The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Education,
#1801
Paweł Jędrzejko
#173694
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Paweł Jędrzejko is a literary scholar and an Americanist, translation studies scholar, musician and yachtsman. Member of the Polish a cappella sextet Banana Boat. Family and education Born into the family of university professors, the botanist Krzysztof Jędrzejko and linguist Ewa Jędrzejko, Paweł Jędrzejko is the elder brother of Maciej Jędrzejko , the founder and lead vocalist of the Polish a cappella sextet Banana Boat. Following in his mother's footsteps, Jędrzejko chose to pursue his career in modern languages and letters. In 1995, he received his MA in English from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.
Go to Profile#1802
Michael Camille
#78273
Overall Influence
1958 - 2002 (44 years)
Michael William Camille was a British art historian and academic, who was an influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages. He was Mary L. Block Professor at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#1803
Michael Parks
#62441
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Michael Parks was an American journalist, editor, and educator who wrote on various political events around the world throughout his career. He served as editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1997 to 2000. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting award in 1987 for his reports about the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He also taught at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and served several stints as its director.
Go to Profile#1804
Carol Tulloch
#154406
Overall Influence
Carol Tulloch is a British author and academic who is a Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at the University of the Arts London, known for her work on cultural heritage, auto/biography, personal archives and style narratives.
Go to Profile#1805
Elizabeth Cropper
#113998
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marjorie Elizabeth Cropper is a British-born art historian with a special interest in Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque art and art literature. Dean of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts since December 2000, she previously held positions as Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University and director of the university’s Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at Villa Spelman in Florence.
Go to Profile#1806
Jessica Snow
#161306
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jessica Snow is an American abstract artist, curator, and professor. Her paintings and drawings are distinguished by bright, vivid colors through a visual language that employs color, shape and texture to speak in conversation with the traditions of geometric abstraction, biomorphism, and color field painting. Her inspiration is fed by research into mid-century architecture, landscape design, 20th century art history and Asian art history. She lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she teaches painting, drawing and art appreciation at the University of San Francisco. Recently she...
Go to Profile#1807
David Labaree
#182591
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David F. Labaree is a historian of education and Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University. Works A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling The Trouble with Ed Schools How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939
Go to Profile#1808
Idah Sithole-Niang
#126860
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Idah Sithole-Niang is a Zimbabwean biochemist and educator. Her main area of research has been viruses which attack the cowpea, one of the major food crops of Zimbabwe. Biography Idah Sithole was born in Hwange, Zimbabwe, on 2 October 1957. She attended the University of London, on scholarship, earning a BS in biochemistry in 1982. When she was awarded a USAID Fellowship in 1983, Sithole chose to continue her education, studying plant and virus genetics. She earned a PhD in 1988 from Michigan State University in Lansing, Michigan. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Plant Researc...
Go to Profile#1809
Victor Swenson
#180689
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Victor Swenson was the founding executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council and the namesake for the Victor R. Swenson Humanities Educator Award. Swenson started work at the Humanities Council on New Year's Day, 1974 in Hyde Park, Vermont, with "a picnic table... and a folding chair and got to work." His early work was "...to travel the state, talk to interesting people explain this newfangled Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues as we were called in those days and encourage people to send us grant applications." with their early budget of $140,000. By the time Swenson...
Go to Profile#1810
Robert E. Harrist
#155960
Overall Influence
Robert E. Harrist is Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art History at Columbia University. His book, The Landscape of Words, was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize in 2010. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge for 2006–07.
Go to Profile#1811
Shoshana Bean
#176342
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Shoshana E. Bean is an American singer, songwriter, YouTuber, and stage actress. She has released three records and has appeared on many theater cast recordings and film soundtracks. In 2022, Bean received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance as Susan Young in Mr. Saturday Night.
Go to Profile#1812
Laurie Dinnebeil
#111145
Overall Influence
Laurie Dinnebeil is an American scholar of childhood education. She is the Daso Herb Endowed Chair at the University of Toledo. She was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Early Intervention for a period of five years, beginning in 2014.
Go to Profile#1813
Colin Wringe
#186439
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Colin Wringe is a British educational theorist and Reader in Education at Keele University, where he is an honorary fellow of the School of Social Science and Public Policy. He is best known for his works on moral education.
Go to Profile#1814
Tom Brady
#167513
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Thomas Adam Brady is an American filmmaker and producer best known for directing and co-writing the fantasy comedy film The Hot Chick . Career Brady was raised in New Jersey. He began writing and acting during high school, earning him a scholarship to Harvard College. At Harvard, where he graduated in 1986 with a B.A. in English Literature, Brady acted in and directed various theater productions, and began writing his own plays and screenplays. Afterwards, he attended the theater department of the University of Hawaiʻi to get a Master of Fine Arts - Directing.
