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).
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List of the most influential female people in Education,
#1001
Ora Brown Stokes Perry
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Ora Brown Stokes Perry was an American educator, probation officer, temperance worker, suffragist, and clubwoman based in Richmond, Virginia. Early life Ora E. Brown was born in Chesterfield County, Virginia, the daughter of Rev. James E. Brown and Olivia Knight Quarles Brown. She trained as a teacher at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1900. She also studied at Hartshorn Memorial College and the University of Chicago. In 1917, she was refused admission to the newly organized Richmond School of Social Economy because of her race.
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Myra Carroll Winkler
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Myra Carroll Winkler was an American educator and was the first woman to hold elected office in El Paso County. Biography Winkler was born in Corsicana, Texas and her father, Clinton M. Winkler, was one of the first judges on the Texas State Court of Appeals. Winkler's mother, A.V. Winkler, was active in collecting Confederate artifacts. Winkler attended and graduated from the Sam Houston Teacher's College, and moved to El Paso, Texas in 1902. In El Paso, Winkler taught at several El Paso public schools, including El Paso High School.
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Marika Cifor
Marika Cifor is an American archivist and feminist academic known for her work in archival science, library science, and digital studies. Her research focuses on community archives, HIV/AIDS, affect theory, and approaches to archival practice rooted in social justice. She is an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School. She also holds an adjunct faculty appointment in UW's Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies department.
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Esther Baker Steele
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Esther Baker Steele was an American educator, author, editor, and philanthropist of the long nineteenth century. She aided her husband, Dr. J. Dorman Steele in his fourteen-week Barnes' Brief Histories series of books, these publications being, Brief History of the United States, 1871; France, 1875; Centenary History of United States, 1875; Ancient Peoples, 1881; Mediaeval and Modern Peoples, 1883; General History, 1883; Greece, with Selected Readings, 1884; Rome, with Selected Readings, 1885; and Revised United States, 1885. She did most of the work upon Brief History of the United States, which proved a phenomenal success.
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Liane Haid
1895 - 2000 (105 years)
Juliane "Liane" Haid was an Austrian actress and singer. She has often been referred to as Austria's first movie star. Biography Juliane Haid was born in Vienna on 16 August 1895, the first child to Georg Haid and Juliane Haid . She had two younger sisters, Grit, who also became an actress, and Johanna .
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Helen Louise Babcock
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Helen Louise B. Babcock was an American educator, elocutionist, and dramatic reader. Early years and education Helen Louise Bailey was born in Galva, Illinois. August 13, 1867. She early displayed a marked talent for elocution and on reaching woman's estate she decided to make dramatic reading her profession. With that aim she became a pupil in the Cumnock School of Oratory of the Northwestern University, and, being an earnest student, she was graduated with the highest honors.
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Sophia D. Stoddard
1820 - 1891 (71 years)
Sarah D. Stoddard was an American educator who served as the fourth president of Mount Holyoke College from 1865 to 1867. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1841 and taught there for eight years before becoming Head.
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Lindsay Errington
1900 - Present (126 years)
Lindsay Margaret Errington is a Scottish art historian and former keeper for over 20 years at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, where she worked to establish a representative collection of Scottish art.
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Marion Walker Spidle
1897 - 1983 (86 years)
Marion Walker Spidle was an American educator. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. Biography Born on July 18, 1897, to parents Letford William Walker and Georgeina Young Walker, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Spidle attended public schools in New Jersey and in Tennessee, and later graduating from the University of Montevallo in 1916. She also gained a B.S. and M.A. from Columbia University, and completed Graduate Studies at the University of Oregon. Spidle worked for the Alabama Polytechnic Institute from 1928 until it became Auburn University in 1960. She worked for Auburn, from 1960 until retiring in 1966.
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Mary W. Chapin
1820 - 1889 (69 years)
Mary W. Chapin was an American educator who served as the third president of Mount Holyoke College from 1850 to 1852 and Principal from 1852 to 1865. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1841 and taught there for seven years before becoming Head.
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Elizabeth Blanchard
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Elizabeth Blanchard was an American educator who was the seventh president of Mount Holyoke College . Blanchard graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1858, and taught there for twelve years before becoming the Associate Principal from 1872-1883. She served as Principal from 1883-1888. When Mount Holyoke Female Seminary received its collegiate charter and became Mount Holyoke College, she served as Acting President from 1888-1889.
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Gertrude Powicke
1887 - Present (139 years)
Gertrude Powicke was a teacher and relief worker. She was one of the first women graduates of Manchester University. She was a suffrage campaigner and worked with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee in France during the First World War.
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Beth Lydy
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Beth Lydy , who also used the name Lyda Betti, was an American actress, operetta singer, writer, educator, and theatrical producer; she was the wife of violinist and broadcaster Eddy Brown. Early life Lydy was born in Indiana and raised in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where her father John W. Lydy worked as a government teacher on a Sioux reservation. She and her sister Ruth Lydy attended school in Frankfort, Indiana, and in Chicago.
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Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
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Auguste Götze
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Auguste Götze was a German classical singer, actress, playwright, and a distinguished voice teacher. Götze was born in Weimar where she initially trained in music with her father, the tenor Franz Götze. In her later years, she had her own singing school in Leipzig as well as teaching in the conservatory there. She died in Leipzig at the age of 68 after several years of increasingly poor health.
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Elizabeth Gilmore Holt
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt was an American art historian. Early life and education Elizabeth Basye Gilmore was born in San Francisco, California in 1905, and raised in Madison, Wisconsin; her father Eugene Allen Gilmore was a diplomat and university president. She grew up living at the Eugene A. Gilmore House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908.
