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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 people in Communications,

#13851

Albert C. Baugh

1891 - 1981 (90 years)

Albert Croll Baugh was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, best known as the author of a textbook for History of the English language . His A History of the English Language was first published in 1935 and praised as "worthy to take a place with the other great histories of single languages". It was revised by Baugh for a second edition published in 1957 and it remains in print, edited by Thomas Cable .

#13852

Mario Pei

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

Mario Andrew Pei was an Italian-born American linguist and polyglot who wrote a number of popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics. His book The Story of Language was acclaimed for its presentation of technical linguistics concepts in ways that were entertaining and accessible to a general audience.

#13853

Morris Swadesh

1909 - 1967 (58 years)

Morris Swadesh was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Sapir, and then followed Sapir to Yale University where he completed a Ph.D. in 1933. Swadesh taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, and then during World War II worked on projects with the United States Army and Office of Strategic Services. He became a professor at the City College of New York after the war's end, but was fired in 1949 due to his membership in the Communist Party.

#13854

Raymond Aron

1905 - 1983 (78 years)

Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. Aron is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people; he argues that Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals in post-war France. In the book, Aron chastised French intellectuals for what he described as their harsh criticism of capitalism and democracy and their simultaneous defense of the actions of the communist governments of the East.

#13855

Wilbur Schramm

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Wilbur Lang Schramm was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars.

#13856

John C. Merrill

John Calhoun Merrill was an American author and professor of journalism. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and taught at a number of other colleges and universities, and was the author of 30 books and over 100 articles in journals, and has been considered one of the leading scholars in journalism during his time. In 2007, a festschrift, Freedom Fighter, was issued in his honor.

#13857

Roland Grubb Kent

1877 - 1952 (75 years)

Roland Grubb Kent was an American educator and a founder of the Linguistic Society of America . He was the first person to translate Marcus Terentius Varro's De Lingua Latina into English. Ken's 1903 doctoral thesis on the history of Thessaly traces the history of the country with particular attention to the times between 600 and 300 BC. Unfortunately, only Chapter V and two appendices were published, and the bulk of his dissertation is currently lost. His Old Persian: Grammar, Texts, Lexicon is one of the seminal works on the subject.

#13858

Henri Ramirez

Henri Ramirez is a French-Brazilian linguist known especially for his research on Arawakan languages and other language families of the Amazonian region. He is currently a professor at the Federal University of Rondônia, Guajará-Mirim.

#13859

David Dowty

David Roach Dowty is a linguist known primarily for his work in semantic and syntactic theory, and especially in Montague grammar and Categorial grammar. Dowty is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University, and his research interests mainly lie in Semantic and Syntactic Theory, Lexical semantics and Thematic roles, Categorial grammar, and Semantics of Tense and Aspect.

#13860

Michel DeGraff

Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian creolist who has served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies. He is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His field of scholarship is Creole language, also known as Lang Kreyòl Linguistics. He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language. In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti. He believes th...

#13861

Diana Archangeli

1900 - Present (126 years)

Diana B. Archangeli is an American linguist and Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She earned her M.A. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1981, and her PhD from MIT in 1984, with a dissertation entitled, "Underspecification in Yawelmani Phonology and Morphology." Her dissertation was selected for publication in Garland's Outstanding Dissertation series .

#13862

Arthur Garfield Kennedy

1880 - 1954 (74 years)

Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.

#13863

George Sherman Lane

1902 - 1981 (79 years)

George Sherman Lane was an American linguist. His research focus was the Tocharian language. Life Lane began his studies in 1922 at the University of Iowa, where he studied under Henning Larsen and received his first award, the Early English Text Society Prize. In 1926, he graduated first of his class, and in 1927 obtained a Master of Arts in English. This was followed by studies in Reykjavík, where he learned Sanskrit, as well as in Paris, where he studied under Meillet, Vendryes and Benveniste. At the University of Chicago he collaborated with Carl Darling Buck on the latter's Dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages.