Go to Profile#1815
Martin Warnke
#28009
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Martin Warnke was a German art historian. Life and work Warnke grew up in a German pastor's family in Brazil. He studied art history, history and German literature at the universities of Munich, Madrid and Berlin. In 1963, he wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Peter Paul Rubens at the Free University of Berlin under Hans Kauffmann. In 1964 and 1965, he worked at the Berlin museums. In 1970, he completed his Habilitationsschrift on court art at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. From 1971 to 1978 he was a professor of art history at the University of Marburg. In 1979, he moved to the Universi...
Go to Profile#1816
John Godfrey
#121397
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Ferguson Godfrey, is a Canadian educator, journalist and former Member of Parliament. Background Godfrey was born in Toronto, Ontario. His father, Senator John Morrow Godfrey , was a Canadian pilot, lawyer and politician. John Godfrey graduated from Upper Canada College in 1960. In 1961, he attended the Neuchâtel Junior College in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
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Lynn Gamwell
#140754
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Lynn Gamwell is an American nonfiction author and art curator known for her books on art history, the history of mathematics, the history of science, and their connections. Gamwell has a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MFA from Claremont Graduate School, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, and has curated exhibits for institutions including the Freud Museum, New York Academy of Sciences, and Loyola University Museum of Art.
Go to Profile#1818
Abdulai Salifu Asuro
#177982
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Professor Abdulai Salifu Asuro is a Ghanaian professor from Tamale. He was Vice-Chancellor of Tamale Technical University . He is the current President of the Madina Institute of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#1819
Albert Bush-Brown
#118352
Overall Influence
1926 - 1994 (68 years)
Albert Bush-Brown was an American architectural historian and university president. He was chancellor and president of Long Island University and president of Rhode Island School of Design He also taught art history at Princeton, Harvard, Case Western Reserve, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1820
Willibald Sauerländer
#34722
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Willibald Sauerländer was a German art historian specializing in Medieval French sculpture. From 1970 to 1989, he was director of the prestigious Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich. Life and work The son of a late-Impressionist painter who disliked art historians, Sauerländer grew up in a house with works of old and modern art. Notwithstanding, he began studying art history in 1946, at a time when Munich was in ruins, the intellectual situation extremely truncated, and the center of everything the study of medieval art, in a curious kind of secular, "aesthetic mystical" spiritualism, which he did not like.
Go to Profile#1821
Ulrich Pfisterer
#101883
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ulrich Pfisterer is a German art historian whose scholarship focuses on the art of Renaissance Italy. He is currently a professor of art history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte.
Go to Profile#1822
Jennifer Roberts
#176161
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jennifer L. Roberts is an American art historian. She serves as Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities and Johnson-Kulukunkdis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focuses on American art from the colonial period to the present.
Go to Profile#1823
Jane Aaron
#126679
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jane Rhiannon Aaron FEA FLSW is a Welsh educator, literary researcher and writer. She was Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan in south Wales, until her retirement in September 2011. She then became an associate member of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of South Wales. Aaron is known for her research and publications on Welsh literature and the writings of Welsh women. She was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2011.
Go to Profile#1824
Stephen Wildman
#138963
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stephen Wildman is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Lancaster and Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre. Wildman was educated at Bedford Modern School, and Queens' College, Cambridge. He was a Research Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Art at Queens' College, Cambridge , Deputy Keeper of Fine Art at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and also its Curator of Prints and Drawings .
Go to Profile#1825
John Pope-Hennessy
#129006
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy , was a British art historian. Pope-Hennessy was director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, and director of the British Museum between 1974 and 1976. He was a scholar of Italian Renaissance art. Many of his writings, including the tripartite Introduction to Italian Sculpture, and his magnum opus, Donatello: Sculptor, are regarded as classics in the field.
Go to Profile#1826
Rodney Wilson
#158215
Overall Influence
1945 - 2013 (68 years)
Thomas Lance Rodney Wilson was a New Zealand art historian and museum professional. He served as director of a number of major New Zealand museums and art galleries, including the Christchurch Art Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery and Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Go to Profile#1827
Clay Walker
#137375
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Clay Walker is an American filmmaker. Early life and education Walker was born in Memphis on March 15, 1968. He first attended college at Georgia Institute of Technology as an industrial design major and then transferred to Laguardia Community College in Queens to study photography and journalism. From there he transferred to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in television & film production.
