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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#1051

Miranda Cooper

#77433

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Miranda Eleanor De Fonbrune Cooper is an English singer, songwriter, record producer, dancer and television presenter. Miranda Cooper has worked in the music industry since 1996 when she gained her first recording contract. She worked as a professional dancer for artists such as Dannii Minogue before going into television presenting.

#1052

Roumyana Slabakova

#114344

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Roumyana Slabakova is a linguist specializing in the theory of second language acquisition , particularly acquisition of semantics, and its practical implications for teaching and studying languages.

#1053

Nancy Farmer

#33195

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Nancy Farmer is an American writer of children's and young adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.

#1054

Judith Aissen

#112943

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Judith Lillian Aissen is an American professor emerita in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Career Aissen began to study Mayan languages in 1972 as a graduate student at Harvard University, conducting field research in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. Her 1974 Harvard dissertation on The Syntax of Causative Constructions was published by Garland in 1979. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983.

#1055

Katarzyna Jaszczolt

Katarzyna Jaszczolt

#93645

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Katarzyna Malgorzata "Kasia" Jaszczolt is a Polish and British linguist and philosopher. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.

#1056

Marcia Bartusiak

Marcia Bartusiak

#32218

Overall Influence

Marcia F. Bartusiak is an author, journalist, and Professor of the Practice Emeritus of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trained in both communications and physics , she writes about the fields of astronomy and physics. Bartusiak has been published in National Geographic, Discover, Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, Science, Popular Science, World Book Encyclopedia, Smithsonian, and MIT Technology Review. The author of seven books, she is also a columnist for Natural History magazine.

#1057

Mireille Perron

#46924

Overall Influence

Mireille Perron is a Canadian visual artist, writer, scholar, and assistant professor at Alberta University of the Arts based in Calgary, Alberta. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Perron has been exhibiting widely across Canada, the United States, and Europe since 1982, and has published over 80 essays relating to visual art and craft and has been faculty at ACAD since 1990.

#1058

Ilana Mushin

#120492

Overall Influence

Ilana Mushin is an Australian linguist. Mushin's research interests include the Garrawa language, discourse and stance. Mushin is currently an associate professor at The University of Queensland in the School of Languages and Cultures. She is an Associate Investigator with the Centre of Excellence "Dynamics of Language".

#1059

Carole Doyle Peel

#84787

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Carole Doyle Peel was an American visual artist, best known for her portraits and still life drawings in graphite, gouache, and watercolor. The work combines appreciation for classical and Old Master painting and drawing with contemporary subjects. Peel was Professor Emerita at California College of the Arts where she taught for forty six years.

#1060

Jane King

#90471

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Jane Kingseed, better known as Jane King , is an American journalist. King is the founder and CEO of LilaMax Media, which provides daily TV broadcast reports from the NASDAQ Marketsite. LilaMax Media launched January 21, 2014. King had previously been doing syndicated business and financial reports for Bloomberg News from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Those reports were discontinued on December 31, 2013. Before that, King covered local Business News for CNN's Newsource division, CNN Marketsource. Before joining CNN, King worked as a business reporter for WPVI-TV in Philadelphia and as an anchor and reporter at both WAND-TV in Decatur, Illinois.

#1061

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

#67399

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (40 years)

Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge is an English actress, screenwriter and producer. As a creator, head writer, and star of the comedy series Fleabag , she won three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globess and a British Academy Television Award. She received further Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for writing and producing the spy thriller series Killing Eve .

#1062

Judy Shepard-Kegl

#99195

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Judy Shepard-Kegl is an American linguist and University of Southern Maine professor, best known for their research on the Nicaraguan sign language. Education Kegl received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in anthropology and a Master of Arts in linguistics both in 1975 from Brown University. They received a Doctor of Philosophy in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.

#1063

Jane Torr

#120679

Overall Influence

Jane Torr is an Australian academic in the fields of early childhood language and literacy development in home and early childhood education and care settings. She is an honorary associate in the department of educational studies at Macquarie University, where she has been teaching and researching for over 30 years. Torr's research draws on systemic functional linguistic theory to explore the relationship between context and meaning in adult-child interactions, and the implications for children's learning. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as p...

#1064

Sara Soskolne

#91519

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Sara Soskolne is a Canadian type designer best known for her work at Hoefler & Frere-Jones type foundry on typefaces such as Gotham. After ten years working in graphic design in Toronto, Soskolne attended the University of Reading where she received her MA in 2003. She has taught type design at Yale School of Art, the Book Arts Institute at Wells College, and New York's School of Visual Arts and the Cooper Type Certificate Program. Soskolne has written about the evolution of sans-serif lower case types in the 19th century.

