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,
#301
Edward C. Green
#25900
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Edward C. Green is an American medical anthropologist working in public health and development. He was a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and served as senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies for eight years, the last three years as director of the AIDS Prevention Project. He was later affiliated with the Department of Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University and the George Washington University as research professor . He was appointed to serve as a member of the Presidential Advisory Counci...
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Jonathan Spencer
#35678
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jonathan Robert Spencer, is a British social anthropologist and academic. Since 2014, he has been the Regius Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh. Early life and education Spencer was born on 23 December 1954 in Dorking, Surrey, England. He studied social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, and graduated with an undergraduate Master of Arts degree in 1977. He was then a postgraduate student at the University of Chicago, and graduated with a postgraduate Master of Arts degree in 1981. He undertook postgraduate research at the Univers...
Go to Profile#303
James Ferguson
#20452
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
James Ferguson is an American anthropologist. He is known for his work on the politics and anthropology of international development, specifically his critical stance . He was chair of the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. His best-known work is his book, The Anti-Politics Machine. He delivered the most prestigious lecture in anthropology, the Morgan Lecture, in 2009, for his work on basic income. He earned his B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.A. and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University.
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William S. Laughlin
#38415
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
William S. Laughlin was an American anthropologist who carried on research and wrote about aboriginal peoples in the Aleutians and Greenland. William Sceva Laughlin was born in Canton, Missouri in 1919. He grew up in Salem, Oregon, where his father was a professor at Willamette University. His education included bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology, and master's and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Harvard University. His academic career in anthropology included professorships at the University of Oregon , the University of Wisconsin , and the University of Connecticut . His pri...
Go to Profile#305
Brian Hare
#22756
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates , and species whose cognition converged with our own . He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
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Raphael Patai
#7785
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Raphael Patai , born Ervin György Patai, was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer, historian, Orientalist and anthropologist. Family background Patai was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary in 1910 to Edith Patai, née Ehrenfeld, and . Patai's mother was born in Nagyvárad to German-speaking, Jewish parents who expressed their commitment to Magyar nationalism by sending their daughter to Hungarian-language schools. Both parents spoke Hungarian and German fluently and educated their children to be perfectly fluent in both languages. His father was a prominent literary figure, author of numerous Zionist and other writings, including a biography of Theodor Herzl.
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Owen Lovejoy
#20265
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Claude Owen Lovejoy is an evolutionary anthropologist and anatomist at Kent State University Ohio. He is best known for his work on Australopithecine locomotion and the origins of bipedalism. "The origin of man", which he published in Science in January 1981, is cited as among his best-known articles. The 'C' of his name stands for Claude, but he never uses the name and is known only as Owen.
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Mamphela Ramphele
#6626
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Mamphela Aletta Ramphele is a South African politician, anti-apartheid activist, medical doctor and businesswoman. She was a partner of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, with whom she had two children. She is a former vice-chancellor at the University of Cape Town and a former managing director at the World Bank. Ramphele founded political party Agang South Africa in February 2013 but withdrew from politics in July 2014. Since 2018, she has been the co-president of the Club of Rome
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Karen Nakamura
#39834
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Karen Nakamura is an American academic, author, filmmaker, photographer and the Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair of Disability Studies and Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. Previously she was Associate Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies and Chair of LGBT Studies at Yale University.
Go to Profile#310
Paul Kockelman
#47199
Overall Influence
Areas of Specialization: Linguistic Anthropology Paul Kockelman is the editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, and a professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is known as one of the last great system-builders in the field. His work in linguistic anthropology has yielded significant insights into Qʼeqchiʼ, an ancient language of the Maya people of Guatemala, as well as his ethnographic work. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Agent, Person, Subject, Self: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction...
Go to Profile#311
Antonio Blanco Freijeiro
#40953
Overall Influence
1923 - 1991 (68 years)
Antonio Blanco Freijeiro was a Spanish archaeologist and historian. He was professor of Archaeology, Epigraphy and Numismatics at the University of Seville , of Classical Archeology at the Complutense University of Madrid , and academic librarian of the Royal Academy of History .
