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,

#1151

Karin Krog

#110909

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Karin Krog is a Norwegian jazz singer. Life and career Krog began singing jazz as a teenager and attracted attention while performing in jam sessions in Oslo. In 1955, she was hired by the pianist Kjell Karlsen to sing in his sextet. In 1962, she started her first band, and that same year she became a student of the Norwegian-American singer Anne Brown. Krog studied with Brown until 1969. In the 1960s, she performed with the rhythm and blues band Public Enemies, releasing the hit singles "Sunny" and "Watermelon Man".

#1152

Rachel Portman

#87177

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Rachel Mary Berkeley Portman, OBE is an English composer who is best known for scoring films. Early life and education Portman was born in Haslemere in Surrey, England, the daughter of Sheila Margaret Penelope Portman and Berkeley Charles Berkeley Portman. She was educated at Charterhouse and became interested in music from a young age, beginning composing at the age of 14.

#1153

Annie Goldson

#92729

Overall Influence

Anne Veronica Goldson is a New Zealand journalism and film academic specialising in documentaries. Her films include Punitive Damage, Georgie Girl, Brother Number One and Kim Dotcom: Caught in the Web.

#1154

Chloé Zhao

#68039

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (43 years)

Chloé Zhao is a Chinese-born filmmaker. She is known primarily for her work on independent films. Her debut feature film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me , premiered at Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim and earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. Her second feature film, The Rider , was critically acclaimed and received nominations for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and Best Director.

#1155

Anne Burns

#122295

Overall Influence

Anne Burns is a British-born Australian educational linguist, internationally known for her work on genre-based pedagogy in TESOL and EAP/ESP. She is a Professor Emerita in Language Education at Aston University and Professor of TESOL at the University of New South Wales . The TESOL International Association named her one of the '50 at 50', leaders who had made a significant contribution to TESOL in its first 50 years.

#1156

Melody Gardot

#95352

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (40 years)

Melody Gardot is an American jazz singer. At the age of 19, Gardot was involved in a bicycle accident and sustained a head injury. Music played a critical role in her recovery. She became an advocate of music therapy, visiting hospitals and universities to discuss its benefits. In 2012, she gave her name to a music therapy program in New Jersey.

#1157

Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin

#113025

Overall Influence

1903 - 1997 (94 years)

Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin was an American puppeteer and authority on the puppet theater. Her two best known puppetry productions were Aristophanes' The Birds and Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles . She was the author of many books on puppetry, including The Puppet Theatre Handbook. She was the second honorary president of the Puppeteers of America. Her marriage to the puppeteer Paul McPharlin was in 1948, a few months before his death. Marjorie was also the creator of the hand-rod puppet which was a style Jim Henson took up for The Muppets.

#1158

Jacqueline Vaissière

#117551

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Jacqueline Vaissière is a French phonetician. Career Vaissière studied computing and automatic language translation under the supervision of Bernard Vauquois, at Centre d’Études et de Traduction Automatique, University of Grenoble, where she earned her PhD in 1971. She joined the Speech Communication Group at MIT , where she acquired a specialization in acoustic phonetics.

#1159

Chung Ling

#26622

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Chung Ling is a Taiwan-Chinese writer, critic, educator and translator. Her name also appears as Zhong Ling.[1] She was born in Chongqing in Sichuan province, a native Cantonese and came to Taiwan with her family in 1950 from Japan. Zhong was educated at a girls' school in Kaohsiung, at Tunghai University and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.[2] She taught at State University of New York at Albany, at Hong Kong University at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, where she became Dean of Liberal Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University where she served as chair professor, Dean of Arts ...

#1160

Renée Van Halm

#101662

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Renée Van Halm is a Canadian contemporary visual artist born in Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands and immigrated to Canada in 1953. Exhibitions Renée Van Halm has been featured in over 30 solo exhibitions including numerous exhibitions at the S.L. Simpson Gallery and Birch Contemporary in Toronto, Ontario, as well as Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Notable exhibitions include:Interior Projections at Mercer Union, Toronto, ON Voor Gerrit/Healing at University of Lethbridge, AB Songs of Experience at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON L’ eau à la bouche, Art Galler...

#1161

Ellen Kaisse

#122470

Overall Influence

Ellen M. Kaisse is an American linguist. She is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Washington, best known for her research on the interface between phonology, syntax, and morphology.

#1162

Beth Haller

#98222

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Beth A. Haller is a professor of mass communication and communication studies at Towson University, specializing in the handling of disability in news and new media. She serves on the advisory board of the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and traveled in Australia as a Fulbright Scholar in 2015.

