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,
#701
Catherine M. Sama
#177694
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Catherine M. Sama is a professor of Italian at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on Early Modern and 18th-Century Italian Women Writers, Correspondence Networks, The Italian Enlightenment, Italian Women Artists, and Gender Studies. In 2013 she was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship. She also serves as a board member of the URI Center for the Humanities. She has edited the work and written a biography of the 18th-century Italian writer Elisabetta Caminèr Turra.
Go to Profile#702
Katie Scott
#174699
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Rachael Katherine Hannah Scott, Lady Deuchar is a British art historian, and Professor in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, since 2014. She was born in New York on 25 February 1958, the daughter of diplomat Sir Peter Scott, and Rachael Scott . She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, University College London, where she earned a BA and a PhD, and Christ's College, Cambridge, where she earned an MA in 1985.
Go to Profile#703
Taína Caragol
#124937
Overall Influence
Taína Caragol also known as Taína Beatriz Caragol-Barreto, is an American art historian, curator, and author. She currently serves as the curator for Latino Art and History at the National Portrait Gallery, since 2013. She previously held positions at Museum of Modern Art and at the Museo de Arte de Ponce.
Go to Profile#704
Annemarie Jacir
#128994
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Annemarie Jacir is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and producer. Career Filmmaking Jacir has been working in independent cinema since 1998 and has written, directed and produced a number of award-winning films. Two of her films have premiered as Official Selections in Cannes, one in Berlin and in Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Telluride. All three of her feature films were selected as Palestine's Oscar Entry for Foreign Language Film. Her short film, like twenty impossibles was the first Arab short film to ever be an official selection of the Cannes International Film Festival and...
Go to Profile#705
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
#162097
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Kathleen James-Chakraborty is a Professor of Art History and Architectural Historian at University College Dublin. She is an expert in American and German modernism, and is interested in modern sacred architecture. In 2018 She was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal for Humanities.
Go to Profile#706
Marjorie Keller
#181102
Overall Influence
1950 - 1994 (44 years)
Marjorie Keller was an experimental filmmaker, author, activist, film scholar. J. Hoberman called her "an unselfish champion of the avant-garde." Early life and education Keller was born in 1950 in Yorktown, New York. The youngest of seven children, Keller grew up in a large, upper-middle-class, Protestant family. As a girl, Keller's mother schooled her in the feminine arts of cooking, gardening and entertaining.
Go to Profile#707
Holly Pittman
#172929
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Holly Pittman is a Near Eastern art historian and archaeologist, and an expert in Near Eastern glyptic art. She is the Bok Family Professor in the Humanities and a Professor in the History of Art Department of the University of Pennsylvania and serves as a curator in the Near East Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, she was a curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1974 to 1989. Since 1972, she has conducted archaeological excavations throughout the Middle East, including projects in Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Iran, and Iraq.
Go to Profile#708
Carma Gorman
#181646
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Carma Ryanne Gorman is an American art historian known for her work in the area of design history. Her American Quarterly article "Educating the eye: Body mechanics and streamlining in the United States, 1925-1950" was one of ten reprinted in the Organization of American Historians' anthology The Best American History Essays 2008.
Go to Profile#709
Meenakshi Gopinath
#186166
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Meenakshi Gopinath is an Indian educationist, political scientist, writer and a former principal of Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi. She is the founder and incumbent director of the Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace , a non governmental organization promoting peace and socio-political leadership among the women of South Asia and a former member of the National Security Advisory Board, the first woman to serve the Government of India agency. She has served as a member of the selection panel of the Lokpal, a legal body which has jurisdiction over the legislators and government officials of India.
Go to Profile#710
Andrea Giunta
#125953
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Andrea Graciela Giunta is an Argentine art historian, professor, researcher, and curator. Biography Andrea Giunta completed her secondary studies at the Instituto Tierra Santa and the Escuela Normal Superior No. 4 in Buenos Aires.
Go to Profile#711
Alice Ripley
#168688
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Alice Ripley is an American actress, singer, songwriter and mixed media artist. She is known, in particular, for her various roles on Broadway in musicals, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Next to Normal and Side Show. She most recently played three roles in the short-lived Broadway musical, American Psycho. Alice Ripley has released albums with her band, RIPLEY, including the single, "Beautiful Eyes", released in February 2012. She also performs as a solo artist, while in February 2011 she released Alice Ripley Daily Practice, Volume 1, a stripped-down collection of acoustic rock cover...
