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.
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#3151
Dora Zaslavsky
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Dora Zaslavsky Koch was an American pianist who was one of the first graduates of and later a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music. Early life Zaslavsky was born in the Russian Empire in 1904, arriving in New York as an infant on February 22, 1905. Her family was Jewish, from the city of Kremenchuk in the oblast of Poltava. Her father Max had emigrated to the United States the previous year. She was traveling with her mother Celia née Fleisher, older siblings Joseph and Fay, and a young cousin. Another brother Israel was born six years later. Other sources give Zaslavsky’s birth year as 1905, but this is incompatible with the ship manifest information.
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Clara Angela Macirone
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Clara Angela Macirone was an English pianist and composer who published her music as C. A. Macirone. Born in London, she was the daughter of Italian musicians; her mother was also a pianist and her father was an amateur tenor. She began her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in 1879 under Cipriani Potter, W H Holmes, Charles Lucas and others. She later took a position teaching at the Academy.
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Jeanne Behrend
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Jeanne Behrend was an American pianist, music educator, musicologist and composer. Life Jeanne Behrend was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the Curtis Institute in 1934, where she studied piano with Josef Hofmann and composition with Rosario Scalero. She made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1922 and at Carnegie Hall in 1937, playing one of her own compositions.
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Anny Konetzni
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Anny Konetzni was an Austrian soprano. She was the sister of soprano Hilde Konetzni. Born in Vienna, Anny Konetzni was a pupil of Erik Schmedes in her hometown, making her debut in Chemnitz as a contralto in 1927. Soon she became a dramatic soprano, singing at the Berlin Staatsoper from 1931 until 1935 and at the Vienna State Opera from 1935 until 1954. She tackled all the heavier parts in the operas of Richard Wagner. Konetzni bowed at the Royal Opera House in 1935 as Brünnhilde in Der Ring des Nibelungen; she had made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Brünnhilde the previous year. She returned to London every year until World War II, and again in 1951.
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Beatrice Irwin
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Beatrice Irwin was an actress, poet, designer and promoter of the Baháʼí Faith. Born Alice Beatrice Simpson, she took Beatrice Irwin as her stage name and later adopted it as her real name. After her family moved to Scotland and then to England, she attended Cheltenham Ladies' College where she graduated 1895 and took the Associate in Arts test in which she placed 5th for that year. She went on through a series of careers starting with being an actor in stage theatre which took her to Cape Colony, as it was known then, touring America, briefly in the then young country of Australia, and performed in Shanghai.
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Irma Wolpe Rademacher
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Irma Wolpe Rademacher , née Schoenberg, was a Romanian-born American pianist and teacher. Life and career She was born in 1902 in Galați, Western Moldavia, Romania, into a bourgeois Jewish family, the third of four children. In 1910 the family moved to Iași , where her father, Jacob Schoenberg , was offered the position of vice president with the newly formed Banca Moldova. Her mother, Rachel Schoenberg née Segall , conversant in many languages, was a gifted essayist and poet. Both parents were Zionists and eminently active in the Jewish community life. They were closely connected with leading...
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Polyna Savridi
Polyna Savridi was an American operatic soprano and voice teacher. As a singer she was primarily active on the international stage during the 1960s, and only performed infrequently afterwards. She taught briefly on the voice faculties of Columbia University and the Jacobs School of Music during the early 1960s before settling at the University of Calgary where she was a professor of voice from 1963 until her death from cancer seventeen years later. She is best remembered for her recordings of Greek folk songs for Concord Records and as a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Audit...
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Liesel Schuch-Ganzel
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Elisabeth Franziska von Schuch-Ganzel also Liesel von Schuch, Liesel Schuch-Ganzel, née von Schuch Life Born in Dresden, Schuch grew up with her parents, the conductor Ernst von Schuch and the opera singer Clementine von Schuch-Proska, in Niederlößnitz . She was a sister of the soprano Käthe von Schuch-Schmidt and the violoncellist Hans von Schuch.
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Regina Vicarino
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Regina Vicarino was an American soprano opera singer. Early life Reine Annette Vicarino was born in New York City, the daughter of Edouard Joseph Vicarino and Leontine Camille Serre Vicarino. Her father was born in Switzerland; her mother was born in New York, to French-born parents. Reine studied voice with Delia Valeri, and with Arthur Lawrason in New York.