#1163

Monica Macaulay

#130593

Overall Influence

Monica Macaulay is a professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is also affiliated with the American Indian Studies Program. Biography During her teenage years, Macaulay attended high school in Santiago, Chile. It was here that she learned Spanish. After graduating high school and traveling South America she then moved to Prescott, AZ. She relocated shortly after to northern California and pursued art school before enrolling at UC Berkeley.

#1164

Joan Tower

#83803

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia , a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems.

#1165

Sandra Lee McKay

#101433

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Sandra McKay is Professor Emeritus of San Francisco State University. Her main areas of interest are sociolinguistics, English as an International Language, and second language pedagogy. For most of her career she has been involved in second language teacher education, both in the United States and abroad. She has received four Fulbright grants, as well as many academic specialists awards and distinguished lecturer invitations.

#1166

Felicity Palmer

#108658

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Dame Felicity Joan Palmer, , is an English mezzo-soprano and music professor. She sang soprano roles until 1983. Palmer was born in Cheltenham and educated at Erith Grammar School, now named Erith School. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and under Marianne Schech's guidance at the Munich College for Music and Theatre. In April 1970, she won first prize in the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship. She made her operatic debut in 1971 as Dido in Dido and Aeneas with the Kent Opera. In 1973, she made her US debut with the Houston Grand Opera and her Metropolitan Opera debut was in 2000 as Waltraute .

#1167

Rebecca Mader

#87343

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Rebecca Leigh Mader is an English actress, best known for her roles as Charlotte Lewis in the ABC series Lost, and as Zelena, the Wicked Witch of the West, on ABC's Once Upon a Time, for which she garnered critical acclaim.

#1168

Tamara Erofeyeva

Tamara Erofeyeva

#87669

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Tamara Ivanovna Erofeyeva is a Soviet-Russian linguist. She is a Doctor of Philology, served as Dean of the philological faculty at Perm State University , is a leader of Sociolinguistic study of urban language, head of the school of Socio- and Psycholinguistics in the Department of General and Slavonic Linguistics at Perm State National Research University, and is an Honorary Figure of Russian Higher Education.

#1169

Alanis Obomsawin

Alanis Obomsawin

#81818

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (93 years)

Alanis Obomsawin, is an Abenaki American-Canadian filmmaker, singer, artist, and activist primarily known for her documentary films. Born in New Hampshire, United States and raised primarily in Quebec, Canada, she has written and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations issues. Obomsawin is a member of Film Fatales independent women filmmakers.

#1170

Alexandra Stoddard

#97726

Overall Influence

Alexandra Stoddard, born Alexandra Green Johns, is an author, interior designer, and lifestyle philosopher. Stoddard has published 28 books as of April 2013. She is the mother of two daughters, Alexandra and Brooke, by her first husband Brandon Stoddard , from whom she was divorced in 1974. She subsequently married Peter Megargee Brown .

#1171

Doris Evans McGinty

#130487

Overall Influence

2000 - 2005 (5 years)

Doris Evans McGinty was a professor in the Department of Music at Howard University from 1947 until 1991. McGinty was chair of the department for eight years, and contributed to numerous publications, including the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Black Women in American Music, and the American Dictionary of Negro Biography. She was a contributing editor to The Black Perspective in Music from 1975 until her retirement in 1991.

#1172

Louise Ravelli

#119714

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Louise Jane Ravelli is an Australian linguist. She is a professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research expertise includes multimodal communication, museum communication, discourse analysis, and systemic functional grammar, using the frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and Multimodal Discourse Analysis.

#1173

Annette Markham

Annette Markham

#83379

Overall Influence

Annette Markham is an American academic, Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement at Utrecht University, Adjunct Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, and Adjunct Professor of Information Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is Director of RMIT's Digital Ethnography Research Centre. She has served on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers since 2013. She publishes research in the area of Internet studies, digital identity, social interaction, innovative qualitative methods for social research, and Internet research ethics.

#1174

Irma Thomas

#69680

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Irma Thomas is an American singer from New Orleans. She is known as the "Soul Queen of New Orleans". Thomas is a contemporary of Aretha Franklin and Etta James, but never experienced their level of commercial success. In 2007, she won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for After the Rain, her first Grammy in a career spanning over 50 years.

#1175

Mitski

#54822

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (35 years)

Mitski Miyawaki is an American singer and songwriter. She self-released her first two albums, Lush , and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business , while studying studio composition at Purchase College's Conservatory of Music. The albums were originally made as her senior project. Her third studio album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, was released in 2014 on the label Double Double Whammy.

