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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List of the most influential people in Communications,

#6551

Marianne Stone

#110722

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Marianne Stone was an English character actress. She performed in films from the early 1940s to the late 1980s, typically playing working class parts such as barmaids, secretaries and landladies. Stone appeared in nine of the Carry On films, and took part in an episode of the Carry On Laughing television series . She also had supporting roles with comedian Norman Wisdom.

#6552

Glynis Johns

#107895

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (103 years)

Glynis Margaret Payne Johns is a British retired actress, dancer, musician and singer. In a career spanning eight decades on stage and screen, Johns appeared in more than 60 films and 30 plays. She has received various accolades throughout her career, including a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award as well as nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Laurence Olivier Award. She is widely considered as being one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood and classical years of British cinema.

#6553

Peter White

#101493

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Peter White is an English musician and composer who plays guitar, piano, accordion and harmonica. He is known for his 20-year collaboration with Al Stewart. Musical career Early career with Al Stewart Born in Luton, England, White first gained fame with his distinctive guitar style as accompanist to singer/songwriter Al Stewart. He started in Stewart's band in 1975 at the age of 20, then moved to Los Angeles in 1978. During a 20-year tenure with Stewart, he co-wrote many songs, including Stewart's 1978 top-ten hit "Time Passages" and “Midnight Rocks” in 1980. That same year he formed Shot I...

#6554

Mickey Curry

#62118

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Michael Timothy Curry is an American drummer. He has collaborated with singer-songwriter Bryan Adams since the early 1980s, but has also worked with Hall & Oates, Cher, Tina Turner, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Sam Phillips, Tom Waits, Survivor, The Cult and Steve Jones.

#6555

Gil Fuller

#104783

Overall Influence

1920 - 1994 (74 years)

Walter Gilbert "Gil" Fuller was an American jazz arranger. He is no relation to the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Walter "Rosetta" Fuller. In the 1930s and 1940s, Fuller did extensive work writing and arranging for bandleaders such as Les Hite, Jimmie Lunceford, Billy Eckstine, and Tiny Bradshaw; he also worked with Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Count Basie, Machito, and Tito Puente. After World War II, he found himself increasingly in demand as a bebop arranger, along with fellow modern arrangers Tadd Dameron, Gil Evans, and George Russell. Fuller's work with Dizzy Gillespie was of particular note, yielding the tunes "Manteca", "Swedish Suite", "Tin Tin Deo", and "One Bass Hit".

#6556

Kathryn Woolard

Kathryn Woolard

#63733

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Kathryn Ann Woolard is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in linguistic anthropology and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.

#6557

Thomas C. Duffy

#79984

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Thomas C. Duffy, DMA is Professor of Music and the Director of Bands at Yale University. Biography Duffy received his Bachelor of Science in Music Education and Master of Music in Composition from the University of Connecticut, and his Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from Cornell University, where he studied with Karel Husa and Steven Stucky. He has taught music courses at the Hartford Conservatory, the University of Connecticut, the Auburn Maximum Security Correctional Facility, Cornell, and Yale.

#6558

Bear McCreary

#47291

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Bear McCreary is an American musician and composer of film, television, and video game scores based in Los Angeles, California. His work includes the scores of the television series Battlestar Galactica , Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Outlander, The Walking Dead, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Serpent Queen, the video games Call of Duty: Vanguard, God of War and God of War Ragnarök, and the films Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

#6559

Macy Nulman

#114699

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Macy Nulman was an American Orthodox cantor and a scholar of Jewish music and Jewish liturgy. Personal background Nulman was married to Sarah, with whom he raised Judy Z. Nulman-Koenigsberg and Efrem Nulman .

#6560

Greg Osby

#95813

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Greg Osby is an American saxophonist and composer. Biography Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Osby studied at Howard University, then at the Berklee College of Music. He moved to New York City in 1982, where he played with Jaki Byard, Jim Hall, Muhal Richard Abrams, Andrew Hill, Jack DeJohnette, Dizzy Gillespie, and Herbie Hancock. In 1985, he joined DeJohnette's group Special Edition. With Geri Allen, Steve Coleman, Gary Thomas, and Cassandra Wilson, he was a founding member of the M-Base Collective.

#6561

Joe Cutbirth

#105715

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Joe Cutbirth is an American scholar, journalist, and media critic, who currently teaches in the communication and journalism programs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a former editor-in-chief of the Texas Observer, political blogger for The Huffington Post, and was a recurring analyst for ABC News Now during the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. He has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York University, the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, The University of Virginia, and The New School. He was a statehou...