Go to Profile#712
Catherine Keever
#129851
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Catherine Keever was an educator and ecologist focused on ecological succession and highland region ecology. Keever proved that moss is the first plant to grow on bald rock, rather than lichens. Early life Keever was born September 8, 1908, in Iredell County, North Carolina to John C. Keever, a Methodist preacher, and Blanche Moore Keever. Her brother, Homer Keever, was the historian of Irdell County, NC. During her childhood, Keever moved throughout Western North Carolina within the Methodist Conference as her father took on various churches. She attended Davenport College in Lenoir, North Carolina, for two years before transferring to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Go to Profile#713
Hildegard Knef
#140652
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was a German actress, singer, and writer. She was billed in some English-language films as Hildegard Neff or Hildegarde Neff. Early years Hildegard Knef was born in Ulm in 1925. Her parents were Hans Theodor and Friede Augustine Knef. Her father, a decorated First World War veteran, died when she was only six months old, and her mother moved to Berlin and worked in a factory. Knef began studying acting at age 14 in 1940. She left school at 15 to become an apprentice animator with Universum Film AG. After she had a successful screen test, she went to the State Film School at Babelsberg, Berlin, where she studied acting, ballet, and elocution.
Go to Profile#714
Raufa Hassan al-Sharki
#169318
Overall Influence
1958 - 2011 (53 years)
Amatalrauf "Raufa Hassan" al-Sharki was an educator, feminist and human rights activist from Yemen. She was a professor of mass media and the director of a Women's Studies Center at the University of Sana'a. Al-Sharki was the first female journalist in Yemen and wrote a regular newspaper column for many years.
Go to Profile#715
Maria de Medeiros
#164871
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Maria Esteves de Medeiros Victorino de Almeida, DamSE , known professionally as Maria de Medeiros , is a Portuguese actress, director, and singer who has been involved in both European and American film-productions.
Go to Profile#716
Jeannette Bastian
#178930
Overall Influence
Jeannette Bastian is an archival scholar, academic, author, and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. From 1987 to 1998, she was the Territorial Librarian of the U.S. Virgin Islands and has published widely on topics related to colonial archives and decolonial archival practices.
Go to Profile#717
Loni Ding
#182496
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Isadora Quanehia Ding Welsh , known professionally as Loni Ding, was an documentary film maker, director, television series producer, activist, and university educator. She is known for her work exploring the experiences of Asian Americans. Notably, two of her films played a critical role in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which granted reparations to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.
Go to Profile#718
Eleanor Tufts
#156490
Overall Influence
1927 - 1991 (64 years)
Eleanor May Tufts was an American art historian, feminist and professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her work as an author, historian and lecturer was key to the opening of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 1974. The collection gathers her papers on biographical data, correspondence, professional material, essays, articles, student papers, and manuscripts covering the years between 1927 and 1991, with the bulk of the materials from 1970 to 1988.
Go to Profile#719
Jane Geddes
#188836
Overall Influence
Jane Geddes is a British art historian and academic, specialising in Scottish architecture, British Medieval manuscripts, Pictish sculpture and Medieval decorative ironwork. She is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Aberdeen.
Go to Profile#720
Constance Edith Fowler
#137266
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Constance Edith Fowler was an American artist known as a painter and printmaker, an author, and an educator who taught at Willamette University and Albion College. Early life and education Constance Edith Fowler was born June 2, 1907, in International Falls, Minnesota. She was the daughter of immigrants George Fowler, a butcher from England, and Matilda Einfeld Fowler, from Hamburg. The family lived in Aitken, Cuyuna, and Crosby, Minnesota, before moving to Pullman, Washington, in 1923, where she finished high school. She earned an A.B. at Washington State College in 1929, studying with the painter William McDermitt.
Go to Profile#721
Sabeth Buchmann
#139013
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sabeth Buchmann is an Austrian art historian and art critic. Currently Buchmann is Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art and the Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She contributes to books, magazines and catalogues. Buchmann's publications include Film, Avantgarde und Biopolitik and Art After Conceptual Art .
Go to Profile#722
Anne Dunlop
#136456
Overall Influence
Anne Elizabeth Dunlop is a Canadian-born art historian. As of 2022 she is Herald Chair of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. Education Dunlop graduated with a BA from Queen's University at Kingston in Canada. She next completed an MA at the University of British Columbia. She moved to the University of Warwick in Coventry, England where she gained her PhD with a thesis titled "Advocata nostra: Central Italian paintings of Mary as the Second Eve, c.1335–c.1445".
Go to Profile#723
Alissandra Cummins
#128216
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Alissandra Cummins is a Barbadian art historian, educator, and scholar; she is a leading expert on Caribbean heritage, museum development, and art. Cummins is Director of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society and she is a lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the West Indies. She is board chair of International Journal of Intangible Heritage. She is on the board of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, and the International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship. She was the Chairperson of the UNESCO Executive Board, from 2011 to 2013.
