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 …
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List of the most influential female people in Education,
#601
Wanda M. Corn
#168317
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Wanda M. Corn is an American art and cultural historian. Corn is a scholar of art and photography from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries movements. She is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor emerita of art history at Stanford University. She held the professorship for eight years before retiring from the university in March 2017. Over her career as an art professor at Stanford she brought John D. Rockefeller's personal collection to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which included a "a body of 110 paintings described as the museums’ “single most important gift of art." She served as acting director of the Stanford Art Museum now known as the Iris & B.
Go to Profile#602
Catherine Beaudry
#144853
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Catherine Beaudry is a Canadian social scientist, currently a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair at Polytechnique Montréal. She is an alumnus of the Global Young Academy from 2010 to 2014. She completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in satellite technology at Polytechnique Montréal followed by graduate and doctoral studies in economics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Go to Profile#603
Meredith Clausen
#106662
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Meredith L. Clausen is an American architectural historian, and professor in the School of Art and the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. She is known for research and writing on American architect Pietro Belluschi and on Art Nouveau architecture.
Go to Profile#604
Summer Edward
#132898
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Summer Edward is a Trinidadian American writer, children's editor, educator, literary activist and children's literature specialist based in the USA. In 2010, at the age of 24, she founded Anansesem ezine, the first children's literature publication in the English-speaking Caribbean and served as its editor-in-chief for 10 years. At 26, she became one of the Caribbean's youngest literary editors. Anansesem has published some of the most distinctive and distinguished voices in Caribbean literature for young people including Floella Benjamin, Gerald Hausman, Ibi Zoboi, Itah Sadu, Lynn Joseph, Margarita Engle, Nadia L.
Go to Profile#605
Myra Roper
#107096
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Myra Ellen Roper was a British-born Australian educationalist, author, broadcaster, and expert on China. She was principal of University Women's College, at the University of Melbourne from 1947 to 1960.
Go to Profile#606
Cheryl Finley
#171069
Overall Influence
Cheryl Finley is an art historian, author, curator and critic. She is a professor at Cornell University and Director of the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective. She won Bard Graduate Center's Horowitz Book Prize for her book, Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon in 2019.
Go to Profile#607
Michelle Hinn
#159926
Overall Influence
Michelle Hinn is the current chairperson of the IGDA's Game Accessibility Special Interest Group, a video game industry advocacy group for creating mainstream games accessible to gamers with disabilities. She is involved with GameAccessibility.com, a game accessibility project funded by the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation, and is the Vice-President of the Game Division of DonationCoder.com.
Go to Profile#608
Kimberly Johnson
#71247
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Kimberly Johnson is an American poet and Renaissance scholar. Life Johnson was raised in Utah. She earned her MA in 1995 from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, her MFA in 1997 Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in 2003 from University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#609
Rose Kekedo
#156217
Overall Influence
1942 - 2005 (63 years)
Dame Rosalina Violet Kekedo , better known as Rose Kekedo, was a leading educator in Papua New Guinea and the first woman to be chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea. Early life Rosalina Violet Kekedo's parents, Mary Angela and Walter Kekedo came from Milne Bay Province and Central Province in Papua New Guinea. Rose, as she would be known, was born in 1942 in Abau, Central Province, where her father, Walter, worked as a clerk and her mother, Mary, was a teacher. She was the second eldest in a family of ten children, six girls and four boys. When she was three years old, the famil...
Go to Profile#610
Joan Kee
#86777
Overall Influence
Joan Kee is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her book, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2013, is credited with sparking global interest in Dansaekhwa, a major constellation of abstract paintings produced in South Korea from the 1960s. In 2014, she curated From All Sides: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, a group show of representative Tansaekhwa artists that was widely acclaimed. She has been cited as Tansaekhwa's most prominent Anglophone scholar. Kee teaches at the University of Michigan where she is Associate Professor in the History of Art.
Go to Profile#611
Trudy Krisher
#108577
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Trudy Krisher is an American author of young adult novels, children's books, a college textbook, and a scholarly biography. She is a former professor of liberal arts in Dayton, Ohio. Early life and education Krisher was born in Macon, Georgia. Her parents were Whitley Herron Butner and Lois Drane Butner. She graduated from The College of William and Mary in 1968 and received a master's in education from Trenton State College in 1972.
Go to Profile#612
Julia Bryan-Wilson
#136775
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Career Bryan-Wilson received her BA from Swarthmore College in 1995 and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. In addition to teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Bryan-Wilson has also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, California College of the Arts, the University of California, Irvine, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She also served as one of the Robert...
