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,
#801
Merry Clayton
#57829
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Merry Clayton is an American soul and gospel singer. She contributed vocals to numerous tracks and worked with many major recording artists for decades, including a duet with Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones song "Gimme Shelter". Clayton is prominently featured in 20 Feet from Stardom, the Oscar-winning documentary about background singers and their contributions to the music industry.
Go to Profile#802
Lucy Seki
#60688
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Lucy Seki was a Brazilian linguist specializing in indigenous languages of the Americas. She authored a grammar of the Kamayurá language. Biography Lucy Seki had a Master's and Ph.D. in linguistics from the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. She was also awarded a Bachelor in history by the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and did post-doctorate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a full professor at the State University of Campinas , Brazil. In 2010, she was elected an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America for her outstanding contribution to the fie...
Go to Profile#803
Julia Baird
#49859
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Julia Woodlands Baird is an Australian journalist, broadcaster and author. She contributes to The New York Times and The Sydney Morning Herald and is a regular host of The Drum, a television news review program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation . Her non-fiction work includes a bestselling memoir, a biography on Queen Victoria and a meditation on the experience of grace during a time of dark politics.
Go to Profile#804
Carlene Carter
#55420
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carlene Carter is an American country music singer and songwriter. She is the daughter of June Carter Cash and her first husband, Carl Smith. As of 2020, since 1978, Carter has recorded 12 albums, primarily on major labels. In the same timespan, she has released more than 20 singles, including three number three-peaking hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts.
Go to Profile#805
Audrey Geisel
#41837
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Audrey Grace Florine Stone was the second wife of American children's book author Theodor Geisel , to whom she was married from 1968 until his death in 1991. She founded Dr. Seuss Enterprises in 1993, and was President and CEO of the company until her death in 2018.
Go to Profile#806
Elisa
#56934
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Elisa Toffoli , performing under the mononym Elisa, is an Italian singer-songwriter. She is one of few Italian musicians to write and record mainly in English. She draws inspiration from many genres such as pop, alternative rock, electronica and trip hop. In Europe she is perhaps most recognised for the single "Come Speak to Me", while American audiences may recognise the song "Dancing" as featured in both the 2006 and 2007 seasons of So You Think You Can Dance. On 18 December 2012, her collaboration with Ennio Morricone, "Ancora qui", was featured on Quentin Tarantino's film, Django Unchaine...
Go to Profile#807
Kathleen Battle
#56389
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kathleen Deanna Battle is an American operatic soprano known for her distinctive vocal range and tone. Born in Portsmouth, Ohio, Battle initially became known for her work within the concert repertoire through performances with major orchestras during the early and mid-1970s. She made her opera debut in 1975. Battle expanded her repertoire into lyric soprano and coloratura soprano roles during the 1980s and early 1990s, until her eventual dismissal from the Metropolitan Opera in 1994. She later has focused on recording and the concert stage. After a 22-year absence from the Met, Battle perfor...
Go to Profile#808
Kathleen Hanna
#42143
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Kathleen Hanna is an American singer, musician and pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, and punk zine writer. In the early-to-mid-1990s she was the lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill, and then fronted Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2010, she has recorded as the Julie Ruin.
Go to Profile#809
Olga Romanova
#68078
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Olga Yevgenyevna Romanova is a Russian journalist and a director of the civil rights organization Russia Behind Bars. Biography Olga Abramovich was born on March 28, 1966, in Lyubertsy, Russia. In 1988 Romanova graduated from the Moscow College of Finance, the Finance Department.
Go to Profile#810
Vera Dulova
#86190
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Vera Georgievna Dulova was a Russian harpist and instructor. The Russian school or method is named after her. Biography She was born into a princely family, related to the Rurik Dynasty, the founders of the Tsardom of Russia. Her grandfather was devoted to the violin and her grandmother, Alexandra Urievna Zograf-Dulov studied the piano with Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory; then she became a favorite pupil of Tchaikovsky. The great master dedicated two of his piano works to Alexandra.
Go to Profile#811
Sonia Boyce
#59616
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sonia Dawn Boyce, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound.
Go to Profile#812
Liz Ogbu
#65512
Overall Influence
Liz Ogbu is an American architect, designer and urbanist whose work focuses on issues related to community building and spatial justice. She is the founder and principal of the design consulting firm Studio O.
Go to Profile#813
Neri Oxman
#8522
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli designer and professor known for art and architecture that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. She coined the phrase "material ecology" to define her work.
Go to Profile#814
Eliza Carthy
#87533
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Eliza Amy Forbes Carthy, MBE is an English folk musician known for both singing and playing the fiddle. She is the daughter of English folk musicians Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. Life and career Carthy was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England. She went to school at Fyling Hall School in North Yorkshire.
