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 people in Anthropology,
#151
John Victor Murra
#20003
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
John Victor Murra was a Ukrainian-American professor of anthropology and a researcher of the Inca Empire. Early life and education Born Isak Lipschitz in Odesa, Ukraine, Russian Empire, in 1916, Murra emigrated to the United States in 1934 and completed an undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1936. In 1937, he sailed to Europe and fought in the Spanish Civil War as a foreign volunteer on the side of the Second Spanish Republic. Serving as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, he initially worked as a smuggler out of Perpignan, France. He then entered Spain and was wounded in battle during the Battle of the Ebro.
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Wolfgang Fikentscher
#16558
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Wolfgang Fikentscher was a German jurist and legal anthropologist. Life Fikentscher was born in Nuremberg, Germany. He earned his Dr. juris and S.J.D. at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich/Germany. His professional career began as assistant in the law department of Wackerchemie , at that time under Allied IG Farben control, and as teacher of labor law at trade union schools . In 1952, he received the degree of LL.M at University of Michigan Law School In 1957, he was appointed full professor at University of Münster School of Law. In 1965, he went to University of Tübingen and in 1971 ...
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Roy Rappaport
#12478
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Roy Abraham Rappaport was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology. Biography Rappaport was born in New York City on 25 March 1926. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University and held a tenured position at the University of Michigan.
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Dennis Tedlock
#13506
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Dennis Ernest Tedlock was an ethnopoeticist, linguist, translator, and poet. He was a leading expert of Mayan language, culture, and arts, best known for his definitive translation of the Mayan text, Popul Vuh, for which he was awarded the PEN translation prize. He co-founded the method of ethnopoetics with Jerome Rothenburg in the late 1960s.
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Andrew Strathern
#23324
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Andrew Jamieson Strathern is a British anthropologist. Strathern earned a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he serves as Andrew Mellon Professor of Anthropology. He is married to Pamela J. Stewart, a fellow anthropologist employed at Pitt. A collection of their joint work is held at the University of Pittsburgh, as the Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern Archive, and at the University of California, San Diego, as the Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Photographs and Audiorecordings. Andrew Strathern is a fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.
Go to Profile#156
Edmund Snow Carpenter
#6810
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter was an American anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media. Early life Born in Rochester, New York to the artist and educator Fletcher Hawthorne Carpenter and Agnes "Barbara" Wight , he was one of four children.
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Owen Beattie
#15763
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Owen Beattie is a Canadian professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta. Beattie gained international attention in 1984 for his investigation into the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin, which had left England in 1845 searching for the Northwest Passage. His specialized knowledge of human skeletal biology and forensic anthropology has led Beattie to assist the RCMP and other agencies in criminal investigations and accidents, including the Hinton rail disaster in central Alberta. Through the exhumation in 1984 and 1986 of the frozen bodies of Petty Officer John Torrington, Able-bod...
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Christian Giordano
#24726
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Christian Giordano was a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist born in Lugano, Switzerland. Since 1989, he has been Professor of Ethnology and Social Anthropology and Head of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has also been teaching 'Contemporary Social Theories' at the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural Exchanges, Bucharest in Romania.
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Tom Dillehay
#17598
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Tom Dillehay is an American anthropologist currently serving as the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture, as well as a Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He has previously held teaching positions at the Universidad Austral de Chile and the University of Kentucky. Since 1977, Dillehay has been actively involved in the excavations at Monte Verde, a site in Chile where an early human settlement was discovered in 1975. Based on calibrated carbon 14 dates, Dillehay proposes that the remains found at Monte Verde are approximately 14,800 years old.
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Robin Fox
#8284
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Robin Fox is an Anglo-American anthropologist who has written on the topics of incest avoidance, marriage systems, human and primate kinship systems, evolutionary anthropology, sociology and the history of ideas in the social sciences. He founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers University in 1967 and had remained a professor there for the rest of his career, also being a director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation from 1972 to 1984.
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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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Rane Willerslev
#19021
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Rane Willerslev is a Danish anthropologist. In his academic career, he has travelled extensively and has a particular interest in primitive tribal cultures, both present and prehistoric. On 1 July 2017, he was appointed director of the National Museum of Denmark by Culture Minister Mette Bock.
