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,
#401
George W. Stocking Jr.
#31275
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
George W. Stocking Jr. was a German-born American scholar noted for his scholarship on the history of anthropology. Early life and education Stocking was born in Berlin, Germany in 1928. His father, the economist George W. Stocking Sr., was conducting research on the German potash industry. Stocking senior moved frequently to take different academic positions, as well as to conduct research and undertake policy and applied work. As a result, George Stocking Jr. moved around frequently as a child. The majority of his childhood, however, was spent in Texas, where his father was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#402
Harold C. Fleming
#16325
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Harold Crane Fleming was an anthropologist and historical linguist specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology in solving anthropological problems.
Go to Profile#403
Carlo Tullio Altan
#65342
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Carlo Tullio Altan was an Italian anthropologist, sociologist and philosopher. He was particularly known for his studies on the Italian national character, and was considered one of the pioneers of Italian cultural anthropology.
Go to Profile#404
Katherine Verdery
#35368
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Katherine Verdery is an American anthropologist, author, and emeritus professor, following her tenure as the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center.
Go to Profile#405
Douglas Stenton
#17608
Overall Influence
Douglas Stenton is a Canadian archaeologist, educator and civil servant. He served as Director of Heritage for the Nunavut Department of Culture and Heritage and played an important role in the finding of from Franklin's lost expedition of 1845.
Go to Profile#406
Barry Cunliffe
#6077
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe, , known as Barry Cunliffe, is a British archaeologist and academic. He was Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 2007. Since 2007, he has been an emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#407
Kirin Narayan
#41113
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Kirin Narayan is an Indian-born American anthropologist, folklorist and writer. Early life, education, and career Narayan is the daughter of Narayan Ramji Contractor, a civil engineer from Nashik, and Didi Kinzinger, a German-American "artist, decorator, and builder of sustainable housing". Narayan was born in Bombay, attended school in India and came to the United States in 1976.
Go to Profile#408
Susan Gal
#42317
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Susan Gal is the Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago She is the author or co-author of several books and numerous articles on linguistic anthropology, gender and politics, and the social history of Eastern Europe.
Go to Profile#409
Vyacheslav Molodin
#32589
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Molodin is a Soviet and Russian archaeologist specializing in prehistory of Siberia, professor, academician of the RAS. Biography He was born on 26 September 1948 in the village of Orekhovo, Domachevsky District, Brest Oblast, BSSR
Go to Profile#410
Tomomi Yamaguchi
#68120
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Tomomi Yamaguchi is a Japanese anthropologist. Her specialist areas are feminism, popular culture, nationalism, and social movements in contemporary Japan. Biography Yamaguchi completed a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2004. She is a professor of anthropology at Montana State University.
Go to Profile#411
Germaine Tillion
#6204
Overall Influence
1907 - 2008 (101 years)
Germaine Tillion was a French ethnologist, best known for her work in Algeria in the 1950s on behalf of the French government. A member of the French resistance, she spent time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Go to Profile#412
Frederica de Laguna
#33638
Overall Influence
1906 - 2004 (98 years)
Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna was an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist influential for her work on Paleoindian and Alaska Native art and archaeology in the American northwest and Alaska.
Go to Profile#413
John Whiting
#29226
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
John Wesley Mayhew Whiting was an American sociologist and anthropologist, specializing in child development. Whiting grew up on Martha's Vineyard, on the Massachusetts coast. He received his B.A. in 1931 and his Ph.D. in sociology & anthropology in 1938, both from Yale University. He remained at Yale until 1947 on the staff of Yale Institute of Human Relations. After two years at the State University of Iowa, he was offered a position at Harvard in the Graduate School of Education. In 1963 he transferred to the Department of Social Relations, where he taught and conducted research in anthro...
Go to Profile#414
Shalini Randeria
#14341
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Shalini Randeria is an American-born Indian anthropologist. Education She was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, and brought up in Mumbai and New Delhi, Randeria is an alumna of the University of Delhi, the University of Oxford and Heidelberg University, and earned her PhD at the Free University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#415
G. William Skinner
#14771
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
George William Skinner was an American anthropologist and scholar of China. Skinner was a proponent of the spatial approach to Chinese history, as explained in his Presidential Address to the Association for Asian Studies in 1984. He often referred to his approach as "regional analysis," and taught the use of maps as a key class of data in ethnography.