Go to Profile#613
Reina Lewis
#76307
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Reina Lewis is a British art historian and author. She is currently a Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London. Early life Lewis was born in northeast London. She trained in Fine Art and Art History at the University of Leeds, and received her MA in English: Critical Theory from Sussex University. Her PhD in Humanities at Middlesex University on western women orientalist artists and writers marked a new development in understandings of gender and imperial cultures.
Go to Profile#614
Nancy Wicker
#106163
Overall Influence
Nancy L. Wicker is professor of art history at the University of Mississippi. She was previously professor in the department of art at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Career Wicker graduated BA with High Honors from Eastern Illinois University, majoring in art history and studio art, in 1975. She took her MA in art history from the University of Minnesota in 1979, followed by her Ph.D. also from Minnesota in 1990, with work on interdisciplinary art history, archaeology, and Germanic philology. In 1988 she was awarded the Aurora Borealis Prize of the Society for the Advancement of Scandina...
Go to Profile#615
Gülru Necipoğlu
#41800
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gülru Necipoğlu is a Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture , her BA in Art History at Wesleyan , her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul . She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.
Go to Profile#616
Ramona Edelin
#148314
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ramona Hoage Edelin is an American academic, activist and consultant. Edelin is credited with introducing the term "African American" into the general vernacular. She has been named one of the most influential Black Americans by Ebony. Today, she serves as executive director of the DC Association of Charter Schools.
Go to Profile#617
Ericka Beckman
#150499
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ericka Beckman is an American filmmaker who began to make films in the 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation. Her films concern the relationship between people and images, and how images structure people's perception of themselves and of reality.
Go to Profile#618
Ann Gunter
#178677
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ann C. Gunter is an art historian and Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on visual and material culture of the ancient Near East and neighboring parts of the eastern Mediterranean.
Go to Profile#619
Joan Marter
#113206
Overall Influence
Joan Marter is an American academic, art critic and author. A 1968 graduate of Temple University, Marter is the "Distinguished Professor of Art History" at Rutgers University. Marter is the co-editor of the Woman's Art Journal, and the editor of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art.
Go to Profile#620
Heini Paas
#169989
Overall Influence
1918 - 2021 (103 years)
Heini Paas was an Estonian art historian. Personal life and education Heini Rosilda Paas was born on 6 October 1918 in Mõniste Parish in Võru County. She was from a farming family. She attended Mõniste primary school followed by Valga Common Gymnasium and left in 1938. She attended the University of Tartu from 1938 until 1945, studying art history as her major subject in the Faculty of Philosophy. Voldemar Vaga was among the lecturers. In 1968, after working under the supervision of Voldemar Vaga, she was awarded a candidate's degree for her dissertation on the work of the sculptor Ferdi Sann...
Go to Profile#621
Lisa E. Bloom
#113263
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Lisa E. Bloom is an American cultural critic, educator and feminist art historian specializing in polar studies, contemporary art, environmental art, history of photography, visual culture and film studies and is known for her books and essay contributions to these areas.
Go to Profile#622
Joan Braderman
#51654
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.
Go to Profile#623
Sereana Naepi
#176390
Overall Influence
Sereana Elina Naepi is a New Zealand academic and works at the University of Auckland. She is of Fijian and Pākehā descent. Academic career Naepi completed undergraduate study at the University of Auckland. Her 2012 master of arts thesis was titled: The Voices of Taciqu. Teaching and Learning Practices in Non-Lecture Settings for Māori and Pasifika Success in the First Year of a Bachelor of Arts. She moved to Canada for a 2018 PhD titled 'Beyond the Dusky Maiden : Pasifika women's experiences working in higher education' at the University of British Columbia, before returning to the Univer...
Go to Profile#624
Chris Hegedus
#98276
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Chris Hegedus is an American documentary filmmaker. She and her husband, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, founded the company Pennebaker Hegedus Films. Hegedus was nominated for an Academy Award for The War Room, a behind-the-scenes film about President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. The film also won the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures prize for Best Documentary. In 2001, she was awarded the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for Startup.com. The film is a boom-bust story of two young internet entrepreneurs, co-produced with Jehane Noujaim. Hegedus...
Go to Profile#625
Naomi Sargant
#177091
Overall Influence
1933 - 2006 (73 years)
Naomi Ellen Sargant, Baroness McIntosh of Haringey was a British academic specialising in adult education and a television executive. Early life The daughter of Thomas Sargant, first secretary of JUSTICE, and Czech-born philologist Marie Hlouskova, Sargant was educated at Friends School Saffron Walden, later graduating from Bedford College, University of London with a degree in sociology.
