The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#351
Edna Andrews
#37236
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Edna Andrews is an American scholar and the Nancy & Jeffrey Marcus Distinguished Professor of Slavic & Eurasian Studies at Duke University and holds an honorary doctorate by St. Petersburg State University. Her current concerns are second language education.
Go to Profile#352
Elena Poniatowska
#26068
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor , known professionally as Elena Poniatowska , is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper-class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns.
Go to Profile#353
Marina Tarlinskaja
#47147
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Marina Tarlinskaja is a Russian-born American linguist specializing in the statistical analysis of verse. She uses the Russian linguistic-statistical method which, at the most basic level, counts the occurrences of word-stresses in ictic and non-ictic positions in lines of verse. From these, "stress profiles" can be built, by which bodies of verse of different periods, authors, genres, and even languages can be compared statistically. In her 2014 book she used twelve parameters of verse analyses including syntactic structure of lines and the use of verse rhythm to emphasize meaning. Tarlins...
Go to Profile#354
Suzanne Lee
#24958
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Suzanne Lee is a Brooklyn, New York based fashion designer working on fashion and future technologies. She is a Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Director of The BioCouture Research Project, and Chief Creative Officer at Modern Meadow.
Go to Profile#355
Laura Poitras
#28299
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films. Poitras has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, while My Country, My Country received a nomination in the same category in 2007. She won the 2013 George Polk Award for national security reporting related to the NSA disclosures. The NSA reporting by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Go to Profile#356
Suzanne Jill Levine
#31794
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Suzanne Jill Levine is an American writer, poet, literary translator and scholar. Levine was born in New York City where she studied piano at Juilliard and went to Music & Art High School. She earned a BA at Vassar College in 1967, an MA at Columbia University in 1969, and a PhD at New York University in 1977. A scholar of Latin American literature, her books include one of the first studies of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Adolfo Bioy Casares, both published in Spanish. She is also a leading specialist in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature. Her 1991 b...
Go to Profile#357
Maureen Corrigan
#13720
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Maureen Corrigan is an American author, scholar, and literary critic. She is the book critic on the NPR radio program Fresh Air and writes for the "Book World" section of The Washington Post. In 2014, she wrote So We Read On, a book on the origins and power of The Great Gatsby. In 2005, she published a literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. Corrigan was awarded the 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle for her reviews on Fresh Air on NPR and in The Washington Post, and the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism by the Mystery Writers of America for her book, Mystery & Suspense Writers, with Robin W.
Go to Profile#358
Justin Tornow
#19410
Overall Influence
Justin Tornow is an American dancer, choreographer, dance scholar, and dance teacher. She is the founder and artistic director of COMPANY, a co-founder and co-organizer of Durham Independent Dance Artists, former Board President of the North Carolina Dance Alliance, and producer of the PROMPTS art series in Durham, North Carolina. Tornow is trained in Cunningham technique and is a New York Public Library Research Fellow in Cunningham dance pedagogy. She serves on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Elon University, and the American Dance Festival.
Go to Profile#359
Janet Fish
#36645
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency , reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.
Go to Profile#360
Nicole Garcia
#59214
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nicole Garcia is a French actress, film director and screenwriter. Her film Charlie Says was entered into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Her film Going Away was screened in the Special Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. She was the President of the Jury for the Caméra d'Or section of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
Go to Profile#361
Noël Riley Fitch
#41691
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Noël Riley Fitch is a biographer and historian of expatriate intellectuals in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of several books on Paris as well as three biographies: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation , translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian and French; Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin , published in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish, and nominated for the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle; and she is the first authorized biographer of Julia Child, with Appetite for Life: the Biography of Julia Child . The Ernest Hemingway book, a b...
Go to Profile#362
Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
#61312
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm is a Russian-born linguist and typologist who is Professor of General Linguistics at Stockholm University. Biography Originally from Moscow, Koptjevskaja-Tamm's interest in linguistics was stimulated when as a teenager she participated in the Moscow Linguistics Olympiad, winning a medal. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1979 and moved to Sweden in 1980, where she received her PhD in linguistics from Stockholm University in 1988. After working as a researcher on a project on part-of-speech systems in the world's languages, she was appointed docent in lingui...
Go to Profile#363
Lelia Green
#14985
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Lelia Green is a professor at the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth. Green is the author of Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex and the editor of Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change, and also on the editorial board of the Australia Journal of Communication and Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy.
