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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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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#2351

Janet DeLaine

#89317

Overall Influence

Janet DeLaine is Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is a Roman archaeologist whose research has focused on urban environments, with a particular focus on bath complexes, urban development and the building industry in the Roman world.

#2352

R. Bruce Hitchner

#171047

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Robert Bruce Hitchner is an American classicist who specializes in the history and archaeology of the Greco-Roman world. He is Professor of Classical Studies and International Relations, and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at Tufts University.

#2353

Louise Zarmati

#162617

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Louise Zarmati is an Australian archaeologist, educator, and author. She is most notable for pioneering Archaeology education in schools in Australia. Education In 1979, Zarmati received her Bachelors and Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. She resumed her studies in 1992, earning her Masters in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge. Deakin University awarded Zarmati a PhD for her research on the history of pedagogy in Australian museums in 2012.

#2354

Teresa Joaquim

#65034

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Teresa Joaquim is a social anthropologist who is the coordinator of the first master's program in women's studies in Portugal. Women's Studies – Gender, Citizenship and Development was launched at the Universidade Aberta in 1995 and Joaquim pressed for it to be expanded to include a PhD platform in 2002. She served as a member of the National Ethics Council for Life Sciences between 1996 and 2001 and as part of the Helsinki Group on Women in Science. She has participated in numerous policy development projects evaluating inclusion and equal opportunity for women for the government of Portugal...

#2355

Sarah Scott

#186197

Overall Influence

Sarah A. Scott is an archaeologist and academic. She is professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester. Scott has a BSc degree from Leicester and completed her DPhil at University of Oxford. She taught at the University of Durham before moving to Leicester. In 2015 she became a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and in 2016 was in receipt of Advance HE's National Teaching Fellowship award. Scott was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 5 May 2002.

#2356

Lee Maracle

#77959

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

Bobbi Lee Maracle was an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, she left formal education after grade 8 to travel across North America, attending Simon Fraser University on her return to Canada. Her first book, an autobiography called Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, was published in 1975. She wrote fiction, non-fiction, and criticism and held various academic positions. Maracle's work focused on the lives of Indigenous people, particularly women, in contemporary North America. As an influential writer and speaker, Maracle fought for ...

#2357

Willeke Wendrich

#118539

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Willemina Zwanida "Willeke" Wendrich is a Dutch-American Egyptologist and archaeologist. She is Professor and Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology in the Near Eastern Language & Cultures Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2016 she is the Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

#2358

Dana Lepofsky

#166648

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Dana Sue Lepofsky is a Canadian archaeologist and ethnobiologist. She is a professor at Simon Fraser University, a former president of the Society of Ethnobiology, and received the Smith-Wintemberg Award in 2018. Her research focuses on the historical ecology of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

#2359

Věra Sokolová

#186550

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Věra Sokolová is a Czech academic who specializes in gender studies and specifically focuses on identity policy and the construction of sexuality from a historical and social perspective, evaluating the power, structuring and defining of sexuality to transcend binary boundaries. She is the chair of the Department of Gender Studies at Charles University in Prague. She is the co-managing editor of Gender and Generation, along with Kateřina Kolářová.

#2360

Ruth Shaffrey

#120345

Overall Influence

Dr Ruth Shaffrey is an archaeologist. Biography Shaffrey was awarded her PhD in Archaeology and Geology from the University of Reading in 1998. She specialises in the study of quern-stones and millstones and is a worked stone specialist for Oxford Archaeology. Her thesis formed the basis of her 2006 BAR volume on Romano-British quern-stones. In February 2021 she reported on the discovery of a quern-stone decorated with a phallus from excavations on the A14 road in Cambridgeshire.

#2361

William Ayres Ward

#91217

Overall Influence

1928 - 1996 (68 years)

William Ayres Ward was an American Egyptologist. Biography Born in Chicago, Ward studied at the Butler University in Indianapolis and received his B.A. in History of religions in 1951. Then, he attained a MA in Egyptology at the University of Chicago in 1955 and a PhD in Semitic languages at the Brandeis University in 1958. He then taught in Beirut, first at the Beirut College for Women and later, since 1963, at the American University of Beirut. From 1986 until his death in 1996, he was a visiting professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

#2362

Catherine Frieman

Catherine Frieman

#172106

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Catherine J. Frieman is an archaeologist and associate professor at the Australian National University. Her research investigates conservatism and innovation, and she is a specialist in material culture and technology.