#1065

Lena Philipsson

Lena Philipsson

#98906

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Maria Magdalena Philipsson , known by her stage name Lena Philipsson, is a Swedish singer, songwriter and media personality. She represented Sweden in the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing fifth.

#1066

Mary Murphy

#51632

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Mary Ann Murphy is an American ballroom dance champion, accredited dance judge, and a judge and choreographer on the Fox dance competition-reality show So You Think You Can Dance. Early life and education Mary Murphy was born in Lancaster, Ohio in an Irish family. She graduated from Northwest High School in Canal Fulton, Ohio. After graduating from Ohio University with a degree in physical education and a minor in modern dance, Murphy moved to Washington, D.C. to begin her career.

#1067

Rachel Mayberry

Rachel Mayberry

#81365

Overall Influence

Rachel I. Mayberry is a language scientist known for her research on the effects of age of acquisition on sign language acquisition among deaf individuals – research that has provided evidence for a critical period in first language acquisition. She is Professor of Linguistics at University of California, San Diego and director of the Multimodal Language Lab.

#1068

Terese Marie Mailhot

#59782

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (42 years)

Terese Marie Mailhot is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher. Early life and education Mailhot grew up in Seabird Island, British Columbia, on the Seabird Island First Nation reservation. Her mother, Wahzinak, was a healer, social worker, poet, and radical activist, and her father, Ken Mailhot, was an artist. Her father had been incarcerated and was an alcoholic who molested Mailhot when she was young, and was often violent. Mailhot's mother had a letter-writing relationship with Salvador Agron, and shared the correspondence with musician Paul Simon, who used them for his Broadway musical, The Capeman.

#1069

Gabriella Ambrosio

Gabriella Ambrosio

#64788

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Gabriella Ambrosio is an Italian writer, journalist, academic, and advertising creative director. Her essays Siamo Quel che Diciamo and Le Nuove Terre della Pubblicita are required advertising texts in several universities in Italy. Her first novel, Prima di Lasciarsi , related to a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, has been translated into several languages including Hebrew and Arabic.

#1070

Lynne Murphy

#105639

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

M. Lynne Murphy is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex. She runs the blog Separated by a Common Language under the username Lynneguist and has written five books. Studies Murphy has a B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as an A.M. and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

#1071

Yma Sumac

#77048

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo , known as Yma Sumac , was a Peruvian-born vocalist, composer, producer, actress and model. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. She has also been called Queen of Exotica and is considered a pioneer of world music. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay , peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God ", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart. It sold a million copies worldwide, becoming an international success in the 1950s.

#1072

Debbie Harry

#67202

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Deborah Ann Harry is an American singer, songwriter and actress, best known as the lead vocalist of the band Blondie. Four of her songs with the band reached on the US charts between 1979 and 1981.

#1073

Laura Wright

#106738

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Laura Wright is a professor of English at Western Carolina University. Wright proposed vegan studies as a new academic field, and her 2015 book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror served as the foundational text of the discipline. As of 2021 she had edited two collections of articles about vegan studies.

#1074

Sara Mills

#84457

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Sara Mills is Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University, England. Her linguistic interests are the comparison of linguistic forms of expression in different languages, particularly in reference to politeness. Her other major work area is feminism.

#1075

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

#79640

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is an American linguist. She is currently Provost Professor and ESL Coordinator at Indiana University . Education and research She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1976 and a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics in 1978 at the California State University, Northridge. She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1983, with a dissertation entitled, A Functional Approach to English Sentence Stress.

#1076

Farah Khan

#50860

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Farah Khan Kunder is an Indian film director, writer, film producer, actress, dancer and choreographer who works predominantly in Hindi films. Khan has choreographed more than a hundred songs in over 80 films, winning the National Film Award for Best Choreography and seven Filmfare Awards for Best Choreography.

#1077

K. S. Chithra

#56282

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Krishnan Nair Shantakumari Chithra is an Indian playback singer and Carnatic musician. In a career spanning over four decades, she has recorded over 25,000 songs in various Indian languages, as well as foreign languages such as Malay, Latin, Arabic, Sinhalese, English and French. She is also known for her extensive history of collaboration with music composers like A. R. Rahman, Ilaiyaraja, Hamsalekha, M. M. Keeravani and with the playback singers K. J. Yesudas and S. P. Balasubrahmanyam over the years. She is regarded as a cultural icon of South Indian states. She is cited as the Golden Voi...

#1078

Tabaimo

#84256

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Ayako Tabata , also known under her artist name Tabaimo, is a contemporary Japanese artist. She combines hand-drawn images and digital manipulation to create large scale animations which evoke traditional Japanese woodblock prints while presenting a pointed, complex view of Japanese society.

