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,
#901
Eleanor Antin
#30900
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Eleanor Antin is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist, feminist artist, and university professor. Early life and education Eleanor Fineman was born in the Bronx on February 27, 1935. Her parents, Sol Fineman and Jeanette Efron, were Polish Jews who had recently immigrated to the United States. She had one sister, Marcia, born 1940.
Go to Profile#902
Milena Žic-Fuchs
#42716
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Milena Žic Fuchs is a Croatian linguist and full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She formerly served as the Croatian Minister of Science and Technology in the cabinet of Zlatko Mateša from February 1999 to January 2000.
Go to Profile#903
Julie Verhoeven
#88802
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Julie Verhoeven is a British illustrator and designer who has collaborated with brands such as Louis Vuitton, Versace and Peter Jensen. While she is recognised primarily for her work in fashion, she has also contributed illustrations to books, magazines and album covers. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at London's Hayward Gallery. She is a design academic at both Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art.
Go to Profile#904
Ruth Finnegan
#51959
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Ruth Hilary Finnegan is a Northern Irish linguistic anthropologist and Emeritus Professor of the Open University. Biography Finnegan was born in 1933 in Derry. She attended Londonderry High School
Go to Profile#905
Helen Baxendale
#68463
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Helen Victoria Baxendale is an English actress of stage and television, known for her roles as Rachel Bradley in the British comedy drama Cold Feet and Emily Waltham in the American sitcom Friends .
Go to Profile#906
Zoya Akhtar
#45228
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Zoya Akhtar is an Indian film director and screenwriter who works in Hindi cinema. Born to the Akthar family of Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani, she completed a diploma in filmmaking from NYU and assisted directors Mira Nair, Tony Gerber and Dev Benegal, before becoming an independent writer and director. Akhtar is the recipient of several accolades, including four Filmfare Awards. Zoya, along with Reema Kagti, founded Tiger Baby Films, a film and web studio in October 2015.
Go to Profile#907
Gudrun Schröfel
#67792
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Gudrun Schröfel is a German choral conductor, conductor and academic teacher. She led choirs, namely the Mädchenchor Hannover, to competition successes and awards for recordings. Life Schröfel studied music pedagogy, conducting, voice and voice pedagogy at the Musikhochschule Hannover. She studied further with Eric Ericson and Arleen Augér. She first focused on concert singing in oratorios and lieder, and conducted choir and orchestra at a .
Go to Profile#908
Viveca Lindfors
#82902
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Elsa Viveca Torstensdotter Lindfors was a Swedish American stage, film, and television actress. She won an Emmy Award and a Silver Bear for Best Actress. Biography Lindfors was born in Uppsala, Sweden, the daughter of Karin Emilia Therese and Axel Torsten Lindfors.
Go to Profile#909
Sarah Stillman
#34976
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (41 years)
Sarah Stillman is an American professor and journalist focusing on immigration policy and the criminal justice system. She won a 2012 George Polk Award, and 2012 Hillman Prize. In 2016, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#910
Alison Wray
#113996
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Alison Wray FAcSS FLSW is a Research Professor in Language and Communication at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. She is known for her work on formulaic language. Career Wray has been teaching at Cardiff University since 1999. She has also taught at Swansea University, York St John University, University College of Ripon and York St John. Her BA and D.Phil. degrees are from the University of York.
Go to Profile#911
Shirley Verrett
#79002
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Shirley Verrett was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who successfully transitioned into soprano roles. Verrett enjoyed great fame from the late 1960s through the 1990s, particularly well known for singing the works of Verdi and Donizetti.
Go to Profile#912
Sarah Banet-Weiser
#65166
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Sarah Banet-Weiser is a distinguished professor of communication and author. She is currently a joint professor at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and at the University of Pennsylvania. She previously was the head of the London School of Economics and Political Science's Media and Communication Department between September 2018 and June 2021. In July 2014, Banet-Weiser became director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
Go to Profile#913
Wanda Jackson
#50062
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Wanda LaVonne Jackson is an American singer and songwriter. Since the 1950s, she has recorded and released music in the genres of rock, country and gospel. She was among the first women to have a career in rock and roll, recording a series of 1950s singles that helped give her the nickname "The Queen of Rockabilly". She is also counted among the first female stars in the genre of country music.
Go to Profile#914
Wendy Perron
#61347
Overall Influence
Wendy Perron is an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher who was the editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine from 2004 to 2013. She is the author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer, Selected Writings, published by Wesleyan University Press in November 2013.
Go to Profile#915
Judith Davidoff
#102710
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Judith Davidoff was an American viol player, cellist, and performer on the medieval bowed instruments. She was considered the “Grande Dame of the viol”, "a master of the viola da gamba and other stringed instruments" and "a central part of the early-music scene." Her recorded performances reflect her wide range of repertoire and styles, including such works as Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht and 13th-century monody. She is responsible for the catalog of 20th- and 21st-century viol music.
