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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#551
Liliana Cavani
#48836
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Liliana Cavani is an Italian film director and screenwriter. She belongs to a generation of Italian filmmakers from Emilia-Romagna that came into prominence in the 1970s, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marco Bellocchio. Cavani became internationally known after the success of her 1974 feature film Il portiere di notte . Her films have historical concerns. In addition to feature films and documentaries, she has also directed opera.
Go to Profile#552
Danah boyd
#30934
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
danah boyd is a technology and social media scholar. She is a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#553
Renata Adler
#49051
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Renata Adler is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker, and in 1968–69, she served as chief film critic for The New York Times. She is also a writer of fiction.
Go to Profile#554
Amira Nowaira
#40352
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Amira Nowaira is an Egyptian academic, translator, columnist and author. She gained her doctorate in English literature from Birmingham University. She has served as chair of the English department at Alexandria University, and is currently a professor there. She has published a number scholarly books and journal articles. More recently, she has contributed journalistic pieces to The Guardian. Apart from her own books, Nowaira has also done translations, both from Arabic to English and from English to Arabic .
Go to Profile#555
Shirley Brice Heath
#29772
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Shirley Brice Heath is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Professor Emerita, Margery Bailey Professorship in English, at Stanford University. She graduated from Lynchburg College, Ball State University, and Columbia University, with a Ph.D. in 1970. She is a Brown University professor-at-large, and a visiting research professor at the Watson Institute.
Go to Profile#556
Angèle Bassolé-Ouédraogo
#34309
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Angèle Bassolé-Ouédraogo is an Ivoirian-born Canadian poet and journalist. She has won the Trillium Book Award and been nominated for the Ottawa Book Award. Biography She was born in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and raised in Upper Volta. She was an avid reader as a child, and was encouraged by her local librarian who eventually taught her as his assistant, which allowed her access to more books than she would normally be allowed. She wrote her first poem around the age of 11 to 12, after being influenced by her brother Francis, who would go on to be a well known poet in Côte d'Ivoire. Her first p...
Go to Profile#557
Carola Häggkvist
#63783
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Carola Maria Häggkvist , commonly known simply as Carola, is a Swedish pop singer. She has been among Sweden's most popular performers since the early 1980s and has released albums ranging from pop and disco to hymns and folk music. Her debut album, Främling , sold around one million copies and remains the biggest-selling album in Swedish music history. She has also worked as a songwriter. During her career, she has recorded many top-selling albums and singles and is referred to as Sweden's most prominent female singer. Some of her biggest hits are "Främling", "Tommy tycker om mig", "Fångad av en stormvind", "All the Reasons to Live", "I Believe in Love", "Genom allt", and "Evighet".
Go to Profile#558
Meredith Davis
#74192
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Meredith Davis is an educator, writer and graphic designer. Her work centers for advocating for a comprehensive, critical and challenging design education. Career Davis graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 1970, receiving her BS in art education and her MEd in 1974. She began her career teaching middle-school art. In 1975, she received her MFA in design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. While at Cranbrook, she received a grant to develop the Michigan curriculum to introduce students to communication, objects and environments through design thinking. The curriculum research cul...
Go to Profile#559
Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
#76158
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen is an American linguist and distinguished professor from the University of Helsinki. Couper-Kuhlen is regarded as an important figure in the development of interactional linguistics and the study of prosody in conversation, through a number of books co-edited with Margret Selting: the 1996 book Prosody in Conversation, the 2001 book Studies in Interactional Linguistics also co-edited with Selting, and the textbook Interactional Linguistics. Her book Building Responsive Action written together with Barbara Fox and Sandra Thompson received the best book award from the I...
Go to Profile#560
Irene McAra-McWilliam
#80023
Overall Influence
Irene Helen McAra-McWilliam, is a design researcher and academic, specialising in design innovation. She was the interim Director of the Glasgow School of Art from November 2018 to May 2020, having been head of its School of Design from 2005. She stood down from the role in 2020, becoming Deputy Director. Penny Macbeth became the new Director following her.
Go to Profile#561
Birgit Nilsson
#52102
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Märta Birgit Nilsson was a Swedish dramatic soprano. Although she sang a wide repertoire of operatic and vocal works, Nilsson was best known for her performances in the operas of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Her voice was noted for its overwhelming force, bountiful reserves of power, and the gleaming brilliance and clarity in the upper register.
Go to Profile#562
Julia Glass
#32240
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Julia Glass is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002. Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.
Go to Profile#563
Ronnie Wilbur
#80697
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ronnie Bring Wilbur is an American theoretical and experimental linguist and a professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Liberal Arts, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She also has a joint appointment in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences in the College of Health and Human sciences. Her main focus is sign language linguistics. Some of Wilbur's major contributions to the subfield include the discovery that sign languages have syllables similar to spoken languages and that blinks can be used grammatically to mark clause boundaries.
Go to Profile#564
Janet Holmes
#72992
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Janet Holmes is a New Zealand sociolinguist. Her research interests include language and gender, language in the workplace, and New Zealand English. Academic career After obtaining an MPhil at the University of Leeds, Holmes moved to Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, later becoming a naturalised New Zealander in 1975. She published a textbook Introduction to Sociolinguistics in 1992 which has run to five editions. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and won the Dame Joan Metge Medal in 2012. She is now an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Go to Profile#565
Pauline Jacobson
#67674
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Pauline Jacobson is a professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University, where she has been since 1977. She is known for her work on variable free semantics, direct compositionality, and transderivationality.
Go to Profile#566
Elizabeth Subercaseaux
#55662
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Elizabeth Subercaseaux Sommerhoff is a Chilean journalist and writer. Biography Elizabeth Subercaseaux grew up near Cauqenes, Chile at her grandparents' home called Santa Clara. Subercaseaux's father died in 1956, when he was 42 years old and she was 11. The five children of the marriage – Bernardo and Juan, older than Elizabeth, and Martin and Ximena, younger – were brought up by their mother, the sculptor, painter, and photographer Gerda Sommerhoff, who was a German and grew up in Holland. She is the great-great-granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck.
Go to Profile#567
Meredith Vieira
#39486
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Meredith Louise Vieira is an American broadcast journalist and television personality. She is best known as the original moderator of the daytime talk show The View , the original host of the syndicated daytime version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , and as co-host of the NBC morning news program Today . , she hosts the syndicated weekday game show 25 Words or Less.
Go to Profile#568
Margaret Mary Vojtko
#44916
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Margaret Mary Vojtko was an American adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University. Her death caused controversy at Duquesne and prompted conversations about unions and the role of adjunct faculty at American universities.
Go to Profile#569
Galina Vishnevskaya
#58122
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya was a Russian soprano opera singer and recitalist who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1966. She was the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and mother to their two daughters, Olga and Elena Rostropovich.
Go to Profile#570
Sissel Kyrkjebø
#60575
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sissel Kyrkjebø , also simply known as Sissel, is a Norwegian soprano. Sissel is considered one of the world's top crossover sopranos. Her musical style ranges from pop recordings and folk songs, to classical vocals and operatic arias. She sings mainly in English and Norwegian and has also sung songs in Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Irish, Italian, French, Russian, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Neapolitan, Māori, Japanese and Latin.
Go to Profile#571
Sylvia Porter
#27085
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Sylvia Field Porter was an American economist, journalist and author. At the height of her career, her readership was greater than 40 million people. Early life Porter was born in Patchogue, New York, on Long Island as Sylvia Field Feldman to Louis and Rose Maisel Feldman. Originally majoring in English literature, she switched to economics and finance given the impact of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It has been suggested that her fiancé, bank employee Reed Porter, was relying upon Sylvia to explain the complications of the worldwide financial panic. They were married in 1931.
Go to Profile#572
Carolin Emcke
#23523
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Carolin Emcke is a German author and journalist who worked for from 1998 to 2006, often writing from areas of conflicts. From 2007 to 2014, she worked as an international reporter for . Her book Echoes of Violence – Letters from a War Reporter was published in 2007 at Princeton University Press. In 2008, she published Stumme Gewalt , in 2013 How We Desire , in 2016 Against Hate , and in 2019 Yes means yes and... . Carolin Emcke was honoured with several awards such as the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 2016, and a Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 2017.
Go to Profile#573
Katherine Dunn
#18184
Overall Influence
1945 - 2016 (71 years)
Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love . She was also a prolific writer on boxing.
Go to Profile#574
Nicole Ellison
#17246
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Nicole Ellison is the Karl E Weick Collegiate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her research in the fields of computer-mediated communication, social media, and social networking sites. Her research has been cited over 63,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#575
Meredith Broussard
#54564
Overall Influence
Meredith Broussard is a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism. Career Broussard was previously a features editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a software developer at the AT&T Bell Labs and MIT Media Lab. Broussard has published features and essays in many outlets including The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Slate Magazine. She is the author of the nonfiction book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.
