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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Anthropology,

#2601

Céline Bon

#192243

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

#2602

Henry George Fischer

#95955

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Henry George Fischer was an American Egyptologist and poet. Biography Born on May 10, 1923, in Philadelphia, Fischer graduated from Princeton University in 1945, after that he was sent teaching English at the American University of Beirut. Returned in the USA, he became an assistant at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and in 1955 he received a Ph.D. from the same university. Shortly after he joined an expedition to Egypt and later he became an assistant professor of Egyptology at Yale University. In 1958 he started working as an assistant curator at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, forming a bond with this place that will last for his entire life.

#2603

Kai-Christian Bruhn

Kai-Christian Bruhn

#183067

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Kai-Christian Bruhn is a German computational archaeologist from the Mainz University of Applied Sciences, with expertise in geoinformatics. He was involved in the discovery of a colossal Ramses II statue in Egypt.

#2604

Igor Dubov

#136081

Overall Influence

1947 - 2002 (55 years)

Igor Vasilievich Dubov was a Russian archaeologist who excavated one of the largest settlements on the Volga trade route, Timerevo. Dubov was born in Leningrad but spent his young years in Yaroslavl. He studied in the Leningrad University under Mikhail Artamonov and later was a professor there. In 1972 he went to study the kurgans near Yaroslavl. It was Dubov's expedition that found in Timirevo the largest hoard of 9th-century Arabic dirhams in Eastern Europe.

#2605

Zeynep Ahunbay

#83302

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Zeynep Ahunbay is a leading Turkish scholar of antiquities. Biography Dr. Ahunbay was born in Ünye, Ordu Province, a small town in the Black Sea region of Turkey. She received her PhD in architectural history in 1976 from Istanbul Technical University, where in 1988 she became a professor of Architectural History and Preservation.

#2606

Froma Zeitlin

#41198

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Froma I. Zeitlin is an American Classics scholar. She specializes in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in epic, drama and prose fiction, along with work in gender criticism, and the relationship between art and text in the context of the visual culture of antiquity. Zeitlin's work on establishing new approaches to Greek tragedy has been considered particularly influential.

#2607

Inés Talamantez

#110119

Overall Influence

Inés M. Talamantez was an ethnographer and scholar of religion. She was professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara . She was an expert on Native American religion and philosophy.

#2608

Friederike Fless

#79792

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Friederike Fless is a German classical scholar and archaeologist. In 2003, she was appointed professor of classical archaeology at the Free University of Berlin. In March 2011, she became the first woman to be appointed president of the German Archaeological Institute where she is responsible for up to 300 digs and other projects per year. For her outstanding contribution to science and science management, in November 2014 she received an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University of Berlin.

#2609

Amin Husain

#171011

Overall Influence

Amin Husain is a Palestinian-American activist and adjunct professor. He is the lead organizer of Decolonize This Place and the MTL+ co-founder whose organization is founded on five main issues: Free Palestine, Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Global Wage Workers, and de-gentrification. He is part of the part-time faculty at New York University and focuses on resistance and liberation and postcolonial theory in his teaching. He is a founding member of Global Ultra Luxury Faction; founding member and managing editor of the magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy; founding member of the collective MTL; and founding member of NYC Solidarity with Palestine.

#2610

Gertrud Pätsch

#69568

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Gertrud Pätsch was a German ethnologist and philologist, who rendered service in the area of Kartvelian studies. In 1937 she graduated in Munster with a degree in the Old Georgian language. After the Second World War she left the western sector of Germany for East Berlin, where she earned a habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin in Indonesian linguistics. She taught in Berlin until she moved to the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 1960, where she founded the Kartvelologian faculty. After her retirement she worked for two years at the Tbilisi State University in Georgia. She published books and many articles in journals, such as Bedi Kartlisa.

#2611

Antonia Syson

#136696

Overall Influence

1973 - 2018 (45 years)

Antonia Jane Reobone Syson was a British-American classical scholar specialising in the study of Virgil's Aeneid. Early life Antonia was born in Botswana whilst her father, John, was private secretary to the president, Sir Seretse Khama and her mother, Lucy, was undertaking research on rural development for the United Nations. The Sysons returned to the UK in 1973 where Antonia attended Hungerford primary school and Camden School for Girls. In 1991 Antonia went to Magdalen College, Oxford to study Classics under Oliver Taplin before, in 1995, taking her PhD in Classics at the University of California, Berkeley.

#2612

Bruce W. Warren

#172503

Overall Influence

Bruce W. Warren is a professor of archeology at Brigham Young University. He holds a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of Arizona. He coauthored The Messiah in Ancient America with Thomas Stuart Ferguson, although it is more accurate to say Warren completed this book several years after Ferguson's death.

