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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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Education,

#1301

John Ellis Bowlt

John Ellis Bowlt

#93086

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

John Ellis Bowlt is an English art historian specialising in Russian avant garde art of 1900-1930. He is a professor at the University of Southern California and directs its Institute of Modern Russian Culture.

#1302

Roland Martin

#32231

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

Roland Martin was a French archaeologist. From 1934 to 1938 Martin studied at the Sorbonne and the École normale supérieure. From 1938 until 1946, he was a member of the French School at Athens. From 1936 to 1971, he taught at the University of Dijon, since 1956 as a professor. From 1965 to 1980 he was Directeur d'études at the École pratique des hautes études and from 1971 to 1980 professor of Greek Archaeology at the University Paris I.

#1303

Del Close

#59963

Overall Influence

1934 - 1999 (65 years)

Del Close was an American actor, writer, and teacher who coached many of the best-known comedians and comic actors of the late twentieth century. In addition to an acting career in television and film, he was one of the influences on modern improvisational theater. Close is co-founder of the ImprovOlympic .

#1304

Yuko Hasegawa

#103310

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Yuko Hasegawa is the director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and professor of curatorial and art theory at Tokyo University of the Arts. Early life and education Hasegawa was born in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan and graduated from Kyoto University with a Bachelor of Arts in law, and from Tokyo University of the Arts with an Master of Fine Arts in art history.

#1305

Franziska Lang

#151596

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Franziska Lang is an archaeologist and professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Education Lang got an M.A. from the Free University of Berlin in 1987, and a doctor of philosophy degree in 1991 from the Free University of Berlin.

#1306

Joseph Grigely

#97470

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Joseph Grigely is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials , and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

#1307

Erma Johnson Hadley

#112216

Overall Influence

1942 - 2015 (73 years)

Erma Johnson Hadley was an American educator, the first woman and first African-American to serve as chancellor of Tarrant County College. She was named to the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in 2010. Early life and education She grew up in Leggett, Texas and was the first black student there to graduate from college. She received a bachelor's degree from Prairie View A&M University and an MBA from Bowling Green State University.

#1308

Paula Barrett

#74518

Overall Influence

Dr Paula Barrett is a clinician, scholar, researcher and professor in the field of child psychology. She has been recognised as being amongst the top 1 percent of publishers within the field of Psychology and Psychiatry at an international level.

#1309

Rudi Fuchs

#52997

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Rudolf Herman "Rudi" Fuchs is a Dutch art historian and curator. Personal life Rudolf Herman Fuchs was born on 28 April 1942 in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. He studied art history from 1967 to 1975 at Leiden University, after which he became a museum director and critic. According to one source "he represents the dying type of museum director who, like a teacher, guides his visitors through the wonderful world of art."

#1310

Ernst Kitzinger

Ernst Kitzinger

#55967

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Ernst Kitzinger FBA was a German-American historian of late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine art. Early life and education Kitzinger was born into a well-educated Jewish family in Munich; his father, Wilhelm Nathan Kitzinger, was a prominent lawyer; his mother, Elisabeth Kitzinger, née Merzbacher, was a pioneering social worker involved with child welfare among Eastern European Jewish refugee and immigrant families. Kitzinger entered the University of Munich in 1931, where he studied the history of art, principally under Wilhelm Pinder. From the summer of 1931 on, Kitzinger spent signif...

#1311

Amarjyoti Choudhury

Amarjyoti Choudhury

#59104

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Amarjyoti Choudhury is an Indian educationist, scientist, actor, reciter, playwright, poet, novelist, orator and editor. He is a former Vice-Chancellor of Gauhati University and a former Pro-vice-chancellor of Tezpur University. After superannuation from Tezpur University, he occupied the CV Raman Chair of Applied Physics and later that of Vice-chancellor of University of Science and Technology, Meghalaya. He was also the Vice-Chancellor of Assam down town University from 1 December 2017 to 31 August 2020. Now, he is the editor of renowned Assamese daily Dainik Asam.

#1312

Michael Rosenthal

#88243

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael J. Rosenthal is emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Warwick. He is a specialist both in British art and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the arts of early colonial Australia.

#1313

Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein

#138014

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein was an American teacher of art and art history and an early innovator in the teaching of women-in-art history courses. She was born to Lillian Kaufman and Aaron Streifer in Harlem, New York, and moved to Brooklyn shortly thereafter.

