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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#1301
Montserrat Boix
#109484
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Montserrat Boix Piqué is a Spanish journalist, considered among the most influential women in her country. In early 2000, she created and developed the concepts of social cyberfeminism, and a year later those of feminist hacktivism. Another of her main areas of work is gender violence and communication. She has also stood out as a defender of the right to communication and citizenship rights for women. Since 1986, she has been a journalist for the Information Services of Televisión Española , in the international section.
Go to Profile#1302
Maria Schneider
#89108
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Maria Lynn Schneider is an American composer and jazz orchestra leader who has won multiple Grammy Awards. Biography Born in Windom, Minnesota, Schneider studied music theory and composition at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1983, then earned a master's degree in Music in 1985 from the Eastman School of Music, studying for one year as well at the University of Miami. After leaving Eastman, she was hired by Gil Evans as his copyist and assistant.
Go to Profile#1303
Daphne Brooker
#120927
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Daphne Elizabeth Brooker was a British model, costume designer, and a professor and head of fashion at Kingston University for three decades, where she had "a leading role in the teaching of fashion".
Go to Profile#1304
Nicoletta Maraschio
#105452
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Nicoletta Maraschio is an academic teacher of "History of Italian Language" at University of Florence. She was the first woman in charge of Accademia della Crusca, from 2008 to 2014, succeeding Francesco Sabatini.
Go to Profile#1305
Anne Manne
#52667
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Anne Manne is an Australian journalist and social philosopher. Her 2005 book Motherhood: How should we care for our children? was short-listed in 2006 for Australian journalism's Walkley Award. Anne Manne has been married to Australian political science professor Robert Manne since 1983. They have two children, including Cornell University philosophy professor Kate Manne.
Go to Profile#1306
Gayane Hovhannisyan
#99156
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Gayane Hovhannisyan is an Armenian linguist, Doctor of Sciences in Philology/Linguistics , Professor . Hovhannisyan was the first Chair of English Teaching Methodology at Armenian State Pedagogical University after Khachatur Abovyan, Yerevan. Currently she is the head of English Communication and Translation Chair at Brusov State University.
Go to Profile#1307
Carla Rippey
#72708
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Carla Rippey is a visual artist and the ex-director of The National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving "La Esmeralda." Although she was born in the US, Rippey is a considered a Mexican feminist artist.
Go to Profile#1308
Carol Rhodes
#125135
Overall Influence
1959 - 2018 (59 years)
Carol Mary Rhodes was a Scottish artist known for paintings and drawings of landscapes and marked by human intervention. Rhodes was born in Edinburgh, but spent her infancy and youth in Serampore, India. She moved to the UK in her mid teens and studied fine art at the Glasgow School of Art. Graduating in 1982 she became politically active around issues of disarmament, feminism and social justice. Her focus returned to painting around 1990, and she developed her distinctive idiom of aerial-view, ‘man-made’ landscapes around 1994. These began to be exhibited in the United Kingdom and internationally, and entered many public collections.
Go to Profile#1309
Grete Sultan
#93984
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Grete Sultan was a German-American pianist. Biography Sultan was born in Berlin into a musical family of Jewish heritage. From an early age she studied piano with American pianist Richard Buhlig, and later with Leonid Kreutzer and Edwin Fischer. In 1933, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, her ethnicity led to her being banned from playing in public. She was allowed to only appear in concerts of the Jüdischer Kulturbund.
Go to Profile#1310
Raffaella Zanuttini
#123983
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Raffaella Zanuttini is an Italian linguist whose research focuses primarily on syntax and linguistic variation. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Education and career Zanuttini completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 under Anthony Kroch and Richard S. Kayne, with a dissertation entitled Syntactic Properties of Sentential Negation. A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. Zanuttini was first an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University Prior to beginning her tenure at Yale in 2008.
Go to Profile#1311
Ellen Roseman
#80252
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Ellen Roseman is a Canadian writer, journalist and lecturer specializing in personal finance and consumer issues. She currently writes a column handling consumer complaints for the Toronto Star and teaches at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. She has been an editor and columnist for the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. She is the author of a number of books and co-author with Phil Edmonston of The Canadian Consumers’ Survival Book. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is married to Edward Trapunski. She has two children.
Go to Profile#1312
Emma Briant
#68949
Overall Influence
Emma L. Briant is a British scholar and academic researcher on media, contemporary propaganda, surveillance and information warfare who was involved in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal concerning data misuse and disinformation. She became Associate Professor of News and Political Communication at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia in 2023. Before this she was an associate researcher at Bard College and taught in the School of Communication at American University. Briant became an honorary associate in Cambridge University Center for Financial Reporting & Accountab...
