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,

#1751

Maurice Pialat

#47293

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Maurice Pialat was a French film director, screenwriter and actor known for the rigorous and unsentimental style of his films. His work is often described as "realist", though many film critics acknowledge it does not fit the traditional definition of realism.

#1752

Roger Blackley

#141850

Overall Influence

1953 - 2019 (66 years)

Roger Allan Blackley was a New Zealand art historian, author, and curator. He was a noted authority on the work of artist C. F. Goldie. Early life and education Blackley was born in Masterton in 1953. He studied art history at the University of Auckland, graduating Master of Arts with first-class honours. During his time at the University he was a member of the Auckland Gay Liberation Front, describing himself as a "radical gay" who believed it was "too late for liberalism, because gay means more than just who you screw - it's a whole lifestyle." His 1978 master's thesis Writing Alfred Sharpe...

#1753

Velina Hasu Houston

#151661

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Velina Hasu Houston is an American playwright, essayist, poet, author, editor and screenwriter who has had many works produced, presented and published. Her work draws from her experience of being multiracial as well as from the immigrant experiences of her family and those she encountered growing up in Junction City, Kansas.

#1754

Simon Shaw-Miller

#150585

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Simon Shaw-Miller is emeritus professor of history of art at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in the relationships between art and music in the modern period. Early life and education Simon Shaw-Miller was born Simon Miller in 1960 in Pembury, on the outskirts of Royal Tunbridge Wells. He was brought up in the village of Hollingbourne and the council estates of Park Wood and Senacre on the outskirts of Maidstone, in Kent. He attended Oldborough Manor High School, and then went to Brighton Polytechnic to study for a joint degree in art with music, graduating in 1982. He did post ...

#1755

Kanishka Raja

#172983

Overall Influence

1970 - 2018 (48 years)

Kanisha Raja was born in Calcutta India, and later lived and worked in New York City. Raja was an artist who explored the intersections between art, craft, and technology, and the gaps that open up as information travels and is represented through images. He participated in numerous international solo exhibitions and was a lecturer at the Yale School of Art.

#1756

Geoffrey Batchen

#43910

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Geoffrey Batchen is an Australian art historian. Since 2020, Batchen has been Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford. Career Professor Assistant Professor, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, 1991–1996; Associate Professor, Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1996–2001; Professor of Art History: City University of New York Graduate Center, New York City, 2002–2010; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2010–2019. Much of Batchen's work as a professor and curator focuses on the history of photography.

#1757

Thomas W. Gaehtgens

#61604

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Thomas W. Gaehtgens is a German art historian with special interest in French and German art and art history from the 18th to the 20th century. He was the founding director of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris and was director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California.

#1758

Theodore Reff

#93500

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Theodore Franklin Reff is Professor Emeritus of European Painting and Sculpture, 1840–1940 at Columbia University. Reff is an expert on French art of the nineteenth century, and in particular Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet.

#1759

Sion Sono

#83719

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

is a Japanese filmmaker, author, and poet. Best known on the festival circuit for the film Love Exposure , he has been called "the most subversive filmmaker working in Japanese cinema today", a "stakhanovist filmmaker" with an "idiosyncratic" career.

#1760

Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles

#113685

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Melvin Van Peebles was an American actor, filmmaker, writer, and composer. He worked as an active filmmaker into the 2000s. His feature film debut, The Story of a Three-Day Pass , was based on his own French-language novel and was shot in France, as it was difficult for a black American director to get work at the time. The film won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival which gained him the interest of Hollywood studios, leading to his American feature debut Watermelon Man, in 1970. Eschewing further overtures from Hollywood, he used the successes he had so far to bankrol...

#1761

Marian Lopez Fernandez-Cao

#180704

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Marian Lopez Fernandez-Cao is a Spanish university professor, curator and researcher, specializing in art, feminism, art therapy and social inclusion. Since 1992 she has been a professor in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, and is expert on the artist Sonia Delaunay.

#1762

Ronald J. Onorato

#124032

Overall Influence

Ronald J. Onorato is a Professor of Art History and Chair in the University of Rhode Island Art and Art History Department. His scholarship focusses on American architecture, public sculpture and funerary art with a special interest in the architectural heritage of Newport, Rhode Island from the colonial period to the present. He is chair of the National Register Review Board for Rhode Island and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architecture, Rhode Island Chapter. He has served as Co-Chair of the URI Center for the Humanities, on the Board of Directors, Newport Historical Socie...