#6562

Mark Kenny

#103176

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Mark Kenny is an Australian journalist. He was the national affairs editor for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and is now a Professor at the Australian Studies Institute at the Australian National University.

#6563

Phill Niblock

#91220

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Phill Niblock is an American composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium.

#6564

Gillian Jacobs

#60540

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Gillian MacLaren Jacobs is an American actress and director. She is known for playing Britta Perry in the NBC sitcom Community , Mickey Dobbs in the Netflix romantic comedy series Love , and Mary Jayne Gold in Transatlantic , also on Netflix. Her other notable television roles include Mimi-Rose Howard in the fourth season of the HBO comedy-drama series Girls and Atom Eve in the animated superhero series Invincible .

#6565

Anton Armstrong

Anton Armstrong

#95753

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Anton Eugene Armstrong is the conductor of the St. Olaf Choir as well as the Harry R. and Thora H. Tosdal Professor of Music at St. Olaf College of Northfield, Minnesota, in the United States. Armstrong became the fourth director of the St. Olaf Choir in 1990, continuing the tradition begun by the choir's founder F. Melius Christiansen in 1911, sustained and developed by his son, Olaf Christiansen, and strengthened and enhanced by Kenneth Jennings. Armstrong teaches conducting in the Sacred Music department at Luther Seminary and also conducts some pieces in "Northfield Youth Choirs".

#6566

Hanibal Srouji

#66761

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Hanibal Srouji is a Lebanese painter. He graduated in 1987 from Concordia University, Montreal. He lived in Canada and France before returning in his country. Srouji developed a technique of burning holes in his paintings after having participated to numerous workshops in America and Europe, including the Triangle Arts Trust. He currently teaches at the Lebanese American University.

#6567

Charlie Louvin

#106638

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Charles Elzer Loudermilk , known professionally as Charlie Louvin, was an American country music singer and songwriter. He is best known as one of the Louvin Brothers, and was a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1955.

#6568

Aleksei Yuryevich German

#78325

Overall Influence

1938 - 2013 (75 years)

Aleksei Yuryevich German was a Russian film director and screenwriter. In a career spanning five decades of filmmaking, German completed six feature films, noted for his stark pessimism, long, serpentine sequence shots, black and white cinematography, overbearing sound design and acute observations of Stalinist Russia.

#6569

James David Mccawley

#151698

Overall Influence

#6570

Hiram Bullock

#86345

Overall Influence

1955 - 2008 (53 years)

Hiram Law Bullock was an American guitarist known mainly for playing in jazz funk and jazz fusion, but he also worked as a session musician in a variety of genres. Biography Bullock was born in Osaka, Japan, to African American parents serving in the U.S. military. At the age of two he returned to Baltimore, Maryland, with his parents and showed musical talent. He studied piano at the city's Peabody Conservatory of Music, giving his first public performance at the age of six. After playing saxophone and bass guitar, he took up the electric guitar at age sixteen.

#6571

Howard Roberts

#91096

Overall Influence

1929 - 1992 (63 years)

Howard Mancel Roberts was an American jazz guitarist, educator, and session musician. Early years Roberts was born in Phoenix, Arizona to Damon and Vesta Roberts, and began playing guitar at the age of 8 - a Gibson manufactured $18 Kalamazoo student model acoustic given to him by his parents at Christmas. He took lessons from Horace Hatchett, who commented to Roberts’ father that Roberts, at the age of 15, “... has his own style of playing and there's nothing else I can show him. He plays better than I do.” By the time he was 15, he was playing professionally locally, predominantly blues-base...

#6572

Rose Bampton

#119018

Overall Influence

1907 - 2007 (100 years)

Rose Bampton was an American opera singer who had an active international career during the 1930s and 1940s. She began her professional career performing mostly minor roles from the mezzo-soprano repertoire in 1929 but later switched to singing primarily leading soprano roles in 1937 until her retirement from the opera stage in 1963.

#6573

Toby D. Wall

#151766

Overall Influence

#6574

Martin Plaut

#83100

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Martin Plaut is a journalist and academic specialising in conflicts in Africa, especially the Horn of Africa. He worked as a BBC News journalist from 1984 to 2012 and is a member of Chatham House. , Plaut was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London.

#6575

Finn Benestad

#113159

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Finn Benestad was a Norwegian musicologist and music critic. He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1965 to 1998, and is probably best known for his long-term research on composer Edvard Grieg.