Go to Profile#364
Tsvia Walden
#22539
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Tsvia Walden is an Israeli psycholinguist. She is a professor at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev and previously a senior lecturer at Beit Berl Academic College and Ben-Gurion University. Walden specializes in social constructionism through language, language and gender, language acquisition, literacy, digital literacy and research of Jewish texts. She is the creator and presenter of a filmed lecture series about language instruction and language acquisition.
Go to Profile#365
Meenakshi Gigi Durham
#74301
Overall Influence
Meenakshi Gigi Durham is an Indian professor of communication studies and writer. Durham was born in Mangalore, India but moved to the United States and then Canada at a young age. She is a full professor at the University of Iowa, with a joint appointment in the journalism and mass communication departments. She was previously a Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Vice President for Research & Economic Development. She was also the Associate Faculty, Director of the Obermann Center of Advanced Studies, and she is a member of the board of directors for the Project of Rhetoric of Inquiry.
Go to Profile#366
Susan E. Jackson
#14177
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Susan E. Jackson is an American researcher in the fields of managing for environmental sustainability, strategic human resource management, occupational burnout, and work team diversity. She was the co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory in 1981, the primary diagnostic instrument for the condition of occupational burnout.
Go to Profile#367
Ilse Lehiste
#53488
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics. Early life Ilse Lehiste finished high school in Tallinn. In 1942 she began her studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tartu. In 1944 she fled to Germany with her parents, where she continued her studies – while living in refugee camps – at the University of Hamburg.
Go to Profile#368
Barbara Abbott
#50419
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Barbara Kenyon Abbott is an American linguist. She earned her PhD in linguistics in 1976 at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of George Lakoff. From 1976 to 2006, she was a professor in the department of linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African languages at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in philosophy. She is now a Professor Emerita.
Go to Profile#369
Natsuko Toda
#41850
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Natsuko Toda is a Japanese subtitler and film industry interpreter. She has been called "the most famous film translator in Japan [...] unquestionably" and the "Subtitle Queen". She has subtitled more than 1,000 English-language films in Japanese.
Go to Profile#370
Anya Schiffrin
#34490
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs , and a lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs.
Go to Profile#371
Margarethe von Trotta
#39437
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Margarethe von Trotta is a German film director, screenwriter, and actress. She has been referred to as a "leading force" of the New German Cinema movement. Von Trotta's extensive body of work has won awards internationally. She was married to and collaborated with director Volker Schlöndorff. Although they made a successful team, von Trotta felt she was seen as secondary to Schlöndorff. Subsequently, she established a solo career for herself and became "Germany's foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history".
Go to Profile#372
Sarah McLachlan
#15155
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sarah Ann McLachlan OC OBC is a Canadian singer-songwriter. As of 2015, she had sold over 40 million albums worldwide. McLachlan's best-selling album to date is Surfacing, for which she won two Grammy Awards and four Juno Awards. In addition to her personal artistic efforts, she founded the Lilith Fair tour, which showcased female musicians.
Go to Profile#373
Mirta Ojito
#33027
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Mirta Ojito is a Cuban-born author and journalist. She has written two nonfiction books, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus a book about her journey to the U.S. as a teenager in the Mariel boatlift, and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town." She was part of a group of New York Times reporters who shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles about race in America. More recently, she was a member of the Telemundo team that won an Emmy for the coverage of Pope Francis's visit to the Americas.
Go to Profile#374
Janet Dean Fodor
#25525
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Janet Dean Fodor was distinguished professor emerita of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her primary field was psycholinguistics, and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 acquisition.
Go to Profile#375
Jane Pratt
#21434
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jane Pratt is the founding editor of Sassy, Jane and xoJane. She is the host of the talk show Jane Radio on Sirius XM Radio. Early life Jane Pratt was born in San Francisco, California, to Sheila Marks Blake, an artist, and Vernon Pratt, a minimalist painter and professor of art at Duke University. Her mother grew up in Queens, New York, and her maternal grandfather, Joseph Marks, was a vice-president of the Doubleday publishing company. Her paternal grandfather was Gaither Pratt, a paranormal psychology researcher at the University of Virginia. Pratt's parents were divorced when she was 13.
Go to Profile#376
Pepa Fernández
#62603
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
María José Fernández Vallés , better known as Pepa Fernández, is a Spanish journalist. She is the director and presenter of the Radio Nacional de España program . Biography Pepa Fernández was born in the town of Cervera, Lleida in 1965. Her father's family is from Ourense. At 18 she started working in radio. She earned a licentiate in Information Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Since 1999, she has been directing and presenting the RNE program , a weekend magazine which has received several awards.