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Hilda Kuper
#29269
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
Hilda Beemer Kuper was a social anthropologist most notable for her extensive work on Swazi culture. She started studying the Swazi culture and associating with the Swaziland's royal family after she was awarded with a grant by the International African Institute of London. She studied and illustrated Swazi traditions embodied in the political vision of King Sobhuza II, who later became a close friend. King Sobhuza II personally awarded Kuper with Swazi citizenship in 1970.
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Donald Brown
#20935
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Donald Edward Brown is an American professor of anthropology . Work He worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is best known for his theoretical work regarding the existence, characteristics and relevance of universals of human nature. In his best-known work, Human Universals , he says these universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exceptions." He is quoted at length by Steven Pinker in an appendix to The Blank Slate , where Pinker cites some of the hundreds of universals listed by Brown. In area st...
Go to Profile#314
Néstor García Canclini
#8811
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Néstor García Canclini is an Argentinian academic and anthropologist known for his theorization of the concept of "hybridity." Biography García Canclini was born December 1, 1939 in La Plata, Argentina. Three years after receiving his PhD in philosophy at the University of La Plata in 1975, thanks to a scholarship awarded from CONICET , García Canclini also received another PhD in philosophy from the Paris Nanterre University. He taught at the University of La Plata between 1966 and 1975 and at the University of Buenos Aires in 1974 and 1975. Throughout his academic career he has also served...
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J. Lorand Matory
#49907
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
J. Lorand Matory is an American academic and Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. Matory grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended Harvard College. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1991, and currently he is Chair of the African and African American Studies department at Duke University. He is the author of Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion ; and Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in th...
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Ronald Inden
#3393
Overall Influence
Ronald B. Inden is a professor emeritus in the Departments of History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a major scholar in South Asian and post-colonial studies. Inden has been a lifelong resident of Hyde Park, the Chicago community which contains the University.
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Steven Feld
#17901
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Steven Feld is an American ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, and linguist, who worked for many years with the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea. He earned a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991. Early life Feld was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 20, 1949. He graduated with a BA cum laude at Hofstra University in anthropology in 1971. He first went to the Bosavi territory in 1976, accompanied by anthropologist Edward L. Schieffelin, whose recordings of the Bosavi inspired him to pursue this work. His work there fulfilled his dissertation for his PhD from Indiana University in 1979 .
Go to Profile#318
Zahi Hawass
#2066
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Zahi Abass Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist, Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, serving twice. He has also worked at archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, the Western Desert, and the Upper Nile Valley.
Go to Profile#319
Sarah Pink
#38299
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, ...
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Kent R. Weeks
#42514
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kent R. Weeks is an American Egyptologist. Biography He was born in Everett, Washington, on December 16, 1941. He remembers deciding to be an Egyptologist at the age of eight. Weeks attended R. A. Long High School in Longview, Washington, and graduated in 1959. He studied anthropology at University of Washington in Seattle, from where he obtained a master's degree. He visited Egypt for the first time in 1963 and was active in digs in Nubia associated with relocation work necessitated by the building of the Aswan Dam and the flooding of the Nile Valley to create Lake Nasser. In 1970 he earned ...
Go to Profile#321
Roberto DaMatta
#22347
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Roberto DaMatta is a Brazilian anthropologist. He is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. DaMatta graduated in history at the Fluminense Federal University and received his PhD from Harvard University.
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Allen Feldman
#28641
Overall Influence
Allen Feldman is an anthropologist and professor. He is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He has taught at Central European University in Budapest, the Institute of Humanities Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at New School for Social Research, where he also received his M.A. and B.A.
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Brian M. Fagan
#28766
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Brian Murray Fagan is a prolific British author of popular archaeology books and a professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Fagan was born in England where he received his childhood education at Rugby School. He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology . His doctoral thesis was titled "Some Iron Age cultures of the Southern Province, Northern Rhodesia, with special reference to the Kalomo Culture". He spent six years as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, Central Africa, and mo...
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Bonno Thoden van Velzen
#29183
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Hendrik Ulbo Eric "Bonno" Thoden van Velzen was a Dutch anthropologist, Surinamist and Africanist. Life Thoden van Velzen was born on 5 April 1933 in Vlissingen. His father was a coxswain in the merchant navy and teacher at the Rijksnormaalschool in the city of Deventer. His ancestors are Protestant pastors from the neighbourhood of Emden in East-Frisia, which is now part of the German federal state of Lower Saxony. In the Second World War he moved together with his parents and siblings to Utrecht because of the German Heer declaring the city of Vlissingen and its surrounds as Sperrgebiet. He finished his secondary school in the Indonesian city of Batavia and later in Vlissingen.
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Jeremy Narby
#9742
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jeremy Narby is a Canadian anthropologist and author. In his books, Narby examines shamanism, molecular biology, and shamans' knowledge of botanics and biology through the use of entheogens across many cultures.
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David Hurst Thomas
#23100
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
David Hurst Thomas is the curator of North American Archaeology in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and a professor at Richard Gilder Graduate School. He was previously a chairman of the American Museum of Natural History's Anthropology Division.
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Francesco Remotti
#53822
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Francesco Remotti is an Italian anthropologist. He is a lecturer and heads the Department of Anthropology at the University of Turin. Works Noi, primitivi. Lo specchio dell’antropologia Luoghi e corpi Contro l’identità Prima lezione di antropologia Centri di potere. Capitali e città nell’Africa precoloniale .
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Floyd Lounsbury
#17882
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar and epigrapher, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. Equally important were his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
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Katherine Ann Dettwyler
#25609
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Katherine Ann Dettwyler is an American anthropologist and advocate of breastfeeding. She was an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware. In 2017, she gained media attention for her comments regarding Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old college student who received fatal brain damage while imprisoned in North Korea.
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Arpad Vass
#13919
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Arpad Alexander Vass is a research scientist and forensic anthropologist. He is also a teaching associate with the Law Enforcement Innovation Center, which is part of the University of Tennessee's Institute for Public Service.
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Patrick Vinton Kirch
#16998
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Patrick Vinton Kirch is an American archaeologist and Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology and the Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the former Curator of Oceanic Archaeology in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and director of that museum from 1999 to 2002. Currently, he is professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, and a member of the board of directors of the Bishop Museum.
Go to Profile#333
Homi K. Bhabha
#1353
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Homi Kharshedji Bhabha is an Indian-British scholar and critical theorist. He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government. H...
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Susan Hirsch
#35842
Overall Influence
Susan F. Hirsch is a legal anthropologist whose work has specialized in the study of legal language. She is a professor of conflict resolution and anthropology at George Mason University, where she holds the Vernon M. and Minnie I. Lynch Chair in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.
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Marjorie Shostak
#25797
Overall Influence
1945 - 1996 (51 years)
Marjorie Shostak was an American anthropologist. Though she never received a formal degree in anthropology, she conducted extensive fieldwork among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari desert in south-western Africa and was widely known for her descriptions of the lives of women in this hunter-gatherer society.
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Roger Sandall
#23290
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Frederick Roger Sandall was a New Zealand-born Australian anthropologist, essayist, cinematographer, and scholar. He was a critic of romantic primitivism, which he called designer tribalism, and argued that this rooted Indigenous people in tradition and discouraged them to assimilate to Western culture.
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Genevieve Bell
#22145
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Areas of Specialization: Culture and Technology Genevieve Bell is the Florence Violet McKenzie Chair and Distinguished Professor for the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science, a Senior Fellow at Intel, Director of the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute (3A Institute) at Australian National University, and the first SRI International Engelbert Distinguished Fellow. She earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. She went on to earn an additional Master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is very well known...
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Alison Sheridan
#39703
Overall Influence
Alison Sheridan is a British archaeologist and was Principal Curator of Early Prehistory at National Museums Scotland, where she worked from 1987 to 2019. She specialises in the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age of Britain and Ireland, and particularly in ceramics and stone axeheads.
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Marianne Gullestad
#46866
Overall Influence
1946 - 2008 (62 years)
Marianne Gullestad was a Norwegian social anthropologist. Gullestad grew up in Bergen, took her magister degree in social anthropology from the University of Bergen in 1975 and her dr. philos. in 1984. Her thesis from 1984, Kitchen table society, treated the life of young working-class mothers. She was appointed guest lecturer at the University of Chicago during three periods in the 1980s and 1990s. From 1998 she was appointed assistant professor at the University of Tromsø. Gullestad frequently appeared in television and radio, and wrote hundreds of newspaper articles.
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Ronald Frankenberg
#38897
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Ronald Frankenberg was a British anthropologist and sociologist, known for his study of conflict and decision-making in a Welsh village. He also contributed to the development of medical anthropology.
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Alessandro Duranti
#44072
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and served as Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA from 2009 to 2016. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Education Duranti was trained in linguistics at the Sapienza University of Rome , where he studied general linguistics and ethnolinguistics with , and at the University of Southern California , where he specialized in Bantu languages under Larry Hyman while working with Elinor Ochs on the conversational foundations of Italian word order patterns. His dissertation, The Fono: A Samoan Speech Event, ...
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Jonathan Friedman
#29937
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Friedman is an American anthropologist. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1972. He is professor emeritus of Anthropology at University of California, San Diego and Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He is an editorial board member of the journal Anthropological Theory. Friedman has done most of his research in Hawaii and the Republic of Congo.
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Nikolay Kradin
#16780
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nikolay Nikolaevich Kradin is a Russian anthropologist and archaeologist. Since 1985 he has been a Research Fellow of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology, Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok. He was Head and Professor of the Department of Social Anthropology in the Far-Eastern National Technical University , and also Head and Professor of the Department of World History, Archaeology and Anthropology in the Far-Eastern Federal University . Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2011 and full Member of the Russian Academy of ...
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Craig Stanford
#20730
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Craig Stanford is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is also a Research Associate in the herpetology section of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. He is known for his field studies of the behavior, ecology and conservation biology of chimpanzees, mountain gorillas and other tropical animals, and has published more than 140 scientific papers and 17 books on animal behavior, human evolution and wildlife conservation. He is best known for his field study of the predator–prey ecology of chimpanzees and the animals they hunt ...
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Don Kalb
#49207
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Don Kalb is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology’s financialization research group, full professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergan, and assistant professor of social sciences and cultural anthropology at Universiteit Utrecht. Considered a Marxist anthropologist, Kalb has specialized in labor history, value, capitalism, class, nationalism, and globalization throughout Europe. He conducted a case study in the Netherlands in his most prominent work, Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950. The study provided a relational analysis intersecting class and culture in innovative ways.
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Jean La Fontaine
#12483
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Jean Sybil La Fontaine FRAI is a British anthropologist and emeritus professor of the London School of Economics. She has done research in Africa and the UK, on topics including ritual, gender, child abuse, witchcraft and satanism. In 1994 she wrote a government report: The Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Abuse.
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Mick Aston
#10004
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Michael Antony Aston was an English archaeologist who specialised in Early Medieval landscape archaeology. Over the course of his career, he lectured at both the University of Bristol and University of Oxford and published fifteen books on archaeological subjects. A keen populariser of the discipline, Aston was widely known for appearing as the resident academic on the Channel 4 television series Time Team from 1994 to 2011.
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Ghassan Hage
#36715
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ghassan J. Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held a number of visiting professorships including at the American University of Beirut, University of Nanterre – Paris X, the University of Copenhagen and Harvard. He is currently a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle .
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Joanna Overing
#29354
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Joanna Overing is an American anthropologist based in Scotland. She has conducted research on egalitarianism, indigenous cosmology, philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, the ludic and linguistics through fieldwork in Amazonia. She has extensively studied indigenous Piaroa people in the Orinoco basin of Venezuela.
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Nicholas Conard
#22279
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Nicholas J. Conard, is an American and naturalized German citizen who works as an archaeologist and prehistorian. He is the director of the department for early prehistory and quaternary ecology and the founding director of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
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