Go to Profile#626
Leigh Markopoulos
#182142
Overall Influence
1968 - 2017 (49 years)
Leigh Markopoulos was an American art critic, curator, and teacher. Markopoulos was the chair of the graduate program in curatorial practice at California College of the Arts. She had curated over 50 exhibitions, including ones at the Serpentine Gallery and the Hayward Gallery. Her focus was the art and artworld of the 1960s and 1970s.
Go to Profile#627
Colleen Denney
#115155
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Colleen Jo Denney is an American art historian and educator. A scholar of British art during the Victorian era, Denney is Professor of Art History and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wyoming.
Go to Profile#628
Zeinabu irene Davis
#178568
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Zeinabu irene Davis is an American filmmaker and professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. In 1985, she received her M.A in African studies at UCLA and went on to earn her M.F.A in Film and Television production in 1989. Davis is known as one of the graduates and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion. The L.A. Rebellion refers to the first African-American students who studied film at UCLA. Through their collective efforts, they sought to put an end to the prejudices of Hollywood by creating experimental and unconventional films. The main goal of these films was to create original Black stories and bring them to the main screens.
Go to Profile#629
Barbette Spaeth
#68777
Overall Influence
Barbette Stanley Spaeth is an American academic who is an associate professor at College of William and Mary, and is an expert in Roman mythology. She is past secretary of the Williamsburg Society, Archaeological Institute of America, and president of the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions.
Go to Profile#630
Liz James
#105105
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Liz James is a British art historian who studies the art of the Byzantine Empire. She is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex. Career James is originally from Derby, East Midlands. She received an undergraduate degree at the University of Durham in Ancient History and Archaeology. She completed a master's degree in Byzantine studies at the University of Birmingham. She received her doctorate at the Courtauld Institute in London in 1989, studying under Robin Cormack. Her thesis discussed light and colour in Byzantine art and was entitled Colour Perception in Byzantium. Upon completion, she embarked on postdoctoral fellowships, notably at the Barber Institute.
Go to Profile#631
Jean Lacy
#185592
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Jean Lacy was an American museum education specialist and visual artist who works primarily in mixed media and collage. She was of African American heritage, and believes her family is descended from indentured Africans at Jamestown Colony. Her work is inspired by creation myths and religious stories, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American culture. From 1975-77 she held the position of Curator of Education and Exhibitions at the Museum of African-American Life and Culture in Dallas, Texas. From 1977-88 she served as the Director of the African American Cultural Heritage Center of the...
Go to Profile#632
Barbara Ruszczyc
#178518
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Barbara Ruszczyc was a Polish Egyptologist and art historian. She was curator at the Department of Ancient Art at the National Museum in Warsaw from 1973 to 1990. In 1987, Ruszczyc was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
Go to Profile#633
Christine Panushka
#152879
Overall Influence
Christine Panushka is an independent filmmaker, freelance animator, artist, and teacher. She is a Professor in the John Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Go to Profile#634
Alison Fields
#90491
Overall Influence
Alison Lynne Fields is an American art historian and educator. Fields is currently the Mary Lou Milner Carver Professor of Art of the American West at University of Oklahoma. Career Fields received a Bachelor of Arts in English and Native American Studies from Colgate University in 2001. There, she was part of the Student Government Association. Fields then proceeded to receive a Master of Arts in American Civilization from Brown University in 2003, and a Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2009. Fields wrote a doctoral dissertation titled "False Clos...
Go to Profile#635
Tina Barton
#123837
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Christina Joy Barton , known as Tina Barton, is a New Zealand art historian, curator, art writer and editor. She was director of the Adam Art Gallery between 2007 and 2023. Education Barton completed a Masters of Art in art history at the University of Auckland in 1987. Her thesis topic was the history of post-object art in New Zealand between 1969 and 1979. She was awarded a Higher Doctorate for her published work in art history in 2022.
Go to Profile#636
Jill M. Norris
#186958
Overall Influence
#637
Kim Hong-nam
#170932
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kim Hong-nam was the South Korean director of the National Museum of Korea, art historian, and currently professor of Ewha Womans University. Before she moved to Seoul , she served the Asia Society, New York , as the curator in charge of the Rockefeller Collection of Asian Art. Back in her native country Korea, she enjoyed the most distinguished career in Korea's museum field as director of three leading museums, Ewha Womans University Museum , National Folk Museum , and National Museum of Korea . She was also the first woman to hold the position of director at two national museums.