#6576

James Levine

#103323

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

James Lawrence Levine was an American conductor and pianist. He was music director of the Metropolitan Opera from 1976 to 2016. He was terminated from all his positions and affiliations with the Met on March 12, 2018, over sexual misconduct allegations, which he denied.

#6577

Nona Liddell

#124096

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Nona Patricia Liddell was a British violinist. She was a soloist, leader of chamber music ensembles, and a teacher. For many years she was leader of the London Sinfonietta. Early life She was born in Ealing, London in 1927, one of three sisters. Her mother had studied at the Royal College of Music. She started playing the violin aged five, and studied with Jessie Grimson, a well-known violinist in the 1890s. She attended Notting Hill High School, and was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Rowsby Woof; she performed concertos by Sibelius and Brahms with the Academy orches...

#6578

Richard Hart

#63409

Overall Influence

Richard Hart was a staple of Bay Area television throughout the 1980s on the popular Evening Magazine. EM aired at 7:30 pm nightly, with co-host Jan Yanehiro and showcased some of the interesting and often technology-based activities and happenings around the San Francisco Bay Area.

#6579

Harvey Brooks

#76253

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Harvey Brooks is an American bass guitarist. Music career Bob Dylan Brooks came out of a New York music scene in the early 1960s. One of the younger players on his instrument, he was a contemporary of Felix Pappalardi and Andy Kulberg and other eclectic bass players in their late teens and early twenties, who saw a way to bridge the styles of folk, blues, rock, and jazz.

#6580

Andrew Cyrille

#100999

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Andrew Charles Cyrille is an American avant-garde jazz drummer. Throughout his career, he has performed both as a leader and a sideman in the bands of Walt Dickerson and Cecil Taylor, among others. AllMusic biographer Chris Kelsey wrote: "Few free-jazz drummers play with a tenth of Cyrille's grace and authority. His energy is unflagging, his power absolute, tempered only by an ever-present sense of propriety."

#6581

Anthony Caruso

#118189

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

Anthony Caruso was an American character actor in more than one hundred American films, usually playing villains and gangsters, including the first season of Walt Disney's Zorro as Captain Juan Ortega.

#6582

Alix M. Freedman

#100031

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Alix Marian Freedman is an American journalist, and ethics editor at Thomson Reuters. Freedman was raised in New York City, where she attended the Chapin School before graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy . She graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in history and literature.

#6583

Harlan Howard

#79978

Overall Influence

1927 - 2002 (75 years)

Harlan Perry Howard was an American songwriter, principally in country music. In a career spanning six decades, Howard wrote many popular and enduring songs, recorded by a variety of different artists.

#6584

Micha Ullman

#31374

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Micha Ullman is an Israeli sculptor and professor of art. Biography Ullman was born in Tel Aviv to German Jews who immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1933. As a teenager, he attended the Kfar HaYarok agricultural school. In 1960-1964, he studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 1965, he attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where he learned etching.

#6585

Katja Sturm-Schnabl

#86787

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Katja Sturm-Schnabl is a Carinthian-Slovene linguist and literary historian known for her research and contemporary eyewitness accounts of the 20th century in central Europe. Life and work Katja Sturm-Schnabl was born into a politically active Slovenian family on a farm in Carinthia, Austria, northeast of Klagenfurt. Her first decisive life experience was the family's deportation in April 1942. Sturm-Schnabl described it this way, "They stormed into the house, shouted incomprehensible things in abrupt sentences and there was immediately indescribable chaos in the house... Nemci to the left...

#6586

Rogério Duprat

#113304

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

Rogério Duprat was a Brazilian composer and musician. Biography Born in Rio de Janeiro, Duprat spent much of his life in São Paulo, where he died. It was there in the early 1960s that he developed an interest in the avant-garde art and music that would soon lead to him studying in Europe with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.

#6587

Kirsten Agresta

#113020

Overall Influence

Kirsten Agresta Copely is an American harpist based in New York City. She received her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from Indiana University Bloomington in Harp Performance. Agresta was Bronze Medal winner in the 1989 USA International Harp Competition. She is the former associate professor of harp at Vanderbilt University and Affiliated Artist on the music faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

#6588

Dennis Ichiyama

#136446

Overall Influence

Dennis Ichiyama is an artist focusing on woodblock prints and former professor of Visual Communications Design at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.. Early life and education Ichiyama attended the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where he obtained his B.F.A., having grown up in Hawaii. He went on to get his M.F.A. in Graphic Design from Yale University in 1968, studying under Paul Rand to learn how to create within limitations. From 1976 to 1978, Ichiyama studied as a post-graduate student at Allegemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland.

