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 …
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#201
Ruby Cohn
#31927
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Ruby Cohn was an American theater scholar and a leading authority on playwright Samuel Beckett. She was a professor of Comparative Drama at the University of California, Davis for thirty years. Early life and education Born in 1922 in Columbus, Ohio, Ruby Burman moved with her family to New York City, where she completed high school and graduated from Hunter College. During World War II she joined the WAVES and served as a document courier. After the war she returned to Europe and completed a doctoral degree at the University of Paris. In January 1953 while a student at the Sorbonne she at...
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Jemele Hill
#9818
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jemele Juanita Hill is an American sports journalist. She worked for the Raleigh News & Observer, the Detroit Free Press, and the Orlando Sentinel. She joined ESPN in 2006 and worked in various roles until 2013, when she succeeded Jalen Rose as host of ESPN2's Numbers Never Lie. The show was rebranded to His & Hers which she co-hosted with Michael Smith. Hill and Michael Smith co-hosted SC6, the 6 p.m. edition of ESPN's flagship SportsCenter from 2017 to 2018.
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Jean Berko Gleason
#19237
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Jean Berko Gleason is an American psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.
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Asya Pereltsvaig
#32869
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Asya Pereltsvaig is a Russian-American linguist, writer, and educator. Life Pereltsvaig has a PhD in Linguistics from McGill University in 2001, with a dissertation entitled, "On the nature of intra-clausal relations: a study of copular sentences in Russian and Italian." She has taught in Yale, Cornell, and Stanford universities, as well as the University of Utah Continuing Education program. She has served as an academic coordinator for the Esperanto society, ESF.
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Jessica Coon
#35802
Overall Influence
Jessica Coon is a professor of linguistics at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in syntax and indigenous languages. She was the linguistics expert consultant for the 2016 film Arrival. Coon works on ergativity, split ergativity, case and agreement, nominalization, field methodology, and collaborative language work in Ch'ol and Chuj and Mi'gmaq .
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Cynthia Tucker
#26818
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Cynthia Tucker, born March 13, 1955, is an American journalist whose weekly column is syndicated by Universal Uclick. She received a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007 for her work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she served as editorial page editor. She was also a Pulitzer finalist in 2004 and 2006.
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Juliette Blevins
#23696
Overall Influence
Juliette Blevins is an American linguist whose work has contributed to the fields of phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and typology. She is currently professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Leanne Hinton
#26580
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Leanne Hinton is an American linguist and emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Education and career Hinton received her PhD in 1977 from UC San Diego, with a dissertation entitled "Havasupai songs: a linguistic perspective," written under the supervision of Margaret Langdon. After joining the Berkeley faculty in 1978, Hinton began working with California languages.
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Pat Cadigan
#6283
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan is a British-American science fiction author, whose work is most often identified with the cyberpunk movement. Her novels and short stories often explore the relationship between the human mind and technology. Her debut novel, Mindplayers, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988.
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Zizi Papacharissi
#34114
Overall Influence
Zizi Papacharissi is a Greek-American writer and communications researcher. She is professor and head of the department of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of the journals Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and Social Media and Society.
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Linda McCartney
#16050
Overall Influence
1941 - 1998 (57 years)
Linda Louise McCartney, Lady McCartney was an American photographer, musician, animal rights activist, vegetarian cookbook author and advocate, and entrepreneur. She was the keyboardist in the band Wings, which also featured her husband, Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
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Elizabeth Bates
#11032
Overall Influence
1947 - 2003 (56 years)
Elizabeth Ann Bates was a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, aphasia, and the neurological bases of language, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. Bates was well known for her assertion that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain and is subserved by general cognitive and neurological processes.
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Audie Cornish
#14296
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Audie N. Cornish is an American journalist and a former co-host of NPR's All Things Considered. She is an anchor and correspondent for CNN and the host of The Assignment, a CNN Audio podcast. She was previously the host of Profile by Buzzfeed News, a web-only interview show that lasted one season, as well as NPR Presents, a long-form conversation series with creatives about their projects, processes, and shaping culture in America.
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Gina Gaston
#37518
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Gina Gaston is a television journalist and currently the lead anchor for KTRK-TV in Houston, Texas. Career She joined channel 13 in 1992 to anchor the morning newscast with Tom Koch. She then left in 1999 to co-anchor HomePage, an afternoon show on MSNBC, with Ashleigh Banfield and Mika Brzezinski. Entertainment Weekly described the trio as "the Powerpuff Girls of journalism". Gaston left MSNBC in 2000. In 2001, she returned to channel 13 to anchor and report the 6 and 10pm newscast, replacing long-time anchor Shara Fryer. Prior to joining KTRK-TV, she worked at WTSP in Tampa, Florida, WHTM-T...
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Mary Hinkson
#33588
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Mary De Haven Hinkson was an African American dancer and choreographer known for breaking racial boundaries throughout her dance career in both modern and ballet techniques. She is best known for her work as a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company.
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Anne Curzan
#23670
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan since 2012 and dean of its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts since 2019. Biography Curzan received a bachelor of arts in linguistics summa cum laude from Yale University in 1991. She received a master of arts and a doctor of philosophy in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in 1995 and 1998, respectively.
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Diane Massam
#38375
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. Education and research She earned her PhD in linguistics under Noam Chomsky in 1985 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She held a position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto from 1989 until her retirement in 2017, when she became professor emeritus.
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Miriam Butt
#37614
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Miriam Butt is Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, where she leads the computational linguistics lab. Education and research Butt earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1993 at Stanford University. She subsequently held research and teaching positions at the Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung at the University of Stuttgart, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the University of Tübingen before taking up her current position at the University of Konstanz.
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Marjolijn Verspoor
#24062
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Marjolijn Verspoor is a Dutch linguist. She is a professor of English language and English as a second language at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She is known for her work on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory and the application of dynamical systems theory to study second language development. Her interest is also in second language writing.
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Leni Riefenstahl
#15655
Overall Influence
1902 - 2003 (101 years)
Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was a German director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer and actress known for producing Nazi propaganda. A talented swimmer and an artist, Riefenstahl became interested in dancing during her childhood, taking lessons and performing across Europe. After seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 film Mountain of Destiny, she was inspired to move into acting and between 1925 and 1929 starred in five successful motion pictures. Riefenstahl became one of the few women in Germany to direct a film during the Weimar era when, in 1932, she decided to try dir...
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Christiane Fellbaum
#9295
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Christiane D. Fellbaum is an American linguist and computational linguistics researcher who is Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Program in Linguistics and the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. The co-developer of the WordNet project, she is also its current director.
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Myrna Gopnik
#13229
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Myrna Lee Gopnik is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor emerita of linguistics at McGill University. She is known for her research on the KE family, an English family with several members affected by specific language impairment.
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Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
#33746
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an American journalist whose works focus on the marginalized members of society: adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison, etc. She is best known for her 2003 non-fiction book Random Family. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship—popularly known as the "Genius Grant"—in 2006.
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Joan Bresnan
#32059
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects of the theoretical framework of lexical functional grammar.
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Donna Jo Napoli
#18099
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Donna Jo Napoli is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist. She currently is a professor at Swarthmore College teaching Linguistics in all different forms .She has also taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Pennsylvania,
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Mia Michaels
#24831
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mia Michaels Melchiona is an American choreographer and judge on the television show So You Think You Can Dance. She has worked with Tom Cruise, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Madonna, Ricky Martin, Prince, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In 2005 she choreographed Cirque du Soleil's world tour Delirium and Celine Dion's A New Day..., for which she received an Emmy Award nomination. In 2007 she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography for her routine on "Calling You" during season two of So You Think You Can Dance. She won another Emmy Award during season five in 2010. She was a judge during season 7 with Adam Shankman and Nigel Lythgoe.
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Janet Pierrehumbert
#38172
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the Universit...
