Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#2001

Martyn Jope

#111959

Overall Influence

1915 - 1996 (81 years)

Edward Martyn Jope was an English archaeologist and chemist. He worked temporarily during the Second World War as a biochemist. Following the war, he returned to working in archaeology, first as a medievalist and later as a prehistorian.

#2002

Colin Burgess

#156991

Overall Influence

1938 - 2014 (76 years)

Colin B Burgess was an archaeologist specializing in the Bronze Age, especially in the north east of England and the Mediterranean. Biography Originally from London, Burgess studied at Cardiff University, where he wrote an undergraduate dissertation on bronze-age metalwork from the Thames.

#2003

Roger Tomlin

#103981

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Roger Simon Ouin Tomlin is a British archaeologist specialising in the translation of Latin text and epigraphy. Tomlin is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Early life Tomlin first studied Honour Moderations at Oxford University before continuing onto study Literae humaniores . His college tutor was Peter Brunt, the Camden Professor of Ancient History.

#2004

Frances J. White

#105944

Overall Influence

Frances J. White is a British biological anthropologist, professor, and primatologist at the University of Oregon. As a behavioral ecologist, her research focuses on the evolution of primate sociality and social systems. She has studied the socioecology of the bonobo chimpanzee for over 35 years at Lomako Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is the foremost American authority on this species in the wild and has done extensive field research on the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzees. Her bonobo research examines why bonobos have evolved a very different social system compared to the closel...

#2005

Erez Ben-Yosef

#101497

Overall Influence

Erez Ben-Yosef is an Israeli archaeologist best known for leading 21st century digs at the ancient copper mines in the Timna Valley, Sinai peninsula. He is Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

#2006

Dan Morse

#174678

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dan Franklin Morse is an archaeologist specializing in the prehistory of the midwestern United States and the central Mississippi Valley, research summarized in a number of books, monographs, and technical articles. He is best known for his 1983 synthesis of the "Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley" with Phyllis A. Morse, and for his 1997 volume issued by the Smithsonian Institution Press on "Sloan: A Paleoindian Dalton Cemetery in Arkansas." The Sloan site is the location of the oldest marked cemetery found to date in the Americas. He conducted excavations on a great many other sign...

#2007

Helmi Järviluoma

#152925

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä is a Finnish sound, music, and cultural scholar and writer. She is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. As sensory and soundscape ethnographer, Järviluoma has developed the mobile method of sensobiographic walking. Her research and art spans the fields of sensory remembering, qualitative methodology , environmental cultural studies, sound art and fiction writing. Helmi Järviluoma was married to Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä .[in Finnish]

#2008

Sherylyn Briller

#176414

Overall Influence

Sherylyn H. Briller is an American cultural anthropologist, who specializes in medical anthropology and applied anthropology. Briller is a professor of anthropology, a faculty associate for the Center on Aging and the Life Course , an affiliated faculty in the Critical Disabilities Studies Program, and an instructor for the Design and Innovation minor at Purdue University. Briller's research focuses on the cross-cultural study of health, aging, disability and end-of-life issues in Mongolia and various parts of the United States. She has completed work as a researcher and consultant for variou...

#2009

Leslie Alcock

#23688

Overall Influence

1925 - 2006 (81 years)

Leslie Alcock was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and one of the leading archaeologists of Early Medieval Britain. His major excavations included Dinas Powys hill fort in Wales, Cadbury Castle in Somerset and a series of major hillforts in Scotland.

#2010

Helen Loney

#117782

Overall Influence

Helen Loney is an archaeologist specialising in the study of prehistory. She is a course tutor in archaeology at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. She has previously worked as Principal Lecturer in Archaeology and Heritage Studies at the University of Worcester and as Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow .

#2011

Amy Richlin

#162512

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Amy Ellen Richlin is a professor in the Department of Classics at the University of California Los Angeles . Her specialist areas include Latin literature, the history of sexuality, and feminist theory.

#2012

Martin Ostwald

#28566

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Martin Ostwald was a German-American classical scholar, who taught until 1992 at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. His main field of study was the political structures of Ancient Greece.