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Daniel Miller
#13379
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Areas of Specialization: Digital Anthropology Daniel Miller is a Professor of Anthropology at UCL Institute of Education. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Archaeology from University of Cambridge. He is the founder of University College of London’s digital anthropology program and the director of Why We Post: Global Social Media Impact Study, an international anthropological study of human social media usage. In so doing, he pioneered the study of digital anthropology, which investigates the experience of human/technology interactions. Why We Post generated a body of research that has been downloaded more than half a million times.
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Christopher Tilley
#17232
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Chris Tilley is a British archaeologist known for his contributions to postprocessualist archaeological theory. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at University College London.
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Barry Bogin
#9971
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Barry Bogin is an American physical anthropologist trained at Temple University who researches physical growth in Guatemalan Maya children, and is a theorist upon the evolutionary origins of human childhood. He is a professor at Loughborough University in the UK, after professorships at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Wayne State University. During 1974–1976, he was a visiting professor at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
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A. Kimball Romney
#19794
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Antone Kimball Romney is an American social sciences professor and one of the founders of cognitive anthropology. He spent most of his career at the University of California, Irvine. Romney was born in Rexburg, Idaho in August 1925. He received his B.A. from Brigham Young University in sociology, his M.A. from Brigham Young University also in sociology, his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Social Anthropology, Social Relations Department. 1955‑56 Assistant Professor, at the University of Chicago. 1957‑60 Assistant Professor, Stanford University. 1960‑66 Associate Professor, Stanford University.
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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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Erik Trinkaus
#12391
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Erik Trinkaus is a paleoanthropologist specializing in Neandertal and early modern human biology and human evolution. Trinkaus researches the evolution of the species Homo sapiens and recent human diversity, focusing on the paleoanthropology and emergence of late archaic and early modern humans, and the subsequent evolution of anatomically modern humanity. Trinkaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor Emeritus of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as Science, Proceedi...
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Alan Macfarlane
#9963
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Alan Donald James Macfarlane is an anthropologist and historian, and a Professor Emeritus of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of 20 books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China. He has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In recent years he has become increasingly interested in the use of visual material in teaching and research. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.
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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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Berhane Asfaw
#12449
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Berhane Asfaw is an Ethiopian paleontologist of Rift Valley Research Service, who co-discovered human skeletal remains at Herto Bouri, Ethiopia later classified as Homo sapiens idaltu, proposed as an early subspecies of anatomically modern humans.
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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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Keith Hart
#14531
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Keith Hart is a British anthropologist and writer living in Paris. His main research has focused on economic anthropology, Africa and the African diaspora, and money. He has taught at universities including East Anglia, Manchester, Yale and the Chicago, as well as at Cambridge University where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World and Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes. His written work f...
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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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Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah
#11550
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah was a social anthropologist and Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specialised in studies of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Tamils, as well as the anthropology of religion and politics.
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Keith H. Basso
#13172
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Keith Hamilton Basso was a cultural and linguistic anthropologist noted for his study of the Western Apaches, specifically those from the community of Cibecue, Arizona. Basso was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and earlier taught at the University of Arizona and Yale University.
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Marcel Danesi
#4658
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marcel Danesi is Professor of Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is known for his work in language, communications and semiotics and is Director of the program in semiotics and communication theory. He has also held positions at Rutgers University , University of Rome "La Sapienza" , the Catholic University of Milan and the University of Lugano.
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Yohannes Haile-Selassie
#13644
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Yohannes Haile-Selassie Ambaye is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist. An authority on pre-Homo sapiens hominids, he particularly focuses his attention on the East African Rift and Middle Awash valleys. He was curator of Physical Anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History from 2002 until 2021, and now is serving as the director of the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins. Since founding the institute in 1981, he has been the third director after Donald Johanson and William Kimbel.
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Kent Flannery
#14572
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Kent Vaughn Flannery is a North American archaeologist who has conducted and published extensive research on the pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations of Mesoamerica, and in particular those of central and southern Mexico. He has also published influential work on origins of agriculture and village life in the Near east, pastoralists in the Andes, and cultural evolution, and many critiques of modern trends in archaeological method, theory, and practice. At the University of Chicago he gained his B.A. degree in 1954; the M.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1964. From 1966 to 1980 he directed proje...
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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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Horace Mitchell Miner
#28995
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Horace Mitchell Miner was an American anthropologist, particularly interested in those languages of his time that were still closely tied to the earth and agricultural practices. During World War II, he served as a counterintelligence agent in Italy and Japan. In 1937, he earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago, going on to teach there, as well as at other universities in the United States, and on a Fulbright Fellowship at a college in Uganda. He later worked elsewhere in Africa, and in South America.
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Louis Dumont
#4087
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Louis Charles Jean Dumont was a French anthropologist. Dumont was born in Thessaloniki, in the Salonica Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. He taught at Oxford University during the 1950s, and was then director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. A specialist on the cultures and societies of India, Dumont also studied western social philosophy and ideologies.
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Giulio Angioni
#13685
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Giulio Angioni was an Italian writer and anthropologist. Biography Angioni was a leading Italian anthropologist, professor at the University of Cagliari and fellow of St Antony's College of the University of Oxford. He is the author of about twenty books of fiction and a dozen volumes of essays in anthropology.
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Gordon Willey
#10881
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Gordon Randolph Willey was an American archaeologist who was described by colleagues as the "dean" of New World archaeology. Willey performed fieldwork at excavations in South America, Central America and the Southeastern United States; and pioneered the development and methodology for settlement patterns theories. He worked as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian Institution and as a professor at Harvard University.
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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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David W. Anthony
#12447
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David W. Anthony is an American anthropologist who is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Hartwick College. He specializes in Indo-European migrations, and is a proponent of the Kurgan hypothesis. Anthony is well known for his award-winning book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language .
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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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Norman Sauer
#15063
Overall Influence
Norman J. Sauer is an American forensic anthropologist and professor emeritus of anthropology at Michigan State University . Education Sauer received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Geneseo and his Ph.D. from Michigan State University.
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Chuner Taksami
#34331
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Chuner Mikhailovich Taksami was a Russian ethnographer of Nivkh origin and had a Doctor of Historical Sciences attained in 1955. Taksami was born in Kalma, Khabarovsk Krai, Russian SFSR. He was a spokesman for the Nivkh and other Siberian peoples. Taksami specialized in Siberian historical, archeological, and anthropological research. He was the Director of Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg, Russia from 1997 to 2001. After his museum tenure was over Taksami collaborated with professors from Chiba University organizing ethnolinguistic expeditions to Nivkh settlements in the lower Amur River basin and on northern Sakhalin.
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Jerome H. Barkow
#14419
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jerome H. Barkow is a Canadian anthropologist who works in the field of evolutionary psychology. He is a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University. Barkow received a BA in Psychology from Brooklyn College in 1964 and a PhD in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1970. Formerly a professor of Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, he retired as professor emeritus in 2008, and was an honorary professor at Queen's University Belfast from 2010 to 2017.
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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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Richard Jantz
#23142
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Richard L. Jantz is an American anthropologist. He served as the director of the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility from 1998–2011 and he is the current Professor Emeritus of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses primarily on forensic anthropology, skeletal biology, dermatoglyphics, anthropometry, anthropological genetics, and human variation, as well as developing computerized databases in these areas which aid in anthropological research. The author of over a hundred journal articles and other publications, his ...
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Ladislav Holý
#24023
Overall Influence
1933 - 1997 (64 years)
Ladislav Holý was a Czech anthropologist and Africanist of the British school of social anthropology. He combined interpretative approach with methodological individualism, most notably in the Actions, Norms and Representations, co-written with Milan Stuchlik.
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Chris Stringer
#11211
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Christopher Brian Stringer is a British physical anthropologist noted for his work on human evolution. Biography Growing up in a working-class family in the East End of London, Stringer first took an interest in anthropology during primary school, when he undertook a project on Neanderthals. Stringer studied anthropology at University College London, holds a PhD in Anatomical Science and a DSc in Anatomical Science .
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Manolis Andronikos
#13457
Overall Influence
1919 - 1992 (73 years)
Manolis Andronikos was a Greek archaeologist and a professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Biography Andronikos was born on October 23, 1919, at Bursa . His father originated from the island of Samos, while his mother was from Imbros. Later, his family moved to Thessaloniki.
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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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Bernard Cohn
#22131
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Bernard S. Cohn was an American anthropologist and scholar of British colonialism in India, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Cohn received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1949 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University in 1954. From 1952-3 he engaged in field research in India as a Fulbright scholar. In addition to Chicago, he also taught at the University of Rochester and was a research assistant for the US Army at Fort Benning. In 1968, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Jacques Ruffié
#15113
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Jacques Ruffié was a French haematologist, geneticist, and anthropologist. He founded a discipline, called blood typing, which allowed the study of blood characteristics to find the history of the people, their migration and their successive interbreeding. He was a colleague and great personal friend of Michel Foucault at the College de France; Foucault mentions him in a newly discovered essay review of a book that Ruffié published in 1976, entitled De la biologie à la culture .
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