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Clemencia Rodriguez
#21149
Overall Influence
Clemencia Rodriguez is a Colombian US-based media and communication scholar recognized for her role in establishing and promoting the field of alternative media studies in English language media studies, notably through her work on 'citizens' media,' a term she coined in her 2001 book Fissures in the Mediascape and through co-founding and facilitating OURMedia/NUESTROSMedios, a global network of researchers and practitioners of alternative media, community media and citizens' media, currently the biggest network of its kind with over 500 members in over 40 countries.
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Roberta Baskin
#20252
Overall Influence
Roberta Baskin is an American journalist and nonprofit director. She co-founded and served as Executive Director of the AIM2Flourish global learning initiative, hosted at Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
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Martha Ratliff
#23033
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Martha Ratliff is an American linguist and Professor Emerita at Wayne State University. She is a leading specialist in Hmong–Mien languages and also notable for her reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.
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Ursula Reutner
#26087
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ursula Reutner is a German linguist. She holds the Chair of Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Passau. Reutner is an internationally renowned expert in Romance Studies and Intercultural Communication, who has won several awards for her work, including the Prix Germaine de Staël, the Elise Richter Prize and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad del Salvador .
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Eileen McNamara
#21208
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Eileen McNamara is an American journalist. She is the author of Eunice, The Kennedy Who Changed the World, published by Simon and Schuster. She is an emerita professor in the Journalism Program at Brandeis University and formerly a columnist with the Boston Globe, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1997.
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Laure Adler
#29469
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Laure Adler is a French journalist, writer, publisher and radio/TV producer. Works Biographies 1986: L'Amour à l'arsenic : histoire de Marie Lafarge, Denoël.1998: Marguerite Duras, Éditions Gallimard2005: Dans les pas de Hannah Arendt, Gallimard2008: L'insoumise, Simone Weil, Actes Sud2011: Françoise, Grasset .2012: Dans les pas de Hannah Arendt, Gallimard2015: François Mitterrand, journées particulières, Flammarion
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Carolyn Carlson
#57584
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Carolyn Carlson is an American professor of journalism at Kennesaw State University. She specializes in Freedom of Information studies. She was the second woman to serve as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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Carly Simon
#10903
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Carly Elisabeth Simon is an American musician, singer, songwriter, memoirist, and children's author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include "Anticipation" , "The Right Thing to Do" , "Haven't Got Time for the Pain" , "You Belong to Me" , "Coming Around Again" , and her four Gold-certified singles "You're So Vain" , "Mockingbird" , "Nobody Does It Better" from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, and "Jesse" . She has authored two memoirs and five children's books.
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Lesley Milroy
#51976
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ann Lesley Milroy is a sociolinguist, and a professor emerita at the University of Michigan. Her work in sociolinguistics focuses on urban and rural dialectology, language ideology and standard. Education and Career Milroy earned her PhD at Queens University Belfast in 1979. She studied and began her work in sociolinguistics in the UK. Milroy held a position at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1983-1994. She moved to the United States in 1994, where she worked as a professor and the chair of the department of linguistics at the University of Michigan until she retired in 2004. She h...
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Yolanda Lastra
#31103
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Yolanda Lastra de Suárez is a Mexican linguist specializing in the descriptive linguistics of the indigenous languages of Mexico. She obtained her PhD degree in 1963 from Cornell University, her dissertation written under the guidance of Charles F. Hockett treating the syntax of Cochabamba Quechua in Bolivia. She was married to Argentinian linguist Jorge A. Suárez .
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Deepa Kumar
#24691
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Deepa Kumar is an Indian American scholar and activist. She is a professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Kumar has been referred to by the Media Education Foundation as “one of the nation’s foremost scholars on Islamophobia" and by the New York Times as "a world-renowned scholar of Islamophobia and race." She is a leader in the Rutgers faculty union, the AAUP-AFT. When she was president, the union fought for gender and race equity, and in 2019 won a contract that AFT president, Randi Weingarten, said “will inspire higher education professionals across [the] country to ...