#2363

Anne Feldhaus

#116918

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Anne Feldhaus is Distinguished Foundation Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus Professor, at Arizona State University. Her field of specialty is Maharashtra, India, combining philological and ethnographic approaches to study religious traditions of Maharashtra, the Marathi-language region of western India.

#2364

Manfred Korfmann

#33230

Overall Influence

1942 - 2005 (63 years)

Manfred Osman Korfmann was a German archeologist. He excavated Hisarlik, the present site of Troy situated in modern-day Turkey. He continued his research in Turkey, excavating from 1982 to 1987 at Besik Bay, a few kilometres from the famous site of Hisarlik . In 1988 the Turkish government gave him an exclusive excavation license for Troy itself . Over many years, his team excavated large sections of the lower part of Troy, beneath the later Roman-era ruins. During the excavation campaign and under the direction of Korfmann, altogether 13,240 square meters of land were excavated by 370 archaeologists.

#2365

Gail Falkingham

#169211

Overall Influence

Gail Falkingham is a British archaeologist, archivist, and curator. Biography Falkingham worked for North Yorkshire County Council as County Archaeologist and is currently employed by the Yorkshire Museum as Assistant Curator of Archaeological Archives. She is also an archivist for the North Yorkshire County Record Office.

#2366

Brenda Dickinson

#184563

Overall Influence

Brenda Dickinson is a British archaeologist. She is a leading scholar in the study of Roman pottery, and a specialist in Roman potter's stamps. Career Dickinson collaborated with Brian Hartley at the University of Leeds. Together they catalogued samian stamps over a 40-year period from central and western Europe. The catalogue was published in a nine-part volume in 2008 entitled Names on Terra Sigillata. An Index of Makers' Stamps & Signatures on Gallo-Roman Terra Sigillata ', containing around 300,000 stamps from 5,000 potters. Dickinson is credited with turning "Brian Hartley's vision of an...

#2367

Greil Marcus

#15245

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics.

#2368

Edna Ahgeak MacLean

#43431

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Edna Ahgeak MacLean or Paniattaaq is an Iñupiaq academic administrator, linguist, anthropologist and educator from Alaska, who has specialized in the preservation and revitalization of the Iñupiaq language.

#2369

Diane Atnally Conlin

#173398

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Diane Atnally Conlin is an American classicist and archaeologist specializing in the art in architecture of ancient Rome. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and directs its excavations at the Villa of Maxentius.

#2370

Antonio Loprieno

Antonio Loprieno

#52663

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Antonio Loprieno is a Swiss Italian Egyptologist and Professor of History of Institutions at the University of Basel. From 2005 to 2015, he was rector of the University of Basel. He was also president of the Rectors’ Conference of the Swiss Universities from 2008 to 2015. Since 2018, he has been president of ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, and of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. From December 2019 to December 2020, he was president of the Jacobs University Bremen.

#2371

Lloyd Laing

#132855

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Lloyd Laing is an archaeologist and ancient art historian specializing in early medieval Britain and Ireland, coins, and ceramics. He has published over 30 books and 60 papers, as well as many contributions to encyclopedias and magazines, either individually or jointly. He has directed many excavations in different parts of Britain. His wife, Jennifer Laing, is also an archaeologist.

#2372

Martin Bommas

#184814

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Martin Bommas is a German Egyptologist, archaeologist, and philologist. He is a professor and Museum Director at the Macquarie University History Museum in Sydney, Australia and the Director of the Qubbet el-Hawa Research Project in Aswan, Egypt. He has published widely on ancient Egyptian mortuary liturgies, rituals and religious texts spanning the Old Kingdom to the Christian era. In archaeology, he has examined the Old and Middle Kingdom settlement remains and the 18th Dynasty temple of Khnum at Elephantine as well as the Old and Middle Kingdom Lower Necropolis at Qubbet el-Hawa. As a mus...

#2373

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Mimi Thi Nguyen

#47327

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Mimi Thi Nguyen is a Vietnamese-born American scholar, punk and zine author. Biography Born in 1974 in Ho Chi Minh City to Hiep and Lien Nguyen, Nguyen earned a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies and a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Her master's degree was in American Studies from New York University. She grew up in Minnesota and relocated to San Diego, California, where she was drawn to the D.I.Y. punk scene.

