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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List of the most influential people in Education,

#1401

Umberto Eco

#179029

Overall Influence

#1402

Slavko Kacunko

#147996

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Slavko Kacunko, b. 1964 in Osijek was Professor for Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Copenhagen . His academic field is art- and culture history and media theory. He studied philosophy, art history and pedagogy at the University of Zagreb and Osijek, Promotion in Düsseldorf , Habilitation in Osnabruck . 2003 – 2009 Junior Professor for Art History of the Modern Period at the University of Osnabruck . 2010 - 2011 Representation Professorship for Visual Studies and Media Theory at the University of Düsseldorf. From 2011 to 2019 Full Professor for Art History and Visual Cult...

#1403

Carolyn A. Maher

#73068

Overall Influence

Carolyn A. Maher is the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education and Director of the Robert B. Davis Institute for Learning. She received the 2022 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Lifetime Achievement Award.

#1404

Philipp Fehl

#92399

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Philipp Pinchas Fehl was an Austrian born American artist and art historian. Early life Fehl was born in Vienna, Austria, to Hugo Fehl and Friederike "Frieda" Fehl . He was the cousin of the renowned ballet photographer Fred Fehl. His older cousin, Paul Eisler, attended Gymnasium, and Fehl determined that he also wanted this classical higher education for gifted students.

#1405

Robert B. Heilman

#79187

Overall Influence

1906 - 2004 (98 years)

Robert Bechtold Heilman was an American educator and writer. Life in academia Heilman attended Lafayette College and later received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University in 1935. Soon after, he began teaching at Louisiana State University . His entry into LSU occurred shortly after the rise of the Fugitive poets. While he was at LSU, many of his colleagues were influenced by the school of New Criticism. In 1948 Heilman joined the University of Washington faculty, as chair of the English department, which he led until his retirement in 1971.

#1406

Dell Upton

#83067

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dell Thayer Upton is an architectural historian. He is emeritus professor at the department of art history at University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He had taught previously at the University of Virginia.

#1407

Alexander Soper

Alexander Soper

#113739

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

Alexander Coburn Soper III was an American art historian who specialized in Asian art. He was a longtime editor of the journal Artibus Asiae and professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. He won the Charles Lang Freer Medal in 1990.

#1408

Lin Jiqing

#64755

Overall Influence

Lin Jiqing was a Chinese educator. He was the acting president of Shandong University in Qingdao from July 1936 to 1946. This was during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this time, Lin oversaw a tumultuous period as president of Shandong University as it moved from Qingdao to Anqing and then to Wanxian in 1938.

#1409

Pearlie Craft Dove

Pearlie Craft Dove

#168662

Overall Influence

1920 - 2015 (95 years)

Pearlie Craft Dove was an African-American educator. Dove taught at Clark College and helped to improve the college's Education Department. Under her leadership, Clark College became the first private Historically Black College in Georgia to be accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Later, she aided in the consolidation of Clark College with Atlanta University in order to begin Clark Atlanta University. She was also elected to work at the policy making level of the Association of Teacher Educators and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Educat...

#1410

Kern Alexander

#179297

Overall Influence

#1411

Rosemarie Haag Bletter

Rosemarie Haag Bletter

#118752

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Rosemarie Haag Bletter is a German-born American architectural historian, university professor, writer, and lecturer. Education Bletter was educated at Columbia University, where she received her BS, MA, and PhD. She completed a master’s thesis on the Catalan Modernista architect Josep Vilaseca and a doctoral dissertation on the work of Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart.

#1412

Gail Levin

#61223

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Gail Levin is an American art historian, biographer, artist, and a Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, Women's Studies, and Liberal Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is a specialist in the work of Edward Hopper, feminist art, abstract expressionism, Eastern European Jewish influences on modernist art and American modernist art. Levin served as the first curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

#1413

Anna Marguerite McCann

Anna Marguerite McCann

#79606

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Anna Marguerite McCann was an American art historian and archaeologist. She is known for being an early influencer—and the first American woman—in the field of underwater archaeology, beginning in the 1960s. McCann authored works pertaining to Roman art and Classical archaeology, and taught both art history and archaeology at various universities in the United States. McCann was an active member of the Archaeological Institute of America, and received its Gold Medal Award in 1998. She also published under the name Anna McCann Taggart.

#1414

David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz

#86852

Overall Influence

1954 - 1992 (38 years)

David Michael Wojnarowicz Biography Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, where he and his two siblings and sometimes their mother were physically abused by their father, Ed Wojnarowicz. Ed, a Polish-American merchant marine from Detroit, had met and married Dolores McGuinness in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 when he was 26 and she was 16. After his parents' bitter divorce, Wojnarowicz and his siblings were kidnapped by their father and raised in Michigan and Long Island. After finding their young, Australian-born mother in a New York City phone book, they moved in with her. During his teenage years in Manhattan, Wojnarowicz worked as a street hustler around Times Square.