#2013

Charlie Gere

#33542

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Charlie Gere is a British academic who is professor of media theory and history at The Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, The University of Lancaster and previously, director of research at the Institute for Cultural Research at The University of Lancaster. He is author of several books and articles on new media art, art and technology, continental philosophy and technology. His main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to post-conceptual art and philosophy.

#2014

Otar Lordkipanidze

#91300

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

Otar Lordkipanidze was a Georgian archaeologist best known for his studies of the ancient sites of Colchis and Iberia and the presence of the Achaemenid culture in the South Caucasus. He was the father of the Georgian paleoanthropologist David Lordkipanidze.

#2015

Pearl Duncan

#90255

Overall Influence

Pearl Maud Duncan Booth was an Australian teacher, anthropologist and academic. A Gamilaraay woman, she was the first known tertiary-qualified Indigenous teacher in Australia. She was named a Queensland Great in 2008.

#2016

Lola Romanucci-Ross

#159568

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Lola Romanucci-Ross was an American cultural anthropologist who has authored and co-authored a number of works on medical, social, and cultural anthropology, with fieldwork in Melanesia , rural Mexico, and her mother's home town in Italy. She was a long-time friend and collaborator of Margaret Mead, having done fieldwork with her in Manus, and later worked with her then-husband Theodore Schwartz on a team of social science researchers under the guidance of Erich Fromm in rural Mexico.

#2017

Deb Verhoeven

#102175

Overall Influence

Deb Verhoeven is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics at the University of Alberta. Previously she was Associate Dean of Engagement and Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney, and before this she was Professor of Media and Communication at Deakin University. Until 2011 she held the role of director of the AFI Research Collection at RMIT. A writer, broadcaster, film critic and commentator, Verhoeven is the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. Her book Jane Campion published by Routledge, is a detailed case study of the com...

#2018

Gilbert Charles-Picard

#79031

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Gilbert Picard, called Gilbert Charles-Picard, was a 20th-century French historian and archaeologist, a specialist of North Africa during Antiquity. The son of Hellenist Charles Picard , he was born at Nercillac. He was married to Colette Picard, also an historian of antiquity and curator of the site of Carthage, and was the father of Olivier Picard, also an Hellenist, former director of the French School at Athens and a member of the Institut de France.

#2019

Anne Salmond

#146005

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Dame Mary Anne Salmond is a New Zealand anthropologist, environmentalist and writer. She was New Zealander of the Year in 2013. In 2020, she was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, the highest honour in New Zealand's royal honours system.

#2020

Jo McDonald

#169393

Overall Influence

Dr Josephine McDonald is an Australian archaeologist and Director of the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia. McDonald is primarily known for her influence in the field of rock art research and her collaborative research with Australian Aboriginal communities.

#2021

Steven Loza

#90102

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Steven Joseph "Steve" Loza is professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA and Lecturer III in music at the University of New Mexico. He is an author of two books and editor of four anthologies in Latin music, including the first in-depth biography of Tito Puente.

#2022

Egbert Bakker

#95902

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Egbert Jan Bakker is a Dutch classical scholar specializing in Greek language, literature and linguistics. He currently is a professor of Classics at Yale University. Career Bakker was born in 1958 in Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1988. Bakker was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences for several months in 1992. He lectured at Leiden University, University of Virginia, University of Texas at Austin, and the Université de Montréal before starting at Yale University in 2004.

#2023

Richard Miles

#95250

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Richard Miles is a British historian and archaeologist, best known for presenting two major historical documentary series: BBC2's Ancient Worlds , which presented a comprehensive overview of classical history and the dawn of civilisation, and BBC Four's Archaeology: A Secret History .

#2024

Romuald Schild

#71325

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Romuald Schild was a Polish archaeologist who was professor for the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He died on 23 November 2021, at the age of 85. Biography He studied at the University of Warsaw . After completing his doctorate , he worked at the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw ; he was habilitated in 1967, in 1978 became an associate professor, and in 1984 a full professor. He was a guest lecturer at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is a member of the Committee on Pre- and Protohist...

#2025

Yoshitaka Ota

#172936

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Yoshitaka Ota is a social anthropologist, specializing in indigenous fisheries, climate change risk, global ocean governance, sustainable fishing business solutions, and coastal management and research communication. He is currently employed as the Nereus Program Director and as a Research Assistant Professor for the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington.