Go to Profile#416
Erwan Dianteill
#19001
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Erwan Dianteill is a French sociologist and anthropologist, graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, holder of the aggregation in the Social Sciences, Doctor of Sociology and professor of Cultural and Social anthropology at the Sorbonne . He is also Senior Laureate of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2012 and Non-Resident Fellow of the WEB DuBois Research Institute at Harvard University since 2017. Dianteill's work explores anthropological and sociological theories about religion and interconnections between political and religious powers. It also includes the study o...
Go to Profile#417
Matt Cartmill
#35786
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Matthew Cartmill is an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, where he formerly served as Chair of Anthropology. Education and career Cartmill was educated at Pomona College and the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of Duke University in 1970, eventually becoming Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Anthropology there. He left Duke to join the faculty of Boston University in 2008. He was a founding editor of the International Journal of Primatology from 1978 to 1989, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Phy...
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Douglas W. Owsley
#40775
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Douglas W. Owsley is an American anthropologist who is head of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History . He is regarded as one of the most prominent and influential archaeologists and forensic anthropologists in the world in some popular media. In September 2001, he provided scientific analysis at the military mortuary located at Dover Air Force Base, following the 9/11 attack in Washington, D.C. The following year, the US Department of Defense honored him with the Commander's Award for Civilian Service for helping in the identification of 60 federal and ...
Go to Profile#419
Michael Shanks
#17849
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Michael Shanks is a British archaeologist specialising in classical archaeology and archaeological theory. He received his BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, and was a lecturer at the University of Wales, Lampeter before moving to the U.S. in 1999 to take up a Chair in Classics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#420
Roderick Sprague
#48003
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Roderick Sprague III was an American anthropologist, ethnohistorian and historical archaeologist, and the Emeritus Director of the Laboratory of Anthropology at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where he taught for thirty years. He had extensive experience in environmental impact research, trade beads, aboriginal burial customs, and the Columbia Basin area. Sprague was president of the Society of Bead Researchers from 2004-2007.
Go to Profile#421
Alice Beck Kehoe
#22903
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Alice Beck Kehoe is a feminist anthropologist and archaeologist. She has done considerable field research among Native American peoples in the upper plains of the US and Canada, and has authored research volumes on Native American archaeology and Native American history. She is also the author of several general anthropology and archaeology textbooks.
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Raymond J. DeMallie
#33383
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Raymond J. DeMallie was an American anthropologist whose work focuses on the cultural history of the peoples of the Northern Plains, particularly the Lakota. His work is informed by interrelated archival, museum-based, and ethnographic research in a manner characteristic of the ethnohistorical method. In 1985 he founded and became the director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University Bloomington, alongside Douglas Parks, whom he worked collaboratively throughout majority of his career to preserve and translate various Indigenous languages, after having first met in 1980.
Go to Profile#423
Stuart Tyson Smith
#15308
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Stuart Tyson Smith is an Egyptologist and professor in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His specialty is the interaction between ancient Egypt and Nubia. Smith is known for reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian language for the films Stargate and The Mummy
Go to Profile#424
Annemarie Mol
#12127
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Annemarie Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher. She is the Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Winner of the Constantijn & Christiaan Huijgens Grant from the NWO in 1990 to study 'Differences in Medicine', she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2010 to study 'The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory'. She has helped to develop post-ANT/feminist understandings of science, technology and medicine. In her earlier work she explored the performativity of health care practices, argued that realities are generated within those practices, and noted that since practices differ, so too do realities.
Go to Profile#425
Aihwa Ong
#24022
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.
Go to Profile#426
Rita Laura Segato
#19604
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Rita Laura Segato is an Argentine-Brazilian academic, who has been called "one of Latin America's most celebrated feminist anthropologists" and "one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this era". She is specially known for her research oriented towards gender in indigenous villages and Latin American communities, violence against women and the relationships between gender, racism and colonialism. One of her specialist areas is the study of gender violence.
Go to Profile#427
Birgit Meyer
#35809
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Birgit Meyer is a German professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. Career Meyer was born on 21 March 1960 in Emden, Germany. She studied comparative religion, pedagogy, and cultural anthropology at the University of Bremen and the University of Amsterdam. She earned her PhD at the latter university in 1995 under doctoral advisors J. Fabian and H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen, with a thesis titled: Translating the Devil. An African Appropriation of Pietist Protestantism. The Case of the Peki Ewe, 1847–1992. She was appointed as professor of religious studies at Utrecht University in 2011....