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Josiane Balasko
#45882
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Josiane Balasko is a French actress, writer, and director. She has been nominated seven times for César Awards, and won twice. Career One of Balasko's most recognized roles among English speakers is as a lesbian in 1995's . She won the 1996 César Award for best screenplay, and was also nominated as best director. The movie itself was nominated for best film. Balasko's other César nominations for best actress were for Too Beautiful for You , , and That Woman .
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Jessica Walsh
#26940
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Jessica Walsh is an American designer, art director, illustrator and educator. She was a partner of the design studio Sagmeister & Walsh , and the founder of the creative agency &Walsh . &Walsh is one of the .1% of creative agencies owned by women. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts .
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Bencie Woll
#53274
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bencie Woll FAAAS is an American–British linguist and scholar of sign language. She became the first professor of sign language in the United Kingdom when she was appointed Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies at City University, London in 1995. In 2005, she moved to University College London where she became Professor of Sign Language and Deaf Studies and Director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre .
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Soonja Choi
#15657
Overall Influence
Soonja Choi is an Austria-based linguist from South Korea. She specializes in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean. Biography Choi initially studied French language and literature, receiving her BA at Sacred Heart Women's College in Seoul in 1972 and her MA at Seoul National University in 1976. After this she went to study in France, and received a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Paris-Sorbonne University in 1980. Her PhD in linguistics was awarded in 1986 by SUNY Buffalo.
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Robyn Carston
#37356
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robyn Anne Carston, is a linguist and academic, who specialises in pragmatics, semantics, and the philosophy of language. Since 2005, she has been Professor of Linguistics at University College London.
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Julie Walters
#22517
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dame Julia Mary Walters , known professionally as Julie Walters, is an English actress. She is the recipient of four British Academy Television Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, two International Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and a Laurence Olivier Award.
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Sofia Coppola
#18454
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sofia Carmina Coppola is an American filmmaker and actress. Coppola has received an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Golden Lion, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, as well as nominations for three BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award.
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Marion Dönhoff
#6699
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Marion Hedda Ilse Gräfin von Dönhoff was a German journalist and publisher who participated in the resistance against Nazism, along with Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. After the war, she became one of Germany's leading journalists and intellectuals, working for over 55 years as an editor and later publisher of the Hamburg-based weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
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Alice Twemlow
#42341
Overall Influence
Alice Twemlow is a writer, critic and educator from the United Kingdom whose work focuses on graphic design. She has been a guest critic at the Yale University School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art , and Rhode Island School of Design . In 2006, the School of Visual Arts in New York named Twemlow the chair and co-founder of its Master of Fine Arts in Design Criticism . According to her SVA biography: "Alice Twemlow writes for Eye, Design Issues, I.D., Print, New York magazine and The Architect’s Newspaper." Twemlow is also a contributor to the online publication Voice: AIGA Journal of Design.
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Jane Hill
#40062
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jane Amanda Hill is an English newsreader working for the BBC. She is one of the main presenters for BBC News, and is the main presenter on the BBC News at One and the BBC News at Five, as well as regularly presenting the BBC Weekend News, BBC News at Ten and BBC News at Six. She also occasionally presents The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4.
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Jane Glover
#35472
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dame Jane Alison Glover is a British conductor and musicologist. Early life Born in Helmsley, Glover attended Haberdashers' Monmouth School for Girls. Her father, Robert Finlay Glover, MA , was headmaster of Monmouth School and it was through this connection that she was able to meet Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears aged only 16. She later described the meeting:
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Adeola Fayehun
#51229
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Adeola Eunice Oladele Fayehun is a Nigerian journalist who specializes in discussing current geopolitical, social and economic issues that affect the daily lives of Africans living on the continent. She is well known for a controversial 2015 on-street interview where she and fellow Sahara TV journalist Omoyele Sowore asked Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe about when he would be stepping down from office. In 2013, she interviewed former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on the streets of New York, asking him what he was doing about the then on-going Boko Haram insurgency.
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