#2026

Andrew Shortland

#182340

Overall Influence

Andrew J. Shortland is an archaeologist at Cranfield University where he is director of the Cranfield Forensic Institute , a position he has held since 2016. Shortland established the Centre for Archaeological and Forensic Analysis at Cranfield in 2005 after having worked in the Ministry of Defence for six years.

#2027

Jodie Lewis

#117816

Overall Influence

Jodie Lewis is a British archaeologist specialising in the study of prehistory. She is a lecturer at the University of Bradford. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2015. Before joining Bradford in 2022, Lewis lectured at the University of Wales, Bangor, the University of West of England, and the University of Worcester. She is a council member of The Prehistoric Society.

#2028

Ken Dark

#65452

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Kenneth Rainsbury Dark is a British archaeologist who works on the 1st millennium AD in Europe and the Roman and Byzantine Middle East, on the archaeology of religion , archaeological theory and methods, and on the relationship between the study of the past and contemporary global political, cultural and economic issues.

#2029

Salima Hashmi

#15680

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Salima Hashmi is a Pakistanii painter, artist, former college professor, anti-nuclear weapons activist and former caretaker minister in Sethi caretaker ministry. She has served for four years as a professor and the dean of National College of Arts. She is the eldest daughter of the renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his British-born wife Alys Faiz.

#2030

Amara Thornton

#93330

Overall Influence

Amara Thornton is a historian of archaeology. Her work focuses on British archaeologists in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She situates archaeology within its broader historical context, including the history of tourism, the history of publishing and popular media, the history of education, government policies and women's history. She is an Honorary Research Associate at UCL.

#2031

Sally Kate May

#117384

Overall Influence

Sally Kate May, usually cited as Sally K. May, is an Australian archaeologist and anthropologist. She is an Associate Professor of Archaeology and Museum Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is a specialist in Indigenous Australian rock art and Australian ethnographic museum collections.

#2032

Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski

#50187

Overall Influence

1910 - 2007 (97 years)

Wilhelmina Mary Feemster Jashemski was an American scholar of the ancient site of Pompeii, where her archaeological investigations focused on the evidence of gardens and horticulture in the ancient city. She is remembered for her contributions to archaeobotany at Pompeiian sites, as she developed methods for preserving the remains of roots from antiquity, known as root casting.

#2033

Rachel Swallow

#104947

Overall Influence

Rachel Swallow is an archaeologist specialising in the study of landscapes and castles. She was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2018. Swallow studied at Birmingham Polytechnic and the University of Liverpool before completing a PhD at the University of Chester in 2015. She is visiting research fellow and guest lecturer at the University of Chester and honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool.

#2034

Charles H. Faulkner

#163558

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Charles H. Faulkner was an American archaeologist and anthropologist, most recently a Distinguished Professor at University of Tennessee. Faulkner made his name in historical archaeology, leading digs in Tennessee and in the south-eastern United States. He also contributed to rock-art research and Woodland-period archaeology.

#2035

Pamela Marshall

#110484

Overall Influence

Pamela Marshall is an archaeologist and historian specialising in the study of castles. Marshall was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2007. She worked at the University of Nottingham, teaching in the departments of archaeology and continuing education until her retirement. Marshall's research on castles has examined castles in England and France, as they had a shared castle culture, and is an authority on great towers. Between 2000 and 2014, Marshall was chair/secretary of the Castle Studies Group and is Comité Permanent of the Colloques Château Gaillard, a bia...

#2036

R. Barclay Mcghee

#185552

Overall Influence

#2037

James Petersen

#184249

Overall Influence

1954 - 2005 (51 years)

James B. "Jim" Petersen was an American anthropologist and archaeologist working in the Brazilian Amazon. He was chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Vermont. He was known for his work on Indian dark earth that demonstrated that indigenous people of the Amazon had been farmers.

#2038

Sabine Strasser

#181406

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sabine Strasser is an Austrian social anthropologist who specializes in migration and gender issues. She evaluates the political nature of transnational relationships, particularly with regard to diversity and multiculturalism. She was one of the first researchers hired when the University of Vienna's founded its Inter-University Coordination Center of Women's Studies in 1993. She has taught at the University of Vienna and the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Since 2013, she has served as a professor at the University of Bern.

