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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#101

Hu Shuli

#11147

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Hu Shuli is the founder and publisher of Caixin Media. She is also the professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at Sun Yat-sen University and the adjunct professor of the School of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China.

#102

Agnès Varda

#17812

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist. Her pioneering work was central to the development of the widely influential French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Her films focused on achieving documentary realism, addressing women's issues, and other social commentary, with a distinctive experimental style.

#103

Merrill Swain

#15801

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Merrill Swain is a Canadian applied linguist whose research has focused on second language acquisition . Some of her most notable contributions to SLA research include the Output Hypothesis and her research related to immersion education. Swain is a Professor Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Swain is also known for her work with Michael Canale on communicative competence. Swain was the president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1998. She received her PhD in psychology at the University of California. Swain has co-su...

#104

Barbara Kopple

#6035

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Barbara Kopple is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work. She is credited with pioneering a renaissance of cinema vérité, and bringing the historic french style to a modern American audience. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA , about a Kentucky miners' strike,[1] and for American Dream , the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota.[2] Consequently, she is the first woman to have won twice in the Oscars' Best Documentary category.

#105

Claire Bowern

#18794

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Claire Louise Bowern is a linguist who works with Australian Indigenous languages. She is currently a professor of linguistics at Yale University, and has a secondary appointment in the department of anthropology at Yale.

#106

Elissa L. Newport

#17945

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Elissa Lee Newport is a professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure, and most recently on the effects of pediatric stroke on the organization and recovery of language.

#107

Sacha Pfeiffer

#22759

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Sacha Pfeiffer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and radio host. In November 2018, she joined NPR as an investigations correspondent. Pfeiffer is known for her work with the Spotlight team run by The Boston Globe. She was a member of the group of reporters whose work in exposing the Roman Catholic church's cover-up of clergy sex abuse earned the newspaper the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

#108

Ella Fitzgerald

#8943

Overall Influence

1917 - 1996 (79 years)

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

#109

Judith Merril

#4335

Overall Influence

1923 - 1997 (74 years)

Judith Josephine Grossman , who took the pen-name Judith Merril around 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist, and one of the first women to be widely influential in those roles.

#110

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein

#16455

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Early life Born in Bootle, Lancashire, England, Feinstein grew up in Leicester. Her father had left school at 12 and had little time for books, but he was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She wrote, "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never ...

#111

Sophie Long

#20785

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Sophie Rebecca Long is an English journalist who works for BBC News, mainly appearing as a presenter on the BBC News Channel. On 18 March 2013, Long and co-presenter Simon McCoy read the final BBC News bulletin from BBC Television Centre.

#112

Una Canger

#20674

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the University of Copenhagen, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement. In 2012 she was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to the study of Mexican culture. In 2005 she received the teaching prize of Co...

#113

Mika Yamamoto

#17333

Overall Influence

1967 - 2012 (45 years)

was an award-winning Japanese video and photojournalist for the news agency Japan Press. Yamamoto was killed on 20 August 2012 while covering the ongoing Syrian Civil War in Aleppo, Syria. She was the first Japanese and fourth foreign journalist killed in the Syrian Civil War that began in March 2011. She was the fifteenth journalist killed in Syria in 2012. Yamamoto was a recipient of the Vaughn-Uyeda Memorial Prize of the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association for her reporting of international affairs in 2004.

#114

Susan Bassnett

#6829

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Susan Edna Bassnett, is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009. As of 2016, she is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States. In 2007, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

#115

Carolina Neurath

Carolina Neurath

#14785

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Anna Carolina Neurath is a Swedish journalist and writer. She specializes in writing business articles for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. In 2016 her first work of fiction, Fartblinda, was published.

#116

Ellen Datlow

#9293

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award . Career Datlow began her career working for Holt, Rinehart and Winston for three years, as well as doing a stint at Crown Publishing Group. She went on to be fiction editor at Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies. She co-edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series from 1988 to 2008 . She was also editor of the webzine Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror...

#117

Juliet Winters Carpenter

#12123

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Juliet Winters Carpenter is an American translator of modern Japanese literature. Born in the American Midwest, she studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. After completing her graduate studies in 1973, she returned to Japan in 1975, where she became involved in translation efforts and teaching.

#118

Alma Guillermoprieto

#9715

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist. She has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press, especially The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world and she has published eight books in both English and Spanish, and been translated into several more languages.