#2374

Neritan Ceka

#129344

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Neritan Ceka is an Albanian archaeologist, professor, and politician. He served as Albania's Minister of Internal Affairs from 27 July 1997 to 18 April 1998. Early life Ceka was born in Tirana. Ceka studied at the Qemal Stafa High School, in Tirana, Albania.

#2375

Tanaya Winder

#98510

Overall Influence

Tanaya Winder is a performance poet, writer, motivational speaker, and educator. She was raised on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colorado and is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe. Her background includes Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Dine, and Black heritages. With fellow Indigenous writer Casandra Lopez, she founded , an online literary magazine to "showcase the creative literary expressions and scholarly work of both emerging and established women writers from around the world." With Lakota rap artist Frank Waln and other collaborators, she runs Dream Warriors Management, an organization to promote Indigenous artists and support young Native students.

#2376

Wolfhart Westendorf

Wolfhart Westendorf

#83117

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Wolfhart Westendorf was a German Egyptologist. He was a student of Hermann Grapow, and with him, was a co-author of the Grundriss der Medizin der alten Ägypter , the most extensive study of the subject of ancient Egyptian medicine done in any language. He has also published many other books on Egyptology and the ancient Egyptian language.

#2377

Fariba Adelkhah

#35841

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Fariba Adelkhah is a French-Iranian anthropologist and academic at Sciences Po who was detained in Iran from 2019 until 2023. Early life and career Born in Tehran, Adelkhah studied in France, first at Université Strasbourg II and then at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. In 1990, she obtained a "very honourable" mention for her Ph.D. thesis on women in Iran, "an anthropological approach of post-revolutionary Iran: the case of Islamic women" , with Jean-Pierre Digard as her advisor. Since 2004, she has been a Research Director at the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

#2378

Maria Tumarkin

#105148

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Maria Tumarkin is an Australian cultural historian, essayist and novelist., and is senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, teaching creative writing.

#2379

Nicholas Brooks

#43056

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Nicholas Peter Brooks, FBA was an English medieval historian. Biography Nicholas Brooks was educated at Winchester College, and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1961 with a degree in history. His doctoral studies on the Anglo-Saxon charters in the archive of Canterbury Cathedral, also undertaken at Oxford, were supervised by Dorothy Whitelock, and provided the basis for his monograph The Early History of the Church of Canterbury, published in 1984. Brooks was lecturer and then senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of St Andrews from 1964 until 1985, when he was appo...

#2380

Annalisa Marzano

#170819

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Annalisa Marzano, FRHistS FSA, MAE is an Italian-American archaeologist and academic. She is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Bologna and has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of Reading in England. She specializes in Roman social and economic history.

#2381

Catherine Ellis

#181928

Overall Influence

1935 - 1996 (61 years)

Catherine Joan Ellis was an Australian ethnomusicologist. She co-founded the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide in 1972. Early life and education Catherine Joan Caughie was born on 19 May 1935 at Birregurra in Victoria.

#2382

Sara Anderson Immerwahr

#129731

Overall Influence

1914 - 2008 (94 years)

Sara Anderson Immerwahr was an American Classical archaeologist. Life Immerwahr earned her bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1935. One of her tutors at Mount Holyoke was archaeologist Caroline Morris Galt. She gained her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1943 with a dissertation entitled "The Mycenaean Pictorial Style of Vase Painting in the Thirteenth Century B.C."

#2383

Gillian Carr

#139793

Overall Influence

Gillian "Gilly" Carr is a British archaeologist and academic. She currently specialises in the Holocaust and conflict archaeology, while her early career research focused on the Iron Age and Roman Archaeology. She is an associate professor and academic director in archaeology at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Continuing Education, and a fellow and director of studies in archaeology at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Royal Historical Society. In 2020, she won the EAA European Heritage Prize for ...

#2384

Barbara Barletta

#131947

Overall Influence

1952 - 2015 (63 years)

Barbara A. Barletta was a prominent American Classical archaeologist and architectural historian. Barletta earned a B.A. in Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. From the American Academy in Rome Barletta received the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Classical Studies in 1990. She received a series of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including an award to support research on the Temple of Athena at Suonion in 2009.

#2385

Peter Meineck

#81609

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Peter Meineck is Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder and humanities program director of Aquila Theatre and has held appointments at Princeton University and University of South Carolina.

