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.

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#1901

Laureen Nussbaum

Laureen Nussbaum

#102590

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Laureen Nussbaum is a German-born American scholar and writer. She is best known for being a Holocaust survivor, and as a scholar and childhood friend of the famed memoirist Anne Frank. Nussbaum is frequently consulted on Anne Frank works and literature.

#1902

Midori Takada

#149630

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Midori Takada is a Japanese composer and percussionist. She has been described as a pioneer of ambient and minimalist music. Early career and Mkwaju Ensemble Takada graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts and began her musical career as a percussionist with the Berlin RIAS Symphonie-Orchester in the mid-1970s. She became dissatisfied with the Western classical musical tradition and returned to Japan to study African drumming and Indonesian gamelan, as well as the early minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. She channeled these influences into the group Mkwaju Ensemble which she formed with Joe Hisaishi, Yoji Sadanari, Junko Arase and Hideki Matsutake.

#1903

Kjersti Fløttum

#119165

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Kjersti Fløttum is a Norwegian linguist. After a tenure at Stavanger University College she was employed by the University of Bergen in 1995 where she is a professor of French language. She has been vice rector of international relations and from 2007 to 2011 led the Bergen Summer Research School.

#1904

Ellen Bromberg

#109632

Overall Influence

Ellen R. Bromberg is an American dance scholar, currently a Distinguished Professor at University of Utah's School of Dance.

#1905

Gloria Jean

#158174

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Gloria Jean was an American actress and singer who starred or co-starred in 26 feature films from 1939 to 1959, and made numerous radio, television, stage, and nightclub appearances. She may be best remembered for her appearance with W. C. Fields in the film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break .

#1906

Janet Jackson

#111088

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Janet Damita Jo Jackson is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer. She is noted for her innovative, socially conscious and sexually provocative records, as well as elaborate stage shows. Her sound and choreography became a catalyst in the growth of MTV, enabling her to rise to prominence while breaking gender and racial barriers in the process. Lyrical content which focused on social issues and lived experiences set her reputation as a role model for youth.

#1907

Annie Gosfield

#166023

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments.

#1908

Ruthie Henshall

Ruthie Henshall

#157089

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Valentine Ruth Henshall , known professionally as Ruthie Henshall, is an English actress, singer and dancer, known for her work in musical theatre. She began her professional stage career in 1986, before making her West End debut in Cats in 1987. A five-time Olivier Award nominee, she won the 1995 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role as Amalia Balash in the London revival of She Loves Me .

#1909

Ann Snodgrass

#170572

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ann Snodgrass is an American poet and translator. Life She graduated from University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University, and from University of Utah with a Ph.D. She lived in the Netherlands, where she taught at Emerson College in Maastricht.

#1910

Nicole Awai

#116982

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Nicole Awai is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Her work captures both Caribbean and American landscapes and experiences and engages in cultural critique. She works in many media including painting, photography, drawing, installations, ceramics, and sculpture as well as found objects.

#1911

Becca Stevens

#127486

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Becca Stevens is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist who draws upon elements of jazz, chamber pop, indie rock, and folk. Early life and education Stevens was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina as the youngest of three children to William Stevens, a composer known for sacred choral music, and Carolyn Dorff, a singer trained in opera and musical theater. During her childhood she performed and toured regionally with her brother, sister, and parents in her family's children's music group, the Tune Mammals. When she was ten years old, she and her mother starred in a year-long national tour of the musical The Secret Garden.

#1912

Jeanne Landry

#175246

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Jeanne Landry was a Canadian composer, pianist and teacher who taught counterpoint and harmony at the Faculty of Music at Université Laval from 1951 to 1983. She began as a solo pianist in 1940 and was named the 1946 winner of the Prix d'Europe grant. Landry gave public recitals, appeared on CBC Radio and was an accompanist for various composers and instrumentalists and singers in concert, radio and television. She retired from teaching in 1983, and devoted her time to composition and writing free-form poems.

#1913

Nellie Ashford

#119056

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Nellie Ashford is a self-taught folk artist from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Her mixed-media folk art depicts the experiences of Charlotte’s African-American community during the era of Jim Crow in the U.S. South.

#1914

Deborah Drattell

#139890

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Deborah Drattell is an American composer. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and started her career in music as a violinist. Her compositions have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Tanglewood and Caramoor Music Festivals, and many other groups and venues. She rewrote the role of the villain in Nicholas and Alexandra, Rasputin, from baritone to tenor when Plácido Domingo expressed interest in singing the role.

#1915

Joan Morris

#140481

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Joan Morris is an American mezzo-soprano and cabaret singer. Life and career Born in Portland, Oregon, her musical partner and husband is composer/pianist William Bolcom. The couple specializes in older popular songs, primarily from the first half of the 20th century, but extending beyond that to include both contemporary cabaret, popular songs of the Gay Nineties, and a number of songs dating back to the 1860s.

#1916

Marta Portal

#90035

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Marta Portal Nicolás was a Spanish writer, critic, journalist, and professor associated with the Generation of '50. She was a recipient of the Premio Planeta de Novela. Career Portal held a degree in philosophy and literature and a PhD in Information Sciences, and taught Hispano-American literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. In her work as a journalist she wrote news articles and literary criticism, as well as opinion columns in media such as ABC, El Alcázar, and .

#1917

Diana Carlin

#117166

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Diana B. Carlin is a Professor Emerita of Communication at Saint Louis University. She is known for her work centering on debate communication, specifically her focus on political debates. Carlin has authored several scholarly articles, and has co-authored several books, including her most recent, Gender and the American Presidency: Nine Presidential Women and the Barriers They Faced. Carlin has also been featured in The New York Times regarding the value of debate. Carlin views presidential debates as valuable due to their ability to summarize a candidates platform, put both candidates on di...

#1918

Chaya Czernowin

#121501

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Chaya Czernowin is an Israeli American composer, and Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is the lead composer at the Schloß Solitude Sommerakademie, a biannual international academy of composers and resident musicians at the landmark Schloß Solitude, in Stuttgart, Germany. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

#1919

Alison Etheridge

Alison Etheridge

#77921

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Alison Mary Etheridge is Professor of Probability and Head of the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford. Etheridge is a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Education Etheridge was educated at Smestow School and the University of Oxford where she was awarded a Master of Arts degree followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1989 for research supervised by David Albert Edwards.

#1920

Priyadarshini

#94040

Overall Influence

Priyadarshini Ram, also known as Priyadharshi Ram or mononymously as Priyadarshini, is a Singaporean-Indian playback singer who has performed in more than 180 movies in the Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Hindi cinema industries. She has also sung more than 800 songs for devotional and private albums in 10 languages.

#1921

Beverly Emmons

#127758

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Beverly Emmons is an American lighting designer for the stage, dance and opera. Career Emmons graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965 and then worked as an assistant to Jules Fisher. Her first credit as a lighting designer was with the Off-Broadway play Sensations in 1970. Emmons first Broadway work was A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1975. She has been the lighting designer for many Broadway plays and musicals since then, most recently the revival of Annie Get Your Gun in 1999 and Stick Fly in 2011.

#1922

Ava June

#175123

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

Ava June Wiggins was an English opera singer noted for her roles with the Sadler's Wells Opera . She joined the Opera in 1953 and switched from a mezzo to soprano on the persuasion of her teacher Clive Carey. June left the company in 1963 and also won a gold medal at the Sofia International Competition for young opera singers. She rejoined Sadler's Wells Opera seven years later and made her first performance in the United States in 1974 with the San Francisco Opera. June's last professional appearance as a singer came in 1983 and retired the following year to enter into a coaching role for the next generation of singers.

#1923

Lisa Bowerman

#122067

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Lisa Bowerman is a British actress. She is best known for portraying Sandra Mute, the paramedic, in the BBC One medical drama Casualty, in the first two series . She also stars as Doctor Who companion Professor Bernice Summerfield in a series of the same name and many Doctor Who audios for Big Finish Productions productions, as well as directing many series for the company.

#1924

Mekia Cox

#96512

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Mekia Cox is an American actress and dancer, known for her recurring role as Sasha in the second and third seasons of The CW drama 90210, Dr. Robyn Charles in the NBC medical drama Chicago Med and her role as a dancer in the Michael Jackson concert series This Is It and the related film Michael Jackson's This Is It. In 2010, she co-starred as Lizzy Gilliam in the short-lived NBC spy drama Undercovers. She is also known for her role as Princess Tiana in the ABC fantasy drama Once Upon A Time and for her role as Detective Nyla Harper in the ABC police drama The Rookie.

#1925

Melissa Aronczyk

#136520

Overall Influence

Melissa Aronczyk is a Canadian media studies scholar working in the United States. She is a member of the faculty of Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information and affiliated faculty in Sociology and with the Eagleton Institute of Politics. Her expertise includes media and political promotion, corporate political advocacy, nationalism, and the political purposes of branding. Dr. Aronczyk has published three books, Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity from Oxford University Press in 2013,; Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture from Peter Lang, in 2010 .