#1763

Ton De Jong

#187581

Overall Influence

#1764

Rea Tajiri

#146934

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American video artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter, known for her personal essay film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige . Early life Tajiri was born in 1958 in Chicago, Illinois. Tajiri's father, Vincent Tajiri, was the founding photo editor for Playboy Magazine. Her uncle, Shinkichi Tajiri, was a prominent sculptor who resided in the Netherlands.

#1765

Chris Welsby

#172887

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Chris Welsby is a Canadian experimental filmmaker, New Media and gallery installation artist. Born in the UK, in the 1970s Welsby was a member of the London Film-Makers' Co-op , and co-founder of the Digital Media Studio at the Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL, London. He immigrated to Canada in 1989. He is considered one of the pioneers of expanded cinema and moving image installation and was one of the first artists to exhibit film installations at the Tate and Hayward galleries London. His expanded cinema works and installations have since continued to break new conceptual ground and attract critical attention.

#1766

Helen Hedges

#187629

Overall Influence

Helen Hedges is a New Zealand education academic. As of 2018 she is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 2002 MEd Early Years thesis titled 'Subject content knowledge in early childhood curriculum and pedagogy' and a 2007 PhD titled 'Funds of knowledge in early childhood communities of inquiry' undertaken at Massey University, Hedges published prolifically. She joined the University of Auckland in 2003, rising to full professor in 2018.

#1767

Van Deren Coke

#86699

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Frank Van Deren Coke, F. Van Deren Coke, or Van Deren Coke was an American photographer, scholar and museum professional. He was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and died in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Early career Coke's introduction to photography began as a practicing photographer. He studied with Nicholas Haz at the Clarence H. White School of Photography and later with Ansel Adams. He had his first exhibition at the University of Kentucky in 1940 while he was there studying history and art history.

#1768

Ellen Spiro

#127894

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Ellen Spiro is an American documentary filmmaker. She is a producer and director of a television documentary Are the Kids Alright?, which won an Emmy Award in 2005. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in documentary, experimental film, and music film production in the Department of Radio-TV-Film. She is a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

#1769

Letitia Fickel

#181543

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Letitia Cope Hochstrasser Fickel is a New Zealand education academic and academic administrator. She is currently a full professor and acting pro-vice chancellor at the University of Canterbury. Academic career After a 1998 EdD at the University of Louisville titled 'Teacher culture and community : an ethnography of a high school social studies department,' Fickel worked at the University of Alaska Anchorage before moving to the University of Canterbury in 2010.

#1770

Branden W. Joseph

Branden W. Joseph

#79145

Overall Influence

Branden Wayne Joseph is the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Prior to coming to Columbia in the fall of 2006, Joseph taught at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, contributing author to Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works and an editor of the journal Grey Room, a multi-disciplinary journal of architecture, art, media and politics. He has published books about Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Diane Arbus, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Morris, Pat O'Neill, and Anthony McCall.

#1771

Kathryn Brush

#174263

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Kathryn Louise Brush is a Canadian art historian. She is Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Western Ontario, and was the first professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario to be named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

#1772

John Steer

#123774

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

John Steer was Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London, from 1979 to his retirement in 1984. Subsequently, he was Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University of London. He was a specialist in Venetian art.

#1773

Geert ten Dam

#187802

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Geert ten Dam is a Dutch scientist. She is the president of the University of Amsterdam.

#1774

Dorothy Price

#171021

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Dorothy Cilla Price is a British art historian and academic. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was previously Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol, and was the first woman of colour to be appointed to a Chair in Art History at a Russell Group university. Price researches, teaches, and curates on "histories, art and thought of people of African descent", with a focus on German modernism, German expressionism, and post-war Black British art, with a focus on women artists. In 2021, she was ele...

#1775

Barbara Bloemink

#101892

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Barbara J. Bloemink is an American art historian and former director and chief curator of five art and design museums. She has published several works on the modernist painter Florine Stettheimer and is considered an expert on the artist.

#1776

Robert Cumming

#142741

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Robert Alexander Cumming is professor of the history of art at Boston University. He worked for the Tate Gallery, London, before moving to Christie's auction house where he founded the education department. After he retired from Christie's he joined Boston University. Cumming is a prolific author of art history books aimed at young people and beginners. His edited edition of the letters between Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark is published by Yale University Press.