Go to Profile#1313
Kay Amert
#117698
Overall Influence
1947 - 2008 (61 years)
Kay Amert was an American scholar of French Renaissance printing and a typographer and letterpress printer. She was the director of the University of Iowa Typography Library from 1972 to 2006 where she was a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Go to Profile#1314
Michiru Ōshima
#117808
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Michiru Oshima is a Japanese composer and arranger. She works on music in wide range of areas, such as anime, films, television series, video games and concerts. She has written scores for over 100 movies, over 200 television titles, video games, various types of events, concerts, theaters, among others. Ōshima is one of the most prolific living composers for film, anime and video game. She has released over 300 CDs including film soundtracks and artist CDs. Her works include composition for Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. movies and scores f...
Go to Profile#1315
Bessie Schonberg
#48510
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Bessie Schonberg was a highly influential dancer, choreographer and teacher of the 20th century. She was at the center of contemporary modern dance from her beginning at Bennington College up until her death in 1997. Her career spanned sixty-five years and she helped mold a new generation of modern dancers including Lucinda Childs, Elizabeth Keen, Meredith Monk and Carolyn Adams .
Go to Profile#1316
Nina Gilden Seavey
#103381
Overall Influence
Nina Gilden Seavey is a documentary filmmaker and Research Professor of History and Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University . She was the Director of the Documentary Center at GW, which she founded in October 1990, before stepping down in 2020. In 2017, Seavey was named a visiting research scholar at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
Go to Profile#1317
Gaby Casadesus
#127164
Overall Influence
1901 - 1999 (98 years)
Gaby Casadesus was a French classical pianist and teacher born in Marseilles, France. She was married to the French pianist Robert Casadesus and their son Jean was also a notable pianist. Biography Born Gabrielle l'Hôte, she studied at the Paris Conservatory with Louis Diémer and Marguerite Long and was awarded the first prize in piano at age 16. She met Claude Debussy at this time, as he was the judge for one of her competitions. She was also friendly with Debussy's daughter Claude-Emma who died soon after of diphtheria. Gaby later won the Prix Pagès, which was the most prestigious award in...
Go to Profile#1318
Nina Hyams
#126481
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles. Education and career Hyams received her PhD in linguistics in 1983 from Graduate Center of the City University of New York, with a dissertation entitled, The acquisition of parameterized grammars. It was published by Springer in 1986, and it remains a widely cited and influential classic.
Go to Profile#1319
Unsuk Chin
#79992
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Unsuk Chin is a South Korean composer of contemporary classical music, who is based in Berlin, Germany. Chin was a self-taught pianist from a young age and studied composition at Seoul National University as well as with György Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.
Go to Profile#1320
Cheryl Studer
#112672
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Cheryl Studer is an American dramatic soprano who has sung at many of the world's foremost opera houses. Studer has performed more than eighty roles ranging from the dramatic repertoire to roles more commonly associated with lyric sopranos and coloratura sopranos, and, in her late stage, mezzo-sopranos. She is particularly known for her interpretations of the works of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.
Go to Profile#1321
Janice Lough
#143029
Overall Influence
Janice Lough is a climate scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science at James Cook University, researching climate change, and impacts of temperature and elevated on coral reefs. She was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2022 for her research in climate change, coral reefs, and developing high resolution environmental and growth histories from corals, particularly the Great Barrier Reef.
Go to Profile#1322
Dorota Simonides
#51862
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Dorota Elżbieta Simonides - Polish folklorist and politician. Professor emerita of the Faculty of Philology, Opole University. During the People's Republic of Poland period she joined a small non-Marxist 'satellite party', the Democratic Party , and was a member of parliament of the Sejm of People's Republic of Poland in 1980–1985. She was one of only a few MPs who did not vote in favour of martial law in 1981 and the criminalisation of Solidarity in 1984.
Go to Profile#1323
Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine
#68116
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine is a French philosopher, essayist, and historian of East European history and culture. Laignel-Lavastine holds a PhD in History and Philosophy. She studied at Paris-Sorbonne University and then at the Center for Training of Journalists , before devoting herself to a career as an essayist.
Go to Profile#1324
Yvonne Ciannella
#121220
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Yvonne Regina Ciannella was an American coloratura soprano in opera and concert. She began her career performing and recording with the Robert Shaw Chorale in the early 1950s. After graduate voice studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, she embarked on a career as an opera singer; working mainly in Germany at the Staatstheater Braunschweig, Theater Bonn, and Theater Dortmund during the 1960s. She also appeared as a guest artist with opera companies in Berlin, Cologne, Florida, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna. For many years she was a member of the voice faculty of the College of Music at Florida...
Go to Profile#1325
Mary Beth Oliver
#109688
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Mary Beth Oliver is a Distinguished Professor of Media Studies at the Penn State College of Communications, where she is also the co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. Education and career Oliver received her B.A. from Virginia Tech in communication studies in 1986. She then attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in 1988 and 1991, respectively. Both of her graduate degrees were in communication arts.
Go to Profile#1326
Alba D'Urbano
#131097
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Alba D'Urbano is a textile and video artist. D'Urbano's most notable work was 1995's "hautnah" ; a series of garments imprinted with life-size digital photographs of her own skin. After an exhibition in 1999, critics stated she depicted nudity as fashionable, provoked voyeurism, and made skin just another interface in a world. In addition to her own work, D'Urbano has been a critic and an art philosopher. Since 1995, D'Urbano has been a professor at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, in Leipzig, Germany.
Go to Profile#1327
Dika Newlin
#101319
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Dika Newlin was a composer, pianist, professor, musicologist, and punk rock singer. She received a Ph.D. from Columbia University at the age of 22. She was one of the last living students of Arnold Schoenberg and was a Schoenberg scholar and a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond from 1978 to 2004. She performed as an Elvis impersonator and played punk rock while in her seventies in Richmond, Virginia.
Go to Profile#1328
Marina Nespor
#111406
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Marina Nespor is a Professor of linguistics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, and senior researcher in the ERC PASCAL Project, a project investigating language acquisition and the nature of the biological endowment that allows humans to learn language. Much of Dr. Nespor's research focuses on the interaction of phonology and syntax: what the prosodic structure of an utterance communicates about its grammatical structure.
Go to Profile#1329
Patricia Carpenter
#91789
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Patricia Carpenter , a music theorist, was a professor of music theory at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her areas of scholarly interest included music theory, the history of music theory, musical analysis, and the aesthetics of music. She was born in Santa Rosa, California.
Go to Profile#1330
Yui
#88163
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (38 years)
Yui , stylized as YUI or yui, is a Japanese singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. In her solo career, she sold more than 5 million physical copies in Japan. She is popular in Japan and in surrounding countries, ranking number one in 2011 Count Down TV "Dearest Female Artist" and Music Station "Artist You Most Want to Marry" polls, as well as Radio Television Hong Kong's "Most Popular Japanese Artist".
Go to Profile#1331
Lillian Wolock Elliott
#132667
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Lillian Wolock Elliott was an American fiber artist, and textile designer. She is known for her innovative basket craft. Biography Lillian Wolock Elliott was born in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan. She attended Wayne State University , and Cranbrook Academy of Art . After she graduated school, she worked at Ford Motor Company, as a designer from 1955 to 1958.
Go to Profile#1332
Carol Burnett
#74836
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Carol Creighton Burnett is an American comedian, actress, and singer. Her groundbreaking comedy-variety show The Carol Burnett Show, which originally aired on CBS, was one of the first to be hosted by a woman. She has performed onstage, on television, and in film in varying genres, including dramatic and comedic roles. She has received numerous accolades, including six Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, a Grammy Award, and seven Golden Globe Awards. Burnett was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2013, and the Screen Actors Guild Lif...
Go to Profile#1333
Isabelle Faust
#125245
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Isabelle Faust is a German violinist who has worked internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. She received multiple awards. Life and career Faust was born in Esslingen on 12 March 1972. She received her first violin lessons at the age of five. Her father, then a 31 year old secondary school teacher, decided to learn the violin. He took his young daughter along: the father's talent was not especially stellar, but his daughter was able to learn the technical fundamentals of violin playing correctly and at an unusually early age, quickly herself becoming the star pupil. Shortly after th...
Go to Profile#1334
Ann Lund
#147479
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Ann Lund is a journalist based in Brisbane, Australia. Biography Lund was born in the UK, is a graduate of Modern English and holds a post graduate diploma in broadcast journalism. She worked for the BBC as a reporter, producer and presenter in radio and television, and as a specialist reporter for the BBC's political unit "Out of Westminster" in Bristol.
Go to Profile#1335
Suzanne Eggins
#113835
Overall Influence
Suzanne Eggins is an Australian linguist who is an Honorary Fellow at Australian National University , associated with the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care. Eggins is the author of a best selling introduction to systemic functional linguistics and she is known for her extensive work on critical linguistic analysis of spontaneous interactions in informal and institutional healthcare settings.
Go to Profile#1336
Bella Davidovich
#103314
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Bella Mikhaylovna Davidovich is a Soviet and American pianist. Biography Davidovich was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, into a Jewish family of musicians and began studying piano when she was six. Three years later, she was the soloist for a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1939, she moved to Moscow to continue her musical education. At the age of 18 she entered the Moscow Conservatory where she studied with Konstantin Igumnov and Yakov Flier. In 1949, she shared the first prize with Halina Czerny-Stefańska at the IV International Chopin Piano Competition. This launched her ...
Go to Profile#1337
El Jones
#68273
Overall Influence
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was Halifax's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. Biography She was born in Wales and grew up in Winnipeg. Her book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! published in 2014 by Roseway, an imprint of Fernwood Publishing, is a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. In 2015, she was a resident at the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. Her work focuses on social justice issues such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism, and decolonization; she wrote in The Washington Postin J...
Go to Profile#1338
Marcia Ball
#104695
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Marcia Ball is an American blues singer and pianist raised in Vinton, Louisiana. Ball was described in USA Today as "a sensation, saucy singer and superb pianist... where Texas stomp-rock and Louisiana blues-swamp meet." The Boston Globe described her music as "an irresistible celebratory blend of rollicking, two-fisted New Orleans piano, Louisiana swamp rock and smoldering Texas blues from a contemporary storyteller."
Go to Profile#1339
Kariamu Welsh
#98832
Overall Influence
1949 - 2021 (72 years)
Kariamu Welsh Asante was an American contemporary dance choreographer and scholar whose awards include a National Endowment for the Arts, three Senior Fulbright Scholar awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a professor at Temple University's Boyer School of Music and Dance.
Go to Profile#1340
Rena Torres Cacoullos
#139404
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Rena Torres Cacoullos is an American linguist known for her work on language variation and change, as well as her research on processes of grammaticalization and the linguistic outcomes of language contact. She is currently Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the Pennsylvania State University.
Go to Profile#1341
Charlotte Moorman
#75409
Overall Influence
1933 - 1991 (58 years)
Madeline Charlotte Moorman was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York and a frequent collaborator with Korean American artist Nam June Paik.
Go to Profile#1342
Yolande E. Chan
#85765
Overall Influence
Yolande E. Chan is a Jamaican-Canadian information systems professor. Chan joined the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University as Dean and James McGill Professor in August 2021. Her research focuses on innovation, knowledge strategy, digital strategy, and business-IT alignment. Chan has long been a champion for women and under-represented groups in academia. In her role as Dean of the Desautels Faculty of Management, she has made equity, diversity and inclusion a major strategic priority.
Go to Profile#1343
Wendy Melvoin
#58743
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Wendy Ann Melvoin is an American guitarist and singer-songwriter, best known for her work with Prince as part of his backing band The Revolution, and for her collaboration with Lisa Coleman as one half of the duo Wendy & Lisa.
Go to Profile#1344
Flora Purim
#82099
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Flora Purim is a Brazilian jazz singer known primarily for her work in the jazz fusion style. She became prominent for her part in Return to Forever with Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke. She has recorded and performed with numerous artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Evans, Opa, Stan Getz, George Duke, Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, Santana, Jaco Pastorius, and her husband Airto Moreira.
Go to Profile#1345
Maria Inês Nassif
#148625
Overall Influence
Maria Inês Nassif is a Brazilian journalist. In her professional career, she was associated with several media outlets, such as Valor Econômico and GGN, usually in the fields of politics and the economy. In recognition of her work as a reporter at the GGN, she was awarded the Woman Press Trophy in the category "Reporter for News Sites" in the year 2014.
Go to Profile#1346
Kathryn Miles
#103783
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Kathryn Miles is an American journalist, writer, and environmental theorist. She is the author of three books including Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy, All Standing and Adventures with Ari.
Go to Profile#1347
Angela Winbush
#62309
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Angela Lisa Winbush is an American R&B/soul singer-songwriter, musician and record producer who rose to fame first in the 1980s R&B duo René & Angela, also scoring hits as a solo artist. To date, Winbush has sold over 10 million albums and singles worldwide.
Go to Profile#1348
Marianne Thorsen
#112108
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Marianne Thorsen is a Norwegian violinist. Biography and career Born in Trondheim, Thorsen was taught by Bjarne Fiskum before studying at The Purcell School for Young Musicians in Hertfordshire, and later tutored by György Pauk at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she won the Roth Prize and the Academy's highest award for performance, the DipRAM.
Go to Profile#1349
Ingeborg Heuser
#29607
Overall Influence
Ingeborg Heuser was a German dancer, choreographer and teacher who worked primarily in the Southwest United States. She is credited with popularizing and promoting ballet in El Paso, Texas. Biography Heuser was born in Berlin and her mother encouraged her love of the arts at a young age. Heuser began training in ballet at the age of seven. She started as an apprentice in the Deutsche Oper Corps de Ballet when she was 12 and made her solo debut at age 15. Heuser moved to the United States in 1949. First she worked in California and later she attended the University of Arizona in Tucson as a "s...
Go to Profile#1350
Pamela Weston
#132532
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Pamela Theodora Weston was a British clarinetist, teacher and writer. Born in London, she attended Priors Field School. Following two years at the Royal Academy of Music she won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music before studying privately with the noted clarinetist Frederick Thurston. She was a professor of clarinet at the Guildhall from 1951 until 1969. She organised the International Clarinet Association Congress in 1984, the first ever held in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile