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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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Communications,

#251

Joan Sutherland

#28544

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano known for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s to the 1980s. She possessed a voice combining agility, accurate intonation, pinpoint staccatos, a trill and a strong upper register, although music critics complained about her poor diction.

#252

Hedy Lamarr

#20783

Overall Influence

1914 - 2000 (86 years)

Hedy Lamarr was an Austro-Hungarian-born American actress and technology inventor. She was a film star during Hollywood's Golden Age. After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy , she fled from her first husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film star with her performance in Algiers . Her MGM films include Lady of the Tropics , Boom Town , H.M. Pulham, Esq. , and White Cargo .

#253

Elizabeth Drew

#11121

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Elizabeth Drew is an American political journalist and author. Early life Elizabeth Brenner was born on November 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the daughter of William J. Brenner, a furniture manufacturer, and Estelle Brenner .

#254

Sali Tagliamonte

#52313

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Canadian linguist. Her main area of research is the field of language variation and change. Education Tagliamonte received a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from York University in 1981, and a Master of Arts in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1991 in Linguistics from University of Ottawa. Her graduate thesis, supervised by Shana Poplack, looked at past temporal reference structures in Samaná English.

#255

Win McMurry

#36801

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Win McMurry is an American sportscaster. Until October 2013, she anchored Golf Channel's "PGA Tour Primetime" and reported for Golf Central, Morning Drive and other programming features and specials. She is also the host of a series of travel shows on GolfChannel.com titled “Gone With the Win”, and McMurry is also the resident fantasy golf expert, as well as the network's authority on golf fashion.

#256

Patricia K. Kuhl

#16515

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.

#257

Alisyn Camerota

Alisyn Camerota

#27247

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Alisyn Camerota is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator for CNN. She formerly was an anchor of CNN's morning show New Day, a co-host of the afternoon edition of CNN Newsroom, she also served as host of CNN Tonight from 2022 to 2023 as well as a presenter at Fox News. Camerota has covered stories nationally and internationally and has twice been nominated for an Emmy Award for news reporting.

#258

Brenda Dervin

#16030

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Brenda Dervin, was a professor of communication at Ohio State University, working in the fields communication and library and information science. Her research about information seeking and information use led to the development of the sense-making methodology . Dervin received a bachelor's degree in journalism and home economics from Cornell University, with a minor in philosophy of religion, and her M.S. and PhD degrees in communication research from Michigan State University. In 1986 she acted as the first president of the International Communication Association. Dervin reviews articles...

#259

Mona Baker

#25878

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Mona Baker is a professor of translation studies and Director of the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester in England. Career Baker studied at the American University in Cairo, where she gained a BA in English and Comparative Literature. Afterwards she studied applied linguistics at the University of Birmingham, obtaining an MA. In 1995 she moved to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology where she became a professor in 1997. She currently holds the Chair in Translation Studies.

#260

Bobbye Hall

#10256

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Bobbye Jean Hall is an American percussionist who has recorded with a variety of rock, soul, blues and jazz artists, and has appeared on 20 songs that reached the top ten in the Billboard Hot 100. Early career, work for Motown and move to Los Angeles Bobbye Jean Hall was born in Detroit, Michigan, and began her career there playing percussion in nightclubs while still in her teens. While playing at the 20 Grand nightclub in 1961 she was approached by Motown arranger Paul Riser to play on a recording session. Using bongos, congas and other percussion, she played uncredited on many Motown recordings in the 1960s.

#261

Lucy Mangan

#16560

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Lucy Katherine Mangan is a British journalist and author. She is a columnist, features writer and TV critic for The Guardian and an opinion writer for i news. A major part of her writing is related to feminism.

#262

Tasmin Little

#36442

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Tasmin Elizabeth Little is an English classical violinist. She is a concerto soloist and also performs as a recitalist and chamber musician. She has released numerous albums, winning the Critics Award at the Classic Brit Awards in 2011 for her recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto.

#263

Miriam Makeba

#24255

Overall Influence

1932 - 2008 (76 years)

Zenzile Miriam Makeba , nicknamed Mama Africa, was a South African singer, songwriter, actress, and civil rights activist. Associated with musical genres including Afropop, jazz, and world music, she was an advocate against apartheid and white-minority government in South Africa.