Go to Profile#377
Lise Menn
#28843
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Lise Menn is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. Professional history Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree from Brandeis University in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's, and later a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976.
Go to Profile#378
Mercedes Bunz
#20243
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mercedes Bunz is a German art historian, journalist, and the Professor of Digital Culture and Society at King's College London. Biography Early career Bunz studied philosophy and art history at the Freie Universität Berlin, after passing her final exams at the Celtis-Gymnasium secondary school in the German town of Schweinfurt in 1991. Together with Sascha Kösch, Riley Reinhold, and Benjamin Weiss she founded the Berlin music monthly De:Bug in 1997, becoming its co-editor and editor-in-chief from 1999 until 2001.
Go to Profile#379
Yamuna Kachru
#50963
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Yamuna Kachru was Professor Emerita of Linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Career Kachru studied linguistics at Deccan College in Poona, India, and then at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London . She earned her PhD as SOAS in 1965 with a dissertation entitled A Transformational Treatment of Hindi Verbal Syntax, the first in-depth analysis of the Hindi language to utilize the Chomskyan framework. She taught Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London until she moved to the University of Illinois with her husband Braj Kachru in 1966.
Go to Profile#380
Antonella Sorace
#73805
Overall Influence
Antonella Sorace,FBA, FRSE, FRSA , Professor of Developmental Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, since 2002; Founding Director, Bilingualism Matters, since 2008 |url=http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whoswho/U294916 |website=Who's Who 2023 |publisher=Oxford University Press |access-date=3 December 2022 |language=en |date=1 December 2022}}</ref>
Go to Profile#381
Annemarie Esche
#46139
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Annemarie Esche was a German scholar of Burmese literature and linguistics. Following her studies of Burmese as a teacher of German in Burma at the cultural centre of the German Democratic Republikc in Yangon from 1955 to 1963, she later became professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Go to Profile#382
Emily M. Bender
#19574
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Emily Menon Bender is an American linguist who is a professor at the University of Washington. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She is also the director of the University of Washington's Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She has published several papers on the risks of large language models.
Go to Profile#383
Rosemarie Tracy
#52046
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Rosemarie Tracy is a German linguist specializing in language acquisition. She is currently senior professor of English linguistics at the University of Mannheim. Biography Tracy studied English, French and Portuguese at the universities of Mannheim and Göttingen, as well as Bryn Mawr College. She received her doctorate at the University of Mannheim for a thesis on child first language acquisition based on longitudinal studies. Subsequently, she taught and researched at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Göttingen, taking a habilitation for her work on bilingual child language acquisition.
Go to Profile#384
Natalie Haas
#41826
Overall Influence
Natalie Haas is an American cellist, originally from Menlo Park, California. A graduate of the Juilliard School, she has toured and recorded extensively with Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser. Also, she has toured and recorded with Mark O'Connor and his Appalachia Waltz Trio, and with Natalie MacMaster. She has appeared on more than 100 albums.
Go to Profile#385
Karin Aijmer
#63620
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Karin Aijmer is a Swedish linguist whose research focuses on topics in pragmatics and discourse, including ways of expressing epistemic modality/evidentiality, pragmatic markers, conversational routines and other fixed phrases. She uses corpus-based methods involving both monolingual and multilingual corpora of English and Swedish for data. She received her PhD in English Linguistics from Stockholm University in 1972. She has been an associate professor in the Department of English at Oslo University and at Lund University and is now professor emerita in the Department of Languages and Liter...
Go to Profile#386
Carlota S. Smith
#70655
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Carlota Smith was an American linguist. She was professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin for 38 years. Smith received her M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under Zellig Harris. In 1969, she joined the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at University of Texas at Austin, where she served for the remainder of her life. She was department chair from 1981-1985. She was named the Dallas TACA Centennial Professor in the Humanities in 1991.
Go to Profile#387
Bambi Schieffelin
#25715
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Bambi B. Schieffelin is a linguistic anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University in the department of Anthropology. Along with Elinor Ochs, she pioneered the field of language socialization. In addition, she has written extensively about language contact, language ideology, literacy, Haitian Creole, and missionization.
Go to Profile#388
Veronika Koller
#41394
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Veronika Koller is an Austrian-British linguist. She is Professor of Discourse Studies at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on critical discourse analysis.