#1415

Mere Berryman

#172310

Overall Influence

Mere Anne Berryman is a New Zealand kaupapa Māori academic. She is Māori, of Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Awa, and Ngāti Whare descent and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Waikato. Academic career Berryman attained a master's degree at the University of Waikato in 2001. After a 2008 PhD titled 'Repositioning within indigenous discourses of transformation and self-determination' at the same institution, Berryman rose to full professor at the university.

#1416

Robert H. Shaffer

#58847

Overall Influence

1915 - 2017 (102 years)

Robert H. Shaffer was an American pioneer in the field of college student personnel and student affairs. His work spanned the course of four decades , which can be characterized as a period of "incredible growth and social and political change in American Society."

#1417

Caroline M. Solomon

#90776

Overall Influence

Caroline M. Solomon is an American academic whose teaching focuses on bringing deaf and hard-of-hearing students into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Having experienced first-hand the problems for deaf students in classrooms without sign language interpreters, Solomon, who teaches biology at Gallaudet University, has designed databases to help students and teachers network with organizations and interpreters familiar with educational bridges for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. She is a co-creator of a database that formalizes the lexicon of signs used for scientific and technological terms in American Sign Language.

#1418

Jenny Sampirisi

#157432

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Jenny Sampirisi is a Canadian poet, novelist, editor, and university instructor, living in Toronto. She is the author of the novel is/was and experimental poetry narrative Croak . Biography Sampirisi graduated with an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor in 2006 where she studied with poets Susan Holbrook, Di Brandt, Margaret Christakos and Marty Gervais. She collaborated with Margaret Christakos and Rachel Zolf for a polyvocal, multimedia staging of Christakos' polyvocal performance of Orphans Fan the Flames and Zolf's Masque. In 2007, she founded the ...

#1419

Michael Dunn

#92454

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Dunn is a New Zealand art historian. Dunn was born in Ashburton in Mid Canterbury, and attended Canterbury School of Fine Arts , graduating with a degree in painting.He was awarded the Painting Prize in 1963. He was awarded an Arts Council Scholarship to study Art History in 1965. He continued his studies at the University of Melbourne where he graduated with First class Honours and University of Auckland, where he received a PhD in Art History in 1985 for his thesis on Gordon Walters.

#1420

Wayne Au

#172443

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Wayne Wah Kwai Au is an American educational researcher and professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. Since August 1, 2022, he has also been the interim dean of the School of Educational Studies, a position he will hold until June 20, 2024. His research focuses on critical theory and the application of social justice in education.

#1421

Bettina Baumgärtel

#133385

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Bettina Baumgärtel is a German art historian who is head of the painting collection of the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. She is a leading authority on the art of Angelica Kauffman and founded the Angelika Kauffmann Research Project , of which she is the director, in 1990.

#1422

Dick Blau

#117442

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dick Blau is a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a photographer and film maker, and a figure in the study of photography of the family Personal life Blau was born in 1943. His mother is actress Beatrice Manley, his biological father the painter Albert Freedberg, and his adoptive father is the theater director Herbert Blau, who raised him from the age of six. His longterm partner is Jane Gallop, a Distinguished Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Together they have two children, Max and Ruby.

#1423

Ursula Hoff

#147754

Overall Influence

1909 - 2005 (96 years)

Ursula Hoff was an Australian scholar and prolific author on art. She enjoyed a long career at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, where she was deputy director from 1968 to 1973. Her involvement then continued when she was appointed London Adviser of the Felton Bequest , a major charitable foundation dedicated to the NGV.

#1424

Terry Barrett

#123570

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Terry Michael Barrett is an American art critic, and Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University. His many books, anthology chapters, and articles about contemporary art, art criticism, aesthetics, and the teaching of these, have had a significant impact on the field.

#1425

L. Jackson Newell

#147424

Overall Influence

L. Jackson Newell is an American historian and philosopher of higher education, specializing in the study and leadership of progressive colleges from Antioch College and Berea College prior to the Civil War through the new wave taking root in the early 2020s, including Outer Coast College, Thoreau College, and the Tidelines Institute. He has served as professor of educational leadership and dean of Liberal Education at the University of Utah, and as president of Deep Springs College.

#1426

Nelson George

#54990

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Nelson George is an American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Biography George attended St. John's University. He was an intern at the New York Amsterdam News before being hired as black music editor for Record World. He later served as a music editor for Billboard magazine from 1982 to 1989. While there, George published two books: Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound in 1986, and The Death of Rhythm & Blues in 1988. He also wrote a column, entitled "Native Son", for the Village Voice from 1988 to 1992.