#264

Yoko Kanno

#30997

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Yoko Kanno is a Japanese composer, arranger and music producer best known for her work on the soundtracks of anime series, video games, television dramas and movies. She has written scores for Cowboy Bebop, Terror in Resonance, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Wolf's Rain, Turn A Gundam and Darker than Black. Kanno is also a keyboardist and the frontwoman for Seatbelts, who perform many of her compositions.

#265

Margaret Langdon

#51968

Overall Influence

1926 - 2005 (79 years)

Margaret Langdon was a US linguist who studied and documented many languages of the American Southwest and California, including Kumeyaay, Northern Diegueño , and Luiseño. Academic career Langdon was born in Belgium and immigrated to the United States following World War II. She grew up speaking French and Flemish. She earned her PhD in 1966 at the University of California-Berkeley under Mary Haas. Her doctoral thesis was a dictionary of the Mesa Grande dialect of Diegueño.

#266

Gillian Ramchand

#51791

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Gillian Ramchand is a linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Biography Ramchand grew up in Jamaica and Trinidad and received her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1994, with a dissertation entitled, "Aspect and Argument Structure in Modern Scottish Gaelic." She subsequently spent 10 years working at the University of Oxford as a lecturer in general linguistics before moving to Tromsø in 2004, where she became full professor two years later in 2006.

#267

Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli

#44956

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli is a British linguist and Chair of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She is an associate editor of the journal Glossa and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2021.

#268

Deborah Schiffrin

#36285

Overall Influence

1951 - 2017 (66 years)

Deborah Sue Schiffrin was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Temple University , an MA in sociology also from Temple University , and her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of William Labov. Schiffrin taught at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and at the University of California in Berkeley California.

#269

Dorothy Casterline

#57403

Overall Influence

1928 - 2023 (95 years)

Dorothy Chiyoko Sueoka Casterline was an American deaf linguist known for her contribution to A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, considered a foundational work of sign language linguistics.

#270

Viktoria Yartseva

#53265

Overall Influence

1906 - 1999 (93 years)

Viktoriya Nikolayevna Yartseva was a Russian linguist and director of the Linguistics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1971 to 1977. She specialized in English and Celtic studies and theoretical linguistics.

#271

Jan Yanehiro

#31463

Overall Influence

Jan Yanehiro is a Japanese-American broadcast journalist. Personal life Yanehiro earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from California State University, Fresno in 1970. She first worked as a flight attendant before getting a job on radio station KFRC in San Francisco. Yanehiro is among the first native-born Asian-American female journalists.

#272

Esther Allen

#24198

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Esther Allen is a writer, professor, and translator of French-language and Spanish-language literature into English. She is on the faculties of Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY . Allen co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature , and worked with PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants from their inception in 2003 to 2010. Allen heads the Development Committee of the American Literary Translators Association, and serves on the board of Writers Omi, part of Omi International Arts Center, on the Advisory Council to the Spanish-language program at the CUN...

#273

Christine Jordis

#55960

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Christine Jordis real name Marie-Christine Morel de Foucaucourt is a French writer, journalist and editor, a specialist in English literature. Biography The daughter of , a colonel of Cavalry, banker and journalist, and Charlotte Goüin, Marie-Christine Morel de Foucaucourt married Alexander Jordis-Lohausen.

#274

Dana Bash

#16202

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dana Ruth Bash is an American journalist, news anchor, host of Inside Politics and co-anchor of State of the Union on CNN. Early life and education Bash was born Dana Ruth Schwartz in Manhattan into a Jewish family, to Frances Schwartz, an author and educator in Jewish studies, and Stuart Schwartz, an ABC News producer who served as the senior broadcast producer for Good Morning America. Bash's maternal grandmother, Teri Vidor Weinman, and her family were Hungarian Jews. Weinman escaped to the U.S. with her husband in October 1941, but her parents and sister were murdered at Auschwitz concen...

#275

Cathy Scott

#4379

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Cathleen "Cathy" Scott is a Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling American true crime author and investigative journalist who penned the biographies and true crime books The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, both bestsellers in the United States and United Kingdom, and was the first to report Shakur's death. She grew up in La Mesa, California and later moved to Mission Beach, California, where she was a single parent to a son, Raymond Somers Jr. Her hip-hop books are based on the drive-by shootings that killed the rappers six months apart in the midst of what has been called the West Coast-East Coast war.