#1079

Gerardine DeSanctis

#44589

Overall Influence

1954 - 2005 (51 years)

Gerardine L. DeSanctis was an American organizational theorist and information systems researcher and Thomas F. Keller Professor of Business Administration at Duke University, known for her work on group decision support systems and automated decision support

#1080

Maggie Black

#102426

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Margaret Black was a ballet teacher who taught in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. She coached dancers such as Martine Van Hamel, Kevin McKenzie, Natalia Makarova and Gelsey Kirkland. She developed a ballet technique based on anatomy. She stressed moving from a neutral spinal and pelvic alignment with weight evenly distributed throughout each foot. She amassed a large following of both ballet and modern dancers. Eventually she split her class into two, one for modern dancers and one for ballet dancers. Choreographers such as William Forsythe and Ohad Naharin attended her class...

#1081

Cris Morena

#79977

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

María Cristina De Giacomi , professionally known as Cris Morena, is an Argentine Award-winning television producer, actress, television presenter, composer, musician, songwriter, writer, former fashion model and CEO of Cris Morena Group. She is one of the most successful producers in the country and is the creator of Argentina's most successful youth-oriented shows such as Jugate Conmigo, Chiquititas, Rebelde Way, Floricienta, Alma Pirata, and Casi Ángeles. She was a producer at Telefe from 1991 to 2001, then created the Cris Morena Group as an independent production company, with Rebelde Way as its first production.

#1082

Gillian Welch

#60747

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Gillian Howard Welch is an American singer-songwriter. She performs with her musical partner, guitarist David Rawlings. Their sparse and dark musical style, which combines elements of Appalachian music, bluegrass, country and Americana, is described by The New Yorker as "at once innovative and obliquely reminiscent of past rural forms."

#1083

Phoebe Snow

#60656

Overall Influence

1950 - 2011 (61 years)

Phoebe Snow was an American roots music singer-songwriter and guitarist, known for her hit 1974 and 1975 songs "Poetry Man" and "Harpo's Blues", and her credited guest vocals backing Paul Simon on "Gone at Last". She was described by The New York Times as a "contralto grounded in a bluesy growl and capable of sweeping over four octaves." Snow also sang numerous commercial jingles for many U.S. products during the 1980s and 1990s, including General Foods International Coffees, Salon Selectives, and Stouffer's. Snow experienced success in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s with five top 100 albums in that territory.

#1084

June Havoc

#64089

Overall Influence

1912 - 2010 (98 years)

June Havoc was an American actress, dancer, stage director and memoirist. Havoc was a child vaudeville performer under the tutelage of her mother Rose Thompson Hovick, born Rose Evangeline Thompson. She later acted on Broadway and in Hollywood, and stage-directed, both on and off-Broadway. She last acted on television in 1990 in a story arc on the soap opera General Hospital, and she last appeared on television as herself in interviews in the "Vaudeville" episode of American Masters in 1997 and in "The Rodgers & Hart: Thou Swell, Thou Witty" episode of Great Performances in 1999. Her elder s...

#1085

Janet Staiger

#33957

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

#1086

Amelia Bence

#105337

Overall Influence

1914 - 2016 (102 years)

Amelia Bence was an Argentine film actress and one of the divas of the Golden Age of Argentine Cinema . Born to Belarusian Jewish immigrants, Bence began her career at a young age, studying with Alfonsina Storni at the Lavardén Children's Theater and with Mecha Quintana at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música y Declamación . She made her film debut in 1933, in only the second sound film of Argentina, Dancing, by Luis Moglia Barth. Bence's acting in La guerra gaucha , one of the most important films in the history of Argentine cinema, gave her recognition and earned her leading role offers. Sh...

#1087

Yael Renan

#75018

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Yael Renan was an Israeli writer and translator. Biography Renan was born and grew up in Tel Aviv and attended Tel Aviv University, where she received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a doctorate in English literature in 1978, for her work on "Figurative Language in the Prose of Modernism". She was a senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature at Tel Aviv University until her retirement in 2007, and also volunteered in the Department of Women's Studies.

#1088

Linda Stern Zisquit

#83037

Overall Influence

Linda Stern Zisquit is an American-born Israeli poet and translator. She teaches poetry, Hebrew literature and poetry translation at Bar-Ilan University. Biography Linda Stern was born in Buffalo, NY. She studied at Tufts University and, later, at Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo. In 1978, she moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem. She is married to the lawyer Donald Zisquit, and is the mother of five children. She also runs the ArtSpace Gallery at her home in Jerusalem's German Colony.