Go to Profile#638
Roberta Kevelson
#47964
Overall Influence
1931 - 1998 (67 years)
Roberta "Bobbie" Kevelson was an American academic and semiotician. She was an acknowledged authority on the pragmatism theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. Personal life Kevelson was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and graduated from B.M.C. Durfee High School in 1948. Although married at 17, she returned to college in the 1960s and received her PhD in semiotics from Brown University in 1978.
Go to Profile#639
Houra Merrikh
#89216
Overall Influence
Houra Merrikh is an Iranian-American microbiologist. She is a full professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Biochemistry. Her field of work is antibiotic resistance and bacterial evolvability.
Go to Profile#640
Jennifer Montagu
#82511
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Jennifer Iris Rachel Montagu is a British art historian with emphasis in the study of Italian Baroque sculpture. Early life Montagu is a daughter of Ewen Montagu, a British judge, writer and Naval intelligence officer. She was educated at Brearley School, New York, Benenden School, Kent, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she gained a BA in PPE, then studied under Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute, London, where she gained her PhD degree.
Go to Profile#641
Sharon Cather
#178421
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Sharon Cather was an art historian who taught at Cambridge University and was a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialised in the preservation of wall paintings. Early life and education Cather was born at Berkeley, California, and graduated in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spent ten years working in the art department offices there, before undertaking MA study at Princeton University and going on to undertake PhD work under Professor John Shearman on Sebastiano Serlio.
Go to Profile#642
Sally Brinkman
#186641
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dr. Sally Brinkman is a social epidemiologist with a focus on early childhood development and the impact of society on children's short and long term outcomes. Brinkman led the development and implementation of the Early Development Instrument for population level data across Australia, now known as the nationwide Australian Early Development Census measuring over 300,000 children in how they have developed by the time they start their first year of full-time school. Brinkman works for international organisations including World Bank, UNICEF and AusAID, and has over 100 publications covering child development and education.
Go to Profile#643
Leslie King-Hammond
#172074
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Leslie King Hammond is an American artist, curator and art historian who is the Founding Director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is also Graduate Dean Emeritus.
Go to Profile#644
Jane Halonen
#177720
Overall Influence
Jane Simmons Halonen is an American educational psychologist whose career has focused on advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning in psychology. She holds the position of Professor of Psychology at the University of West Florida where she also served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2012.Halonen is a contributing writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Go to Profile#645
Margie Hohepa
#187265
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Margie Kahukura Hohepa , sometimes Margie Ratapu , is a New Zealand education academic specialising in Māori education. She is Māori, of Te Māhurehure, Ngāpuhi and Te Ātiawa descent and are currently a full professor at the University of Waikato.
Go to Profile#646
Velina Hasu Houston
#151661
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Velina Hasu Houston is an American playwright, essayist, poet, author, editor and screenwriter who has had many works produced, presented and published. Her work draws from her experience of being multiracial as well as from the immigrant experiences of her family and those she encountered growing up in Junction City, Kansas.
Go to Profile#647
Marian Lopez Fernandez-Cao
#180704
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Marian Lopez Fernandez-Cao is a Spanish university professor, curator and researcher, specializing in art, feminism, art therapy and social inclusion. Since 1992 she has been a professor in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, and is expert on the artist Sonia Delaunay.
Go to Profile#648
Rea Tajiri
#146934
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American video artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter, known for her personal essay film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige . Early life Tajiri was born in 1958 in Chicago, Illinois. Tajiri's father, Vincent Tajiri, was the founding photo editor for Playboy Magazine. Her uncle, Shinkichi Tajiri, was a prominent sculptor who resided in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#649
Helen Hedges
#187629
Overall Influence
Helen Hedges is a New Zealand education academic. As of 2018 she is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 2002 MEd Early Years thesis titled 'Subject content knowledge in early childhood curriculum and pedagogy' and a 2007 PhD titled 'Funds of knowledge in early childhood communities of inquiry' undertaken at Massey University, Hedges published prolifically. She joined the University of Auckland in 2003, rising to full professor in 2018.
Go to Profile#650
Ellen Spiro
#127894
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Ellen Spiro is an American documentary filmmaker. She is a producer and director of a television documentary Are the Kids Alright?, which won an Emmy Award in 2005. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in documentary, experimental film, and music film production in the Department of Radio-TV-Film. She is a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
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