#276

Clare Cavanagh

#21642

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Clare Cavanagh is an American literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator. She is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz. She holds a B.A from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University . Before coming to Northwestern University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been transla...

#277

Christian Kay

#42851

Overall Influence

1940 - 2016 (76 years)

Christian Janet Kay was Emeritus Professor of English Language and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor, with her mentor Michael Samuels, of the world's largest and first historical thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of English, first published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary , a project to which she dedicated 40 years .

#278

C. J. Cherryh

#10754

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Carolyn Janice Cherry , better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award–winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen , both set in her Alliance–Union universe, and her Foreigner series. She is known for worldbuilding, depicting fictional realms with great realism supported by vast research in history, language, psychology, and archeology.

#279

Asifa Majid

#35324

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Asifa Majid is a psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist who is professor of language, communication and cultural cognition at the University of Oxford, UK. Biography Majid's academic career began at the University of Glasgow, where she took first an undergraduate degree and then a PhD in psychology; she also worked there as a lecturer in 2000-2001. From 2001 to 2012 she was based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, initially as a Marie Curie fellow and later as a scientific staff member and senior researcher. In 2012 she took up a position as professor of lan...

#280

Sophie Bessis

#18089

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sophie Bessis is a Tunisian-born French historian, journalist, researcher, and feminist author. She has written numerous works in French, Spanish, and English on development in the Maghreb and the Arab world, as well as the situation of women denouncing the identity imprisonment to which they are subjected. She is the recipient of the Paris Liège literary prize and was honored as Commandeur of the Order of the Republic.

#281

Anne Cutler

#29824

Overall Influence

1945 - 2022 (77 years)

Elizabeth Anne Cutler FRS FBA FASSA was an Australian psycholinguist, who served as director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. A pioneer in her field, Cutler's work focused on human listeners' recognition and decoding of spoken language. Following her retirement from the Max Planck Institute in 2012, she took a professorship at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University.

#282

Nicoline van der Sijs

Nicoline van der Sijs

#62418

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Nicoline van der Sijs is a Dutch linguist and etymologist who is Professor of Historical Dutch Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. Biography Nicoline van der Sijs was born in Heerlen on 1 April 1955. She received a master's degree in Slavistics from the University of Utrecht in 1979, and a Ph.D. in Dutch historical linguistics from Leiden University in 2001. On January 1, 2013, van der Sijs was appointed Professor of Historical Dutch Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen.

#283

Anna Dybo

#42607

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Anna Vladimirovna Dybo is a Russian linguist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and co-author of the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages , which encompasses some 3,000 Proto-Altaic stemss.

#284

Thrity Umrigar

#26469

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Thrity Umrigar is an Indian-American journalist, critic, and novelist. Early life Umrigar was born in Mumbai, India to a Parsi family, and relocated to the United States at the age of 21. Career Umrigar received a Bachelor of Science from Bombay University, an M.A. From Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in English from Kent State University.

#285

Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley

#21486

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Keira Christina Knightley is an English actress. Known for her work in both independent films and blockbusters, particularly period dramas, she has received several accolades, including nominations for two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. In 2018, she was appointed an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to drama and charity.

#286

Shanley Allen

#39805

Overall Influence

Shanley E. M. Allen is a professor of linguistics working at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. Her research is primarily in the area of psycholinguistics and language acquisition, studying both monolingual and multilingual speakers. She is also a specialist on the Inuktitut language.

#287

Dana L. Cloud

#25968

Overall Influence

Dana L. Cloud is an American communication professor. Cloud's primary research focuses on rhetoric, cultural theory, gender theory, and queer theory. She is best known for her 1998 book Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetoric of Therapy in which she coined the term "rhetoric of therapy".

#288

Claudia Dreifus

#10818

Overall Influence

Claudia Dreifus is an American journalist, educator and lecturer, producer of the weekly feature “Conversation with…” of the Science Section of The New York Times, and known for her interviews with leading figures in world politics and science. She is adjunct associate professor of international affairs and media at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University.

