguing that gender oppression could not be adequately explained by Marxist conceptions of the patriarchy. Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She has written on a range of subjects including the politics of sexuality, gender oppression, sa...
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Nancy Scheper-Hughes
#9247
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a program director and professor for medical anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in social science and a Ph.D. in anthropology. She also served a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard University. Her research has specialized in many areas, including, but not limited to: cultural forensic anthropology, human organ trafficking, invisible genocides, Pope Francis, violence, death squads, and epidemics.
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Louise Lamphere
#18617
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Feminist Anthropology, Urban Anthropology Louise Lamphere is a feminist anthropologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research interests have included feminist anthropology, gender, de-industrialization, and urban anthropology. She has published extensively on Native American issues, such as kinship and cooperation, and on issues such as working mothers, immigration and women’s lives and remains active in her advocacy on behalf of feminist causes. Lamphere started as an ass...
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Mary Leakey
#3449
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, eastern Africa. For much of her career she worked with her husband, Louis Leakey, at Olduvai Gorge, where they uncovered fossils of ancient hominines and the earliest hominins, as well as the stone tools produced by the latter group. Mary Leakey developed a system for classifying the stone tools found at Olduvai. She discovered the Laetol...
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Marija Gimbutas
#990
Overall Influence
1921 - 1994 (73 years)
Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.
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Ruth Landes
#11837
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Ruth Landes was an American cultural anthropologist best known for studies on the Brazilian religion of Candomblé and her published study on the topic, City of Women . Landes is recognized by some as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations.
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Margaret Lock
#15251
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Margaret Lock is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.
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Mary-Ann Ochota
#16008
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Mary-Ann Ochota is a British broadcaster and anthropologist specialising in anthropology, archaeology, social history and adventure factual television. Biography Ochota was born and grew up in Wincham, Northwich, Cheshire, to an Indian mother and a Polish father. She studied at the sixth-form college of Sir John Deane's College.
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Janet Carsten
#10869
Overall Influence
Janet Carsten is an anthropologist and professor currently employed at the University of Edinburgh. Carsten studies social and cultural anthropology. She is the daughter of the British historian Francis Ludwig Carsten.
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Ruth Shady
#11967
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ruth Martha Shady Solís is a Peruvian anthropologist and archaeologist. She is the founder and director of the archaeological project at Caral. Career Throughout her career, she has directed many different projects of archeological investigation on the coast, the highlands and the rain forests of Peru, placing emphasis on the study of the development of the complex socio-political organizations. She was director of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Antropología del Perú , and director of the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of National University of San Marcos. She has worked at the Ca...
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Unni Wikan
#22649
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Unni Wikan is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has served as visiting professor at the University of Chicago , Harvard University , Goethe University, Frankfurt , London School of Economics , École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris . She has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard University , guest lecturer at Harvard , guest lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel and visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University .
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Jane E. Buikstra
#21230
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jane Ellen Buikstra, a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist, earned her B.A. in anthropology from DePauw University and her M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. She is a professor and director of the Center for Bioarchaeological Research within the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, president of the Center for American Archaeology and the first editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Palaeopathology. Her research has reflected her interdisciplinary expertise, in fields as diverse as bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology and paleodemography, among others.
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Laura Bohannan
#15402
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Laura Bohannan , pen name Elenore Smith Bowen, was an American cultural anthropologist best known for her 1966 article, "Shakespeare in the Bush." Bohannan also wrote two books during the 1960s, Tiv Economy, with her husband, and Return to Laughter, a novel. These works were based on her travels and work in Africa between 1949 and 1953.
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Alison Galloway
#22449
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alison Galloway is a forensic anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is best known for her work in identifying the physical remains of Laci Peterson in the Scott Peterson Trial. She co-edited a book called The Evolving Female: A Life History Perspective with Mary Morbeck and Adrienne Zihlmann. She is also editor of "Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma" and co-editor of the second edition of that volume. She is also co-author of "Practicing Forensic Anthropology: an eResource" with Susan Kuzminsky.
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Kay Warren
#24826
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Kay Barbara Warren is an American academic anthropologist, known for her extensive research and publications in cultural anthropology studies. Initially trained as an anthropologist specializing in field studies of Latin American and Mesoamerican indigenous cultures, Warren has also written and lectured on an array of broader anthropological topics. These include studies about the impacts on politically marginalized and indigenous communities of social movements, wars and political violence, transnationalism, and foreign aid programs. Warren holds an endowed chair as the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr.