#1314

Erna Diez

#127152

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Erna Diez was an Austrian classical archaeologist who undertook significant work on Roman art and the archaeology of the provinces of Noricum and Pannonia. Early life and education Diez was born in Kaschau in 1913. Diez studied classical philology, archaeology, art history and history at the University of Vienna and graduated from the University of Graz. In 1937 she earned her doctorate, with a thesis entitled "Quomodo Valerius Maximus res in factorum and dictorum memorabilium libris IX narratas exornaverit".

#1315

Fernando de Toro

#81127

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Fernando de Toro wasborn the 13th of January 1950 in Santiago / Chile. Fernando de Toro is a Full Professor in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He was for five years Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies in the same university . De Toro published in diverse fields: literary theory, semiotics, comparative literature, post-modernity and post-coloniality, Latin American literature and Western Literatures. Some of his publications include: * Brecht en el teatro latinoamericano contemporáneo * Semiótica del teatro * Theat...

#1316

Robin Cormack

#43252

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Robin Sinclair Cormack, FSA is a British classicist and art historian, specialising in Byzantine art. He was Professor in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1991–2004.

#1317

Albert Ritzhaupt

#173173

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Albert Dieter Ritzhaupt is an American educational researcher, author, professor of educational technology and computer science education at the University of Florida, where he has served since 2010. Ritzhaupt serves as the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Research on Technology in Education since 2018, the official research publication of the International Society for Technology in Education. Ritzhaupt is a member of the Institute for Advanced Learning Technologies, research member of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, and President for the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance, and Instruction .

#1318

Gannit Ankori

#40484

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Gannit Ankori is an Israeli art historian. She is Professor of Fine Arts and Chair in Israeli Art at the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University. She was previously chair of the Department of Art History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

#1319

Christopher Wood

#94823

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Christopher S. Wood is professor in the Department of German at New York University; he is best known as an art historian. Early life and education Wood is the son of Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize winning historian of the early American republic and University professor emeritus at Brown University. His sister, Amy Wood, is a professor of history at Illinois State University.

#1320

Karsonya Wise Whitehead

Karsonya Wise Whitehead

#110790

Overall Influence

Karsonya "Kaye" Wise Whitehead is an American educator, author, radio host, speaker, and documentary filmmaker who is known as the #blackmommyactivist. She is the founding director of The Karson Institute for Race, Peace, and Social Justice, a Professor of Communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland, and the host of Today With Dr. Kaye on WEAA. In 2022, Dr. Kaye received the Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence from Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication for Outstanding Reporting on the Impact Racial Reckoni...

#1321

David Jung-Kuang Chiu

#72099

Overall Influence

1936 - 2006 (70 years)

David Jung-Kuang Chiu was a Chinese-born American educator, serving as both Professor and Dean at Hofstra University from 1970 to 2001 when he retired. David J. Chiu was born on July 11, 1936, in Gulangyu, a westernized Island-city in southern China to Minxian and Juyin Chiu. At the time, Gulangyu was the location of the consulate offices of the Western countries in China. Soon after Chiu's birth, the family moved to Qinhuangdao in northern China, the starting point of the Great Wall of China. In 1947 at the age of eleven, Chiu's family moved to Taiwan, because Chiu's father, Mingxian, a comm...

#1322

Josue Cruz Jr.

#111963

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Josué Cruz Jr. is an educator, professor, and current Dean of the School Education at Bowling Green University. Cruz, a supporter of early childhood education, was appointed President of the National Association for the Education of Young Children in 2005.

#1323

Emil Loteanu

#88796

Overall Influence

1936 - 2003 (67 years)

Emil Loteanu was a Moldovan and Soviet film director born in what is now Moldova. He moved to Moscow in his early life. His best known films are Lăutarii, Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven, A Hunting Accident and Anna Pavlova.

#1324

Keva Bethel

#96195

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

Keva Marie Bethel, CMG was a Bahamian educator and the first president of the College of the Bahamas. Early life Bethel was born Keva Marie Eldon on 18 August 1935 in Nassau, Bahamas to Rowena and Sidney Eldon.