Go to Profile#916
Lera Auerbach
#86349
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born Austrian-American classical composer, conductor and concert pianist. Early life and education Auerbach was born to a Jewish family in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Ural Mountains. Her mother was a piano teacher, many of whose ancestors had also been musicians. Lera began composing her own music at an early age; she later told an interviewer, "I was born to do this, to work in art... I had this feeling when I was four and I had it when I came to New York...". She received permission to visit the United States on a concert tour in 1991; although she spoke no English, she decided to stay in the country to pursue her musical career.
Go to Profile#917
Beverly Schmidt Blossom
#51340
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Beverly Schmidt Blossom was an American modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher. She was an original member and soloist with the Alwin Nikolais Dance Theater, a modern dance choreographer for Illinois Dance Theatre, Blossom & Co. and others, and a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#918
Susan Zaeske
#83288
Overall Influence
Susan Zaeske is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Arts and Arts and was formerly Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Go to Profile#919
Carole Chaski
#76890
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Carole Elisabeth Chaski is a forensic linguist who is considered one of the leading experts in the field. Her research has led to improvements in the methodology and reliability of stylometric analysis and inspired further research on the use of this approach for authorship identification. Her contributions have served as expert testimony in several federal and state court cases in the United States and Canada. She is president of ALIAS Technology and executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, a non-profit research organization devoted to linguistic evidence.
Go to Profile#920
Jane Greer
#71065
Overall Influence
1924 - 2001 (77 years)
Jane Greer was an American film and television actress best known for her role as femme fatale Kathie Moffat in the 1947 film noir Out of the Past. In 2009, The Guardian named her one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
Go to Profile#921
Chisato Moritaka
#51200
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Chisato Moritaka is a Japanese pop singer who also is notable as a songwriter. She is affiliated with Up-Front Create, a subsidiary of the Up-Front Group. Moritaka's singing career as the unrivaled "Dance Queen" began in May 1987 with the release of her debut album New Season. She differed from many other female Idol singers in Japan in that she wrote her own lyrics for majority of her albums. More than 60 of her songs were composed by Hideo Saitō. Moritaka also played drums on many of the tracks, as well as piano, guitar, recorder, clarinet, and other instruments. Her musical style was influenced by Pink Lady, Janet Jackson, Roger Taylor, and The Beatles.
Go to Profile#922
Elena Bashir
#82377
Overall Influence
Elena Bashir is an American linguist and senior lecturer in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations of the Humanities Division of the University of Chicago. She studies languages of Pakistan and the broader northwestern part of South Asia, and has published extensive linguistic work on the Dardic languages, Hindko, Saraiki, Balochi, Brahui, Wakhi and Hindustani, among other languages of the region. Bashir also teaches Urdu.
Go to Profile#923
Judit Hidasi
#53050
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Judit Hidasi is a Hungarian linguist, professor of communication at Faculty of International Management and Business, Budapest Business School. Biography and career Hidasi was born on 11 July 1948 in Budapest. She earned M.A. degrees at the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, School of English and American Studies in English and Russian Philology in 1971, and in General and Applied Linguistics in 1976.
Go to Profile#924
Gabriele Hegerl
#114114
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Gabriele Clarissa Hegerl is a German climatologist. She is a professor of climate system science at the University of Edinburgh School of GeoSciences. Prior to 2007 she held research positions at Texas A&M University and at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, during which time she was a co-ordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth and Fifth Assessment Report.
Go to Profile#925
Tina Charles
#88424
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Tina Charles is an English singer who achieved success as a disco artist in the mid to late 1970s. Her most successful single was the UK no. 1 hit "I Love to Love " in 1976. Early life Charles was born Tina Hoskins in Whitechapel, London, to Charles Hoskins, who worked in a box-making factory in Bow and his wife Hilda. She recovered from meningitis as a newborn. She has a brother, Warren, who was her tour manager during the height of her career.
Go to Profile#926
Giedrė Lukšaitė-Mrázková
#105496
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Giedrė Lukšaitė-Mrázková is a Lithuanian–Czech harpsichordist and organist. Lukšaitė was born to the family of educator and cultural historian Meilė Lukšienė in Kaunas, Lithuania. She studied organ and piano at the Musical Academy in Vilnius, and at the P. I. Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Moscow. She completed study at the Musical College of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 1974. Her professor was organist Jiří Rheinberger. After that she studied harpsichord with Zuzana Růžičková.
Go to Profile#927
Elena Berezovich
#89046
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Elena Lvovna Berezovich is a Russian linguist known for her work in onomastics, etymology, and ethnolinguistics. She is currently a professor at the Department of Russian Language and General Linguistics of the Ural Federal University . Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences , corresponding member of the RAS .