Go to Profile#724
Valerie Kinloch
#189580
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Valerie Kinloch is an American writer, educator, and academic administrator. She is the president of the Johnson C. Smith University starting in August 2023. She also served as the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.
Go to Profile#725
Barbara Baert
#79855
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Barbara Baert is a Belgian art historian, and professor of art history at KU Leuven. In 2016 Baert earned the prestigious , which is yearly awarded by the to a scientist in human, exact and biological-medical sciences.
Go to Profile#726
Dai Sil Kim-Gibson
#118745
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is a Korean–American documentary filmmaker and author. Her films and writing focus on humanizing "the voiceless" within issues of human rights, overlooked periods in history, and Asian-American diaspora.
Go to Profile#727
Nancy Mowll Mathews
#134295
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Nancy Mowll Mathews is a Czech-American art historian, curator and author. She was the Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art from 1988 to 2010. She is currently an independent scholar, curator, professor and host of the television show Art World with Nancy Mathews.
Go to Profile#728
Gloria Jean
#158174
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Gloria Jean was an American actress and singer who starred or co-starred in 26 feature films from 1939 to 1959, and made numerous radio, television, stage, and nightclub appearances. She may be best remembered for her appearance with W. C. Fields in the film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break .
Go to Profile#729
Trine Dyrholm
#178461
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Trine Dyrholm is a Danish actress, singer and songwriter. Dyrholm received national recognition when she placed third in the Dansk Melodi Grand Prix as a 14-year-old singer. Four years later, she again achieved national recognition when she won the Bodil Award for Best Actress in her debut film: the teenage romance Springflod. Dyrholm has won the Bodil Award for Best Actress five times and a Bodil award for Best Supporting Actress twice as well as six Robert Awards in her acting career.
Go to Profile#730
Barbara Hammer
#114393
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.
Go to Profile#731
Birgit Dahlenburg
#171854
Overall Influence
1959 - 2017 (58 years)
Birgit Dahlenburg, née Handschel was a German art historian. She worked as custodian for the art collections of the University of Greifswald and was instrumental in digitising art. Life Born in Heldburg, she studied German studies, art history and art didactics at the University of Greifswald. She received her doctorate in art history there in 1986 with a dissertation on the history of romantic art in Northern Germany. She worked as a research assistant for the Chair of Contemporary Art History from 1987.
Go to Profile#732
Doris Troy
#149619
Overall Influence
1937 - 2004 (67 years)
Doris Troy was an American R&B singer and songwriter, known to her fans as "Mama Soul". Her biggest hit was "Just One Look", a top 10 hit in 1963. Life and career She was born as Doris Elaine Higginsen, in the Bronx, the daughter of a Barbadian Pentecostal minister. She later took her grandmother's name and grew up as Doris Payne. Her parents disapproved of "subversive" forms of music like rhythm & blues, so she cut her teeth singing in her father's choir. At age 16, she was working as an usherette at the Apollo where she was discovered by James Brown. Under the name Doris Payne, she began so...
Go to Profile#733
Karen Sosnoski
#157604
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Karen Sosnoski is an American author, radio contributor, and documentary filmmaker. Career Sosnoski is working on a novel, Rosemary's Models, about the intimate secrets, hopes, and fears that cause men, women, and even children to plunge hopefully into artistic relationships with a wood engraver, craving, and in some cases commissioning her unsettling vision. This literary fiction is inspired by the real art of Rosemary Feit Covey.
Go to Profile#734
Thalia Gouma-Peterson
#122749
Overall Influence
1933 - 2001 (68 years)
Thalia Gouma-Peterson was Professor Emerita of Art History and museum curator at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Born in Athens, Greece she came to the U.S. as a Fulbright student in 1952. Education She earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Art History at Mills College and her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Go to Profile#735
Silvia Malagrino
#130968
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Silvia A. Malagrino is an American multimedia artist, independent filmmaker and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for interdisciplinary work that explores historical and cultural representation, and the intersections of fact, fiction, memory and subjectivity. Her experimental documentary, Burnt Oranges , interwove personal narrative, witness testimony, interviews, and both documentary and re-created footage to examine the long-term effects of Argentina's Dirty War. Malagrino's art has been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, Palais de Glace and Centro Cultural Recoleta ,...
Go to Profile#736
Kana Hanazawa
#124168
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
is a Japanese actress, voice actress and singer. A prolific voice performer in anime, she has amassed several film and television credits since her debut in 2003. She won the Seiyu Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2015, and won the Newtype Anime Awards for Best Voice Actress three times in 2015, 2017 and 2018.