#1176

Terttu Nevalainen

#113175

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Terttu Nevalainen is a Finnish linguist and the current Chair of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. She has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences since 2001 and was inducted as a First Class Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 2015. Nevalainen works on corpus linguistics, the history of English and historical sociolinguistics.

#1177

Julie Anne Legate

#119984

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Julie Anne Legate is a professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Education and research Legate earned her B.A. from York University in 1995 and her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1997. She received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, writing a dissertation on the Warlpiri language, under the supervision of Noam Chomsky and Sabine Iatridou.

#1178

Mabel

#101767

Overall Influence

1996 - Present (29 years)

Mabel Alabama-Pearl McVey is an English and Swedish singer and songwriter. She had her breakthrough in 2017 with her single "Finders Keepers" which peaked at number eight on the UK Singles Chart. Her debut studio album High Expectations released in 2019 entered the UK Albums Chart at number three and was certified platinum. It included the UK top 10 singles: "Don't Call Me Up", "Mad Love" and "Boyfriend". She won the Brit Award for British Female Solo Artist in 2020. Her second studio album About Last Night... was released in 2022. It was supported by the release of its lead single "Let Them Know".

#1179

Alejandra Costamagna

Alejandra Costamagna

#90473

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Alejandra Costamagna Crivelli is a Chilean writer and journalist. Biography Costamagna's parents arrived in Chile from Argentina in 1967. Alejandra Costamagna recalls that her first approach to writing was through journal entries that she began to make irregularly from age 10.

#1180

Gail Anderson

#112702

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Gail Anderson is an American graphic designer, writer, and educator- known for her typographic skill, hand-lettering and poster design. Biography Early life and education Gail Anderson's family migrated to the Bronx, New York from Jamaica. She was the first-generation American, and first-generation college-educated in her family. In her youth, Anderson created Jackson 5 and Partridge Family pretend magazines. As she got older, she began to look into what was then called “commercial art” as a possible career field.

#1181

Ananya Chatterjea

#88807

Overall Influence

Ananya Chatterjea is a contemporary Indian dancer and scholar. She is the founder, artistic director, and choreographer of Ananya Dance Theatre, a professional, contemporary Indian dance company composed of women artists of color. She is also a professor of dance at the University of Minnesota. Originally from Bengal, India, Chatterjea now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

#1182

Susan Tully

#90714

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Susan Tully is an English actress, television producer, and television director. Her most prominent television acting roles were those of rebellious teenager Suzanne Ross in Grange Hill and single mother Michelle Fowler in the BBC soap opera EastEnders. Tully played one of the original EastEnders characters, appearing in the first episode on 19 February 1985 and remaining central to the series until 1995.

#1183

Candice Breitz

#69292

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Candice Breitz is a South African white artist who works primarily in video and photography. She won a 2007 Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize. Her work is often characterized by multi-channel moving image installations, with a focus on the “attention economy” of contemporary media and culture, often represented in the parallelism of the identification with fictional characters and celebrity figures and widespread indifference to global issues. In 2017, she was selected to represent South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale.

#1184

Virginia Grey

#88513

Overall Influence

1917 - 2004 (87 years)

Virginia Grey was an American actress who appeared in more than 100 films and a number of radio and television shows from the 1930s to the early 1980s. Biography Grey was born on March 22, 1917, in Edendale, California, the youngest of three daughters of Florence Anna Grey and director Ray Grey. One of her early babysitters was film star Gloria Swanson. Grey debuted at the age of 10 in the silent film Uncle Tom's Cabin as Little Eva. She continued acting for a few more years, but then left acting for three years to finish her education.

#1185

Jorja Smith

#89432

Overall Influence

1997 - Present (28 years)

Jorja Alice Smith is an English singer-songwriter. Born and raised in Walsall, West Midlands, she has been writing songs since the age of 11. In 2012, Smith's friend uploaded her cover of Labrinth's "Earthquake" to YouTube, which led to her discovery by record producer Guy Moot. After her first two singles received broader recognition, she signed with Sony/ATV in early 2016, releasing two EPs throughout later that year and into 2017.

#1186

Jeanine Tesori

#71718

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Jeanine Tesori, known earlier in her career as Jeanine Levenson, is an American composer and musical arranger best known for her work in the theater. She is the most prolific and honored female theatrical composer in history, with five Broadway musicals and six Tony Award nominations. She won the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play for Nicholas Hytner's production of Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for Caroline, or Change, the 2015 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Fun Home , making them the first female writing team to win that award, and the 2023 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Kimberly Akimbo .