#1089

Phyllis Curtin

#81514

Overall Influence

1921 - 2016 (95 years)

Phyllis Curtin was an American soprano and academic teacher who had an active career in operas and concerts from the early 1950s through the 1980s. She is known for her creation of roles in operas by Carlisle Floyd, such as the title role in Susannah and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. She was a dedicated song recitalist, who retired from singing in 1984. She was named Boston University's Dean Emerita, College of Fine Arts in 1991.

#1090

Mattiwilda Dobbs

Mattiwilda Dobbs

#91554

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Mattiwilda Dobbs was an American coloratura soprano and was one of the first black singers to enjoy a major international career in opera. She was the first black singer to perform at La Scala in Italy, the first black woman to receive a long-term performance contract and to sing a lead role at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the first black singer to play a lead role at the San Francisco Opera.

#1091

Blanca María Prósper

#45953

Overall Influence

Blanca María Prósper Pérez is a Spanish linguist and scholar of Celtic studies. Since 2019, she has been Professor in Indo-European linguistics at the University of Salamanca. Biography Blanca María Prósper earned a PhD in Indo-European linguistics from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1992.

#1092

Reet Kasik

#100319

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Reet Kasik is an Estonian linguist. She was born in Tallinn. In 1969, she graduated from Tartu State University with a degree in Estonian philology. Since 1969, she has taught at the University of Tartu. She has also taught Estonian language in several universities in Finland.

#1093

Fernande Saint-Martin

#116109

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Fernande Saint-Martin was a Canadian art critic, museologist, semiologist, visual arts theorist and writer. A graduate of the Université de Montréal and McGill University, her career began at La Presse in 1954 before being made editor-in-chief of Châtelaine magazine in 1960. Saint-Martin left the magazine in 1972 and was made director of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. She was a professor and researcher at Université Laval and later Université du Québec à Montréal from 1979 to 1996. Saint-Martin wrote several books and essays, contributed to various art publications and was awarded...

#1094

Mica Paris

#70140

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Michelle Antoinette Wallen , known professionally as Mica Paris , is an English singer, presenter and actress. Paris was born in Islington in North London, but moved to Brockley, South London, when she was nine. In 1988, she released her debut album, So Good, which spawned singles including "My One Temptation" and "Where Is the Love". She has since gone on to release seven further albums: Contribution , Whisper a Prayer , Black Angel , If You Could Love Me , Soul Classics , Born Again and Gospel . In 2020, Paris was cast in the BBC soap opera EastEnders as Ellie Nixon.

#1095

LaVern Baker

#59429

Overall Influence

1929 - 1997 (68 years)

Delores LaVern Baker was an American R&B singer who had several hit records on the pop chart in the 1950s and early 1960s. Her most successful records were "Tweedle Dee" , "Jim Dandy" , and "I Cried a Tear" .

#1096

Peaches Golding

Peaches Golding

#54483

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Lois Patricia Golding , commonly known as Peaches Golding , is an American-British business executive, administrator, and former academic who is Lord-Lieutenant of the County and City of Bristol. On her 2010 appointment as High Sheriff of Bristol, she was the second Black person and the first Black woman to hold the position. She was appointed Honorary Captain of the Royal Naval Reserves in June 2020.

#1097

Jeannette Littlemore

#39368

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Jeannette Littlemore is a British scholar of English and applied linguistics whose work focuses on the interpretation of figurative language, including metaphor and metonymy, as it relates to second language learning and teaching. Her research examines the ways that metaphor is misunderstood by learners of English.

#1098

Roberta Kevelson

#47964

Overall Influence

1931 - 1998 (67 years)

Roberta "Bobbie" Kevelson was an American academic and semiotician. She was an acknowledged authority on the pragmatism theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. Personal life Kevelson was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and graduated from B.M.C. Durfee High School in 1948. Although married at 17, she returned to college in the 1960s and received her PhD in semiotics from Brown University in 1978.

#1099

Carol Wincenc

#83778

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Carol Wincenc born June 29, 1949, is an American flutist based in New York City. She is known for her solo and chamber music performances and her support of new music for the flute. She is on the faculty of the Juilliard School and Stony Brook University.

#1100

Fay McAlpine

#124053

Overall Influence

Fay McAlpine is a New Zealand designer, typographer and academic at Massey University. She primarily teaches in the visual communication design programme, particularly in the areas of graphic design, with a strong interest in the typographical aspect of visual communication. Her speciality is teaching typographic fundamentals, type history, publication design, typographic practice in spatial environments and interpretive, navigational or informational typography. McAlpine's "passion for typography has influenced generations of young talent" through her teaching.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions