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,
#201
H. James Birx
#18629
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Harry James Birx , is an American anthropologist and a professor of Anthropology at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He is a distinguished research scholar at the State University of New York at Geneseo.
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William W. Howells
#25553
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
William White Howells was a professor of anthropology at Harvard University. Howells, grandson of the novelist William Dean Howells, was born in New York City, the son of John Mead Howells, the architect of the Chicago Tribune Tower, and Abby MacDougall White. He graduated with an S.B. in 1930 and obtained a doctorate from Harvard in 1934 and worked for the American Museum of Natural History. He lectured at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1954, serving as a lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II. He taught at Harvard from 1954 until his retirement ...
Go to Profile#203
Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
#31680
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Kenneth Adrian Raine Kennedy was an anthropologist who studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology and Asian Studies in the Division of Biological Sciences at Cornell University. Among his areas of interest have been forensic anthropology and human skeletal biology. He died in Ithaca, New York on April 23, 2014.
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Stanley Marion Garn
#17473
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Stanley Marion Garn Ph.D. was a human biologist and educator. He was Professor of Anthropology at the College for Literature, Science and Arts and Professor of Nutrition at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He joined the University of Michigan in 1968.
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Lionel Tiger
#11191
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Lionel Tiger is a Canadian-American anthropologist. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and co-Research Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Early life and education Born in 1937 in Montreal, Quebec, he is a graduate of McGill University, and the London School of Economics at the University of London, England. He is also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense on the future of biotechnology. Lionel Tiger lives in New York City, and regularly contributes to mainstream media such as Psychology Today and The New York Times.
Go to Profile#206
Henry Giroux
#740
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Henry Armand Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.
Go to Profile#207
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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Philip Gulliver
#11507
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Philip Hugh Gulliver was a Canadian anthropologist specifically in Oriental and African Studies, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at York University and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Marcus Banks
#36111
Overall Influence
1960 - 2020 (60 years)
Marcus John Banks was an English visual anthropologist, who did fieldwork among the Jains in Leicester, England and Jamnagar, Gujarat, India. He was a prominent figure in the development of visual anthropology in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
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Nematollah Fazeli
#32819
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Nematollah Fazeli is an Iranian anthropologist, author, and translator. Career Fazeli received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies. He received a masters in cultural anthropology from Tehran University. He is currently associate professor of cultural anthropology and cultural studies at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. He has been a Research Associate of SOAS since 2005. Fazeli's formal academic training was in anthropology and the social sciences but he concurrently continued his studies of cultural studies and sociology of literature and art at a professional academic level.
Go to Profile#211
Bruce Kapferer
#27370
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Bruce Kapferer is an Australian anthropologist. He is best known for his work on Sri Lanka, Australia and Zambia. He has been at the forefront of anthropological debate for over three decades. He was honoured with Huxley Prize in 2011 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.
Go to Profile#212
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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Jack Weatherford
#9866
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jack McIver Weatherford is the former DeWitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is best known for his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. In 2006, he was awarded the Order of the Polar Star, and the Order of Chinggis Khan in 2022, Mongolia’s two highest national honors. Moreover, he was honoured with the Order of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho by the Government of Bolivia in 2014.
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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.
Go to Profile#215
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.
Go to Profile#216
Chris Hann
#23634
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Areas of Specialization: Ethnography, History and Anthropology Christopher Hann is one of the founding Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a well-known British social anthropologist. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Jesus College at Cambridge, before taking on his graduate studies at University of Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College. As a graduate student, he focused his research on Eastern Europe, learning to speak and read Hungarian, and conducting field work in the Hungarian village of Tázlár. Perhaps best known for his ethnographic work, Hann has also explored the connections between anthropology and history.
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Teuku Jacob
#20663
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Teuku Jacob was an Indonesian paleoanthropologist. As a student of Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald in the 1950s, Jacob claimed to have discovered and studied numerous specimens of Homo erectus. He came to international prominence as a vocal critic of scientists who believed remains discovered in Flores belonged to a new species in the genus Homo, Homo floresiensis.
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Nasser Fakouhi
#16709
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nasser Fakouhi is an Iranian anthropologist, writer and translator. Fakouhi was born to a middle-class family in Tehran. He is a professor of anthropology of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran and the president of a scientific and multidisciplinary website called Anthropology and Culture . He is also a member of International Association of Sociology and International Society of Iranian Studies.
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Jean-Pierre Vernant
#3337
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Jean-Pierre Vernant was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and society which would itself be influential among classical scholars. He was an honorary professor at the Collège de France.
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Stanton Wortham
#31096
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Stanton E.F. Wortham is a teacher, scholar, and documentary film producer who is the inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean American professor at Boston College Lynch School of Education. Biography Wortham previously work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he was the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor and associate dean for academic affairs. He spent 18 years as a professor and administrator at Penn, where he served twice as interim dean of the Graduate School of Education and won awards for teaching excellence, including the University of Pennsylvania...