#1187

Elizabeth Henstridge

Elizabeth Henstridge

#86158

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (38 years)

Elizabeth Frances Henstridge is an English actress and model. She starred as Jemma Simmons in the ABC superhero action drama series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. , set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

#1188

Melba Liston

#105007

Overall Influence

1926 - 1999 (73 years)

Melba Doretta Liston was an American jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. Other than those playing in all-female bands, she was the first woman trombonist to play in big bands during the 1940s and 1960s, but as her career progressed she became better known as an arranger, particularly in partnership with pianist Randy Weston. Other major artists with whom she worked include Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Count Basie.

#1189

Peggy Lee

#86572

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Norma Deloris Engstrom , known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music. Called the "Queen of American pop music," Lee recorded over 1,100 masters and composed over 270 songs.

#1190

Marsha Thomason

Marsha Thomason

#100271

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Marsha Lisa Thomason Sykes is an English television and film actress who is best known for playing Sara Evers in Disney's The Haunted Mansion, Nessa Holt in the first two seasons of the NBC series Las Vegas, Naomi Dorrit on the ABC series Lost, FBI agent Diana Berrigan on the USA Network series White Collar and DS Jenn Townsend in ITV crime series The Bay.

#1191

Gabriele Evertz

Gabriele Evertz

#49529

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Gabriele Evertz is an American painter, curator and professor who is applying the history and theory of color in her work. She is known for abstract color painting and Geometric abstraction. Life and work Gabriele Evertz emigrated to the United States at the age of 19. She holds an M.F.A. in painting and a B.A. in art history, both from Hunter College, where she has taught since 1998. She is a member of the American Abstract Artists. Evertz lives and works in New York. In 2012, she received the Basil H. Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting.

#1192

Caryl Rivers

#75867

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Caryl Rivers is an American novelist and journalist. Her 1984 novel Virgins was a New York Times Best Seller and sold millions of copies around the world. Her articles have appeared in major publications such as The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times.

#1193

Elizabeth A. Barnes

#61313

Overall Influence

Elizabeth A. Barnes is an American climate scientist. Barnes is best known for her work and expertise on the use of statistical methods to understand the variability of Earth's short- and long-term climate. Her work is characterized by an integration of both physics and computer science approaches. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

#1194

Audrey Totter

#90275

Overall Influence

1917 - 2013 (96 years)

Audrey Mary Totter was an American radio, film, and television actress and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the 1940s. Early life Audrey – some sources indicate "Audra" – Totter was born in 1917 and grew up in Joliet in Will County in northeastern Illinois. Her parents were John Totter, who was born in Slovenia with birth name Janez, and Ida Mae Totter. Her father was of Austro-Slovenian descent and her mother was Swedish American. She had two brothers, Folger and George, and a sister, Collette.

#1195

Wei Chen

#46357

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (124 years)

Wei Chen is a Canadian television and radio journalist. Born in Taiwan, she started her career with stations in London and Hamilton. She has worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to Canada AM, the morning show at the CTV Television Network. She was also an anchor on CTV News Channel and a correspondent for the network's newsmagazine series W5, receiving Gemini Award nominations in 2000 and 2002 for her work with W5.

#1196

Shirin Neshat

#58044

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.

#1197

Emily Jeremiah

#110134

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Emily Jeremiah is a British academic and literary translator. She studied modern languages at Exeter College, Oxford, and obtained her PhD from Swansea University. She has taught at Helsinki University, Goldsmiths College and finally Royal Holloway University where she is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies.

#1198

Ursula Holliger

#80972

Overall Influence

1937 - 2014 (77 years)

Ursula Holliger, née Hänggi, was a Swiss harpist, known for her commitment to contemporary music. Career Born in Basel, Holliger studied at the Basel Academy and then at the Conservatoire de Bruxelles. She subsequently went on to pursue a solo career, alone or with her husband, oboist, conductor and composer, Heinz Holliger.

#1199

Miranda July

#66919

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Miranda July is an American film director, screenwriter, actress and author. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations and live performance art. She wrote, directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future and wrote and directed Kajillionaire . She has authored a book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You ; a collection of nonfiction short stories, It Chooses You ; and the novel The First Bad Man .

#1200

Helen Aristar-Dry

#89002

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Helen Aristar-Dry is an American linguist who currently serves as the series editor for SpringerBriefs in Linguistics. Most notably, from 1991 to 2013 she co-directed The LINGUIST List with Anthony Aristar. She has served as principal investigator or co-Principal Investigator on over $5,000,000 worth of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She retired as Professor of English Language and Literature from Eastern Michigan University in 2013.

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