Go to Profile#576
Jennifer Ward Clarke
#89385
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Jennifer Ward Clarke was a British cellist. After an early career in contemporary music, she later specialised in baroque music and performances on period instruments. Early life and career Jennifer Ward Clarke was born in Yateley, Hampshire on 20 June 1935, the daughter of Dorothea and Harry Ward Clarke, a prep school headteacher. At Benenden School in Kent she became interested in the cello, and studied at London's Royal College of Music with Ivor James, where she won the prize for cello. She won a scholarship to study for a year at the Paris Conservatoire with Paul Tortelier. On three occ...
Go to Profile#577
Faten Hamama
#44937
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Faten Ahmed Hamama was an Egyptian film and television actress and film producer. She was the first wife of Ezz El-Dine Zulficar. She made her screen debut in 1939, when she was only seven years old. Her earliest roles were minor, but her activity and gradual success helped to establish her as a distinguished Egyptian actress. Later revered as an icon in Egyptian cinema. In 1996, nine of the films she starred in were included in the Top hundred films in the history of Egyptian cinema by the cinema critics of Cairo International Film Festival.
Go to Profile#578
Margalit Finkelberg
#20900
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Margalit Finkelberg is an Israeli historian and linguist. She is the professor emerita of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2005 and served as president of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies from 2011 to 2016.In 2021, she was elected Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Go to Profile#579
Jane Grimshaw
#81661
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jane Barbara Grimshaw is a Distinguished Professor [emerita] in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is known for her contributions to the areas of syntax, optimality theory, language acquisition, and lexical representation.
Go to Profile#580
Pearl Lang
#24068
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Pearl Lang was an American dancer, choreographer and teacher renowned as an interpreter and propagator of the choreography style of Martha Graham, and also for her own longtime dance company, the Pearl Lang Dance Theater. She is known for Appalachian Spring , American Masters and Driven
Go to Profile#581
Aditi Lahiri
#31489
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Aditi Lahiri is an Indian-born British linguist and Professor emerita of Linguistics at the University of Oxford. She held the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Oxford from 2007 until her retirement in 2022; she was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her main research interests are in phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics.
Go to Profile#582
Elena Semino
#44187
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Elena Semino is an Italian-born British linguist whose research involves stylistics and metaphor theory. Focusing on figurative language in a range of poetic and prose works, most recently she has worked on topics from the domains of medical humanities and health communication. Her projects use corpus linguistic methods as well as qualitative analysis.
Go to Profile#583
Ellen Contini-Morava
#57272
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ellen Contini-Morava is an anthropological linguist, interested in the meanings of linguistic forms, discourse analysis, functional linguistics and classification; in particular, in the relationship between lexicon and grammar. She specializes in Bantu languages in general, and Swahili in particular.
Go to Profile#584
Alison Mackey
#89513
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alison Mackey is a linguist who specializes in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and research methodology. She is currently a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on applied linguistics and research methods.
Go to Profile#585
Carol Kaye
#40193
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Carol Kaye is an American musician. She is one of the most prolific recorded bass guitarists in rock and pop music, playing on an estimated 10,000 recordings in a career spanning over 65 years. Kaye began playing guitar in her early teens and after some time as a guitar teacher, began to perform regularly on the Los Angeles jazz and big band circuit. She started session work in 1957, and through a connection at Gold Star Studios began working for producers Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. After a bassist failed to turn up to a session in 1963, she switched to that instrument, quickly making a name for herself as one of the most in-demand session players of the 1960s, playing on numerous hits.
Go to Profile#586
Anahid Ajemian
#53586
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Anahid Marguerite Ajemian was an American violinist of Armenian descent. Her career in contemporary music began from her desire to help young composers of her generation get their compositions performed. Additionally, she enjoyed performing the music of established contemporary composers. She included these composers with the traditional repertoire in her performances.
Go to Profile#587
Janine Zacharia
#72610
Overall Influence
Janine Sherri Zacharia is an American journalist. Family She is the daughter of Richard Zacharia, vice president of the Granada Sales Corporation in New York. She is married to Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford University associate professor of communications.
Go to Profile#588
Anna Maria Di Sciullo
#62130
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Anna Maria Di Sciullo is a professor in the Linguistics Department at the Université du Québec à Montréal and visiting scientist at the Department of Linguistics at New York University. Her research areas are Theoretical Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Biolinguistics.