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Michael Brian Schiffer
#28274
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Brian Schiffer is an American archaeologist and one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer's earliest ideas, set out in his 1976 book Behavioral Archeology and many journal articles, are mainly concerned with the formation processes of the archaeological record . His most important early contribution to archaeology was the rejection of the common processualist assumption that the archaeological record is a transparent fossil record of actual ancient societies. In fact, he argues, artifacts and sites undergo, respectively post-use and post-occupat...
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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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Wolfgang Abel
#17219
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Wolfgang Abel was an Austrian anthropologist and one of Nazi Germany's top racial biologists. He was the son of the Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel. Early life and career From 1931 Wolfgang Abel was engaged at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. In 1933 he became a member of the NSDAP. He was involved in compulsory sterilization of children, who resulted from relationships between German women and dark-skinned French soldiers. In 1934 he wrote an article, which was published in the German newspaper "Neues Volk", with the title "Bastarde am Rhein" . In 1935 he joined the SS.
Go to Profile#224
Alexei Yurchak
#35352
Overall Influence
Alexei Vladimirovich Yurchak is a Russian-born American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations in Russia and the post-Soviet states.
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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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Joseph Tainter
#3637
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joseph Anthony Tainter is an American anthropologist and historian. Biography Tainter studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1975. he holds a professorship in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University. His previous positions include Project Leader of Cultural Heritage Research, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.
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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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Mary Catherine Bateson
#7465
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Mary Catherine Bateson was an American writer and cultural anthropologist. The daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Bateson was a noted author in her field with many published monographs. Among her books was With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, a recounting of her upbringing by two famous parents. She taught at Harvard, Amherst, and George Mason University, among others. Bateson was a fellow of the International Leadership Forum and was president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York until 2010.
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William R. Maples
#34248
Overall Influence
1937 - 1997 (60 years)
William Ross Maples, Ph.D. was an American forensic anthropologist working at the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History. His specialty was the study of bones. He worked on several high-profile criminal investigations, including those concerning historical figures such as Francisco Pizarro, the Romanov family, Joseph Merrick , President Zachary Taylor and Medgar Evers. His insights often proved beneficial in closing cases that otherwise may have remained unsolved.
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Mai Yamani
#14469
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mai Yamani is an independent Saudi scholar, author and anthropologist. Early life Yamani was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1956 to an Iraqi mother from Mosul and a Saudi Arabian father from Mecca. Her paternal grandfathers came from Yemen, hence the surname Yamani . Her early education included schooling in Baghdad, Iraq and Mecca, Saudi Arabia. She attended secondary school at the renowned Château Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1967 to 1975. She received her bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania; and subsequently attended Somerville College, University of Oxford, where she was the first Yemeni woman to obtain a M.St.
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Alain Testart
#19110
Overall Influence
1945 - 2013 (68 years)
Alain Testart was a French social anthropologist, emeritus research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and member of the Laboratory for Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. He specialized in primitives societies and comparative anthropology. His research themes included: slavery, marriage arrangements, funeral practices, gift and exchange, typology of societies, the political, the evolution of the societies, and questions of interpretation in prehistoric archaeology.
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Thomas Blom Hansen
#14318
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Thomas Blom Hansen is a Danish anthropologist and leading contemporary commentator on religious and political violence in India. Background Hansen has a BA in Sociology and an MA in political theory from the University of Aalborg in Denmark. He then did development work in Orissa, India, in the mid-1980s. He became interested in anthropology during a PhD on Indian nationalism in Pune and Mumbai in western India, begun in the late 1980s when he was unexpectedly granted a research visa to study nationalism. He graduated from Roskilde University and his D.Phil. was later made into a book .
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Ian Tattersall
#12022
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ian Tattersall is a British-born American paleoanthropologist and a curator emeritus with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York. In addition to human evolution, Tattersall has worked extensively with lemurs. Tattersall is currently working with the Templeton Foundation.
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Gen Suwa
#22487
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gen Suwa is a Japanese paleoanthropologist. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of the evolution of early hominids, including the discovery of a tooth from a hominid that was more than one million years older than the oldest previously known hominid. The discovery changed scientific opinion regarding the ancestral splits between humans, chimps and gorillas.
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Janice M. Morse
#43229
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Janice Margaret Morse in Blackburn, Lancs., UK to New Zealand parents. She is an anthropologist and nurse researcher who is best known as the founder and chief proponent of the field of qualitative health research. She has taught in the United States and Canada. She received PhDs in transcultural nursing and in anthropology at the University of Utah, where she later held the Ida May “Dotty” Barnes and D Keith Barnes Presidential Endowed Chair in the College of Nursing at University of Utah,. She is also an Emerita Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah and Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta.
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Russell Mittermeier
#9479
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Russell Alan Mittermeier is a primatologist and herpetologist. He has written several books for both popular and scientist audiences, and has authored more than 300 scientific papers. Biography Russell A. Mittermeier is Chief Conservation Officer of Re:wild . He served as President of Conservation International from 1989 to 2014, then Executive Vice-Chair from 2014 to 2017. He specialises in the fields of primatology, herpetology, biodiversity and conservation of tropical forests. He has undertaken research in more than 30 countries, including Amazonia and Madagascar.
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Bambi Schieffelin
#25715
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Bambi B. Schieffelin is a linguistic anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University in the department of Anthropology. Along with Elinor Ochs, she pioneered the field of language socialization. In addition, she has written extensively about language contact, language ideology, literacy, Haitian Creole, and missionization.
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Naomi Quinn
#20131
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Naomi Robin Quinn was a major figure in cognitive anthropology, with contributions to research methods and cultural models, particularly applied to topics such as American models of marriage and relationships and to child-rearing cross-culturally.
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Fredric Jameson
#124
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Political Unconscious .
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Martin C. Putna
#15764
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Prof. Mgr. Martin C. Putna, Dr., is a Czech literary historian, university teacher, publicist and essayist. He works at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Biography and career Putna was born in Písek, Czech Republic. Between 1986 and 1991 he studied Philology at the Charles University in Prague. Since 1992 he has worked at the Charles University. He also studied Theology at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. He was visiting scholar at the University of Regensburg.
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John Howland Rowe
#22929
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
John Howland Rowe was an American archaeologist and anthropologist known for his extensive research on Peru, especially on the Inca civilization. Rowe studied classical archaeology at Brown University and anthropology at Harvard University . After graduating he traveled to Peru where he undertook archaeological research and taught until 1943. Between 1944 and 1946 he served as sergeant in the U.S. Combat Engineers in Europe. From 1946 to 1948 he studied the Guambía people in Colombia for the Smithsonian Institution, returning briefly to Harvard in 1946 to complete his doctorate in Latin American history and anthropology in 1947.
Go to Profile#242
David Wengrow
#11048
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He co-authored the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in 2022. Wengrow has contributed essays on topics such as social inequality and climate change to The Guardian and The New York Times. In 2021 he was ranked No. 10 in ArtReview's Power 100 list of the most influential people in art.
Go to Profile#243
Regina Bendix
#39857
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Dr. Regina Bendix is a professor of European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. History Bendix began her academic studies in Volkskunde, cultural anthropology and German studies in her native Switzerland. She immigrated to the United States in 1980 when she moved to Berkeley, California. Here she completed a B.A. in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. She pursued graduate studies at Indiana University where she completed a M.A. in 1984 in Folklore, with minors in cultural anthropology and German studies. Ultimately she was awarded her PhD in these disciplines in 1987.
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Helen Fisher
#6590
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Helen Elizabeth Fisher is an American anthropologist, human behavior researcher, and self-help author. She is a biological anthropologist, is a senior research fellow, at The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, and a member of the Center For Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Prior to Rutgers University, she was a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
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Alba Zaluar
#36935
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Alba Maria Zaluar was a Brazilian anthropologist, with emphases in urban anthropology and in anthropology of violence. In 1984, she obtained her PhD in social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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Charles L. Briggs
#27357
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Charles Leslie Briggs is an anthropologist who works at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Before working at Berkeley he held a position as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department and Director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at University of California, San Diego.
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Arturo Escobar
#10714
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Arturo Escobar is a Colombian-American anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His academic research interests include political ecology, anthropology of development, social movements, anti-globalization movements, political ontology, and postdevelopment theory.
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Dmitri Bondarenko
#14870
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Dmitri Mikhailovich Bondarenko is a Russian anthropologist, historian, and Africanist. He has conducted field research in a number of African countries and among Black people in Russia and the United States. He is Principal Research Fellow and Vice-Director for Research with the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the International Center of Anthropology of the HSE University, and Full Professor in Ethnology with the Center of Social Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. He holds the titles of Professor in Ethnology from th...
Go to Profile#249
Anthony Cohen
#42833
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Anthony Cohen, CBE, FRSE is a British social anthropologist and served as Principal of Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University. Cohen was born in London in 1946. Educated at Whittingehame College, Brighton, the University of Geneva and the University of Southampton, he is a social anthropologist with specialist interests in personal, social and national identity. He conducted fieldwork in Springdale, Newfoundland on local-level politics; and in Whalsay , the longest sustained study of a rural British community ever undertaken. He then did research on personal and national identity in Scotland, ...
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Maeve Kennedy McKean
#8411
Overall Influence
1979 - 2020 (41 years)
Maeve Fahey Kennedy McKean was an American public health official, human rights attorney, and academic. A member of the Kennedy family, she was a daughter of Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and a granddaughter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
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