#2613

Victoria Whitworth

#136079

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Victoria Whitworth is a British writer, archaeologist and art historian. Her published writings, which focus on Britain in the later first millennium AD, include novels, academic works and a memoir.

#2614

Sunhild Kleingärtner

Sunhild Kleingärtner

#172985

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Sunhild Kleingärtner is a German historian and archaeologist, specialising in maritime history and maritime archaeology. Career Kleingärtner was born in Wolfsburg, and began her studies at the University of Kiel in 1994. Her research focused on prehistoric archaeology, classical archaeology and art history. In 2000 she gained a Master of Arts degree, and thereafter worked as a research assistant at the Kiel Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology , where she took over the management of terrestrial and subaquatic excavations. In 2004 Kleingärtner gained her PhD from the University of Kiel, with a study of the archaeological finds at Hedeby harbour .

#2615

Gertrude Eyifa-Dzidzienyo

#188609

Overall Influence

Gertrude Eyifa-Dzidzienyo is the first Ghanaian woman to hold a PhD in archaeology. She currently lectures at department of archaeology and heritage studies at University of Ghana. Her research interest are centered on the interrelationship between archaeological findings and gender subjects, particularly women in Ghana. In 2017, she completed her PhD thesis on Archaeology and Heritage Management Practices in Ghana: Assessment of Tengzug Heritage Preservation and Development.

#2616

Alicia Daneri

#68623

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Alicia Daneri Rodrigo is an Argentine Egyptologist who earned a doctorate at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Daneri graduated in History at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. She completed a Master's Degree in Egyptology at the University of Toronto, Canada, and later a Doctorate at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She was Professor of Ancient Near East history at the Universidad de la Plata and Buenos Aires. She has been a researcher at CONICET, deputy director of the Egyptology Studies Program and director of the Department of Egyptology at the Instituto Multidisciplinario de Historia y Ciencias Humanas .

#2617

Dieter Vieweger

Dieter Vieweger

#44380

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Dieter Vieweger, a Biblical scholar and Prehistoric Archaeologist, was born in Chemnitz, East Germany in 1958. He studied Theology and Prehistoric Archaeology in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main. After that he held a number of distinguished research and educational positions. Today he teaches at the „Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal“, and the universities of Münster and Witten-Herdecke while also being the director of scientific institutes in Jerusalem and Amman as well as in Wuppertal.

#2618

David H. Trump

#108217

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

David Hilary Trump was a British archaeologist known for his work in the area of Maltese prehistory. In 1954, Trump helped John Davies Evans excavate at Ġgantija. He took part in the excavation of many important sites in Maltese prehistory, including the Skorba Temples and Xagħra Stone Circle . From 1958-1963, he was a curator at the National Museum of Archaeology, Malta. He retired in 1997. He was awarded the National Order of Merit by Malta in 2004.

#2619

Patrick Johansson

#89486

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Patrick Johansson Keraudren is a French-born naturalized Mexican academic, researcher and professor of Nahuatl language. He is a Doctor of Letters from the University of Paris. Since 1979, he is a researcher of the Institute of Historical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and associate professor of Miguel Leon-Portilla in the Seminario de Cultura Nahuatl. Since 1992, he has taught Nahuatl literature at the Faculty of Arts at the same university.

#2620

Yevhen Chernenko

#127141

Overall Influence

1934 - 2007 (73 years)

Yevhen Vasylovych Chernenko was a Ukrainian archaeologist. He was Professor of Archaeology at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and an internationally renowned expert on Scythian archaeology.

#2621

Matthias Untermann

#93721

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Matthias Untermann is a German art historian and medieval archaeologist. Life Born in Tübingen, Untermann, son of the Indo-Germanist Jürgen Untermann, studied art history, classical archaeology and medieval history at the universities of Cologne and Zurich. In 1984, he was awarded a doctorate in medieval history under Günther Binding in Cologne with the dissertation "Kirchenbauten der Premonstratensian. Untersuchungen zum Problem einer Ordensbaukunst im 12. Jahrhundert".

#2622

Jesse McCarthy

#113499

Overall Influence

Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, cultural critic, and assistant professor in English and African-American studies at Harvard University. Publications Non-fiction He is the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, an essay collection addressing questions such as: “What do people owe each other when debts accrued can never be repaid?”

#2623

Ailsa Mainman

#152991

Overall Influence

Ailsa Jean Mainman is a British archaeologist and pottery specialist. Career Mainman completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield and is now a research associate at the University of York. She is a former assistant director of York Archaeological Trust.

#2624

James Kinnier Wilson

#44348

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (105 years)

James Vincent Kinnier Wilson was a British Assyriologist. He was Eric Yarrow Lecturer, from 1955 until 1989, and Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge. Life and career Kinnier Wilson was born in Marylebone, London on 27 November 1921. The youngest son of the neurologist Samuel Alexander Kinnier Wilson, he combined a skill in reconstructing Mesopotamian legends and epics with an enduring interest in the study of the organic and mental diseases of ancient Mesopotamia.

#2625

Luca Giuliani

#103121

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Luca Giuliani is a professor at the Humboldt University specialising in Greek and Roman archaeology. Career Giuliani was curator at the Berliner Antikensammlung from 1982 to 1992. He was a lecturer at the Freie Universität Institute of Classical Archaeology between 1986 and 1991 and became Professor of Greek and Roman archaeology at the University of Freiburg in 1992 through to 1998 and then at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to 2007. Since April 2007 he has been the Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin .

#2626

Alfonso Lacadena

Alfonso Lacadena

#75295

Overall Influence

1964 - 2018 (54 years)

Alfonso Lacadena García-Gallo , was a Spanish archaeologist, historian and epigraphist, one of the greatest experts in Mayan culture, researcher and specialist in writing and deciphering its texts. He was also a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.

#2627

Anthony Bonanno

#184002

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Anthony Bonanno is a Maltese archaeologist based at the University of Malta who has published several books about the archaeology of the Maltese Islands. He was born on 4 June 1947 in the city of Żejtun. He has been on various boards and committees, including the Planning Authority, Heritage Malta and the Scientific Committee for the Conservation of the Megalithic Temples.

#2628

Leroy Little Bear

#64344

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Leroy Little Bear is a Blackfoot researcher, professor emeritus at the University of Lethbridge, founding member of Canada's first Native American Studies Department, and recognized leader and advocate for First Nations education, rights, self-governance, language and culture. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his work, including the Officer Order of Canada, and the Alberta Order of Excellence.

#2629

Felipe Cerezo Andreo

#192379

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

#2630

Reidar Grønhaug

#183826

Overall Influence

1938 - 2005 (67 years)

Reidar Grønhaug was a Norwegian social anthropologist. He was born in Stavanger. He took his mag.art. degree in 1967, and started working as a lector at the University of Bergen. He was promoted to associate professor in 1972, took his dr.philos. degree on the thesis Micro-Macro Relations: Social Organization in Antalya, Southern Turkey in 1975 and became a professor in 1976.

#2631

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

#119356

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku is a New Zealand academic specialising in Māori cultural issues and a lesbian activist. In 1972, she was famously denied a visa to visit the United States on the basis of her sexuality.

#2632

T. Douglas Price

#130630

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Theron Douglas Price is an American archaeologist who is the Weinstein Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is well known as an authority on prehistoric Northern Europe and for his pioneering research in the field of archaeological science.

#2633

Maria Ludwika Bernhard

#26329

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Maria Ludwika Bernhard was a Polish classical archaeologist and a specialist in Greek Art. During the German Occupation of Poland in World War II, Bernhard was living in Warsaw and was active in the Polish Resistance Movement. After the war, Bernhard was a Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. In 1957 she became the chair of the Department of Classical Archaeology at Jagiellonian University. She was also curator of the Ancient Art gallery at the National Museum in Warsaw from 1945 to 1962.

#2634

Zhang Wenbin

#180259

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Zhang Wenbin was a Chinese archaeologist, museum curator and politician. He served as Director of the National Cultural Heritage Administration and Chairman of the Chinese Museums Association. Biography Zhang was born in July 1937 in Hunyuan County, Shanxi, Republic of China. From 1958, he studied in the Department of History of Peking University, majoring in archaeology.

#2635

Edda Bresciani

#50898

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Edda Bresciani was an Italian Egyptologist. Life Bresciani was born in Lucca, and graduated in 1955 from the University of Pisa. She excavated at several places in Egypt and is mainly known for her work at several sites in the Faiyum, most notably the temple of Medinet Maadi. She also found and excavated a Middle Kingdom cemetery at Khelua.

#2636

Margaret C. Miller

#182053

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Margaret Christina Miller is an archaeologist and the Arthur and Renee George Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Career Miller holds a BA from the University of British Columbia, a MA from Oxford University and an AM from Harvard University. Her 1985 PhD, also from Harvard, was titled "Perserie : the arts of the East in fifth-century Athens". She then continued her studies in the Classics at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

#2637

Tjalling Waterbolk

Tjalling Waterbolk

#79386

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Harm Tjalling "Tjalling" Waterbolk was a Dutch archaeologist. He was a professor of archaeology and director of the Biological-Archaeological Institute at the University of Groningen between 1954 and 1987.

#2638

Rainer Hannig

#101373

Overall Influence

1952 - 2022 (70 years)

Rainer Hannig was a German Egyptologist. Biography Hannig studied Egyptology, lexicography, and linguistics and earned a master's degree from the University of Tübingen in 1979. From 1984 to 1987, he was a guest professor in Egyptology at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations and the Northeast Normal University. From 1998 to 2000, he worked at the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim. During this time, he led excursions to Egypt with the German Research Foundation. He discovered the tomb of Iri-en-achti, a king of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt.