#1777

Lothar Ledderose

#97056

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Lothar Ledderose is a German professor of the History of Art of Eastern Asia at the University of Heidelberg. A renowned authority in his field, he received the prestigious Balzan Prize in 2005. Life After graduating from the prestigious ?? Apostelgymnasium of Cologne he studied East-Asian as well as European History of Art, Sinology and Japanology at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, Paris, Taipei and Heidelberg.

#1778

Timon Screech

#55524

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Timon Screech was professor of the history of art at the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London from 1991 - 2021, when he left the UK in protest over Brexit. He is now a professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Screech is a specialist in the art and culture of early modern Japan.

#1779

Richard Meyer

#133006

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Richard Meyer is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford, he was an associate professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Outlaw Representation, a book about censorship and homosexuality in American art, and What Was Contemporary Art?, as well as a contributor to Artforum magazine. In 2013, he co-authored the book Art and Queer Culture, with Catherine Lord.

#1780

Gerard Vaughan

#126754

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gerard Ronald Vaughan is an Australian art historian and curator. He was director of the National Gallery of Victoria from 1999 to 2012, and was director of the National Gallery of Australia from 2014 to 2018.

#1781

Christopher White

#108582

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Sir Christopher John White CVO FBA is a British art historian and curator. He is the son of the artist and art administrator Gabriel White. He has specialized in the study of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age painting and printmaking.

#1782

William Hood

#117406

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

William Hood is an art historian and the Mildred C. Jay Professor of Art Emeritus at Oberlin College, where he taught from 1974 through 2007. Professor Hood taught the history of Italian Renaissance Art in Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology from 2008 through 2010. He is currently teaching art history seminars at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

#1783

Ruby Lin

#150988

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Ruby Lin Xin-ru is a Taiwanese actress, television and film producer, and pop singer. American entertainment critic Derek Elley named Lin as "Taiwan's TV Drama Queen". 3 years after Lin made her acting debut in a TV commercial, she rose to national and regional prominence overnight for her role as Xia Ziwei in the TV series My Fair Princess 还珠格格 . My Fair Princess was highly popular in East and Southeast countries; launching Lin as a household name in Asia. She followed the success with other hit series including The Duke of Mount Deer , Romance in the Rain , Boy & Girl , Affair of Half a Lif...

#1784

Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis

#178032

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis is a painter, art historian, and visual culturalist who focuses on African American, modern and contemporary African art, African Diaspora, and modern European Art and Primitivism. She is Professor Emerita, Departments of African-American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2021 she was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 31st Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art at Howard University.

#1785

Laura O'Dwyer

#169009

Overall Influence

Laura Mary O'Dwyer is a professor of Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics at Boston College known for her work on examining the impact of technology in education, especially science education, and for quantifying outcomes for K-12 student success.

#1786

Lizzie Borden

#146050

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Lizzie Borden is an American filmmaker, best known for her early independent films Born in Flames and Working Girls . Early life The daughter of a Detroit stockbroker, she was originally named Linda Elizabeth Borden. At the age of eleven she decided to take the name of the infamous accused double murderer Lizzie Borden, the inspiration for this children's rhyme:Lizzie Borden took an axeAnd gave her father forty whacks,When she saw what she had done,She gave her mother forty-oneOf her announcement to her parents that she was legally changing her name, Borden says, "At the time, my name was th...

#1787

Bernadine Newsom Denning

Bernadine Newsom Denning

#182647

Overall Influence

1930 - 2011 (81 years)

Bernadine Newsom Denning was an educator and civil rights activist recognised in the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. Biography Denning née Newsom was born in 1930 in Detroit. At the age of 16, she taught swimming at the Lucy Thurman branch of the Detroit YWCA. In 1951, she began work as a physical education teacher in Detroit public schools; she retired as assistant superintendent for community relations. She was also assistant professor of education at the University of Michigan. She served on the board of trustees for Central Michigan University.

#1788

Michele Bacci

#174991

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Michele Bacci, is an Italian art historian. He is professor of medieval history of art at the University of Fribourg since 2011 and member of the Academia Europaea since 2015. Career Michele Bacci studied art history at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and received his PhD there in 1999. Between 2002 and 2011, he was associate professor for medieval art history at the University of Siena; 2011 he received a call to the chair for medieval art history at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, which he holds since then. Visiting professorships and research stays brought him to, among oth...