Go to Profile#815
Antje Weithaas
#93947
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Antje Weithaas is a German classical violinist. Apart from solo recitals and chamber music performances, she has played with leading orchestras in Europe, Asia and the United States. Career Born in Guben, Weithaas studied at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin. In 1987 she won the Kreisler-Wettbewerb in Graz, in 1988 the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig and in 1991 the International Joseph Joachim Violin Competition in Hannover, whose artistic director she became in 2019. Weithaas worked for some years as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and moved in 2004 to the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler".
Go to Profile#816
Karyn Pugliese
#84445
Overall Influence
Karyn Pugliese is a Canadian broadcast journalist and communications specialist, of Algonquin descent. She is member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation in Ontario. She is a Nieman Fellow, Class of 2020, Harvard University and has been recognized by the Canadian Association of Journalists with a Charles Bury Award for her leadership supporting journalists and fighting for media rights. In 2018 the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television presented Pugliese with the organization's annual Gordon Sinclair Award for distinguished achievement in journalism at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards.
Go to Profile#817
Kara Walker
#45388
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
Go to Profile#818
Anna Giacalone Ramat
#87676
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Anna Giacalone Ramat, born Anna Giacalone in Forlì, Italy, 17 June 1937, is an Italian linguist known for her work on grammaticalization and language acquisition. Biography Anna Giacalone graduated from the University of Florence in 1959, subsequently studying Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit and Germanic linguistics at the University of Würzburg and Saarland University, before taking up a position as teaching assistant and then assistant professor at the University of Cagliari. During the 1970s she held professorial positions at the University of Messina and the University of Milan; she ...
Go to Profile#819
Laura DeNardis
#30641
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Laura DeNardis is an American author and a scholar of Internet governance and technical infrastructure. She is the Professor and Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society at Georgetown University. DeNardis is an affiliated Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School and served as its executive director from 2008 to 2011. She previously served as a Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Director of Research for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. With a background in information technology engineering and a doctorate i...
Go to Profile#820
Whitney Crothers Dilley
#76538
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Whitney Crothers Dilley is an American professor of comparative literature and cinema studies. She is best known as the author of the 2007 monograph The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen, published by Wallflower Press, and distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press.
Go to Profile#821
Lindsey Stirling
#43559
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Lindsey Stirling is an American violinist, songwriter, and dancer. She presents choreographed violin performances, in live and music videos found on her official YouTube channel, which she created in 2007.
Go to Profile#822
Robin Gianattassio-Malle
#68537
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Robin Gianattassio-Malle is an American journalist and producer specializing in the use of aural and visual media and is founder and executive director of Blue Egg Media, established in 2008. Gianattassio-Malle lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former Director of The Center for Word, Text and Image, she is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Design and Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the California College of the Arts , where she teaches courses using interview as a medium for the Upper Division Interdisciplinary Department as well as the V...
Go to Profile#823
Marcella Detroit
#58051
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marcella Levy , known professionally as Marcy Levy and Marcella Detroit, is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. She co-wrote the 1977 Eric Clapton hit "Lay Down Sally" and released her debut studio album Marcella in 1982. She joined Shakespears Sister in 1988 with ex-Bananarama member Siobhan Fahey. Their first two studio albums, Sacred Heart , and Hormonally Yours , both reached the top 10 of the UK Albums Chart. Detroit sang the lead vocals on their biggest hit, "Stay", which spent eight consecutive weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart in 1992. Detroit left the band in 1993 and had a UK top 20 hit with "I Believe" in 1994.
Go to Profile#824
Gabrielle
#61360
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Louise Gabrielle Bobb , known professionally as Gabrielle, is a British singer and songwriter. Bobb was born in Hackney, London. She released her debut single, "Dreams", in 1993, and it topped the UK Singles Chart the same year. Her other singles include "Going Nowhere", "Give Me a Little More Time", "Walk On By", and "If You Ever" – a duet with East 17.
Go to Profile#825
Lourdes Ortega
#76912
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Lourdes Ortega is a Spanish-born American linguist. She is currently a professor of applied linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and second language writing. She is noted for her work on second language acquisition and for recommending that syntactic complexity needs to be measured multidimensionally.
Go to Profile#826
Miyuki Sawashiro
#75476
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
is a Japanese actress, voice actress and narrator. She has played voice roles in a number of Japanese anime/games including Beelzebub, Bishamon in Noragami, Petit Charat/Puchiko in Di Gi Charat, Mint in Galaxy Angel, Sinon in Sword Art Online II, Twilight/Towa Akagi/Cure Scarlet in Go! Princess Precure, Dlanor A. Knox in Umineko: When They Cry, Izuna Hatsuse in No Game, No Life, Amagi in Azur Lane, Celty Sturluson in Durarara!!, Kurapika in Hunter × Hunter, Raiden Mei and Dr.MEI in Honkai Impact 3, Raiden Shogun/Raiden Ei in Genshin Impact and Gun Girl Z, Akane Kurashiki in Zero Escape, Ayane...