Go to Profile#589
Lynsey de Paul
#58855
Overall Influence
1948 - 2014 (66 years)
Lynsey de Paul was an English singer-songwriter and producer. After initially writing hits for others, she had her own chart hits in the UK and Europe in the 1970s, starting with UK top 10 single "Sugar Me", and became the first British female artist to achieve a number one with a self-written song . She represented the UK in the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest, scoring another chart-topping hit in Switzerland and had a successful career as a two-time Ivor Novello Award-winning composer, record producer, actress and television celebrity.
Go to Profile#590
Pauline Oliveros
#38996
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Pauline Oliveros was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego , Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliveros authored books, formulated new music theories, and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of "deep listening" and "sonic awareness", drawing on metaphors from cybernetics.
Go to Profile#591
Yvonne Loriod
#67856
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Yvonne Louise Georgette Loriod-Messiaen was a French pianist, teacher, and composer, and the second wife of composer Olivier Messiaen. Her sister was the Ondes Martenot player Jeanne Loriod. Biography Loriod was born in Houilles, Yvelines to Gaston and Simone Loriod. Initially receiving piano lessons from her godmother, she later studied at the Paris Conservatoire and became one of Olivier Messiaen's most avid pupils. She also studied with Isidor Philipp, Lazare Lévy then Marcel Ciampi. She went on to become a nationally acclaimed recording artist and concert pianist and premiered most of Messiaen's works for the piano, starting in the 1940s.
Go to Profile#592
Nancy Bonvillain
#53025
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Nancy Bonvillain is a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Bard College at Simon's Rock. She is author of over twenty books on language, culture, and gender, including a series on Native American peoples. In her field work she worked with the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka and Diné peoples, and she has published a grammar and dictionary of the Akwesasne dialect of Kanyenʼkéha . She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1972 and has taught at Columbia University, The New School, SUNY Purchase, Stony Brook University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She now teaches at Bard College at Simon's Roc...
Go to Profile#593
Cher
#32188
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Cher is an American singer, actress and television personality. Often referred to by the media as the "Goddess of Pop", she has been described as embodying female autonomy in a male-dominated industry. Known for her distinctive contralto singing voice and for having worked in numerous areas of entertainment, as well as adopting a variety of styles and appearances, Cher rose to fame in 1965 as one half of the folk rock husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher before launching a successful, six-decade-long solo career.
Go to Profile#594
Elena Anagnostopoulou
#81477
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Elena Anagnostopoulou is a Greek theoretical linguist and syntactician. She is currently Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Crete. Education and career Anagnostopoulou received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Salzburg. Following this, she held a postdoctoral position at the MIT from 1997 to 1998, before taking up a position as assistant professor at the University of Crete in 1998, where she remains to this day. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005 and to full professor in 2009. In 2007 she returned to MIT as a visiting associate professor.
Go to Profile#595
Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen
#83011
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen is a Danish linguist and professor of applied linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. She has contributed significantly to the description of Danish Sign Language and was the only sign language linguist in Denmark from 1978 to 2004. She is considered an important figure in the development of Danish functional linguistics, and has also studied autism and the relation between language and cognition from a cognitive-functional perspective with focus on semantics and pragmatics. She is the sister of Troels Engberg-Pedersen.
Go to Profile#596
Ana Maria Carvalho
#44265
Overall Influence
Ana Maria Carvalho is a Brazilian sociolinguist and a professor of linguistics within the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She is the author of several books and articles on sociolinguistics and language acquisition.
Go to Profile#597
Julia Hasting
#66054
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Julia Hasting is a German graphic designer. She is the Creative Director of Phaidon Press, head of the design department. She is known for the many best-selling books she designed such as Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, magnumº, A Day at elBulli, and Bruce Nauman: the True Artist.
Go to Profile#598
Dee Dee Bridgewater
#56844
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dee Dee Bridgewater is an American jazz singer and actress. She is a three-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award-winning stage actress. For 23 years, she was the host of National Public Radio's syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. She is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Go to Profile#599
Christa Ludwig
#64312
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Christa Ludwig was a German mezzo-soprano and sometime dramatic soprano, distinguished for her performances of opera, lieder, oratorio, and other major religious works like masses, passions, and solos in symphonic literature. Her performing career spanned almost half a century, from the late 1940s until the early 1990s.
Go to Profile#600
Lisa R. Cohen
#43093
Overall Influence
Lisa R. Cohen is a television news magazine producer, known for writing about the Etan Patz case. Biography and career highlights Cohen grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in international relations and French.
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