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Nelli Gardini
1877 - 1970 (93 years)
Grace Nelson Stensland, better known as Nellie Gardini or Madame Gardini was an American singer and educator. She was known for her opera singing and for working as the head of the voice department of the Chicago Musical College.
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Helene Wildbrunn
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Leonore Helene Wildbrunn was an Austrian operatic soprano. She was a celebrated Wagnerian singer, possessing a wide vocal range and dramatic creativity and fine sense of style. She made her debut in 1907 at the Stadttheater Dortmund as a contralto and mezzo-soprano. She performed at the Stuttgart Court Opera from 1914 to 1918, the Berlin State Opera from 1919 to 1925, the Städtische Oper Berlin from 1925 to 1932, and the Vienna State Opera from 1919 until 1932. From 1932 to 1950, she only appeared as a concert singer, and taught at the Vienna Music Academy as a professor.
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Trixie Smith
1895 - 1943 (48 years)
Trixie Smith was an American blues singer. She made four dozen recordings. Biography Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Smith came from a middle-class background. Various years are given for her birth including 1885, 1888, and 1895. She attended Selma University, in Alabama, before moving to New York City at the age of twenty around 1915. Soon after, she began working in a number of different cafés and theaters in Harlem and Philadelphia.
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Cecilia Clare Bocard
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Sister Cecilia Clare Bocard, S.P., was an American musician and composer of works for organ, piano, and chorus. Born Frances Ada Bocard in New Albany, Indiana, she began studying piano in first grade and organ in third grade. Bocard began as her parish's organist at the early age of nine. She entered the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in 1916 at the age of 17, taking the religious name Sister Cecilia Clare. In addition to her composing work, Bocard taught piano, organ, composition and theory at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College Conservatory of Music for 47 years. Beginning in 1970, she served as organist at the Church of the Immaculate Conception until her death in 1994.
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Tina Lerner
1889 - 2000 (111 years)
Tina Lerner was a Russian-American concert pianist born in Odessa. Early life Valentina Osipovna Lerner was the daughter of Yiddish writers Osip Mikhailovich Lerner and Mariam Rabinovitch. She showed musical promise from an early age, in her birthplace, Odessa. She studied at Moscow Conservatory and with Leopold Godowsky, and began performing while still a teenager.
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Henrietta Myers
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Henrietta Crawley Myers, a.k.a. "Mrs. James A. Myers" was a singer and choral director, primarily known for her work as director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. Early life Henrietta Crawley was born November 10, 1878, in Nashville, Tennessee, the oldest of 10 children born to Thomas Edward and Mary Jane Crawley. She was educated in the public schools of Nashville, and later at Fisk University. She began her career as a Fisk Jubilee Singer under the direction of John W. Work II.
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Eliza Mazzucato Young
1846 - 1937 (91 years)
Eliza Mazzucato Young was an Italian-born American composer, musician, and educator. She wrote Mr. Sampson of Omaha , one of the first operas by a woman to be produced in the United States. Early life Elisa Mazzucato was born in Milan, the daughter of opera composer Alberto Mazzucato and Teresa Bolza, a daughter of Count , Austrian police commissioner in Milan.
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Katarina Jovanović
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Katarina A. Jovanović was a Serbian translator, literary historian, publicist, philosopher, journalist and humanitarian. She translated into German Petar II Petrović Njegoš's masterpiece "Mountain Wreath" .
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Elisabeth Kuyper
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Elisabeth Johanna Lamina Kuyper was a Dutch Romantic composer and conductor. Life Elisabeth Kuyper was born in Amsterdam, the eldest of three children. At the age of twelve, she began the formal study of music at the Maatschappij tot Bevordering der Toonkunst with Antoon Averkamp, Louis Coenen, and Daniel de Lange. She began composing at an early age, including a piano sonata and a prelude and fugue, which she performed for her diploma examination in 1895, and a one-act opera that was performed in Amsterdam in 1895. She moved to Berlin in 1896 to continue her composition studies with Heinrich...
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Han Young-suk
1920 - 1990 (70 years)
Han Young-suk , was an Ingan-munhwage for the Seungmu and Hakmu, which is an Important Intangible Cultural Properties of Korea. She was designated on July 4, 1969. She was a master of Korean dance especially Seungmu, Hakmu, Taepyeongmu and Salpuri. She used Byeoksa as a pseudonym.