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Margaret Clapp
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Margaret Antoinette Clapp was an American scholar, educator and Pulitzer Prize winner. She was the president of Wellesley College from 1949 to 1966. During her presidency, she was able to make many improvements to the college campus by increasing the number of faculty members and increasing financial aid for students. Other accomplishments of note during her tenure construction and remodeling of major campus buildings as well as increasing the college endowment fund.
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Grace Coyle
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Grace Longwell Coyle was a highly influential American thinker in the area of social work with groups. She wrote important books on the subject, and had great influence on the development of teaching group work concepts.
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Françoise Henry
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Françoise Henry was a scholar of early Irish art, archaeologist, and art historian. While at University College Dublin , she founded the Department of History of European Painting in 1965, and was head until she retired in 1974.
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Sirarpie Der Nersessian
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Sirarpie Der Nersessian was an Armenian art historian, who specialized in Armenian and Byzantine studies. Der Nersessian was a renowned academic and a pioneer in Armenian art history. She taught at several institutions in the United States, including Wellesley College in Massachusetts and as Henri Focillon Professor of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University. She was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, its deputy director from 1954–55 and 1961–62, and a member of its Board of Scholars. Der Nersessian was also a member of several international institutions such as the British Academy , the Ac...
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Jodie Hunter
Jodie Margaret Roberta Hunter is a New Zealand academic, of Cook Island Māori descent, and is a full professor at Massey University. Hunter researches mathematics pedagogy, with a particular interest in culturally responsive teaching of mathematics to Pasifika students. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow and has been a Fulbright Scholar.
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Irene Emery
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .
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Margarete Bieber
1879 - 1978 (99 years)
Margarete Bieber was a Jewish German-American art historian, classical archaeologist and professor. She became the second woman university professor in Germany in 1919 when she took a position at the University of Giessen. She studied the theatre of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the sculpture and clothing in ancient Rome and Greece.
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Una Ellis-Fermor
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.
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Maria Montessori
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, becoming one of the first women to attend medical school in Italy; she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
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Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
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Lotte Brand Philip
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Lotte Brand Philip was a German art historian, professor and expert on Netherlandish art, one of the most notable and incisive experts on 14th- and 15th-century art to have studied under Erwin Panofsky. Born a Christian of Jewish descent, she resisted state intimidation to leave Germany, only moving to the United States in 1941. She began her new life as a jewelry designer, before establishing a career as an art historian and writer, and taking professorship at a number of universities, including New York University and Queens College, Flushing. During her long career, Brand wrote highly reg...
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Florence E. Bamberger
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Florence Eilau Bamberger was an American pedagogue, school supervisor, progressive education advocate, and author. Influenced by the ideas of John Dewey, she researched, lectured, and wrote extensively on the concept of child-centered education. She spent most of her career as a professor of education in the department of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and was the first woman to attain a full professorship at that university. From 1937 to 1947 she served as director of Johns Hopkins' College for Teachers. After her retirement, she taught in private elementary schools in Baltimore, Ma...
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Eleanor McDougall
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Eleanor McDougall was a Resident Lecturer in Classics at Westfield College, London from 1902, and later one of the pioneers in women's education in India. She was the First Principal of Women's Christian College in Madras, Madras Presidency in British India in 1915.
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Jeannette Augustus Marks
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Jeannette Augustus Marks was an American professor at Mount Holyoke College. She is the namesake of the Jeannette Marks Cultural Center , which provides support and programming for LGBT students and allies.
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Anna Cox Brinton
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Anna Shipley Cox Brinton was an American classics scholar, college administrator, writer, and Quaker leader, active with the American Friends Service Committee . She has credited with being one of those who "reinvented Quakerism" for the 20th century.
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Lucy Donnelly
1870 - 1948 (78 years)
Lucy Martin Donnelly was a teacher of English at Bryn Mawr College. She was head of the English department starting in 1914. Sources James, E. T, Wilson James, J. and Boyer, P. S. 1971, Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary , p. 499Russell, B. and Griffin, N. 1992, The selected letters of Bertrand Russell, p. Lucy Donnelly
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Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth was an archaeologist and art history and classical studies professor. She studied at Vassar and received her doctorate at Radcliffe. In addition to her research contributions to the classics, she also bridged her interest to contemporary art and architecture. Her grandfather was Henry van Ingen.
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Fanny Jackson Coppin
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Fanny Jackson Coppin was an American educator, missionary and lifelong advocate for female higher education. One of the first Black alumnae of Oberlin College, she served as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and became the first African American school superintendent in the United States.
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Alice Mabel Bacon
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan. Early life Alice Mabel Bacon was the youngest of the three daughters and two sons of Reverend Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, professor at the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry. In 1872, when Alice was fourteen, Japanese envoy Mori Arinori selected her father's home as a residence for Japanese women being sent overseas for education by the Meiji government, as part of the Iwakura Mission. Alice received twelve-year-old Yamakawa Sutematsu as her house-guest.
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Alice Freeman Palmer
1855 - 1902 (47 years)
Alice Freeman Palmer was an American educator. As Alice Freeman, she was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she left to marry the Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer. From 1892 to 1895 she was dean of women at the newly founded University of Chicago.
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Margaret Haley
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Margaret A. Haley was a teacher, unionist, and Georgist land value tax activist, who was dubbed the "lady labor slugger". Haley was the first business representative of the Chicago Teachers Federation and a pioneer leader in organizing schoolteachers. During her long career with the CTF, Haley fought to correct tax inequalities, increase the salaries of teachers, and expose unfair land leasing by the Chicago Board of Education.
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