#13864

Egon Wellesz

1885 - 1974 (89 years)

Egon Joseph Wellesz, CBE, FBA was an Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist, notable particularly in the field of Byzantine music. Early life and education in Vienna Egon Joseph Wellesz was born on 21 October 1885 in the Schottengasse district of Vienna to Samú Wellesz and Ilona Wellesz . Although his parents met and married in Vienna, they both originated from Hungary and came from Jewish families in that nation. His parents, while ethnically Hungarian Jews, were both practicing Christians in Vienna and Wellesz received a Protestant upbringing. He later converted to Catholicism.

#13865

Lorenzo Dow Turner

1890 - 1972 (82 years)

Lorenzo Dow Turner was an African-American academic and linguist who did seminal research on the Gullah language of the Low Country of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. His studies included recordings of Gullah speakers in the 1930s. As head of the English departments at Howard University and Fisk University for a combined total of nearly 30 years, he strongly influenced their programs. He created the African Studies curriculum at Fisk, was chair of the African Studies Program at Roosevelt University, and in the early 1960s, cofounded a training program for Peace Corps volunteers going to A...

#13866

George Frederick McKay

1899 - 1970 (71 years)

George Frederick McKay was a prolific modern American composer. Biography McKay was born in the small frontier wheat farming town of Harrington, Washington. His family later moved to Spokane, where he attended school up to his college years. He was attracted to American folk-song, including jazz and blues and Native American themes, and to a great degree, his music contains a poignant evocation of the West Coast American spirit, including glimpses of a populist era of street marches, honky-tonk dance halls and social chaos along with a recognition of the great natural beauty of his home region and the vitality of its people .

#13867

Ingolf Dahl

1912 - 1970 (58 years)

Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Biography Dahl was born Walter Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg, Germany, to a German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers, Gert Marcus , and Holger, and one sister Anna-Britta.

#13868

Charles Bally

1865 - 1947 (82 years)

Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first to Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915, and finally with Alice Bellicot. In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics.

#13869

Ferdinand Brunot

1860 - 1938 (78 years)

Ferdinand-Eugène-Jean-Baptiste Brunot was a French linguist and philologist, editor of the ground-breaking Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900 . Brunot was born in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. He found his first faculty position and published his first book from the Faculté des lettres de Lyon, now the Lumière University Lyon 2. In October 1891 he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne at the age of 31. Here he began his long collaboration with fellow linguist Louis Petit de Julleville and produced the first volume of his monumental History, dealing with medieval French. It would eventually stretch to nine volumes published in his lifetime, and 13 volumes altogether.

#13870

Charles Siepmann

Charles Siepmann

1899 - 1985 (86 years)

Charles Siepmann was a British-born media scholar and policy advocate who spent much of his career in the United States where he was a professor at New York University's graduate communication program for over two decades. Siepmann was instrumental in drafting the FCC document "Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees", which became known as the "Blue Book" for its distinctive colour. Though he was an academic, Siepmann remained an advocate for the democratic potentials of radio and television and was "overtly political and engaged with media policy interventions" during his career.

#13871

Harold Wentworth

1904 - 1965 (61 years)

Harold Wentworth was an American lexicographer and specialist in English usage and slang in the United States. Born in Cortland, New York, he studied at Cornell University and taught at Cornell University and the University of West Virginia.

#13872

Mark Brunswick

1902 - 1971 (69 years)

Mark Brunswick was an American composer of the twentieth century. He had only recently completed the second act of an opera based on Ibsen's The Master Builder when he died suddenly in London in May 1971, at the start of what was to have been an extended tour of Europe with his wife, Natascha Artin Brunswick. Brunswick had been at work on the opera for several years, and Act I had not long before received a concert performance as a work in progress at the City College of New York.

#13873

Roger Fulford

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford was an English journalist, historian, writer and politician. In the 1930s, he completed the editing of the standard edition of the diaries of Charles Greville. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he wrote several important biographies and other works. Between 1964 and 1981 he edited five volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. He was President of the Liberal Party from 1964 to 1965.