Go to Profile#389
Midge Decter
#11594
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Midge Decter was an American journalist and author. Originally a liberal, she was one of the pioneers of the neoconservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Early life Decter was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on July 25, 1927. She was the youngest of three daughters of Rose and Harry Rosenthal, a sporting goods merchant. Her family was Jewish. She attended the University of Minnesota for one year, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1946 to 1948, and New York University, but did not graduate from any of them. She initially identified as a liberal on the political spectrum.
Go to Profile#390
Reba McEntire
#11977
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Reba Nell McEntire , or simply Reba, is an American country music singer and actress. Dubbed "the Queen of Country", she has sold more than 75 million records worldwide. Since the 1970s, McEntire has placed over 100 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, 25 of which reached the number one spot. She is an actress in films and television. She starred in the television series Reba, which aired for six seasons. She also owns several businesses, including a clothing line.
Go to Profile#391
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
#46237
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Dame Olga Maria Elisabeth Friederike Schwarzkopf, was a German-born Austro-British lyric soprano. She was among the foremost singers of lieder, and is renowned for her performances of Viennese operetta, as well as the operas of Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss. After retiring from the stage, she was a voice teacher internationally. She is considered one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#392
Asha Bhosle
#19398
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Asha Bhosle is an Indian playback singer, entrepreneur, actress and television personality who predominantly works in Indian cinema. Known for her versatility, she has been described in the media as one of the greatest and most influential singers in Hindi cinema. In her career spanning over eight decades she has recorded songs for films and albums in various Indian languages and received several accolades including two National Film Awards, four BFJA Awards, eighteen Maharashtra State Film Awards, nine Filmfare Awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award and a record seven Filmfare Awards for Best Female Playback Singer, in addition to two Grammy nominations.
Go to Profile#393
Olga Fischer
#66702
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Olga Fischer is a Dutch linguist and an expert on the English language. She is Professor Emerita of Germanic Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and former president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English.
Go to Profile#394
Florence Welch
#27833
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Florence Leontine Mary Welch is an English–American singer and songwriter. She is best known as the lead vocalist and primary songwriter of the indie rock band Florence and the Machine. The band's debut studio album, Lungs , topped the UK Albums Chart and won the Brit Award for Best British Album. Their next four albums also achieved chart success. In 2018, Welch released a book titled Useless Magic, a collection of lyrics and poems written by her, along with illustrations.
Go to Profile#395
Anne Dudley
#30026
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Anne Jennifer Dudley is a British composer, keyboardist, conductor and pop musician. She was the first BBC Concert Orchestra's Composer in Association in 2001. She has worked in the classical and pop genres, as a film composer, and was one of the core members of the synth-pop band Art of Noise. In 1998, Dudley won an Oscar for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score for The Full Monty. In addition to over twenty other film scores, in 2012 she served as music producer for the film version of Les Misérables, also acting as arranger and composing some new additional music.
Go to Profile#396
Güzin Dino
#38895
Overall Influence
1910 - 2013 (103 years)
Güzin Dino was a Turkish literary scholar, linguist, translator and writer. She is known for writing from a Marxist perspective. She was married to the painter Abidin Dino . Güzin and Abidin Dino married 1943 in Adana, Turkey. Her husband was a member of the Turkish Communist Party, who was exiled to the southern Turkish city. Subject to political pressure and prosecution, Abidin Dino left Turkey in 1952 to settle in Paris, France. She followed her husband in 1954 to France.
Go to Profile#397
Maria Lipman
#10010
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maria Alexandrovna Lipman is a Russian journalist, political scientist and Russia expert, who edited the magazine of the Carnegie Moscow Center until 2014. She is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University and Co-Editor of the Institute’s website Russia.Post. She also writes for Foreign Affairs.
Go to Profile#398
Norah Jones
#15191
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Norah Jones is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She has won several awards for her music and, as of 2023, had sold more than 50 million records worldwide. Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000s decade. She has won nine Grammy Awards and was ranked 60th on Billboard magazine's artists of the 2000s decade chart.
Go to Profile#399
Katalin É. Kiss
#70971
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Katalin É. Kiss is a Hungarian linguist. She is currently professor at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in Budapest. Education She earned her PhD and her habilitation at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 1979 and 1991, respectively.
Go to Profile#400
Johanna Narten
#17066
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Johanna Narten , was a German Indo-Europeanist and Indo-Iranian linguist who discovered the reconstructed morphological category in Proto-Indo-European now known as the Narten present. She was Professor of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian Linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Go to Profile