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.

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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#1

Julia Kristeva

#105

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend...

#2

Gloria Steinem

#118

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

#3

Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters

#144

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Barbara Jill Walters was an American broadcast journalist and television personality. Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, she appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NATAS in 2000 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.

#4

Naomi Campbell

#287

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Naomi Elaine Campbell is an English model. Beginning her career at the age of 8, Campbell was one of six models of her generation declared supermodels by the fashion industry and the international press. She was the first black woman to appear on the covers of Time and Vogue France.

#5

Janet Maslin

#217

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Janet R. Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as a Times film critic from 1977 to 1999 and as a book critic from 2000 to 2015. In 2000, Maslin helped found the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. She is president of its board of directors.

#6

Luce Irigaray

#201

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman , which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One , which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions can be read as a res...

#7

Oriana Fallaci

#747

Overall Influence

1929 - 2006 (77 years)

Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist and author. A partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her "long, aggressive and revealing interviews" with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

#8

Katie Couric

#683

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Katherine Anne Couric is an American journalist and presenter. She is founder of Katie Couric Media, a multimedia news and production company. She also publishes a daily newsletter, Wake Up Call. From 2013 to 2017, she was Yahoo's Global News Anchor. Couric has been a television host at all of the Big Three television networks in the United States, and in her early career she was an assignment editor for CNN. She worked for NBC News from 1989 to 2006, CBS News from 2006 to 2011, and ABC News from 2011 to 2014. In 2021, she appeared as a guest host for the game show Jeopardy!, the first woman ...

#9

Diane Sawyer

#563

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lila Diane Sawyer is an American television broadcast journalist known for anchoring major programs on two networks including ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, 20/20, and Primetime newsmagazine while at ABC News. During her tenure at CBS News she hosted CBS Morning and was the first woman correspondent on 60 Minutes. Prior to her journalism career, she was a member of U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House staff and assisted in his post-presidency memoirs. Presently she works for ABC News producing documentaries and interview specials.

#10

Marianne Mithun

#4278

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.

#11

Anna Wierzbicka

#2191

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist who is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Brought up in Poland, she graduated from Warsaw University and emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived since. With over twenty published books, many of which have been translated into other languages, she is a prolific writer.

#12

Elizabeth II

#605

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states over the course of her lifetime and remained the monarch of 15 realms by the time of her death. Her reign of over 70 years is the longest of any British monarch and the longest verified reign of any female head of state in history.

#13

Tina Brown

#1240

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Christina Hambley Brown, Lady Evans , is an English journalist, magazine editor, columnist, broadcaster, and author. She is the former editor in chief of Tatler , Vanity Fair and The New Yorker , and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast . From 1998 to 2002, Brown was chairman of Talk Media, which included Talk Magazine and Talk Miramax Books. In 2010, she founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform to elevate the voices of women globally, with summits held through 2019. Brown is author of The Diana Chronicles , The Vanity Fair Diaries and The Palace Papers .

#14

Diana, Princess of Wales

Diana, Princess of Wales

#1222

Overall Influence

1961 - 1997 (36 years)

Diana, Princess of Wales , was a member of the British royal family. She was the first wife of Charles III and mother of Princes William and Harry. Her activism and glamour made her an international icon, and earned her enduring popularity.

#15

Anthea Bell

#4513

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Anthea Bell was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include The Castle by Franz Kafka, Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French Asterix comics with co-translator Derek Hockridge.

#16

Terry Gross

#1302

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Terry Gross is an American journalist who is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview-based radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed nationally by NPR. Since joining NPR in 1975, Gross has interviewed thousands of guests.

#17

Amy Goodman

#1392

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement, Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara, and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria.

#18

Julie Taymor

#2096

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Julie Taymor is an American director and writer of theater, opera, and film. Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997 and received eleven Tony Award nominations, with Taymor receiving Tony Awards for her direction and costume design. Her film Frida, about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a Best Original Song nomination for Taymor's composition "Burn It Blue". She also directed the 2007 jukebox musical film Across the Universe, based on the music of the Beatles.

#19

Johanna Nichols

#3744

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Johanna Nichols is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Career She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax."

#20

Margaret Busby

#1052

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL , also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa , and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.

#21

Connie Chung

#2228

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Constance Yu-Hwa Chung is an American journalist who has been a news anchor and reporter for the U.S. television news networks ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. Some of her more famous interview subjects include Claus von Bülow and U.S. representative Gary Condit, whom Chung interviewed first after the Chandra Levy disappearance, and basketball legend Magic Johnson after he went public about being HIV-positive. In 1993, she became the second woman to co-anchor a network newscast as part of CBS Evening News.

#22

Tracey Emin

#1305

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.

#23

Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn

#2910

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. Gellhorn reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. She was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. She died in 1998 by apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.

#24

Lesley Stahl

#2109

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lesley Rene Stahl is an American television journalist. She has spent most of her career with CBS News, where she began as a producer in 1971. Since 1991, she has reported for CBS's 60 Minutes. She is known for her news and television investigations and award-winning foreign reporting. For her body of work she has earned various journalism awards including a Lifetime Achievement News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2003 for overall excellence in reporting.

#25

Deborah Tannen

#2814

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Deborah Frances Tannen is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

#26

Hope Hicks

#4973

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Hope Charlotte Hicks is an American public relations executive and political advisor who served in President Donald Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2018 and 2020 to 2021. She served as White House director of strategic communications from January to September 2017, as White House communications director from 2017 to 2018, and returned to serve as a counselor to the president from 2020 to 2021.