Go to Profile#928
Milena Doleželová-Velingerová
#48434
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Milena Doleželová-Velingerová was a renowned Czech sinologist at the University of Toronto. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová received her M.A. degree from the Charles University in Prague in 1955 and her Ph.D. degree from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1964.
Go to Profile#929
Teena Marie
#41963
Overall Influence
1956 - 2010 (54 years)
Mary Christine Brockert , known professionally as Teena Marie, was an American R&B and soul singer, songwriter, musician, composer, and producer. She was known by her childhood nickname Tina before taking the stage name Teena Marie and later acquired the nickname Lady T, given to her by her collaborator and friend Rick James.
Go to Profile#930
Masami Okui
#84540
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
is a Japanese singer and songwriter from Itami, Hyōgo. She began her professional musical career at age 21 as a concert backup singer. From almost the very beginning of her career, Masami has sung themes for anime television and movies. She is especially well known for her songs from Revolutionary Girl Utena, Tales of Eternia The Animation, Slayers, Sorcerer Hunters, Di Gi Charat, Magic User's Club, Jungle de Ikou!, Akihabara Dennou Gumi, Ray the Animation, He Is My Master and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters. She has performed material for more than 50 singles and 20 albums to date . Okui hosts @Tunes...
Go to Profile#931
Lidiia Hryhorchuk
#86969
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Lidiia Mikhailovna Hryhorchuk was a Ukrainian linguist, linguogeographer, dialectologist, paleographer, art critic, professor and a doctor of philology. She was a junior researcher at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine from 1956 to 1972 before becoming a senior researcher between 1999 and 2002. Hryhorchuk was a professor of philology at the University of Lviv, her alma mater, and at the Lviv National Academy of Arts. She was elected to the Shevchenko Scientific Society in 1992 and was appointed a Laureate of the State Prize of Ukraine in Science ...
Go to Profile#932
Julee Cruise
#70659
Overall Influence
1956 - 2022 (66 years)
Julee Ann Cruise was an American singer and actress, known for her collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and film director David Lynch in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She released four albums beginning with 1989's Floating into the Night.
Go to Profile#933
Craige Roberts
#96456
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Craige Roberts is an American linguist, known for her work on pragmatics and formal semantics. Education and career Roberts earned her A.B. at Indiana University in 1979. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987, under the supervision of Barbara Partee. She is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Linguistics of Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#934
Patrice Oppliger
#81502
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Patrice A. Oppliger , is the assistant professor of communication at Boston University College of Communication. Oppliger has written extensively about the impact of popular culture on student's high school years, and has been consulted by the media on the subject. Interviewed by CNN about cyberbullying, Oppliger discussed the film "Mean Girls", which is based on the book "Queen Bees and Wannabes" by Rosalind Wiseman. Oppliger accused the film of "glamorizing bad behavior", she went on to say that, "The book is a helpful guide to relationships between girls; the movie, on the other hand, showe...
Go to Profile#935
Diana Der Hovanessian
#75930
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Diana Der Hovanessian , Armenian American poet, translator, and author. Much of the subject of her poetry was about Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. She wrote and published over twenty-five books. Life and career Diana Der Hovanessian was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an Armenian family. She received her education at Boston University, majoring in English, and then continued her education at Harvard University, studying under Robert Lowell. She became an American literature professor at Yerevan State University, and twice a Fulbright Professor of Armenian Poetry. She led many worksho...
Go to Profile#936
Katia Ricciarelli
#80428
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Catiuscia Maria Stella Ricciarelli , known as Katia Ricciarelli , is an Italian soprano and actress. Biography Born in Rovigo, Veneto, to a very poor family, she struggled during her younger years. She studied at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, won several vocal competitions in 1968, and made her professional debut as Mimì in Puccini's La bohème in Mantua in 1969. She appeared as Leonora in Verdi's Il trovatore in Parma in 1970. In the following year, she won RAI's "Voci Verdiane" award. Between 1972 and 1975, engagements followed in the major European and American opera houses,...
Go to Profile#937
Anne Balsamo
#33814
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Anne Marie Balsamo is a scholar whose career encompasses contributions as a theorist, designer, educator, and entrepreneur in the fields of feminist technology studies, media studies, design research, public interactives, cultural heritage, and media archeology.
Go to Profile#938
Monika Bednarek
#115701
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Monika Bednarek is a German-born Australian linguist. She is a professor in linguistics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Corpus Lab. She is one of the co-developers of Discursive News Values Analysis , which is a framework for analyzing how events are constructed as newsworthy through language and images. Her work ranges across various linguistic sub-disciplines, including corpus linguistics, media linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, stylistics, and applied linguistics.