Go to Profile#827
Ann Hobson Pilot
#60034
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ann Hobson Pilot is an American musician and the former principal harpist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. She has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and as a soloist with many orchestras in the United States. She was one of four African American musicians who were the first to play in United States symphony orchestras during the 1960s.
Go to Profile#828
Liz Neeley
#50412
Overall Influence
Liz Neeley is a science communicator, researcher, and founder of Liminal Creations. She was formerly the Executive Director of The Story Collider, a nonprofit organization that focuses on true, personal stories inspired by science. She began her career in marine biology and conservation and has since become an expert in the use of narrative storytelling for effective science communication.
Go to Profile#829
Ann Brill
#97598
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Ann Brill is the Dean of the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. Career Brill focuses her research work on how journalists are affected by the changes in media technology. Through her research, she has found that the developments in media technology have forced journalists to become adaptive and flexible in the ways that they work in turn causing them to be lifelong learners.
Go to Profile#830
Mitra Jashni
#60806
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Mitra Jashni is an Iranian visual artist and political activist, of Kurdish ethnicity. She works in the mediums of painting, drawing, and sculpture; as well as works as an art teacher, poet, and singer of Iranian contemporary music. She is one of the founders and executive director of Farashgard, an Iranian political party and activist group based in Washington, D.C..
Go to Profile#831
Judit Kormos
#85738
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Judit Kormos is a Hungarian-born British linguist. She is a professor and the Director of Studies for the MA TESOL Distance programme at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She is renowned for her work on motivation in second language learning, and self-regulation in second language writing. Her current interest is in dyslexia in second language learning.
Go to Profile#832
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
#104961
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ingrid Marijke Tieken-Boon van Ostade is a professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University's Centre for Linguistics. She has researched widely in the area of English socio-historical linguistics having looked at such diverse fields as English negations, historical social network analysis, the standardisation process and the language of 18th-century letters. She has recently published a book on Bishop Lowth . Her work on a collaborative project on English usage was featured in the BBC Radio 4's Making History programme.
Go to Profile#833
Ameena Ahmad Ahuja
#58569
Overall Influence
Ameena Ahmad Ahuja is an Indian painter, calligrapher, writer and linguist, known for her Urdu poetry-inspired art works. Biography Ameena Ahmad Ahuja was born to a British mother and Nuruddin Ahmed, a barrister and litterateur. She did her training in art at the Slade School of Art in London. She is a former member of faculty of the Department of Russian at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and, besides Russian, she is proficient in languages such as Persian, German, French, Hindi and English. Her career also covered stints at Columbia University as a lecturer of poetry and as an Artist-in-res...
Go to Profile#834
Janice Gould
#74051
Overall Influence
1949 - 2019 (70 years)
Janice Gould was a Koyangk'auwi Maidu writer and scholar. She was the author of Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather and co-editor with Dean Rader of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Her book Doubters and Dreamers was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.
Go to Profile#835
Kim Deal
#48757
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kimberley Ann Deal is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist rock musician. She was the original bassist and co-vocalist in the alternative rock band Pixies from 1986 to 1993 and 2004 to 2013, and is the frontwoman of the Breeders, which she formed in 1989.
Go to Profile#836
Michele Zappavigna
#85233
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michele Zappavigna is an Australian linguist. She is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her major contributions are based on the discourse of social media and ambient affiliation . Her work is interdisciplinary and covers studies in systemic functional linguistics , corpus linguistics, multimodality, social media, online discourse and social semiotics. Zappavigna is the author of six books and numerous journal articles covering these disciplines.
Go to Profile#837
Jennifer S. Cole
#72898
Overall Influence
Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor of linguistics and Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Go to Profile#838
Wynonna Judd
#37117
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Wynonna Ellen Judd, known simply as Wynonna , is an American country music singer. She is one of the most widely recognized and awarded female country musicians in history. In all, she has had 19 No. 1 singles, including those with The Judds. Her solo albums and singles are all credited to—and performed under—the singular stage name, Wynonna. She first rose to fame in the 1980s alongside her mother, Naomi, in their mother-daughter country music duo, The Judds. They released seven albums on Curb Records, in addition to 26 singles, of which 14 were No. 1 hits. In 2023 Wynonna was named the best ...