#1427

James E. Lewis

#91294

Overall Influence

1923 - 1997 (74 years)

James Edward Lewis was an African-American artist, art collector, professor, and curator in the city of Baltimore. He is best known for his role as the leading force for the creation of the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, an institution of the HBCU Morgan State University. His work as the chairman of the Morgan Art Department from 1950 to 1986 allowed for the museum to amass a large collection of more than 3,000 works, predominantly of African and African diasporan art. In addition, he is also well known for his role as an interdisciplinary artist, primarily focused on sculpture, though also having notable examples of lithography and illustration.

#1428

Jack Shallcrass

#165587

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

John James Shallcrass was a New Zealand author, educator and humanist. Biography Born in Takapuna in 1922, Shallcrass was educated at Wellington College, and served in the Pacific during World War II. He later studied at Victoria University College, from where he graduated with a Diploma of Education in 1952, a Bachelor of Arts in 1959 and Master of Arts in 1961.

#1429

Whitney Chadwick

#118584

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Whitney Chadwick is an American art historian and educator, who has published on contemporary art, modernism, Surrealism, and gender and sexuality. Her book Women, Art and Society was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1990 and revised in 1997; it is now in its fifth edition. Chadwick is Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University from the School of Art.

#1430

Davor Džalto

#29761

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Davor Džalto is an artist, art historian, theologian and philosopher of Bosnian-Herzegovinian origin. Biography Džalto was born in Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He graduated from the School of Art in Niš, Serbia. As an 18-year-old student he published his first book – On Writing as an Artistic, Historical, Social and Cultural Phenomenon.

#1431

Tim Carroll

#96241

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Timothy E. Carroll is a Canadian politician and educator. He represented 5th Queens in the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island from 1986 to 1996 as a Liberal. Carroll was born in 1951 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. He graduated from the University of Prince Edward Island with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree, and the University of Saskatchewan with a Masters of Business Administration degree. He married Kathy Jenkins in 1978. In his early career, he was manager of the Ontario Vegetable Board for five years, worked as a marketing consultant in Western Canada and P.E.I., and was an assistant professor at St.

#1432

Rowena Arshad

#167185

Overall Influence

Rowena Arshad is Chair in Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctorate was an interpretive study of teacher activism in equity and anti-discrimination in Scotland and her ongoing research is into equity and anti-discrimination issues in education and within educational policy.

#1433

Kate Pahl

#175764

Overall Influence

Kate Heron Pahl is Professor of Literacies and Head of Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work draws on arts and humanities methodologies to co-produce knowledge with community partners and the intersections between arts methodologies and community cohesion. Her publications have drawn on literary theory, New Literacy Studies and social anthropology.

#1434

Raymond Ward Bissell

#80159

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Raymond Ward Bissell, Jr. was an American art historian and educator. A scholar of Italian Baroque art, Bissell was a professor of art history at the University of Michigan. Career Born in New York City to Raymond Sr. and Elizabeth Weston, Bissell graduated from Towson High School in 1954. He then received a Bachelor of Arts in 1958 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1966, both from the University of Michigan. Bissell wrote a doctoral dissertation on the Italian Baroque painter Orazio Gentileschi. He would dedicate the rest of his career to studying that period of art, as well as Orazio's daughter...

#1435

Marc Michael Epstein

#104521

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Marc Michael Epstein is Professor of Religion and Visual Culture on the Mackie M. Paschall & Norman Davis Chair at Vassar College. Education Epstein received his B.A. from Oberlin College and earned the M.A., M.Phil., and PhD degrees in Religious Studies at Yale University. He completed much of his graduate research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

#1436

Peter H. Feist

#85465

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Peter Heinz Feist was a German art historian. Life Feist was born in 1928 in Warnsdorf in northern Bohemia, where he grew up. His father Georg H. Feist was a surgeon and in 1926 he moved with his wife from Prague to Warnsdorf, where he took over the management of the municipal hospital. Peter's mother, Isolde Feist née Sojka, was a nurse who as a so-called half-Jewish woman converted to Lutheranism before her marriage in 1923; her father was a wealthy wine and spirits merchant from Reichenberg. In 1932 Peter's parents divorced. His mother was later murdered together with her second husband ...

#1437

Mel George

#85250

Overall Influence

1936 - 2016 (80 years)

Melvin D. George was an American educator who was president of St. Olaf College from 1985 to 1994, and twice interim president of the University of Missouri. George was interim president from 1984 to 1985 and again from 1996 to 1997.

#1438

Sherry Farrell Racette

#131211

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Sherry Farrell Racette is a Métis-Canadian feminist scholar, author, curator, and artist. She is best known for her contributions to Indigenous and Canadian art histories. She is currently an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina.