#2039

David Grose

#147990

Overall Influence

1944 - 2004 (60 years)

David F. Grose was an American archaeologist and Professor of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was an authority on the classification of early ancient glass from the Roman period.

#2040

Susan Pfeiffer

#183968

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Susan Pfeiffer is an American anthropologist. In 2019 she was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Life She graduated from University of Toronto, and University of Iowa. She taught at University of Toronto, and George Washington University. She is a research associate at the University of Cape Town.

#2041

Lisa Nakamura

#14980

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also the Coordinator of Digital Studies and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures.

#2042

Richard Walter

#183893

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Richard Knowles Walter is a New Zealand archaeologist who specialises in the archaeology of the tropical Pacific and New Zealand. His early work focused on East Polynesian colonisation and his PhD tested new models for the colonisation of East Polynesia based on field research he carried out in the Cook Islands. He is best known for his work on the archaeology of Wairau Bar. He did his BA and PhD in anthropology at the University of Auckland with his thesis titled The Southern Cook Islands in Eastern Polynesian prehistory. He then moved to Otago University, where he is currently a professor. ...

#2043

Kristín Loftsdóttir

Kristín Loftsdóttir

#178572

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Kristín Loftsdóttir is a professor in anthropology at the University of Iceland. Kristín has organized and been part of diverse research projects. Examples include research on racism, colonialism, whiteness, precarious migrants, crisis, and nationalism. Kristín has also conducted research relating to the tourism industry, development cooperation and masculinity. Kristín has done research in Europe , as well as West Africa . Kristín's writings have also appeared in many scholarly journals and chapters in books. Kristín has written three monographs and two novels and edited six books with other...

#2044

William Simmons

#125870

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

William Scranton Simmons was an American anthropologist specializing in the culture and history of the Narragansett people. Life and career Born in Rhode Island, Simmons attend Classical High School. He subsequently enrolled at Brown University where he received a degree in human biology in 1960. During his undergraduate studies he carried out archeological fieldwork in Alaska with archaeologist J. Louis Giddings. Simmons completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard University, and took a position at the University of California Berkeley from 1967 to 1998. First as a professor in t...

#2045

Robert Manuel Cook

#79015

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Robert Manuel Cook was a classical scholar and classical archaeologist from England with expertise in Greek painted vases. He was Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, the author of several academic texts and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1974, having been made a Fellow of the German Archaeological Institute in 1953.

#2046

Holly Pittman

#172929

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Holly Pittman is a Near Eastern art historian and archaeologist, and an expert in Near Eastern glyptic art. She is the Bok Family Professor in the Humanities and a Professor in the History of Art Department of the University of Pennsylvania and serves as a curator in the Near East Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, she was a curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1974 to 1989. Since 1972, she has conducted archaeological excavations throughout the Middle East, including projects in Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Iran, and Iraq.

#2047

Valerie Maxfield

#95316

Overall Influence

Valerie Maxfield FSA is a Roman archaeologist and emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of Exeter. She is a specialist in the archaeology of the Roman army and frontiers, and edited the Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Society until December 2020.

#2048

Kurt Bittel

#101037

Overall Influence

1907 - 1991 (84 years)

Kurt Bittel was a German prehistorian. As president of the German Archaeological Institute and excavator of the Hittite city of Hattusha in Turkey, as well as an expert on the Celts in Central Europe, he acquired great merit.

#2049

Lydia T. Black

#112473

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Lydia T. Black was an American anthropologist. She won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804. She also received a Historian of the Year award from the Alaska Historical Society.

#2050

Agnes Hsu-Tang

#35185

Overall Influence

Agnes Hsin Mei Hsu-Tang is a Taiwan-born American archaeologist and art historian. On October 19, 2021, she became the first person of Asian heritage to be elected board chair of one of the oldest historical institutions in America, the New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804. She is chairwoman of the New-York Historical Society board of trustees and Co-chair of The Met Museum's Objects Conservation Visiting Committee. She is a distinguished consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Hsu-Tang works in cultural heritage protection and rescue and has advised UNESCO and the U.S.

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