#6589

August Alsina

#90186

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (34 years)

August Anthony Alsina Jr. is an American singer-songwriter from New Orleans, Louisiana. Alsina released his first mixtape The Product in 2012, followed by The Product 2 and his debut extended play Downtown: Life Under the Gun in 2013, the latter released under The-Dream's Radio Killa Records and Def Jam Recordings. The same year, Alsina released his debut single, "I Luv This Shit" to commercial success as it peaked within the top 50 of the Billboard Hot 100; a follow up single, "No Love " reached similar success as both received platinum certification by the RIAA.

#6590

KK

#72978

Overall Influence

1968 - 2022 (54 years)

Krishnakumar Kunnath , popularly known as KK, was an Indian playback singer. He recorded songs in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Bengali, Assamese and Gujarati. KK began his career by singing advertising jingles and made his film debut in 1996 on an A. R. Rahman soundtrack.

#6591

Ralf Otto

#105597

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Ralf Otto is a German conductor, especially known as a choral conductor and academic teacher. He founded the Vokalensemble Frankfurt, focused on contemporary music and winning competitions including Let the Peoples Sing. Since 1986, he has been director of the Bachchor Mainz, with a tradition of performing Bach cantatas in broadcast church services. He added late romantic and contemporary works to their repertoire and made international tours with them. They made world premiere recordings of some cantatas by Bach's oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, among other recordings. Otto was professo...

#6592

Roger Kellaway

#100575

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Roger Kellaway is an American composer, arranger and jazz pianist who has recorded over 250 albums, and composed over 20 film scores Life and career Kellaway was born in Waban, Massachusetts, United States. He is an alumnus of the New England Conservatory. Kellaway has composed commissioned works for ensembles of various sizes. He also has composed music for film, television, ballet and stage productions. Pianist Phil Saltman was one of his early mentors.

#6593

Nan Levinson

#97244

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Nan Levinson is an American writer, journalist and teacher. Her writing focuses on civil and human rights, military culture, the arts, and communication technology. Her books include War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built and Outspoken: Free Speech Stories. Levinson was the first U.S. correspondent for the Index on Censorship.

#6594

Allen Britton

#52093

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Allen Perdue Britton was an American music educator. Through his many passions in life he contributed to elevating the field of music education to the same stature as the field of musicology. He developed the doctoral program in music education at the University of Michigan, where he directed 51 dissertations. He contributed heavily to the history of music pedagogy in early America, especially singing schools. To combine his two interests of music education and history he joined with Marguerite V. Hood, Warren S. Freeman, and Theodore F. Normann and created the Journal of Research in Music...

#6595

Masao Nakagawa

#152163

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

#6596

Elizabeth Maconchy

#126502

Overall Influence

1907 - 1994 (87 years)

Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy LeFanu was an Irish-English composer. She is considered to be one of the finest composers Great Britain and Ireland have produced. Biography Elizabeth Violet Maconchy was born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, of Irish parents, and grew up in England and Ireland. Her family moved to Ireland in 1917, where they lived in Howth, on the east coast. The adolescent Maconchy began her musical studies in Dublin, studying piano with Edith Boxhill, and harmony and counterpoint with John Francis Larchet. Those formative years in Ireland were important for Maconchy who considered herself Irish.

#6597

Judith Sarmiento

#104247

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Judith Sarmiento Granada is a Colombian lawyer and journalist known nationally for her work in various radio and television media since the 1970s. Biography Judith Sarmiento was born in Armenia, Colombia, on 20 January 1954, the daughter of Gilberto Sarmiento and Ofelia Granada.

#6598

Jean Coulthard

#130494

Overall Influence

1908 - 2000 (92 years)

Jean Coulthard, was a Canadian composer and music educator. She was one of a trio of women composers who dominated Western Canadian music in the twentieth century: Coulthard, Barbara Pentland, and Violet Archer. All three died within weeks of each other in 2000. Her own work might be loosely termed "prematurely neo-Romantic", as the orthodox serialists who dominated academic musical life in North America during the 1950s and 1960s had little use for her.

#6599

Juan Serrano

#128343

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Dr. Juan Serrano Rodríguez is spanish guitarist of flamenco who has played concerts and made recordings throughout the world. He has devoted much of his life to giving concerts and teaching flamenco guitar around the world.

#6600

William L. Smith Jr.

#152285

Overall Influence

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