#2386

Richard J. Harrison

#172056

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Richard John Harrison is an archaeologist and Professor in the University of Bristol, England. Harrison studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and gained his Bachelor's degree in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1970. He held a Prize Fellowship at Harvard from 1970 to 1975, and was awarded his PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 1975. His first employment was in the Department of Prehistoric and Roman-British Antiquities at the British Museum, from where he moved to the University of Bristol as a lecturer in 1976. In 1977 he was elected a Fellow of...

#2387

Glenn Foard

#110397

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Glenn R. Foard is an English landscape archaeologist, best known for discovering the location of the final phases of the Battle of Bosworth Field . He is Reader in Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Huddersfield.

#2388

Peter Drewett

#129768

Overall Influence

1947 - 2013 (66 years)

Peter Ladson Drewett was an English archaeologist and academic, best known for his work in Sussex. Drewett was brought up in Croydon, where he first became interested in archaeology; he began working on excavations in his early teens, joining the Croydon Natural History & Scientific Society in 1960. Drewett later worked on digs in Sussex, and in 1973 joined Sussex Archaeological Society. After graduating, he became a lecturer at the London Institute of Archaeology and founded the Sussex Archaeological Field Unit , subsequently being involved in over 200 projects in the county. Sites he worked on included Caburn hillfort, Black Patch and Chanctonbury Ring.

#2389

Michel Kazanski

#91287

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Michel Kazanski is a French archaeologist who is the director of research at the Center for Byzantine History and Civilization of the Collège de France and the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

#2390

Chris Caple

#129343

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Chris Caple, FSA, FIIC, is a British archaeologist and conservator, who specialises in the conservation of artefacts. He was a senior lecturer/associate professor at Durham University and was director of their postgraduate programme in artefact conservation. Upon his retirement in 2018, he was appointed Emeritus Reader in Archaeological Conservation.

#2391

Aert H. Kuipers

#59592

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Aert Hendrik Kuipers was a Dutch linguistics professor who, from his pioneering fieldwork among First Nations people of British Columbia during the 1950s, compiled the first detailed reference grammarss of Squamish and Shuswap, two almost extinct Salishan languages. He also advised Jan van Eijk in his work on Lillooet and Hank Nater in his work on Nuxalk and did important work on comparative Salishan.

#2392

Michael D. Rhodes

#60718

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael Dennis Rhodes is an associate professor of ancient scripture emeritus, formerly at Brigham Young University . Rhodes is an Egyptologist who has published a translation of some of the extant Joseph Smith papyri.

#2393

Grenville Astill

#80898

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Grenville Astill is a professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Reading. Astill is a specialist in Medieval urbanisation, the medieval countryside and landscape archaeology, monasticism and technology and industry.

#2394

Alexandre Baril

Alexandre Baril

#120291

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Alexandre Baril , is a Canadian writer and since 2018 an associate professor at the School of Social Work, at the University of Ottawa. He researches sexual and gender diversity, bodily diversity , and linguistic diversity. He considers his work to be intersectional, involving queer, trans, feminist and gender studies, as well as sociology of the body, health, social movements, and of critical suicidology.

#2395

Jenifer Neils

#47474

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jenifer Neils is an American classical archaeologist and was from July 2017 to June 2022 director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Formerly she was the Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts in the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University.

#2396

Françoise Dussart

#178936

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Françoise Dussart is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Trained in France and Australia, her specialties in social anthropology include Australian Aboriginal society and culture , iconography and visual systems, various expressions of gender, ritual and social organization, health and citizenship.

#2397

Corinna Rossi

#99798

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Corinna Rossi is an Italian Egyptologist known for her works on Ancient Egyptian mathematics and Ancient Egyptian architecture, on the archaeology of the Kharga Oasis, and on related topics in the history of Egypt and the Levant.

#2398

Angela Davis

#190894

Overall Influence

#2399

Donna Yates

#190290

Overall Influence

Donna Yates is an archaeologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Maastricht University. Her research considers transnational illicit trade in cultural objects, art and heritage crime including Looted art and the Antiquities trade, and white collar crime.

#2400

Nicholas Chare

#85936

Overall Influence

Nicholas Chare is a professor of art history at the Université de Montréal. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and the history of art from the University of Leeds in 1997, and his Master of Arts in the social history of art from the same institution in 1998. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2005. He has served as an instructor at the University of Melbourne, the University of Leeds, the University of Reading, the University of York, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

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