#1926

Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph

#170896

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph is a South African composer, pianist and teacher. She was the first woman in South Africa to obtain a doctorate in composition. She arranged the composition of the South African national anthem and also wrote its final verse.

#1927

Tanis S'eiltin

#171447

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Tanis Maria S'eiltin is a Tlingit installation artist, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Early life and career S'eiltin was born into a family of artists. She learned from her mother, who weaved Chilkat robes and sewed skins into garments. As a child, she often visited Tlingit relatives in Haines, Alaska.

#1928

Susan Yelavich

#108412

Overall Influence

Susan Yelavich is a design scholar, critic, curator and professor emerita of design studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York City. Career Academic Yelavich was director of the MA design studies program at Parsons from 2012 to 2018. She is a member of Scientific Committee for Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan; and has taught frequently in Poland under the auspices of the New School's Transregional Center for Democratic Studies in Wroclaw, the School of Form in Poznan, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

#1929

Isabel Noronha

#161689

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Isabel Helena Vieira Cordato de Noronha is a film director from Mozambique. Biography Noronha was born in 1964 in Lourenço Marques , in Mozambique, during the Portuguese colonial period. Her father was a doctor, who was born in Goa when it was under Portuguese rule, which lasted until 1961, and her mother is from Mozambique.

#1930

Irene B. Vogel

#175904

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Irene B. Vogel is an American linguist, specializing in phonology. She is a professor in the University of Delaware Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department, best known for her work on the phonology-syntax interface.

#1931

Máire Breatnach

#147389

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Máire Breatnach is an Irish fiddle, violin and viola player. She also sings in Irish on some of her albums. Since the early 1990s, she has recorded five solo albums, participated in many collaborations, and developed didactic material for children, mostly in Irish.

#1932

Patricia H. Thornton

#32484

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Patricia H. Thornton is an American organizational theorist, and Grand Challenge Initiative Professor of Sociology and Entrepreneurship at Texas A&M University as well as Adjunct Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She is known for her work on "the sociology of entrepreneurship" and "the Institutional Logics Perspective."

#1933

Laura Karpman

#123388

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Laura Anne Karpman is an American composer, whose work has included music for film, television, video games, theater, and the concert hall. She has won five Emmy Awards for her work. Karpman was trained at The Juilliard School, where she played jazz, and honed her skills scatting in bars.

#1934

Kathleen O'Grady

Kathleen O'Grady

#152685

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Kathleen O'Grady is a Canadian author and academic. She has published two children's books, but is more widely known as a feminist scholar who investigates women's health issues through a cultural lens and whose work addresses the under-researched intersection between feminism and the study of religion. She is also a past Editor of Network, the national, bilingual health magazine for Canadian women, and has published several books addressing feminist theory and methodology.

#1935

Rachel Gough

#121189

Overall Influence

Rachel Gough FRAM is a British classical bassoonist. She has been Principal Bassoon of the London Symphony Orchestra since 1999 and was Co-Principal Bassoon of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 1999.

#1936

Eliza Hittman

#125448

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Eliza Hittman is an American screenwriter, film director, and producer from New York City. She has won multiple awards for her film Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which include the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the National Society of Film Critics Award—both for best screenplay.

#1937

Irma Ravinale

#175646

Overall Influence

1937 - 2013 (76 years)

Irma Ravinale was an Italian composer and music educator. Biography Irma Ravinale was born in Naples, Italy. She studied composition at the Rome Conservatory of Santa Cecilia with Goffredo Petrassi, and continued her studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, also studying piano, conducting and choral music. After completing her education, she took a position in 1966 teaching composition at the Conservatory Santa Cecilia in Rome.

#1938

Vera Neubauer

#144450

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Vera Neubauer is a Czech born British experimental filmmaker, animator, feminist activist and educator. She is known for her jarring, provocative and anti establishment approach. Her life's work spans genres, from cinematic short film to television series for children. Neubauer has received two BAFTA Cymru awards.

#1939

Núria Almiron

#128200

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Núria Almiron Roig is a Catalan researcher who specializes in communication and power relations. Since 2008, she has been a professor in the Department of Communication at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and was previously a professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona .

#1940

Margaret Harshaw

#142966

Overall Influence

1909 - 1997 (88 years)

Margaret Harshaw was an American opera singer and voice teacher who sang for 22 consecutive seasons at the Metropolitan Opera from November 1942 to March 1964. She began her career as a mezzo-soprano in the early 1930s but then began performing roles from the soprano repertoire in 1950. She sang a total of 39 roles in 25 works at the Met and was heard in 40 of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. She was also active as a guest artist with major opera houses in Europe and North and South America.

#1941

Juana Valdes

#138899

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Juana Valdés is a multi-disciplinary artist and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her works examine Afro-Cuban migration through the lens of material culture and personal experience. Valdés's work in ceramics, printmaking, video, and installation explores the colonial and imperial economies that tie the transoceanic movement of people and political ideologies across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Her installations and photographs of mass-produced decorative objects chart the history of colonial trade in conversation with her sub-Saharan and East Asian...

#1942

Laura Schwendinger

Laura Schwendinger

#176846

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Laura Elise Schwendinger was the first composer to win the American Academy in Berlin's Berlin Prize. Biography Schwendinger was the first composer to win the American Academy in Berlin Prize, and her opera Artemisia, is the winner of the 2023, American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Opera Award, the largest such award for vocal music in the US. Additionally, she is a recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and fellowships from the Yaddo Colony, MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Conference Center. She is a Professor of Composition at the University o...

#1943

Joan Havill

#165599

Overall Influence

Joan Rosalie Havill is a concert pianist and piano tutor, currently serving as Senior Professor of Piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Having played with many leading orchestras and tutored dozens of award-winning students, Havill has gained worldwide recognition.

#1944

Betty Allen

#166520

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Betty Allen was an American operatic mezzo-soprano who had an active international singing career during the 1950s through the 1970s. In the latter part of her career her voice acquired a contralto-like darkening, which can be heard on her recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was known for her collaborations with American composers, such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Ned Rorem, and Virgil Thomson among others.

#1945

Elizabeth Rowe

#175612

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Elizabeth Rowe is an American flutist, known for being the principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and for a gender discrimination lawsuit. Rowe grew up in Oregon where she started playing the flute as a child. She earned a music degree and has held several titled positions with professional orchestras. In 2004, she won a blind audition against 250 other applicants to become the principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

#1946

Shweta Mohan

#123195

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Shweta Mohan is an Indian playback singer. She has received four Filmfare Awards South for Best Female Playback Singer, one Kerala State Film Award and one Tamil Nadu State Film Award. She has recorded more than 700 songs and albums in all the four south Indian languages namely Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, she has also recorded songs for Hindi films and has established herself as a leading playback singer of South Indian cinema.

#1947

Naděžda Kniplová

#161678

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Naděžda Kniplová was a Czech operatic soprano who had an active international career from the 1950s through the 1980s. Kniplová possessed a large voice with a sonorous, metallic, dark timbre that was particularly well suited to the dramatic soprano repertoire. While she was most admired in Czech operas and as Wagnerian heroines, she sang a wide repertoire that also encompassed Italian, Russian, and Hungarian language roles. A fine actress, her performances were praised for their intensity and pathos. However, some critics commented on a certain lack of steadiness or purity in her singing. Her...

#1948

Jane Ring Frank

#110443

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Jane Ring Frank is a female American Choral Conductor who leads music publisher E.C. Schirmer's Philovox Recording Chorus. She founded the Boston Secession, which is a professional chorus, in 1996, and was the Artistic Director until they disbanded in 2009. She was named Music Director of the Cantemus Chamber Chorus in 2011.

#1949

Birgit Åkesson

#68511

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Anna Ida Birgit Åkesson, born 24 March 1908 in Malmö; died 24 March 2001 in Stockholm, was a Swedish choreographer, dancer and dance researcher. Biography Birgit Åkesson trained as a dancer at Mary Wigman's school in Dresden from 1929 to 1931. After having danced with her a few years, Åkesson knew she wanted something else from this art, but she could not quite put her finger on it yet. She wanted to explore the body's possibilities and limitations. She then decided to go to Paris and start from zero. According to her, she listened to her body and the memories that were stored in it. In 1934 s...

#1950

Lydia Kavina

#134740

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Lydia Evgenevna Kavina is a Russian-British theremin player, based in Oxfordshire, UK. The granddaughter of Léon Theremin's first cousin, Soviet anthropologist and primatologist Mikhail Nesturkh, Kavina was born in Moscow and began studying the instrument under the direction of Léon Theremin when she was nine years old. Five years later, she gave her first theremin concert, which marked the beginning of a musical career that has led to numerous concert, theatre, radio and television performances around the world.

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