#27

Susan Curtiss

#6985

Overall Influence

Susan Curtiss is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Curtiss' main fields of research are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Her 1976 UCLA PhD dissertation centered on the study of the grammatical development of Genie, a famous feral child. Her subsequent work has been on grammatical development in children with SLI; maturational constraints on first-language development ; hemispheric specialization for language and language acquisition; and the cognitive modularity of grammar.

#28

Judy Woodruff

#2237

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Judy Carline Woodruff is an American broadcast journalist who has worked in local, network, cable, and public television news since 1970. She was the anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour through the end of 2022. Woodruff has covered every presidential election and convention since 1976. She has interviewed several heads of state and moderated U.S. presidential debates.

#29

Ruth Wodak

#7362

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ruth Wodak is an Austrian linguist, who is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Professor in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.

#30

Mary Haas

#8861

Overall Influence

1910 - 1996 (86 years)

Mary Rosamond Haas was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

#31

Maureen Dowd

#1841

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Maureen Brigid Dowd is an American columnist for The New York Times and an author. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Dowd worked for The Washington Star and Time, writing news, sports and feature articles. She joined The New York Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter, and became an op-ed writer in 1995.

#32

Ruqaiya Hasan

#7968

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

Ruqaiya Hasan was a professor of linguistics who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.

#33

Alexandra Aikhenvald

#10871

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Alexandra Yurievna "Sasha" Aikhenvald is an Australian-Brazilian linguist specialising in linguistic typology and the Arawak language family of the Brazilian Amazon basin. She is a professor at the James Cook University.

#34

Pamela Munro

#10381

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Pamela Munro is an American linguist who specializes in Native American languages. She is a distinguished research professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has held a position since 1974.

#35

Keren Rice

#9253

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Keren D. Rice is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto. Education and career Rice earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Toronto, with a dissertation entitled, "Hare phonology."

#36

Lina Wertmüller

Lina Wertmüller

#5577

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller , known as Lina Wertmüller , was an Italian film director and screenwriter. She is best known for her 1970s art house films Seven Beauties , The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away.

#37

Henriette Walter

Henriette Walter

#12319

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Henriette Walter is a French linguist, emeritus professor of French at the University of Rennes 2, and director of the Phonology Laboratory at the École pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne. She is known for both her specialized academic work and her popular linguistics publications.

#38

Jane Jacobs

#383

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.

#39

Helen McCarthy

#6440

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Helen McCarthy is the British author of such anime reference books as 500 Manga Heroes and Villains, Anime!, The Anime Movie Guide and Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation. She is the co-author of The Erotic Anime Movie Guide and the exhaustive The Anime Encyclopedia with Jonathan Clements. She also designs needlework and textile art.

#40

Anna Politkovskaya

Anna Politkovskaya

#1193

Overall Influence

1958 - 2006 (48 years)

Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist and human rights activist, who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War . It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage c...

#41

Jane Pauley

#3264

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Margaret Jane Pauley is an American television host, and author, active in news reporting since 1972. Pauley first became widely known as Barbara Walters's successor on the NBC morning show Today, beginning at the age of 25, where she was a co-anchor from 1976 to 1989, at first with Tom Brokaw, and later with Bryant Gumbel; for a short while in the late 1980s she and Gumbel worked with Deborah Norville. In 1989, with her job apparently threatened by Norville's addition to the program, she asked to be released from her contract, but her request was denied. Her next regular anchor position was ...

#42

Kate Adie

#5073

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kathryn Adie is an English journalist. She was Chief News Correspondent for BBC News between 1989 and 2003, during which time she reported from war zones around the world. She retired from the BBC in early 2003 and works as a freelance presenter with From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4.

#43

Victoria Fromkin

#8321

Overall Influence

1923 - 2000 (77 years)

Victoria Alexandra Fromkin was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors, which she applied to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.

#44

Sarah Thomason

#9394

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Sarah Grey Thomason is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, Native American languages and typological universals. She also has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy.

#45

Paula Scher

#6314

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design. She also served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991. Education Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970.

#46

Jancis Robinson

Jancis Robinson

#4174

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jancis Mary Robinson OBE, ComMA, MW is a British wine critic, journalist and wine writer. She currently writes a weekly column for the Financial Times, and writes for her website JancisRobinson.com, updated daily. She provided advice for the wine cellar of Queen Elizabeth II.

#47

Juliane House

#11011

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Juliane House is a German linguist and translation studies scholar. Biography House received a degree in English and Spanish Translation and International Law from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Later, she worked as a translator and researcher. She earned her BEd, MA and PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada.

#48

Jenny Holzer

#1987

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.

#49

Cokie Roberts

#3362

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne "Cokie" Roberts was an American journalist and author. Her career included decades as a political reporter and analyst for National Public Radio, PBS, and ABC News, with prominent positions on Morning Edition, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, World News Tonight, and This Week. She was considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and Nina Totenberg.

#50

Megyn Kelly

#2354

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Megyn Marie Kelly is an American journalist and media personality. She currently hosts a talk show and podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, that airs live daily on SiriusXM. She was a talk show host at Fox News from 2004 to 2017 and a host and correspondent with NBC News from 2017 to 2018. She is also active in posting to her Instagram page and YouTube channel.

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