Go to Profile#428
Kenelm Burridge
#53695
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Kenelm Oswald Lancelot Burridge was a Maltese-born Canadian anthropologist. Biography Kenelm Burridge was born in October 1922 in Malta. After a childhood in Lucknow, India, he attended school in Great Britain. Burridge enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1939, serving throughout World War II. Although his ship, , was sunk off Naples, Italy in 1943 and he was captured, Burridge escaped, returned to naval service, and retired as a lieutenant three years later.
Go to Profile#429
Robert John Braidwood
#44169
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
Robert John Braidwood was an American archaeologist and anthropologist, one of the founders of scientific archaeology, and a leader in the field of Near Eastern Prehistory. Life Braidwood was born July 29, 1907, in Detroit, Michigan, the first child of Walter John Braidwood and Reay Nimmo , and was educated at the University of Michigan, from where he graduated with an M.A. in architecture in 1933. Within a year he had joined the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's expedition to the Amuq Plain with the archaeologist James Henry Breasted. He worked with the expedition until 1938, dur...
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J. David Sapir
#32785
Overall Influence
J. David Sapir, son of Edward Sapir, is a linguist, anthropologist and photographer. He is Emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is known for his research on Jola languages. He has been editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review
Go to Profile#431
Barbara Smuts
#10512
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Barbara Boardman Smuts is an American anthropologist and psychologist noted for her research into baboons, dolphins, and chimpanzees, and a Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Smuts received a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard University and a Ph.D in neurological and biological behavioral science from Stanford Medical School. In the 1970s she began studying animal behaviour at the University of Michigan, including research with Jane Goodall on chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, where she had a violent introduction to field research, being among four field researchers kidnapped and beaten by a Marxist revolutionary group.
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David Pilbeam
#28040
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
David Pilbeam is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and curator of paleoanthropology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University.
Go to Profile#433
André-Georges Haudricourt
#10447
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
André-Georges Haudricourt was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist. Biography He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood, he was curious about technology, plants and languages. After he obtained his baccalauréat in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture , in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in the administration. However, at graduation , Haudricourt got the worst mark of the entire year group. Unlike his peers, he was interested not in promoting modern tools and technology but in understanding traditional technology, societies and languages.
Go to Profile#434
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski
#72097
Overall Influence
#435
Emily Martin
#27141
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Emily Martin is a sinologist, anthropologist, and feminist. Currently, she is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at New York University. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her PhD degree from Cornell University in 1971. Before 1984, she published works under the name of Emily Martin Ahern.
Go to Profile#436
Margaret Conkey
#34212
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Margaret W. Conkey is an American archaeologist and academic, who specializes in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic in the French Pyrénées. Her research focuses on cave art produced during this period. Conkey is noted as one of the first archaeologists to explore the issues of gender and feminist perspectives in archaeology and in past human societies, using feminist theory to reinterpret images and objects from the Paleolithic Era or the late Ice Age. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was named by Discover magazine in their ...
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Wendy James
#26355
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Wendy Rosalind James, is a British retired social anthropologist and academic. She was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2007, and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2001 to 2004.
Go to Profile#438
Mary Lee Jensvold
#22673
Overall Influence
Mary Lee Jensvold is a senior lecturer at Central Washington University. She was the Director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute located on the campus of Central Washington University. CHCI was the home of the chimpanzee Washoe and four other chimpanzees who use the signs of American Sign Language to communicate with one another and their human caregivers.
Go to Profile#439
P. Steven Sangren
#56764
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Paul Steven Sangren is a socio-cultural anthropologist of China and Taiwan, and is a leading expert in the study of Chinese religion. He is Hu Shih Distinguished Professor of Chinese Studies and Anthropology Emeritus at Cornell University. His research interests include socio-cultural anthropology, religion and ritual, gender, psychoanalysis, practice, China and Taiwan.
Go to Profile#440
Brackette Williams
#39313
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Brackette F. Williams is an American anthropologist, and Senior Justice Advocate, Open Society Institute. She is currently an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#441
Joe Medicine Crow
#10279
Overall Influence
1913 - 2016 (103 years)
Joseph Medicine Crow was a Native American writer, historian and war chief of the Crow Nation. His writings on Native American history and reservation culture are considered seminal works, but he is best known for his writings and lectures concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876.
Go to Profile#442
Wilhelm Solheim
#39436
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Wilhelm G. Solheim II was an American anthropologist recognized as the most senior practitioner of archaeology in Southeast Asia, and as a pioneer in the study of Philippine and Southeast Asian prehistoric archaeology. He is perhaps best known, however, for hypothesizing the existence of the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network , one of two dominant hypotheses regarding the peopling of the Asia-Pacific region during the Neolithic age.
Go to Profile#443
Lawrence Rosen
#20787
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Lawrence Rosen is an American anthropologist and scholar of law. He is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#444
Clement Woodward Meighan
#66868
Overall Influence
1925 - 1997 (72 years)
Clement Woodward Meighan was an archaeologist who made notable contributions to reconstructing the prehistory of southern California, Baja California, and west central Mexico. Early life and education Meighan was born in San Francisco and raised in that city, in Phoenix, Arizona, and in California's San Joaquin Valley. Serving in World War II, he was severely wounded. After the war, while still convalescing, he began studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in anthropology.
Go to Profile#445
Pauline Turner Strong
#41604
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Pauline Turner Strong is an American anthropologist specializing in literary, historical, ethnographic, media, and popular representations of Native Americans. Theoretically her work has considered colonial and postcolonial representation, identity and alterity, and hybridity. She has also researched intercultural captivity narratives, intercultural adoption practices, and the appropriation of Native American symbols and practices in U.S. sports and youth organizations.
Go to Profile#446
Akbar Ahmed
#17993
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed, is a Pakistani-American academic, author, poet, playwright, filmmaker and former diplomat. He currently is a professor of International Relations and holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University, School of International Service in Washington, D.C. Akbar Ahmed served as the Pakistan High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland. He currently is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Go to Profile#447
Ilse Schwidetzky
#36292
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Ilse Schwidetzky was a German anthropologist. Biography She was the daughter of Georg and Susanne Schwidetzky. Susanne Schwidetzky, who studied math at the University of Berlin around 1900, died in 1911 of tuberculosis. Georg Schwidetzky studied law and had a successful political career which ended with World War I. The family moved to Leipzig, where Georg Schwidetzky worked for Die Deutsche Bücherei, roughly equivalent to the Library of Congress. Ilse Schwidetzky had three siblings, Eva , Walter , and Georg . She is related to Oscar Schwidetzky, who invented the ace bandage and was the fi...
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Zeresenay Alemseged
#27115
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Zeresenay "Zeray" Alemseged is an paleoanthropologist who is a faculty member at the University of Chicago. In 2013, he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021. In 2022, he was appointed to the Comité Scientifique International du Musée d’Anthropologie Préhistorique de Monaco and the Pontifical Academy of Science. Alemseged is best known for his discovery, on 10 December 2000, of Selam, also referred to as the "Dikika child" or “Lucy’s child”, the almost-complete fossilized remains of a 3.3 million-year-old child of the species Australopithecus afarensis.
Go to Profile#449
Richard L. Burger
#33909
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Richard Lewis Burger, Ph.D. , is an archaeologist and anthropologist from the United States. He is currently a professor at Yale University and holds the positions of Charles J. MacCurdy Professor in the Anthropology Department, Chair of the Council on Archaeological Studies, and Curator in the Division of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. He has carried out archaeological excavations in the Peruvian Andes since 1975, publishing several books and many articles on Chavin culture, a pre-Hispanic civilization that developed in the northern Andean highlands of Peru from 1000 BC to 400 BC.
Go to Profile#450
Stephen D. Houston
#26081
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Stephen Douglas Houston is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, epigrapher, and Mayanist scholar, who is particularly renowned for his research into the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. He is the author of a number of papers and books concerning topics such as the Maya script, the history, kingships and dynastic politics of the pre-Columbian Maya, and archaeological reports on several Maya archaeological sites, particularly Dos Pilas and El Zotz. In 2021, National Geographic noted that he participated in the correct cultural association assigned to a half-size replica dis...
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