Go to Profile#939
Rehema Ellis
#48632
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Rehema Ellis is an Americann television journalist, working for NBC News. A correspondent based in New York City, New York, she is also the lead education correspondent for NBC News. Early life and education Ellis was born in North Carolina, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#940
Zuzanna Topolińska
#72516
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Zuzanna Topolińska - Polish linguist, Slavist, Macedonist. Biography Zuzanna Topolińska was born in Warsaw into an intellectual family. Her father was a historian, before the war he worked as a program director at Polish Radio. She passed her high school diploma in 1948 at the Gymnasium of Królowej Jadwigi in Kielce.
Go to Profile#941
Kira Muratova
#62095
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Kira Georgievna Muratova was a Ukrainian award-winning film director, screenwriter and actress of Russian/Jewish descent, known for her unusual directorial style. Muratova's films underwent a great deal of censorship in the Soviet Union, yet still Muratova managed to emerge as one of the leading figures in contemporary Cinema of Ukraine and Russian cinema and was able to build a very successful film career from 1960s onwards. She is People's Artist of Ukraine; Academician of National Academy of Arts of Ukraine . Laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize ; Oleksandr Dovzhenko State Prize . Mu...
Go to Profile#942
Brandi Carlile
#32668
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Brandi Marie Carlile is an American singer-songwriter. Her music spans many genres, including folk rock, alternative country, Americana, and classic rock. Born in Ravensdale, Washington, a rural town southeast of Seattle, Carlile dropped out of high school to pursue a career in music. , Carlile has released seven studio albums. Her debut major label album, Brandi Carlile , was released to critical acclaim. Carlile garnered wider recognition with her 2007 single, "The Story", from her album of the same name. Carlile later released Give Up the Ghost , Bear Creek , The Firewatcher's Daughter , B...
Go to Profile#943
Gaiutra Bahadur
#43324
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American writer. She is best known for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014. Early life Bahadur was born in New Amsterdam, East Berbice-Corentyne in rural Guyana and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was six years old. She grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey and earned her bachelor's degree, with honors in English Literature, at Yale University and her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#944
Ana Paula Höfling
#37198
Overall Influence
Ana Paula Höfling is an American dancer, dance scholar, academic, and capoeirista. Education and training Höfling began dancing as a child and trained in classical ballet at the Royal Academy of Dance. She has a bachelor of arts in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, a master of fine arts in dance from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a master of arts in dance and a PhD in Culture and Performance Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#945
Dottie West
#47795
Overall Influence
1932 - 1991 (59 years)
Dottie West was an American country music singer and songwriter. Along with her friends and fellow recording artists Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, she is considered one of the genre's most influential and groundbreaking female artists. West's career started in the 1960s, with her top-10 hit "Here Comes My Baby Back Again", which won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1965, the first woman in country music to receive a Grammy.
Go to Profile#946
Candi Staton
#63352
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Canzetta Maria "Candi" Staton is an American singer–songwriter, best known in the United States for her 1970 remake of Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man" and her 1976 disco chart-topper "Young Hearts Run Free". In Europe, Staton's biggest selling record is the anthemic "You Got the Love" from 1986, released in collaboration with the Source. Staton was inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame and is a four-time Grammy Award nominee.
Go to Profile#947
Erika Check Hayden
#92441
Overall Influence
Erika Check Hayden is an American science journalist and the director of the Science Communication Program , a graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, created in January 2017. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Go to Profile#948
Amy Schwartz Moretti
#92369
Overall Influence
Amy Schwartz Moretti is an American violinist, currently the Caroline Paul King Chair in Strings at Mercer University's Townsend School of Music. Moretti was born in Wisconsin and raised in North Carolina and California. She studied in the pre-college program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who awarded her their Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music, who awarded her an Alumni Achievement Award in 2005. She has been concertmaster at The Florida Orchestra and the Oregon Symphony and in 2007 became the fir...
Go to Profile#949
Joan Chissell
#91774
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Joan Olive Chissell was an English writer and lecturer on music, and music reviewer for The Times 1948–79. She made a special study of the life and works of Robert Schumann. Career Joan Chissell was born in Cromer, and was educated at the Manor School in Sheringham. She gained a scholarship at Royal College of Music in 1937, where she studied piano and composition with Kendall Taylor, theory under Herbert Howells and history and criticism under Frank Howes. Her pianistic career was cut short by an injury. Despite this, while at the RCM she gave the first UK performance of Maurice Ravel's P...
Go to Profile#950
Anne Jackson
#67368
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Anne Jackson was an American actress of stage, screen, and television. She was the wife of actor Eli Wallach, with whom she often co-starred. In 1956, she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night. In 1963, she won an Obie Award for Best Actress for her performance in two Off-Broadway plays, The Typists and The Tiger.
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