#1789

Jaroslav Folda

#117212

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jaroslav Thayer Folda III is a medievalist, in which field he is a Haskins Medal winner; he is a scholar in the history of the art of the Crusades and the N. Ferebee Taylor Professor of the History of Art at the University of North Carolina. His area of interest for teaching and research is the art of the Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean world.

#1790

Anne Coffin Hanson

#183455

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Anne Coffin Hanson was an American art historian. She was the first female to be hired as a fully tenured professor, serve as president of the College Art Association, and department chair at Yale University.

#1791

Roger Stalley

#171343

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Roger Andrew Stalley is a scholar and teacher in medieval architecture and sculpture. His speciality is Early Gothic and Romanesque architecture and sculpture in England and Western Europe with a particular focus on Irish architecture and art. He has published numerous papers and books including Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland in 1987, for which he was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion in 1988 by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and Early Medieval Architecture in 1999 for the Oxford History of Art series. He is noted for his innovative teaching practices f...

#1792

David Essex

#115352

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David Essex is an English singer, songwriter, and actor. Since the 1970s, he has attained 19 Top 40 singles in the UK and 16 Top 40 albums. Internationally, Essex had the most success with his 1973 single "Rock On". He has also had an extensive career as an actor.

#1793

Jack M. Wilson

#179236

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jack M. Wilson is an American educator, entrepreneur and the President-Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Innovation at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. During his career, he has served various institutions as professor of physics, department chair, research center director, dean, provost, vice president, and president, and has served with multiple professional societies and government committees.

#1794

Ayoka Chenzira

#170016

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ayoka "Ayo" Chenzira is an independent African-American producer, film director, television director, animator, writer, experimental filmmaker, and transmedia storyteller. She is the first African American woman animator and one of a handful of Black experimental filmmakers working since the late 1970s. She has earned international acclaim for her experimental, documentary, animation, and cross-genre filmmaking productions. Her work, as well as her efforts as one of the first African American woman film educators, have led some in the press to describe her as a media activist for social justi...

#1795

Jillianne Code

#180197

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Jillianne Reay Code is a Canadian researcher and learning scientist. She is an associate professor in the faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and director of the Assessment for Learning in Immersion and Virtual Environments research lab.

#1796

Caroline A. Jones

#68929

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Caroline A. Jones , is an American art historian, author, curator, and critic. She teaches and serves within the History Theory Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

#1797

Delores J. Knaak

#184054

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Delores J. "Dee" Knaak was an American educator and politician. Knaak was born Delores Jean McComber in Hibbing, Minnesota and graduated from Hibbing High School and Hibbing Junior College. She went to St. Cloud State University. Knaak lived in White Bear Lake, Minnesota and taught in elementary school. Knaak served on the Ramsey County Commission. Knaak served in the Minnesota Senate from 1977 to 1980 and was a Republican. Knaak then served on the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission from 1991 to 1996. Knaak died in Maplewood, Minnesota. Her son was Fritz Knaak who also served in the Minne...

#1798

Philip Hallinger

#188162

Overall Influence

#1799

Pedro Oliveira

#183131

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Pedro Oliveira is a Portuguese innovation scholar who is Dean of Nova School of Business and Economics for the period 2023-26, succeeding Daniel Traça. He is also Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Chair Professor for the Impact Economy and Full Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics, professor with special responsibilities at Copenhagen Business School, and an entrepreneur. Previously he was a professor of Technology and Innovation Management at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics. He is best known for his work in the notion of patient innovation and for founding the Patient Innovation platform.

#1800

Jonathan Newman

Jonathan Newman

#126493

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Jonathan Newman is a British filmmaker and writer. Newman made his first feature film at the age of 25. Being Considered starred James Dreyfus and David Tennant. His recent movies include the action adventure film Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box, starring Sam Neill, Michael Sheen, Lena Headey and Keeley Hawes, with the lead of Mariah Mundi played by Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard. Retitled The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box, the film was released theatrically in USA on 10 January 2014. In 2012 Newman wrote and directed the critically acclaimed film Foster, starring Toni Collette, Ioan Gruffudd, Richard E.

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