#2639

Mihai Pop

#54026

Overall Influence

1907 - 2000 (93 years)

Mihai Pop was a Romanian ethnologist. He won the Herder Prize in 1967. Notable works include Obiceiuri tradiţionale româneşti and Folclor românesc . He was a member of the Romanian Academy. Biography Pop was born in Glod village in what is now the commune of Strâmtura in Maramureș County in northern Romania , the son of a Greek-Catholic priest. He pursued studies in a Hungarian high school in Sighetu Marmației led by Piarist monks. After the First World War, he came to Bucharest. There, he pursued studies in literature and philosophy , followed by Slavonic studies in Prague, Bonn and Warsaw, and obtained a Ph.D.

#2640

Michel Leiris

1901 - 1990 (89 years)

Julien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.

#2641

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Russel Wallace

1823 - 1913 (90 years)

Alfred Russel Wallace was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.

#2642

W. H. R. Rivers

W. H. R. Rivers

1864 - 1922 (58 years)

William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist known for treatment of First World War officers suffering shell shock, so they could be returned to combat. Rivers' most famous patient was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he remained close friends until his own sudden death.

#2643

Joseph Deniker

1852 - 1918 (66 years)

Joseph Deniker was a Russian Empire and French naturalist and anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly detailed maps of race in Europe. Life Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents in Astrakhan, Russian Empire. He first studied at the university and technical institute of St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity, traveled extensively in the petroleum districts of the Caucasus, in Central Europe, Italy and Dalmatia. Settling in Paris, France in 1876, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in natural science in 1886.

#2644

Giuseppe Sergi

1841 - 1936 (95 years)

Giuseppe Sergi was an Italian anthropologist of the early twentieth century, best known for his opposition to Nordicism in his books on the racial identity of Mediterranean peoples. He rejected existing racial typologies that identified Mediterranean peoples as "dark whites" because they implied a Nordicist conception of Mediterranean peoples descending from whites who had become racially mixed with non-whites which he claimed was false. His concept of the Mediterranean race, identified Mediterranean peoples as being an autonomous brunet race and he claimed that the Nordic race was descended from the Mediterranean race whose skin had depigmented to a pale complexion after it moved north.

#2645

Robert Ranulph Marett

1866 - 1943 (77 years)

Robert Ranulph Marett was a British ethnologist and a proponent of the British Evolutionary School of cultural anthropology. Founded by Marett's older colleague, Edward Burnett Tylor, it asserted that modern primitive societies provide evidence for phases in the evolution of culture, which it attempted to recapture via comparative and historical methods. Marett focused primarily on the anthropology of religion. Studying the evolutionary origin of religions, he modified Tylor's animistic theory to include the concept of mana. Marett's anthropological teaching and writing career at Oxford University spanned the early 20th century before World War Two.

#2646

Lubor Niederle

1865 - 1944 (79 years)

Lubor Niederle was a Czech archeologist, anthropologist and ethnographer. He is seen as one of the founders of modern archeology in Czech lands. He was born in Klatovy. He studied at the Charles University in Prague from 1883 to 1887. He was initially interested in classical archaeology, then studied anthropology, sociology and ethnology. Later, he studied in Munich under professor Johannes Rank and in Paris under professor Léonce Manouvriere at the École d’anthropologie. Niederle also travelled in several Slavic countries, studying archaeological findings and historical documents.

#2647

Marcel Griaule

1898 - 1956 (58 years)

Marcel Griaule was a French author and anthropologist known for his studies of the Dogon people of West Africa, and for pioneering ethnographic field studies in France. He worked together with Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch on African subjects. His publications number over 170 books and articles for scholarly journals.

#2648

Raymond Dart

1893 - 1988 (95 years)

Raymond Arthur Dart was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924 discovery of the first fossil ever found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa in the Northwest province.

#2649

Augustus Pitt Rivers

Augustus Pitt Rivers

1827 - 1900 (73 years)

Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers was an English officer in the British Army, ethnologist, and archaeologist. He was noted for innovations in archaeological methodology, and in the museum display of archaeological and ethnological collections. His international collection of about 22,000 objects was the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford while his collection of English archaeology from the area around Stonehenge forms the basis of the collection at The Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire.

#2650

Leo Frobenius

1873 - 1938 (65 years)

Leo Viktor Frobenius was a German self-taught ethnologist and archaeologist and a major figure in German ethnography. Life He was born in Berlin as the son of a Prussiann officer and died in Biganzolo, Lago Maggiore, Piedmont, Italy. He undertook his first expedition to Africa in 1904 to the Kasai district in Congo, formulating the African Atlantis theory during his travels.

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