#1439

Deborah Adetuni Egunyomi

#174545

Overall Influence

Deborah Adetunbi Egunyomi is a professor of Continuing and Non-Formal Education at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, where she previously served as the Head of the Adult Education Department. She was a member of the Visitation Panel set up by Ekiti state government to reposition the College of Health Science and Technology, Ijero-Ekiti.

#1440

Jacinta Duncan

#105454

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jacinta Duncan is an Australian science educator who grew up on marginal farming land in the Millewa area in the top North West of Victoria. Working alongside her father, Duncan learned animal husbandry, and how to crop wheat and barley while her mother, a primary school teacher, taught her music, French and took her to learn ballet. Duncan says "the importance of an inquisitive mind and a robust education has always been at the forefront of my life".

#1441

Mihhail Lotman

#87649

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mihhail Lotman is an Estonian literature researcher and politician, son of Juri Lotman and Zara Mints. Mihhail Lotman's research fields include general semiotics and semiotics of culture as well as text theory and history of Russian literature. Lotman was a member of the board of Russian Cultural Society in Estonia from 1988 to 1994. Lotman is a professor of semiotics and literary theory at the Tallinn University and also a member of a research group on semiotics at the University of Tartu.

#1442

Catherine Karkov

#92404

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Catherine E. Karkov is professor of History of Art and head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research centres on early medieval art, especially Anglo-Saxon art, and she has published three monographs. Her first concerns Anglo-Saxon art; the second one on the relation between text and image in Anglo-Saxon literature; and the third on how Anglo-Saxon writers imagined England as a place, how Anglo-Saxon England is understood by modern audiences, and the "fraught history of 'Anglo-Saxon' studies".

#1443

Paul Thompson

#118863

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Paul Warwick Thompson FRSA is rector of the Royal College of Art in London, England. From January 2024, Thompson will take up appointment as Chair of the British Council. Thompson was educated at Bryanston School, the University of Bristol and the University of East Anglia .

#1444

Yusuf Ali Mollah

#114516

Overall Influence

Mohammad Yousuf Ali Mollah is a Bangladeshi professor and educator. He served as the acting chairman of University Grants Commission of Bangladesh in May 2019. Early life Mollah graduated in Chemistry from Dhaka University in 1969. He completed his post graduation in Physical-Inorganic chemistry from the same university in 1970. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Macquarie University in 1979.

#1445

Duccio Tessari

#70473

Overall Influence

1926 - 1994 (68 years)

Duccio Tessari was an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor, considered one of the fathers of Spaghetti Westerns. Born in Genoa, Tessari started in the fifties as documentarist and as screenwriter of peplum films. In 1964 he co-wrote Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, one year later he gained an impressive commercial success and launched the Giuliano Gemma's career with A Pistol for Ringo and its immediate sequel, The Return of Ringo.

#1446

Alessandro Nova

#125075

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Alessandro Ferruccio Nova is an Italian art historian who specialises in the Renaissance. He is Director Emeritus of the Art History Institute of Florence – the Max-Plank-Institute and Honorary Professor of Goethe University Frankfurt .

#1447

William T. Beaver

#99288

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

William Thomas Beaver was an American medical researcher and educator who was a professor at Georgetown University. He is best known for his role in drafting the first versions of the rules governing clinical studies in the United States, and for his research into medical usage of painkilling drugs.

#1448

Shyne

#68621

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Moses Michael Levi Barrow is a Belizean rapper and politician. He is the Leader of the Opposition in the Belize House of Representatives, and the leader of the Belize United Democratic Party. Barrow was born in Belize but moved to Brooklyn in New York City as a child and began to rap as a teenager. He is perhaps best known for his 2000 singles "Bad Boyz" and "Bonnie & Shyne". He also wrote and performed on a number of multi-platinum albums, such as Usher's Confessions, Lil Wayne's Carter IV, Notorious B.I.G's Born Again, Mase's Double Up, and Puff Daddy's Forever among other top-selling album...

#1449

Elmira Mangum

#80269

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Elmira Mangum is an American educator and retired university administrator, who served as President of Florida A&M University from 2014 to 2017. She was the 11th President of FAMU and the first woman to permanently hold the position in the 128-year history of the university. She served as President until March 2017, but was on administrative leave from September 2016 to March 2017.

#1450

Bennett Lorber

#126928

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Bennett Lorber is an American medical educator. In 2018 he became professor emeritus at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. An authority on the listeriosis bacterial infection in humans, he has been recognized for the quality of his clinical teaching and has received distinguished teacher awards from the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American College of Physicians . He also received a lifetime achievement award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America . He was president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia between 2010 and 2012 and of the ...

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