#119

Karen Davila

#14533

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Kristen Karen Lising Davila-Sta. Ana , known professionally as Karen Davila, is a Filipino journalist and news anchor. Early life Davila went to high school at the Colegio San Agustin – Makati, where she was batchmates with Kris Aquino and Pinky Webb. She took a degree of Bachelor of Arts major in Mass Communication at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City.

#120

Alanna Nash

#5956

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Alanna Kay Nash is an American journalist and biographer. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Nash holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of several acclaimed books. She is a 1972 graduate of Stephens College. A feature writer for The New York Times, Stereo Review, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Weekend, she was named the Society of Professional Journalists' National Member of the Year in 1994. In 1977, Nash's job afforded her the opportunity to become one of the journalists to view the remains of Elvis Presley. In her dust jacket biograp...

#121

Natasha Kaplinsky

Natasha Kaplinsky

#18585

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Natasha Margaret Kaplinsky is an English newsreader, TV presenter and journalist, best known for her roles as a studio anchor on Sky News, BBC News, Channel 5 and ITV News. After two years at Sky News, Kaplinsky joined BBC News in 2001 where she co-hosted Breakfast until 2005, when she became the host of the Six O'Clock News. In October 2007, Kaplinsky was recruited to help relaunch Five , reportedly for the highest fee ever paid to a UK newsreader, where she presented a new look, retitled Five News with Natasha Kaplinsky for three years. After leaving Channel 5, she went on to join ITV News...

#122

Sigrid Löffler

#15185

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sigrid Löffler is an Austrian cultural commentator, arts correspondent and literary critic. Life Sigrid Löffler was born in Aussig in Czechoslovakia, at the height of the Second World War. As she later spelled out to an interviewer, she was presumably conceived while her father was on leave from the frontline. Her mother's family came from the northern border region of Bohemia that had more recently become known as the Sudetenland. During the ethnic cleansing of 1945 her mother took her to rejoin her father in Vienna where he was rebuilding his peace-time career as a teacher. It was in...

#123

Marta Hillers

#20933

Overall Influence

1911 - 2001 (90 years)

#124

Ann Goldstein

#17554

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ann Goldstein is an American editor and translator from the Italian language. She is best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. She was the panel chair for translated fiction at the US National Book Award in 2022. She was awarded the PEN Renato Poggioli prize in 1994 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008.

#125

Apolline de Malherbe

#31483

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Apolline de Malherbe is a French broadcast journalist who is a presenter on the 24-hour rolling news and weather channel BFM TV. Biography Education After studying the humanities, de Malherbe completed a MAS in social politics at Sciences Po, along with a master's degree in public service. She put her MAS degree to use by analysing politicians who appeared in the television programmes of Marc-Olivier Fogiel and Thierry Ardisson. A politically left-wing woman, she supported the presidential candidacy of Jean-Pierre Chevènement in 2002. During this campaign, Apolline de Malherbe was a member o...

#126

Barbara Johnstone

#23807

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Barbara Johnstone is an American professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in discourse structure and function, sociolinguistics, rhetorical theory, and methods of text analysis. She was the editor in chief of Language in Society from 2005 to 2013, and is the editor of Pittsburgh Speech & Society, a website about Pittsburgh English for non-linguists. She has published several books, including Speaking Pittsburghese and Discourse Analysis, 2nd Ed. . She has also written for The New York Times.

#127

Eve Sweetser

#17492

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Eve Eliot Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1984, and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since that time. She has served as Director of Berkeley's undergraduate Cognitive Science Program and is currently Director of the Celtic Studies Program.

#128

Emma Alberici

#12355

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Emma Alberici is an Australian journalist and former foreign correspondent who was the chief economics correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television network. Alberici was until 2017 the presenter of ABC TV's flagship current affairs program, Lateline. She has been a foreign correspondent for the ABC. She previously worked as a reporter for the ABC's The 7.30 Report and Lateline, and was also a reporter and producer with A Current Affair on Australia's Nine Network.

#129

Sandra Thompson

#32710

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara . She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.

#130

Suzanne Farrell

Suzanne Farrell

#16481

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Suzanne Farrell is an American ballerina and the founder of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Farrell began her ballet training at the age of eight. In 1960, she received a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. Her first leading roles in ballets came in the early 1960s. A muse of George Balanchine, she left the New York City Ballet in 1969 and subsequently moved to Brussels to dance for Maurice Bejart's Ballet of the 20th Century.

#131

Karen Hunter

#17674

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Karen Hunter is an American journalist and publisher, talk show host, and the co-author of several books. Hunter is the host of The Karen Hunter Show on SiriusXM Urban View. Early life and education Born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Hunter graduated from Marylawn of the Oranges High School in 1983 and received a B.A. in English literature from Drew University in 1987.

#132

Carol Padden

#22809

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Carol A. Padden is an American academic, author, and lecturer. She is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been teaching since 1983.

#133

Ana Celia Zentella

#29378

Overall Influence

Ana Celia Zentella is an American linguist known for her "anthro-political" approach to linguistic research and expertise on multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and language intolerance, especially in relation to U.S. Latino languages and communities. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

#134

Nina Simone

#13119

Overall Influence

1933 - 2003 (70 years)

Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, composer, arranger and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop. The sixth of eight children born into a poor family in North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where, despite a well received audition, she was denied admission, which she attributed to racism.

#135

Salma Khadra Jayyusi

#11508

Overall Influence

1926 - 2023 (97 years)

Salma Khadra Jayyusi was a Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist. She was the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic , which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English.

#136

Connie Schultz

#13668

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Connie Schultz is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Schultz is a columnist for USA Today. She wrote for Cleveland's daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer, from 1993 to 2011, winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "her pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged". She teaches journalism at Denison University.

#137

Maggie Smith

#14692

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Dame Margaret Natalie Smith is an English actress. With an extensive career in theatre, film, and television over seven decades, she is one of Britain's most recognisable and prolific actresses. She is particularly noted for her wit in comedic roles.

#138

Ofelia Zepeda

#24123

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. She is Regents' Professor of Tohono O'odham language and linguistics and Director of the American Indian Language Development Institute at The University of Arizona. Zepeda is the editor for Sun Tracks, a series of books that focuses on the work of Native American artists and writers, published by the University of Arizona Press.

#139

Eva Hajičová

#28268

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Eva Hajičová is a Czech linguist, specializing in topic–focus articulation and corpus linguistics. In 2006, she was awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award. She was named a fellow of the ACL in 2011.

#140

Lydia White

#30036

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Lydia White is a Canadian linguist and educator in the area of second language acquisition . She is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at McGill University. Biography She received her BA in Moral Sciences and Psychology from Cambridge University in 1969 and PhD in linguistics from McGill University in 1980.

#141

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson

#12305

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

#142

Penelope Eckert

#25148

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.

#143

Joan Bybee

#37594

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Joan Lea Bybee is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, morphology, and phonology. Bybee is best known for proposing the theory of usage-based phonology and for her contributions to cognitive and historical linguistics.

#144

Laurie Garrett

#9996

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Laurie Garrett is an American science journalist and author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

#145

Adele Goldberg

#24684

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Adele Eva Goldberg is an American linguist known for her development of construction grammar and the constructionist approach in the tradition of cognitive linguistics. Early life Goldberg grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where her mother was a reading teacher and her father was an engineer. Her brother, Ken Y. Goldberg is chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and her sister, Elena is a pediatrician and child psychologist in Brooklyn.

#146

Gretchen McCulloch

#28399

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gretchen McCulloch is a Canadian linguist. On her blog, as well as her podcast Lingthusiasm she offers linguistic analysis of online communication such as internet memes, emoji and instant messaging. She writes regularly for Wired and previously did so for The Toast. In 2019, she published a book on internet linguistics, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.

#147

Kris Holmes

#14376

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kris Holmes is an American typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida and Wingdings font families, among many other typeface designs. She is President of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a typeface design studio.

#148

Miranda Seymour

#13557

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Miranda Jane Seymour is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer. The lives she has described have included those of Robert Graves and Mary Shelley. Seymour, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has in recent years been a visiting Professor of English Studies at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

#149

Naomi Baron

#26878

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Naomi S. Baron is a linguist and professor emerita of linguistics at the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University in Washington, D.C. Education and career Baron earned a B.A. in 1968 in English and American Literature at Brandeis University, and, in 1973, a PhD in linguistics at Stanford University. Her dissertation is titled, "The Evolution of English Periphrastic Causatives: Contributions to a general theory of linguistic variation and change." She taught at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Emory University, and Southwestern University before com...

#150

Jolanta Antas

#34604

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jolanta Antas is a Polish professor of linguistics at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. Antas is the head of the Institute of Theory of Communication at the Faculty of Polish Language and Literature of the Jagiellonian University. She conducts research on pragmatic and semantic aspects of negation and lying. With a team of associates, she has drafted a ground-breaking scientific study called “The map of Polish expressions”.

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