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Audrey Smedley
#32178
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Audrey Smedley was an American social anthropologist and professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University in anthropology and African-American studies. Early life and education Smedley received her BA and MA in history and anthropology from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Manchester in the UK, based on field research in northern Nigeria. She taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses in social anthropology, African societies and cultures, the history of anthropology, and anthropological theory.
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Elinor Ochs
#16122
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Elinor Ochs is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Ochs has conducted fieldwork in Madagascar, Italy, Samoa and the United States of America on communication and interaction. Together with Bambi Schieffelin, Professor Ochs developed language socialization, a field of inquiry which examines the ways in which individuals become competent members of communities of practice to and through the use of language. Professor Ochs is also known for her contributions to applied linguistics and the theorization of narr...
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Setha Low
#11466
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Setha M. Low is a former president of the American Anthropological Association, a professor in environmental psychology, and the director of the Public Space Research Group at the City University of New York. Low also served as a Conservation Guest Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute.
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Janice Boddy
#13612
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Janice Boddy is a Canadian anthropologist. As Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Boddy specializes in medical anthropology, religion, gender issues, and colonialism in Sudan and the Middle East. She is the author or co-author of Wombs and Alien Spirits , Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl , and Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan .
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Françoise Héritier
#15258
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Françoise Héritier was a French anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist. She was the successor of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France . Her work dealt mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest . In addition to Lévi-Strauss, she was also influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. She was replaced by Philippe Descola, who is the current holder of the chair of anthropology at the Collège.
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Cora Du Bois
#19921
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Cora Alice Du Bois was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally. She was Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College from 1954. After retirement from Radcliffe, she was Professor-at-large at Cornell University and for one term at the University of California, San Diego .
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Karen Ho
#27560
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Karen Ho is an American anthropologist. She contributed to anthropological research in Wall Street culture. Ho is a Marshall Scholar. Life Karen Ho grew up in a middle-class household outside Memphis. Her father was a Taiwanese immigrant and doctor. She earned her undergraduate and master's degrees at Stanford University and got her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University.
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Saba Mahmood
#13170
Overall Influence
1961 - 2018 (57 years)
Saba Mahmood was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Tal...
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Ruth Behar
#15030
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.
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Amber Case
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#19023
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Amber Case is an American cyborg anthropologist, user experience designer and public speaker. She studies the interaction between humans and technology. Biography Case was born in about 1986. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology from Lewis & Clark College in 2008, having written a thesis about cell phones. In 2008, she co-founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and computers.
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Catherine Lutz
#22050
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Catherine A. Lutz is an American anthropologist and Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. She is also a Research Professor at the Watson Institute where she serves as a director of the Costs of War Project, which attempts to calculate the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
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Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
#6336
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sarah Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She is considered "a highly recognized pioneer in modernizing our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates". In 2013, Hrdy received a Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
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Lila Abu-Lughod
#9609
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lila Abu-Lughod is a Palestinian-American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world, and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry, nationalism and media, gender politics and the politics of memory.
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Eugenie Scott
#1894
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique of overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.
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Annette Weiner
#27390
Overall Influence
1933 - 1997 (64 years)
Annette Barbara Weiner née Cohen was an American anthropologist, Kriser Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, chair of the Anthropology Department, dean of the social sciences, and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. She was known for her ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands and her development of the concept of inalienable wealth in social anthropological theory.
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Gabriella Coleman
#6888
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Enid Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on cultures of hacking and online activism, particularly Anonymous. She previously held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific & Technological Literacy at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada and is currently a full professor at Harvard University's Department of Anthropology.
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Sally Falk Moore
#22640
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Sally Falk Moore was a legal anthropologist and professor emerita at Harvard University. She did her major fieldwork in Tanzania and published extensively on cross-cultural, comparative legal theory.
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Meave Leakey
#12723
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Meave G. Leakey is a British palaeoanthropologist. She works at Stony Brook University and is co-ordinator of Plio-Pleistocene research at the Turkana Basin Institute. She studies early hominid evolution and has done extensive field research in the Turkana Basin. She has Doctor of Philosophy and Doctor of Science degrees.
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