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Auguste Götze
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Auguste Götze was a German classical singer, actress, playwright, and a distinguished voice teacher. Götze was born in Weimar where she initially trained in music with her father, the tenor Franz Götze. In her later years, she had her own singing school in Leipzig as well as teaching in the conservatory there. She died in Leipzig at the age of 68 after several years of increasingly poor health.
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Anna Granville Hatcher
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Anna Granville Hatcher was an American linguist. She started her career as a Romance linguist, and later conducted research in medieval literature as well as branching out from Late Latin and Old French to studies on Provençal, Spanish, Italian, English, and German. She was the first woman to hold the position of full professor at Johns Hopkins University.
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Nora Bayes
1880 - 1928 (48 years)
Nora Bayes was an American singer and vaudeville performer who was popular internationally between the 1900s and 1920s. She is credited with co-writing the song "Shine On, Harvest Moon" and performed many successful songs during the First World War, including "Over There." She was also noted for her independent views and unconventional private life, becoming an early media celebrity. She made over 160 recordings.
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Margaret Masterman
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.
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Maria Luisa Zubizarreta
1900 - Present (126 years)
Maria Luisa Zubizarreta is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Southern California. Education and personal life Zubizarreta was born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay. She obtained her Maîtrise in General Linguistics from Paris 8 University in 1978 and her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, with a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. She held various academic positions before arriving at the University of Southern California , where she held a position from 1988 until her retirement.
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Mandy Simons
Mandy Simons is a linguist and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University . She researches semantics and pragmatics, in particular phenomena like presupposition and projection.
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Gladys Pitcher
1890 - 1996 (106 years)
Gladys Pitcher was an American music editor, teacher, and composer. Biography Pitcher was born in Belfast, Maine in 1890. She attended high school in Belfast and was considered for the Boston Globe scholarship contest in 1906 and received many votes towards it, including from people who were not from Belfast. She graduated from the New England Conservatory and completed postgraduate work in theory, composition, and cello. Pitcher taught at Beloit College and directed music at schools in Bennington, Vermont and Manchester, New Hampshire. She was the music editor for C.C. Birchard Company in Boston before moving back to Belfast, Maine.
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Doris Humphrey
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Doris Batcheller Humphrey was an American dancer and choreographer of the early twentieth century. Along with her contemporaries Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham, Humphrey was one of the second generation modern dance pioneers who followed their forerunners – including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn – in exploring the use of breath and developing techniques still taught today. As many of her works were annotated, Humphrey continues to be taught, studied and performed.
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Louise Kaiser
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Louise Kaiser was a Dutch phonetician and linguist and the first female lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and became known for her research into the phonetic and physical-anthropological measurements on the people of Urk in the Netherlands.
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Camille Nickerson
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Camille Lucie Nickerson was an American pianist, composer, arranger, collector, and Howard University professor from 1926 to 1962. She was influenced by Creole folksongs of Louisiana, which she arranged and sang.
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Hazel Harrison
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Hazel Harrison was an American concert pianist. She was the first fully American-trained musician to appear with a European orchestra. Harrison was born in La Porte, Indiana, and spent most of her childhood home schooled; but she attended La Porte High School, and graduated. She began private piano training as a child of four or five years old with Richard Warren Pellow, an English organist at the First Presbyterian Church who taught music in the local public schools. In high school she began studies under German musician Victor Heinze, eventually commuting between La Porte and Chicago to continue lessons with him.
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Marion Bauer
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Marion Eugénie Bauer was an American composer, teacher, writer, and music critic. She played an active role in shaping American musical identity in the early half of the twentieth century. As a composer, Bauer wrote for piano, chamber ensembles, symphonic orchestra, solo voice, and vocal ensembles. She gained prominence as a teacher, serving on the faculty of Washington Square College of New York University, where she taught music history and composition from 1926 to 1951. In addition to her position at NYU, Bauer was affiliated with Juilliard as a guest lecturer from 1940 until her death in 1955.
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Isobel Baillie
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dame Isobel Baillie, , née Isabella Douglas Baillie, was a Scottish soprano. She made a local success in Manchester, where she was brought up, and in 1923 made a successful London debut. Her career, encouraged by the conductor Sir Hamilton Harty, quickly developed, with breaks in the first years for vocal study in Milan. Baillie's career was almost wholly as a concert singer: she only once acted in an opera production on stage. She was associated above all with oratorio, becoming well known for her many performances in Handel's Messiah, Haydn's The Creation, Mendelssohn's Elijah and the chor...