Go to Profile#839
Magdalena Smoczyńska
#100403
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Magdalena Smoczyńska, born 25 April 1947 in Kraków, is a Polish psycholinguist and expert in the development of language in children. She is an emeritus reader in the department of linguistics at Jagiellonian University where she was once head of the Child Language Laboratory and now studies specific language impairment at the Institute for Educational Research.
Go to Profile#840
Caroline Haythornthwaite
#67061
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Caroline Haythornthwaite is a professor emerita at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. She served as the School's director of the Library Science graduate program from July 2017 to June 2019. She previously served as Director and Professor at the Library, Archival and Information Studies, School of SLAIS, at The iSchool at The University of British Columbia . Her research areas explore the way interaction, via computer media, supports and affects work, learning, and social interaction, primarily from a social-network-analysis perspective. Previously, during 1996–2010, at the Uni...
Go to Profile#841
Angela Gheorghiu
#74439
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Angela Gheorghiu is a Romanian soprano, especially known for her performances in the operas of Puccini and Verdi, widely recognised by critics and opera lovers as one of the greatest sopranos of all time.
Go to Profile#842
Brigitte Fassbaender
#92601
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Brigitte Fassbaender , is a German mezzo-soprano opera singer and a stage director. From 1999 to 2012 she was intendant of the Tyrolean State Theatre in Innsbruck, Austria. She holds the title Kammersängerin from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Vienna Staatsoper.
Go to Profile#843
Stephanie Cole
#61175
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Patricia Stephanie Cole is an English stage, television, radio and film actress, known for high-profile roles in shows such as Tenko , Open All Hours , A Bit of a Do , Waiting for God , Keeping Mum , Doc Martin , Cabin Pressure , Still Open All Hours , Man Down and as Sylvia Goodwin in ITV soap opera Coronation Street .
Go to Profile#844
Sarah Cohen
#70833
Overall Influence
Sarah Cohen is an American journalist, author, and professor. Cohen is a proponent of, and teaches classes on, computational journalism and authored the book "Numbers in the Newsroom: Using math and statistics in the news."
Go to Profile#845
Lüqiu Luwei
#77410
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Lüqiu Luwei , also known as Rose Luqiu, is a Chinese television journalist and the executive news editor for Phoenix Television . She was the first female reporter to cover the 2001 Afghan war. Career Lüqiu was born into an ordinary worker's family in Shanghai on September 19, 1969. Her father Lüqiu Zhiyi is a veteran. Her parents divorced when she was four years old. Her mother went to Shenzhen and she lived with her paternal grandparents. Lüqiu entered into No. 2 High School of East China Normal University in 1982, where she worked on the Shanghai Middle school students press corps and later became the head.
Go to Profile#846
Sarah Polley
#51809
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Sarah Ellen Polley is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, political activist and retired actress. She first garnered attention as a child actress for her role as Ramona Quimby in the television series Ramona, based on Beverly Cleary's books. This subsequently led to her role as Sara Stanley in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea . She has starred in many feature films, including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , Exotica , The Sweet Hereafter , Guinevere , Go , The Weight of Water , No Such Thing , My Life Without Me , Dawn of the Dead , Splice , and Mr. Nobody .
Go to Profile#847
Zhu Hua
#98656
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Zhù Huá , is Professor of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, and Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. She was previously Chair of Educational Linguistics in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, and Professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was a member of the Education subpanel of the 2021 UK Research Excellence Framework , member of the 2020 Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise, and chairs the grant assessment panel for language and linguistics for the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.
Go to Profile#848
Susan Jordan
#90814
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Susan Jordan is a New Zealand dancer, choreographer and dance instructor. Biography Jordan began dancing at the age of 7, and danced professionally with the New Zealand Ballet Company from the age of 17. She briefly gave up dancing to study typing and shorthand at a business school, and then theology with the aim of becoming a missionary, however she returned to dancing.
Go to Profile#849
Hazel Carter
#80715
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Joan Hazel Carter was a British-American linguist, known in particular for her work on the Bantu languages, Shona, Kongo and Tonga. Born on 22 February 1928 to Charles and Constance Wilkinson, Carter graduated from the County Grammar School for Girls in Beckenham, Kent, England in 1947 and received a full scholarship to attend Oxford University, Oxford, England where she was a member of St. Hugh's College from 1947 to 1950.
Go to Profile#850
Mildred Dunnock
#73518
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Mildred Dorothy Dunnock was an American stage and screen actress. She was twice nominated for an Academy Award: first Death of a Salesman in 1951, then Baby Doll in 1956. Early life Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Dunnock graduated from Western High School. She developed an interest in theater while she was a student at Goucher College where she was a member of Alpha Phi sorority and the Agora dramatic society. After graduating, she taught English at Friends School of Baltimore and helped with productions of plays there.
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