#13874

Hanya Holm

1893 - 1992 (99 years)

Hanya Holm is known as one of the "Big Four" founders of American modern dance. She was a dancer, choreographer, and above all, a dance educator. Early life, connection with Mary Wigman Born as Johanna Eckert on 3 March 1893 in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, German Empire. Holm was drawn to music and drama at an early age, she attended the Dalcroze Institute of Applied Rhythm in Frankfurt, studying under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze throughout her childhood and young adult life.

#13875

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

1710 - 1736 (26 years)

Giovanni Battista Draghi , usually referred to as Giovanni Battista Pergolesi , was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, and organist, leading exponent of the Baroque; he is considered one of the greatest Italian musicians of the first half of the 18th century and one of the most important representatives of the Neapolitan school.

#13876

Jakob Jud

1882 - 1952 (70 years)

Jakob Jud [ju:t] was a Swiss Romance linguist . From 1922 to 1950 he taught classes in Romance philology and Old French literature at the University of Zürich. With Karl Jaberg, he was the author of Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz . In 1936, with Arnald Steiger, he founded the magazine Vox Romanica.

#13877

Otto Behaghel

1854 - 1936 (82 years)

Otto Behaghel was a germanist and professor in Heidelberg, Basel, and Gießen. He added theoretical contributions to the German and Middle High German language. He formulated Behaghel's laws. His work is still important in Theme and rheme research.

#13878

Madeleine Carroll

Madeleine Carroll

1906 - 1987 (81 years)

Edith Madeleine Carroll was an English actress, popular both in Britain and America in the 1930s and 1940s. At the peak of her success in 1938, she was the world's highest-paid actress. Carroll is remembered for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps where she originated the "ice cold blonde" role in Hitchcock films. The director stated, "how very well Madeleine fitted into the part. I had heard a lot about her as a tall, cold, blonde beauty. After meeting her, I made up my mind to present her to the public as her natural self". She is also noted for largely abandoning her acting career...

#13879

David W. Maurer

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

David Warren Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972. He was the writer of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld. Biography Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures.

#13880

Emmanuel Chabrier

Emmanuel Chabrier

1841 - 1894 (53 years)

Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.

#13881

Georg Wenker

1852 - 1911 (59 years)

Georg Wenker was a German linguist who began documenting German dialect geography during the late nineteenth century. He is considered a pioneer in this field and contributed several groundbreaking publications, most notably, the Deutscher Sprachatlas.

#13882

Ted Koehler

1894 - 1973 (79 years)

Ted L. Koehler was an American lyricist. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Life and career Koehler was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C. He started out as a photo-engraver, but was attracted to the music business, where he started out as a theater pianist for silent films.

#13883

Niccolò Paganini

Niccolò Paganini

1782 - 1840 (58 years)

Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violinist and composer. He was the most celebrated violin virtuoso of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique. His 24 Caprices for Solo Violin Op. 1 are among the best known of his compositions and have served as an inspiration for many prominent composers.

#13884

Trevor Howard

1913 - 1988 (75 years)

Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith was an English stage, film, and television actor. After varied work in the theatre, he achieved star status with his role in the film Brief Encounter , followed by The Third Man .

#13885

Hans Marchand

1907 - 1978 (71 years)

Hans Marchand was a German linguist. He studied Romance languages, English and Latin, and after fleeing Germany during the Third Reich was a lecturer of linguistics at Istanbul, Yale University, and Bard College. From 1957 to 1973 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen.

#13886

Solomon Birnbaum

1891 - 1989 (98 years)

Solomon Asher Birnbaum, also Salomo Birnbaum was a Yiddish linguist and Hebrew palaeographer. Biography Birnbaum , born in Vienna, was the oldest son of Nathan Birnbaum and Rosa Korngut. He was an Austrian Jew of West Galician descent.

#13887

Raoul Walsh

1887 - 1980 (93 years)

Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh. He was known for portraying John Wilkes Booth in the silent film The Birth of a Nation and for directing such films as the widescreen epic The Big Trail starring John Wayne in his first leading role, The Roaring Twenties starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart, and White Heat starring James Cagney and Edmond O'Brien. He directed his last film in 1964. His work has b...

#13888

Zainul Abedin

1914 - 1976 (62 years)

Zainul Abedin , also known as Shilpacharya was a prominent Bangladeshi painter. He became well known in 1944 through his series of paintings depicting some of the great famines in Bengal during its British colonial period. After the Partition of Indian subcontinent he moved to East Pakistan . In 1948, he helped to establish the Institute of Arts and Crafts at the University of Dhaka. The Indian Express has described him as a legendary Bangladeshi painter and activist. Like many of his contemporaries, his paintings on the Bengal famine of 1943 are viewed as his most characteristic works. His ...

#13889

Théodore Dubois

1837 - 1924 (87 years)

Clément François Théodore Dubois was a French Romantic composer, organist, and music teacher. After study at the Paris Conservatoire, Dubois won France's premier musical prize, the Prix de Rome in 1861. He became an organist and choirmaster at several well-known churches in Paris, and at the same time was a professor in the Conservatoire, teaching harmony from 1871 to 1891 and composition from 1891 to 1896, when he succeeded Ambroise Thomas as the Conservatoire's director. He continued his predecessor's strictly conservative curriculum and was forced to retire early after a scandal erupted ov...

#13890

Hank Williams

1923 - 1953 (30 years)

Hiram "Hank" Williams was an American singer-songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most significant and influential American singers and songwriters of the 20th century. Williams recorded 55 singles that reached the top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, five of which were released posthumously, and 12 of which reached No.1.

#13891

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky

1932 - 1986 (54 years)

Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky was a Russian film director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinema history, Tarkovsky's films explore spiritual and metaphysical themes, and are noted for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery, and preoccupation with nature and memory.

#13892

Walther von Wartburg

1888 - 1971 (83 years)

Walther von Wartburg was a Swiss philologist and lexicographer. He was the editor-in-chief of the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch . After studying at the universities of Berne, Zurich, Florence and Paris , in 1918 he presented his doctoral thesis . In 1921 he became Privatdozent at Berne. He worked in the method of Lausanne, and later studied, from 1929 to 1939, at the University of Leipzig. From 1940 to 1959, he was Professor of French Philology at the University of Basle.

#13893

Eduard Prokosch

1876 - 1938 (62 years)

Eduard Prokosch was an Austrian historical linguist who specialized in Indo-European and, specifically, Proto-Germanic studies. He was the father of Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Frederic Prokosch and Walther Prokosch.

#13894

Muddy Waters

1913 - 1983 (70 years)

McKinley Morganfield , known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude".

#13895

Marion Davies

1897 - 1961 (64 years)

Marion Davies was an American actress, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. Educated in a religious convent, Davies fled the school to pursue a career as a chorus girl. As a teenager, she appeared in several Broadway musicals and one film, Runaway Romany . She soon became a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies.

#13896

Edgard Varèse

1883 - 1965 (82 years)

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has al...

#13897

Paul Renner

1878 - 1956 (78 years)

Paul Friedrich August Renner was a German typeface designer, author, and founder of the Master School for Germany's Printers in Munich. In 1927, he designed the Futura typeface, which became one of the most successful and most-used types of the 20th century.

#13898

Michael Bennett

Michael Bennett

1943 - 1987 (44 years)

Michael Bennett was an American musical theatre director, writer, choreographer, and dancer. He won seven Tony Awards for his choreography and direction of Broadway shows and was nominated for an additional eleven.

#13899

Vayalar Ramavarma

Vayalar Ramavarma

1928 - 1975 (47 years)

Vayalar Ramavarma , also known as Vayalar, was an Indian poet and lyricist of Malayalam language. He was known for his poems which include Sargasangeetham, Mulankaadu, Padamudrakal, Aayisha and Oru Judas janikkunnu and for around 1300 songs he penned for 256 Malayalam films. He received the National Film Award for Best Lyrics in 1972 and was the winner of the Kerala State Film Award for Best Lyrics in its year of inception which he received three more times. He was also a recipient of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1962. His collaborations with G. Devarajan produced the golden ...

#13900

Ferruccio Busoni

1866 - 1924 (58 years)

Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition.

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