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Angna Enters
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Anita "Angna" Enters was an American dancer, mime, painter, writer, novelist and playwright. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and was a 1934 Guggenheim fellow. She wrote a novel and three autobiographies as well as the films Lost Angel and Tenth Avenue Angel .
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Saint Cecilia
180 - 230 (50 years)
Saint Cecilia , also spelled Cecelia, was a Roman virgin martyr and is venerated in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the patroness of music and musicians, it being written that, as the musicians played at her wedding, Cecilia "sang in her heart to the Lord". Musical compositions are dedicated to her, and her feast, on 22 November, is the occasion of concerts and musical festivals. She is also known as Cecilia of Rome.
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Ulrike Meinhof
1934 - 1976 (42 years)
Ulrike Marie Meinhof was a German left-wing journalist and founding member of the Red Army Faction in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept . The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism".
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Marina Abramović
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute , a non-profit foundation for performance art.
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Sarah Bernhardt
1844 - 1923 (79 years)
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictur...
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Aleksandra Ekster
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster , also known as Alexandra Exter, was a Russian and French painter and designer. As a young woman, her studio in Kiev attracted all the city's creative luminaries, and she became a figure of the Paris salons, mixing with Picasso, Braque and others. She is identified with the Russian/Ukrainian avant-garde, as a Cubo-futurist, Constructivist, and influencer of the Art Deco movement.
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Margaret Mitchell
1900 - 1949 (49 years)
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
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Fatima Jinnah
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Fatima Jinnah was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman. She was the younger sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and the first governor-general of Pakistan. She was the Leader of the Opposition of Pakistan from 1960 until her death in 1967.
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Rita Hayworth
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Rita Hayworth was an American actress. She achieved fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars, appearing in 61 films over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
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Nadia Boulanger
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Juliette Nadia Boulanger was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.
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Barbara Stanwyck
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress, model and dancer. A stage, film, and television star, during her 60-year professional career she was known for her strong, realistic screen presence and versatility. She was a favorite of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang, and Frank Capra, and made 85 films in 38 years before turning to television.
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Clotilde Tambroni
1758 - 1817 (59 years)
Clotilde Tambroni , was an Italian philologist, linguist and poet. She was a professor in the Greek language at the University of Bologna in 1793–1798, and a professor in Greek and literature in 1800–1808. She succeeded in achieving institutional recognition by a university long before women in many parts of the world could even attend university. As well as her native Italian, she was also fluent in French, English and Spanish.
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Catherine Winkworth
1827 - 1878 (51 years)
Catherine Winkworth was an English hymnwriter and educator. She translated the German chorale tradition of church hymns for English speakers, for which she is recognized in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls, and translated biographies of two founders of religious sisterhoods. When 16, Winkworth appears to have coined a once well-known political pun, peccavi, "I have Sindh", relating to the British occupation of Sindh in colonial India.
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Cedar Paul
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Cedar Paul, née Gertrude Mary Davenport was a singer, author, translator and journalist. Biography Gertrude Davenport came from a musical family: she was the granddaughter of the composer George Alexander Macfarren and the daughter of the composer Francis William Davenport . She was educated at convent schools in Belgium, France, Italy and England, and studied music in Germany.
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Natalie Duddington
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Natalie Duddington was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie . Biography Nataliya Aleksandrovna Ertel was born in Voronezh on 14 November 1886, to the author Alexander Ertel. She was Ertel's oldest daughter and considered intelligent as a child. When the English translator Constance Garnett visited Ertel in the summer of 1904, she was much impressed by Natalie, who began studying at Saint Petersburg University the following year. When the university was temporarily closed due to student unrest in the 1905 revolution, Garnett encouraged Natalie to come to England.
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Billie Holiday
1915 - 1959 (44 years)
Billie Holiday was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made a significant contribution to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
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Louise Brooks
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
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Jenny Lind
1820 - 1887 (67 years)
Johanna Maria Lind was a Swedish opera singer, often called the "Swedish Nightingale". One of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century, she performed in soprano roles in opera in Sweden and across Europe, and undertook an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the United States beginning in 1850. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1840.
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