#289

Libuše Dušková

#49967

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Libuše Dušková is a Czech linguist specializing in the fields of contrastive analysis of English grammar and functional syntax, member of the Prague Linguistic Circle and key representative of the Prague School of Linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of English Linguistics at Charles University. Her research spans a broad spectrum of topics in English linguistics, namely the verb phrase, the noun phrase, simple and complex sentences, the grammar-text interface, and aspects of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective viewed through the prism of Jan Firbas' approach.

#290

Montserrat Caballé

#30131

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

María de Montserrat Bibiana Concepción Caballé i Folch or Folc , known simply as Montserrat Caballé , was a Spanish operatic soprano from Catalonia. Widely considered to be one of the best sopranos of the 20th century, she won a variety of musical awards thoroughout her six-decade career, including three Grammy Awards.

#291

Joan Rivers

#11819

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Joan Alexandra Molinsky , known professionally as Joan Rivers, was an American comedian, actress, producer, writer, and television host. She was noted for her blunt, often controversial comedic persona that was heavily self-deprecating and acerbic, especially towards celebrities and politicians, delivered in her signature New York accent. She is considered a pioneer of women in comedy. She received an Emmy Award and a Grammy Award, as well as nomination for a Tony Award.

#292

Jane Kramer

#29743

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jane Kramer is an American journalist. She began her writing career at the Village Voice, moving to The New Yorker in 1964, where she remains a staff writer. Her books Allen Ginsberg in America and Honor to the Bride , based on her travels in Morocco, were developed from long-form New Yorker articles.

#293

Blair Tindall

#16185

Overall Influence

1960 - 2023 (63 years)

Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was an American oboist, performer, producer, speaker, and journalist. After spending years as a classical musician, she wrote the 2005 memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, which was later adapted into a television series.

#294

Muriel Cooper

#19731

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

Muriel Cooper was a pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator. She was the first design director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications. She moved on to become founder of MIT's Visible Language Workshop, and later became a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. In 2007, a New York Times article called her "the design heroine you've probably never heard of".

#295

Lauryn Hill

#9690

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Lauryn Noelle Hill is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. She is regarded as one of the greatest rappers of all time, as well as one of the most influential musicians of her generation. Hill is credited for breaking barriers for female rappers, popularizing melodic rap, redefining hip hop, and helping neo soul reach mainstream popularity. In addition to being named one of the 50 Great Voices by NPR, Hill was listed as one of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time by Rolling Stone. In 2015, she was ranked as the greatest woman rapper by Billboard. Her accolades include e...

#296

Carla Bley

#40359

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Carla Bley was an American jazz composer, pianist, organist, and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she was perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator over the Hill , as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer, Robert Wyatt, John Scofield, and her ex-husband Paul Bley. She was a pioneer in the development of independent artist-owned record labels, and recorded over two dozen albums between 1966 and 2019.

#297

Anne H. Charity Hudley

#38668

Overall Influence

Anne Harper Charity Hudley is an American linguist who works on language variation in secondary schools. Since 2021, she has been a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Early life and education Charity Hudley received her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. She is from Richmond, Virginia, where she attended St. Catherine's School for 13 years. Her undergraduate degree is from Harvard University.

#298

Snježana Kordić

Snježana Kordić

#37761

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Snježana Kordić is a Croatian linguist. In addition to her work in syntax, she has written on sociolinguistics. Kordić is known among non-specialists for numerous articles against the puristic and prescriptive language policy in Croatia. Her 2010 book on language and nationalism popularises the theory of pluricentric languages in the Balkans.

#299

Eli Fischer-Jørgensen

#50904

Overall Influence

1911 - 2010 (99 years)

Eli Fischer-Jørgensen was a professor of phonetics at the University of Copenhagen and led the Institute for Phonetics. She was a member of the Danish resistance movement fighting against the German occupation of Denmark.

#300

Renée A. Blake

#52204

Overall Influence

Renée A. Blake is a Latina Caribbean-American linguistics professor at New York University. Biography Renée A. Blake is a second-generation Caribbean American by way of Trinidad and Venezuela. She is an associate professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She also serves as a Faculty Fellow in Residence at New York University.

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