#1325

Max Hattler

#101604

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Max Hattler is a German video artist and experimental filmmaker. He created the kaleidoscopic political short films "Collision" and "Spin" , abstract stop motion works "Shift" and "AANAATT" , and psychedelic animation loops "Sync", "1923 aka Heaven" and "1925 aka Hell" .

#1326

Gerd-Helge Vogel

#130498

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gerd-Helge Vogel is a German art historian. Life Vogel was born in Zwickau, Saxony and grew up as the son of the dentist Helmut Vogel and his wife Lisa, née Leupold, in Hartenstein in the Ore Mountains. From 1966 to 1970 he visited the Extended Secondary School in Aue in Saxony, where he simultaneously completed vocational training as a lathe operator in the Blema company. After the Abitur in 1970, even before taking up his studies of Art history and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, he did will complete eighteen months of basic military service as part of compulsory military service. In 1976 he completed his studies with the professors Peter H.

#1327

Margo Machida

#104924

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Margo Machida is an American art historian, curator, cultural critic, and artist. Machida is a Professor of Art History and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her book, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, was awarded the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2011. In 2003 she co-edited the book, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art, published by the University of California Press. She was a co-founder of Godzilla, an arts advocacy organization for Asian American artists.

#1328

Louis A. Waldman

#84267

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Louis Alexander Waldman is an American art historian and author specializing in the Italian Renaissance. Early life Waldman was born near Detroit, Michigan on October 29, 1965. Education Waldman attended Hunter College and subsequently studied with Sir John Pope-Hennessy and Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt at the Institute of Fine Arts .

#1329

Melvin N. Johnson

#63402

Overall Influence

Melvin N. Johnson is an American academic administrator. He served as the seventh president of Tennessee State University, a historically black public university in Nashville, Tennessee, from 2005 to 2011.

#1330

Hugo van der Velden

#138037

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Hugo Tjeerd van der Velden is a Dutch art historian. He currently is Rijksmuseum Chair of Art History of the Middle Ages, especially in the Low Countries . Education and career Hugo van der Velden studied art history at the Universiteit Utrecht, where he also taught from 1992–2003. During this time he was also a fellow at the Warburg Institute and a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. In 2003, he was appointed Professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University. He currently teaches at the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

#1331

Earl A. Powell III

Earl A. Powell III

#76071

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Earl Alexander Powell III , nicknamed Rusty Powell, is an American art historian and museum director. From 1980 to 1992, he was Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in September 1992. The Gallery announced in November 2017 that Powell would step down in 2019. He was appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in 2003 and elected Chair in 2005. He was appointed to a second four-year term on August 30, 2012, and continues to serve as Chair.

#1332

David Bradley

#88341

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David Henry Bradley, Jr. is the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. Both novels have been recently released in electronic editions by Open Road Media.

#1333

Benjamin Munson

#157688

Overall Influence

Benjamin Munson is a professor and chair of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences University of Minnesota. His research relates to relationships among speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary growth in children. The bulk of his research has examined how speech perception, production, and word knowledge interact during development in typically developing children, in children with Speech Sound Disorder, in children with Developmental Language Disorder, in adult second-language learners, and in adults with age-related hearing impairment. He has also studied how people convey and perceive...

#1334

Michael Sullivan

#56901

Overall Influence

1916 - 2013 (97 years)

Donovan Michael Sullivan was a Canadian-born British art historian and collector, and one of the major Western pioneers in the field of modern Chinese art history and criticism. Sullivan was born in Toronto, Ontario, and moved to England at the age of three. He was the youngest of five children of Alan Sullivan , a Canadian mining engineer turned novelist and his wife Elisabeth . Sullivan was a graduate of Rugby School and graduated from the University of Cambridge in architecture in 1939. He was in China from 1940 to 1946 with the International and Chinese Red Cross followed by teaching and ...

#1335

Stephen Hunter

#69976

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Stephen Hunter is an American novelist, essayist, and film critic. Life and career Hunter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. His father was Charles Francis Hunter, a Northwestern University speech professor who was murdered in 1975 by two male prostitutes. His mother was Virginia Ricker Hunter, a writer of children's books. After graduating from Northwestern in 1968 with a degree in journalism, he was drafted for two years into the United States Army. He served in The Old Guard in Washington, D.C., a unit that has both operational and ceremonial missions, the latter most notably being the guard force for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

#1336

Phoebe Stanton

#56673

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Phoebe Baroody Stanton was an American architectural historian, professor and urban planner. She taught at Johns Hopkins University, from 1955 until 1982. Stanton was outspoken about the architectural history and design for the city of Baltimore. She wrote and published three books.

#1337

Naomi Zigmond

#177388

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Naomi Zigmond is an American education scholar, currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research involves child education and classroom education.

#1338

Gauvin Alexander Bailey

Gauvin Alexander Bailey

#40149

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Gauvin Alexander Bailey is an American-Canadian author and art historian. He is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen's University. Bailey is a correspondent étranger at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He held the 2017 Panofsky Professorship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

#1339

Lena Liepe

#82274

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Lena Liepe, born 1962, is a Swedish art historian, who since 2017 is professor in art history at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She has worked at the University of Lund, Sweden, University of Tromsø, Norway and University of Oslo, Norway. Her main research areas are medieval art history, art theory and method, genus perspective on medieval art, and icelandic medieval illuminated manuscripts. In her research she has focused on how museums in Sweden grew out of 19th century displays of medieval church art, and for the moment she completes a major work on the importance of relics in medieval church art.

#1340

Mahendran

#85744

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

J. Alexander , known professionally as Mahendran, was an Indian film director, screenwriter and actor, known for his work in the Tamil film industry. Mahendran is regarded as one of the greatest film makers of Tamil cinema and has influenced several filmmakers of the generations that followed.

#1341

Susan Casteras

#70520

Overall Influence

Susan Paulette Casteras is an American art historian, educator, and curator. Casteras is Professor of Art History Emeritus from the University of Washington. She is a specialist on British art, particularly Victorian art and Pre-Raphaelitism.

#1342

Nan Giese

#109137

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Nancy Giese was an Australian leader in education and the visual and performing arts, who pioneered tertiary education in the Northern Territory, leading the Darwin Community College which eventually became Charles Darwin University.

#1343

Sal Khan

#107570

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Salman "Sal" Amin Khan is an American educator and the founder of Khan Academy, a free online non-profit educational platform with which he has produced over 6,500 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects, originally focusing on mathematics and science. He is also the founder of Khan Lab School, a private brick-and-mortar school in Mountain View, California.

#1344

Umberto Eco

#177523

Overall Influence

#1345

Don Trent Jacobs

#177537

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Donald Trent Jacobs, also known as "Wahinkpe Topa," a Lakota term translating as Four Arrows, is an American college professor, writer and activist for American Indian rights whose work has focused on Indigenous worldviews, wellness and counter-hegemonic education. He lives in Mexico.

#1346

Lisa Jackson Pulver

#99769

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Lisa Rae Jackson Pulver is an Aboriginal Australian epidemiologist and researcher in the area of Aboriginal health who has been Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney since October 2018.

#1347

Robert J. Jones

#119938

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert J. Jones is a crop physiology scientist and currently the tenth chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Jones is the first African-American to hold this office. He previously served as president of the University of Albany. In addition to his academic career, Jones was a tenor singer in Sounds of Blackness, a vocal ensemble from Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota that sings gospel, soul, and R&B.

#1348

Elizabeth McKinley

Elizabeth McKinley

#176135

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Ann McKinley is a New Zealand academic and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Melbourne. Academic career After a 2003 PhD titled Brown Bodies, White Coats: Postcolonialism, Māori Women and Science at the University of Waikato, McKinley moved to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor and moving to the University of Melbourne.

#1349

Joseph A. Amato

Joseph A. Amato

#35359

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Joseph A. Amato is an American author and scholar. Amato was a history professor and university dean of local and regional history. He has written extensively on European intellectual and cultural history, and the history of Southwestern Minnesota. Since retiring, he has continued publishing history books, as well as five poetry collections and his first novel.

#1350

Patricia Jennings

#158165

Overall Influence

Patricia A. Jennings is a Professor of Education at the University of Virginia. Education and early career Patricia A. Jennings received a BA from Antioch College in 1977, an M.Ed. from Saint Mary's College in 1980, and a Ph.D. from the University of California Davis in 2004. Before her degrees in education and human development, Jennings also studied Buddhism at the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and later founded a Montessori school that taught meditation during the late 1980s.

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