Go to Profile#737
Maria Lluïsa Borràs i Gonzàlez
#181109
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Maria Lluïsa Borràs i González , doctorate in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona, was a Spanish writer, critic, exhibition curator and specialist in the avant-garde and Dadaism. "The critic is not a judge, but a bridge between artist and audience". –Maria Lluïsa Borràs–
Go to Profile#738
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#181272
Overall Influence
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is an American educator and author. She is the founder and president of the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation, a private operating foundation that describes itself as a philanthropic "innovation lab", and founded the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund , a venture philanthropy fund. She is also the author of Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World.
Go to Profile#739
Krista McCracken
#185609
Overall Influence
Krista McCracken is a Canadian public historian, educator, curator and archivist known for their work raising awareness about the history of the Canadian Indian residential school system. Career McCracken holds an MA in public history from the University of Western Ontario. They work Researcher/Curator at Arthur A. Wishart Library and Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, an archival repository and cross-cultural education centre within Algoma University where they have worked since 2010. McCracken's research focuses on community archives, residential schools, research and access. In their rol...
Go to Profile#740
Marie-Jo Bonnet
#50883
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Marie-Josèphe Bonnet is a French specialist in the history of women, history of art, and history of lesbians. She has also published books in the history of the French resistance and occupation. Biography
Go to Profile#741
Glòria Bordons
#180211
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Glòria Bordons de Porrata-Doria is a Spanish art historian, pedagogue, and philologist. She is considered an expert on the works of Joan Brossa, having published three books on his works.
Go to Profile#742
Rhea Anastas
#161333
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Rhea Anastas is an art historian, critic, curator and an associate professor at the Department of Art, University of California, Irvine. She was also one of the founding members of Orchard, an experimental artist-run gallery in the Lower East Side in New York.
Go to Profile#743
Sarah Cook
#88107
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Sarah Cook is a Scotland-based Canadian scholar. She is well known as a historian and curator in the field of New Media art. Cook was a Research Fellow at the University of Sunderland, where she worked with the research institute CRUMB – Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, that she co-founded with Beryl Graham in 2000, and taught on the MA Curating course. In 2013 she was appointed as a Reader and Dundee Research Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. As part of her role as Dundee Fellow she founded and curated LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery in the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee .
Go to Profile#744
Jacqueline Jung
#186537
Overall Influence
Jacqueline E. Jung is a Professor in the department of history of art at Yale University. Jung's first book, The Gothic Screen: Sculpture, Space, and Community in French and German Cathedrals, ca. 1200-1400, received the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication at Yale and was a co-winner of the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Her second book, Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture, received the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize from Yale University's MacMillan Center for International Studies.
Go to Profile#745
Denise van Outen
#168172
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Denise van Outen is an English actress, singer, dancer and presenter. She presented The Big Breakfast, played Roxie Hart in the musical Chicago both in the West End and on Broadway and finished as runner-up in the tenth series of the BBC One dancing show Strictly Come Dancing.
Go to Profile#746
Alice Faye
#122816
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Alice Faye was an American actress and singer. A musical star of 20th Century-Fox in the 1930s and 1940s, Faye starred in such films as On the Avenue and Alexander's Ragtime Band . She is often associated with the Academy Award–winning standard "You'll Never Know", which she introduced in the 1943 musical film Hello, Frisco, Hello.
Go to Profile#747
Christine Mitchell
#179020
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Christine I. Mitchell is an American filmmaker and bioethicist and until her retirement in September 2022, the executive director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School . Education Mitchell studied nursing at Boston University, where she earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in the field. She then studied philosophical and religious ethics and the ethics of care at Harvard University and the Harvard Divinity School, where she earned a master's degree.1969 – Narragansett Regional High School, Baldwinville, Massachusetts, diploma1973 – Boston University, School of Nursing,...
Go to Profile#748
Élisabeth Lebovici
#94990
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Élisabeth Lebovici is a French art historian, journalist, and art critic. Biography Élisabeth Lebovici completed her studies in Paris and New York, where she was enrolled in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1983, she defended her thesis L'Argent dans le discours des artistes américains, 1980-81 [Money in the discourse of American artists, 1980-81] at the Université Paris X.
Go to Profile#749
Anke Voss-Hubbard
#187613
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Anke Voss-Hubbard is an archivist, writer and feminist. Early life and education Voss-Hubbard is a native of Germany and holds degrees in history and archival preservation and management. She attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for her BA in History and MA in United States Political, Social, and Women’s History. She completed her Master's in Library Science at New York State University in Albany.
Go to Profile#750
Avril Henry
#116576
Overall Influence
1935 - 2016 (81 years)
Avril K. Henry was an English activist who campaigned for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia and former professor of English medieval culture at the University of Exeter. In her works Dr. Henry researched theory of typology.
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