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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Communications,

#151

Tracey Emin

#1305

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.

#152

Võ Nguyên Giáp

#4832

Overall Influence

1911 - 2013 (102 years)

Võ Nguyên Giáp was a self-taught general of the People's Army of Vietnam , communist revolutionary and politician. Regarded as one of the greatest military strategists of the 20th century, Giáp commanded Vietnamese communist forces in various wars. He served as the military commander of the Việt Minh and later the PAVN from 1941 to 1972, as the minister of defence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and later Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1946–1947 and from 1948 to 1980, and as deputy prime minister from 1955 to 1991. He was also a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietn...

#153

Rodney Huddleston

#9270

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English. Huddleston is the primary author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , which presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English.

#154

Robert W. McChesney

Robert W. McChesney

#2407

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Robert Waterman McChesney is an American professor notable in the history and political economy of communications, and the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies. He is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He co-founded the Free Press, a national media reform organization. In 2002–12, he hosted Media Matters, a weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL , Illinois Public Media radio.

#155

Jamal Khashoggi

Jamal Khashoggi

#314

Overall Influence

1958 - 2018 (60 years)

Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist, dissident, author, columnist for Middle East Eye and The Washington Post, and a general manager and editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

#156

Stanley Fish

#612

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

#157

Laurent Sagart

#5462

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Laurent Sagart is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research . Biography Born in Paris in 1951, he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 at the University of Paris 7 and his doctorat d'État in 1990 at University of Aix-Marseille 1. His early work focused on Chinese dialectology. He then turned his attention to Old Chinese, attempting a reconstruction of Old Chinese that separated word roots and affixes. His recent work, in collaboration with William H. Baxter, is a reconstruction of Old Chinese that builds ...

#158

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

#1399

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Martin Charles Scorsese is an American filmmaker and actor who holds both American and Italian citizenship. He emerged as one of the major figures of the New Hollywood era. Scorsese has received many accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Directors Guild of America Awards. He has been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Five of his fil...

#159

Gérard Diffloth

#6777

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Gérard Diffloth was a French linguist known as a leading specialist in the Austroasiatic languages. As a linguistics professor, he was employed at the University of Chicago and Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA, after a dissertation on the Irula language. He was an advocate of immersion fieldwork for linguistic research.

#160

Robert Hanssen

#668

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Robert Philip Hanssen was an American Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001. His espionage was described by the Department of Justice as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history".

#161

Peter Gabriel

#1929

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Peter Brian Gabriel is an English musician. He rose to fame as the original lead singer of the progressive rock band Genesis. After leaving Genesis in 1975, he launched a successful solo career with "Solsbury Hill" as his first single. His fifth studio album, So , is his best-selling release and is certified triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the US. The album's most successful single, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and, according to a report in 2011, it was MTV's most played music video of all time.

#162

Alistair Cooke

#2388

Overall Influence

1908 - 2004 (96 years)

Alistair Cooke was a British-American writer whose work as a journalist, television personality and radio broadcaster was done primarily in the United States. Outside his journalistic output, which included Letter from America and America: A Personal History of the United States, he was well known in the United States as the host of PBS Masterpiece Theatre from 1971 to 1992. After holding the job for 22 years, and having worked in television for Cooke retired in 1992, although he continued to present Letter from America until shortly before his death. He was the father of author and folk sin...

#163

Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer

#2088

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

Philip José Farmer was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers and Riverworld series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family books, ...

#164

Jay Rosen

#4251

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jay Rosen is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He is a contributor to De Correspondent and a member of the George Foster Peabody Awards Board of Directors. Biography Rosen received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and M.A. & Ph.D. degrees from the New York University Media Ecology Program . Noted media theorist Neil Postman chaired Rosen's dissertation committee.

#165

Richard Serra

#708

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Richard Serra is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material quality and exploration of the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site. Since the mid-1960s, Serra has worked to radicalize and extend the definition of sculpture beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead, to his large-scale steel works.

#166

David Halberstam

David Halberstam

#1407

Overall Influence

1934 - 2007 (73 years)

David Halberstam was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, Korean War, and later, sports journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, while doing research for a book.

#167

Kenneth L. Hale

Kenneth L. Hale

#9607

Overall Influence

1934 - 2001 (67 years)

Kenneth Locke Hale , also known as Ken Hale, was an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially indigenous languages of North America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo, O'odham, Warlpiri, and Ulwa.

#168

Andrey Zaliznyak

Andrey Zaliznyak

#5915

Overall Influence

1935 - 2017 (82 years)

Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was a Soviet and Russian linguist, an expert in historical linguistics, accentology, dialectology and grammar. Doctor of Philological Sciences . In his later years he paid much attention to the popularization of linguistics and the struggle against pseudoscience.

#169

Art Buchwald

#2887

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Arthur Buchwald was an American humorist best known for his column in The Washington Post. At the height of his popularity, it was published nationwide as a syndicated column in more than 500 newspapers. His column focused on political satire and commentary.

#170

Paul Kay

#5125

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Paul Kay is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He joined the University in 1966 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, transferring to the Department of Linguistics in 1982 and now working at the International Computer Science Institute . He is best known for his work with anthropologist Brent Berlin on colour: Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution . More recently, he has worked in the area of Construction Grammar with Charles J. Fillmore, authoring the textbook Construction Grammar . He is currently working on...

#171

Uri Geller

#849

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Uri Geller is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller uses conjuring tricks to simulate the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller's career as an entertainer has spanned more than four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries. Magicians have called Geller a fraud because of his claims of possessing psychic powers.

#172

Martha Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn

#2910

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. Gellhorn reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. She was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. She died in 1998 by apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.

#173

Claude Piron

#5220

Overall Influence

1931 - 2008 (77 years)

Claude Piron, also known by the pseudonym Johán Valano, was a Swiss psychologist, Esperantist, translator, and writer. He worked as a translator for the United Nations from 1956 to 1961 and then for the World Health Organization.

#174

Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker

#1534

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Charlton Brooker is an English writer, television presenter, producer and satirist. He is the creator and co-showrunner of the sci-fi drama anthology series Black Mirror, and has written for comedy series such as Brass Eye, The 11 O'Clock Show, and Nathan Barley.

#175

Dave Marsh

#1224

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dave Marsh is an American music critic, and radio talk show host. He was an early editor of Creem magazine, has written for various publications such as Newsday, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, and has published numerous books about music and musicians, mostly focused on rock music. He is also a committee member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

#176

Lesley Stahl

#2109

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Lesley Rene Stahl is an American television journalist. She has spent most of her career with CBS News, where she began as a producer in 1971. Since 1991, she has reported for CBS's 60 Minutes. She is known for her news and television investigations and award-winning foreign reporting. For her body of work she has earned various journalism awards including a Lifetime Achievement News and Documentary Emmy Award in 2003 for overall excellence in reporting.

#177

Deborah Tannen

#2814

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Deborah Frances Tannen is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

#178

William A. Foley

#8932

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

William A. Foley is an American linguist and professor at Columbia University He was previously located at the University of Sydney. He specializes in Papuan and Austronesian languages. Foley developed Role and Reference Grammar in a partnership with Robert Van Valin.

#179

George Will

#844

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

George Frederick Will is an American libertarian conservative writer and political commentator, who writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NewsNation. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America." Will won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977.

#180

Max Hastings

#2663

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of thirty books, most significantly histories, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion and contributes to The Times and The Sunday Times.

#181

John Lyons

#5569

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Sir John Lyons FBA was a British linguist, working on semantics. Education John Lyons was born and brought up in Stretford, Lancashire . He was initially educated at St Ann's RC School, Stretford, before he won a scholarship to St Bede's College, Manchester, joining in September 1943. In July 1950, Lyons progressed to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954.

#182

Nicholas Hytner

#3305

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sir Nicholas Robert Hytner is an English theatre director, film director, and film producer. He was previously the Artistic Director of London's National Theatre. His major successes as director include Miss Saigon, The History Boys and One Man, Two Guvnors. He has also known for directing films such as The Madness of King George , The Crucible , The History Boys , and The Lady in the Van . Hytner was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to drama by Queen Elizabeth II.

#183

William Safire

#2461

Overall Influence

1929 - 2009 (80 years)

William Lewis Safire was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He was a long-time syndicated political columnist for The New York Times and wrote the "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine about popular etymology, new or unusual usages, and other language-related topics.

#184

John Dinges

#1665

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

John Dinges is an American journalist. He was special correspondent for Time, Washington Post and ABC Radio in Chile. With a group of Chilean journalists, he cofounded the Chilean magazine APSI. He is the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a position he held from 1996 to 2016, currently with emeritus status.

#185

Hope Hicks

#4973

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Hope Charlotte Hicks is an American public relations executive and political advisor who served in President Donald Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2018 and 2020 to 2021. She served as White House director of strategic communications from January to September 2017, as White House communications director from 2017 to 2018, and returned to serve as a counselor to the president from 2020 to 2021.

#186

Stephen Daldry

#3208

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Stephen David Daldry CBE is an English director and producer of film, theatre, and television. He has won three Tony Awards for his work on Broadway and an Olivier Award for his work in the West End. He has received three Academy Awards nominations for Best Director, for the films Billy Elliot , The Hours , and The Reader .

#187

Richard Helms

#788

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

Richard McGarrah Helms was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency , he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.

#188

Studs Terkel

#1313

Overall Influence

1912 - 2008 (96 years)

Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.

#189

Theo Vennemann

#7215

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld is a German historical linguist known for his controversial theories of a "Vasconic" and an "Atlantic" stratum in European languages, published since the 1990s. He was professor of Germanic and theoretical linguistics at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich from 1974 .

#190

Indro Montanelli

Indro Montanelli

#2735

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Indro Alessandro Raffaello Schizogene Montanelli was an Italian journalist, historian, and writer. He was one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes according to the International Press Institute. A volunteer for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and an admirer of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship, Montanelli had a change of heart in 1943, and joined the liberal resistance group Giustizia e Libertà but was discovered and arrested along with his wife by Nazi authorities in 1944. Sentenced to death, he was able to flee to Switzerland the day before his scheduled execution by firing squad thanks to...

#191

Paul Johnson

#1819

Overall Influence

1928 - 2023 (95 years)

Paul Bede Johnson was an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian.

#192

Fareed Zakaria

#792

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.

#193

Susan Curtiss

#6985

Overall Influence

Susan Curtiss is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Curtiss' main fields of research are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Her 1976 UCLA PhD dissertation centered on the study of the grammatical development of Genie, a famous feral child. Her subsequent work has been on grammatical development in children with SLI; maturational constraints on first-language development ; hemispheric specialization for language and language acquisition; and the cognitive modularity of grammar.

#194

Judy Woodruff

#2237

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Judy Carline Woodruff is an American broadcast journalist who has worked in local, network, cable, and public television news since 1970. She was the anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour through the end of 2022. Woodruff has covered every presidential election and convention since 1976. She has interviewed several heads of state and moderated U.S. presidential debates.

#195

Joseph Barbera

#1366

Overall Influence

1911 - 2006 (95 years)

Joseph "Joe" Roland Barbera was an American animator, cartoon artist, storyboard artist, screenwriter, director and producer who co-founded the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera.

#196

Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer

#1054

Overall Influence

1950 - 2018 (68 years)

Charles Krauthammer was an American political columnist. A moderate liberal who turned independent conservative as a political pundit, Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The Washington Post in 1987. His weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide. While in his first year studying medicine at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the waist down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at cervical spinal nerve 5. After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduati...

#197

Michael Bierut

#6938

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Michael Bierut is a graphic designer, design critic and educator, who has been a partner at design firm Pentagram since 1990. He designed the logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Early life and education Michael Bierut was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. His family lived in Garfield Heights and he attended Saturday morning classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art where he developed his drawing skills. The family moved to the suburb Parma in 1967, and he attended Normandy High School, graduating in 1975.

#198

Rob Marshall

#3120

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Robert Doyle Marshall Jr. is an American film and theater director, producer, and choreographer. He is best known for directing the film version of the Broadway musical Chicago, which was based on the play of the same name by playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins. His work on the film earned him the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film, as well as nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director, the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction.

#199

Norman Smith

#3324

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Norman Smith was an English musician, record producer and engineer. In the 1960s, he notably engineered all of the Beatles' EMI studio recordings up to the end of 1965 and produced three Pink Floyd albums including their first, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn . He later had a successful recording career as Hurricane Smith, achieving a transatlantic hit single with "Oh, Babe, What Would You Say?" in 1972.

#200

David Fricke

#1024

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

David Fricke is an American music journalist who serves as the senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine, where he writes predominantly about rock music. One of the best known names in rock journalism, his career has spanned over 40 years. In the 1990s, he was the magazine's music editor before stepping down.

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