Go to Profile#1828
Jennylyn Mercado
#174766
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Jennylyn Anne Pineda Mercado-Ho is a Filipino actress, singer, and songwriter. She was the winner of the first season of the reality talent competition StarStruck. Mercado garnered acclaim at a young age for her acting performances on television and film. She starred in multiple commercially successful films, including English Only, Please , The Prenup , Walang Forever , and Just the 3 of Us . With GMA Records and Viva Records, Mercado has released three albums, which have several popular singles such as "Sa Aking Panaginip", "Moments Of Love" in collaboration with Janno Gibbs, "Basta't Nandito Ka", and "Kahit Sandali".
Go to Profile#1829
C. Cameron Macauley
#141064
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Charles Cameron Macauley was a photographer, filmmaker and educator noted for his prize winning still photographs, his ethnographic films and his expertise on historic films and photographs. His career spanned over 75 years.
Go to Profile#1830
Sadia Shepard
#115925
Overall Influence
Sadia Quraeshi Shepard is a Pakistani American filmmaker and author. She is the author of The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Lost Loves, and a Sense of Home, which was published by the Penguin Press in 2008. She is the daughter of an American father, architect Richard Shepard, and a Pakistani American mother - artist, designer and educator, Samina Quraeshi.
Go to Profile#1831
Anne B. Kerr
#46490
Overall Influence
Anne B. Kerr is an American academic and the president of Florida Southern College since 2004. Life Kerr attended Mercer University for her bachelor's degree. She received both her master's and doctorate from Florida State University. Kerr is the 17th president in Florida Southern's history. She was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa at Florida Southern in 2005.
Go to Profile#1832
Jan Allen
#153863
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jan Allen is a Canadian curator, writer, visual artist, and assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, and the Cultural Studies Program, at Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario.
Go to Profile#1833
Joseph Connors
#48151
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joseph James Connors is an American art historian and educator, who specializes in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Career Born in New York City, Connors was graduated from Regis High School in Manhattan. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Boston College in 1966. Two years later, Connors received a Marshall Scholarship to study at Clare College at the University of Cambridge for a year. After a period teaching Greek and Latin at the Boston Latin School, Connors studied with Ernst Kitzinger and James S. Ackerman in the Department of Fine Arts of Harvard University . He has ta...
Go to Profile#1834
Susan Elliott
#123724
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susan Leigh Elliott is an Australian academic specialising in medical education. Since 2017, she has served as the deputy vice-chancellor and vice-president for education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She was previously the deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#1835
Billy West
#101710
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Richard Werstine , known professionally as Billy West, is an American voice actor, musician and former radio personality. His voice roles include Bugs Bunny in the 1996 film Space Jam and several subsequent projects, the title characters of Doug and The Ren & Stimpy Show, as well as the Futurama characters Philip J. Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Dr. Zoidberg, Zapp Brannigan and many more. In commercials, he voices the Red M&M and formerly voiced Buzz for Honey Nut Cheerios. West also voices other such established characters such as Elmer Fudd, Popeye, Shaggy Rogers, Skeets, Muttley, and Woody Woodpecker.
Go to Profile#1836
Marisa Morán Jahn
#126919
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Marisa Morán Jahn, also known as Marisa Jahn is an American multimedia artist, writer, and educator based in New York City. She is a co-founder and president of Studio REV-, a nonprofit arts organization that creates public art and creative media to impact the lives of low-wage workers, immigrants, youth, and women. She teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a lecturer, Teachers College of Columbia University, and The New School. Jahn has edited three books about art and politics.
Go to Profile#1837
Santiago Álvarez
#112949
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
Santiago Álvarez Román was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed many documentaries about Cuban and American culture. His "nervous montage" technique of using "found materials," such as Hollywood movie clips, cartoons, and photographs, is considered a precursor to the modern video clip.
Go to Profile#1838
Ingrid D. Rowland
#96158
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Biography She is the daughter of Nobel Chemistry Prize laureate Frank Sherwood Rowland.
Go to Profile#1839
Mitchell Schwarzer
#114135
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Mitchell Schwarzer is a historian who writes on architecture and the built environment. He is Professor of Architectural and Urban History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts. His wife Marjorie is a professor of museum studies.
Go to Profile#1840
George Martinez
#168573
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
George Martinez, , also known as "George Rithm Martinez" and "Hon. George Martinez", is an American educator, community entrepreneur, and artist. He is a former adjunct professor of political science at Pace University and a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State for the Western Hemisphere. He was elected in 2002 as the district leader in the 51st Assembly District in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and a former Assistant Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for the Office of the New York State Attorney General. He is the first hip-hop artist elected to political office in New York.
Go to Profile#1841
Miriam Basilio
#183798
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Miriam Margarita Basilio Gaztambide is an American art historian and Associate Professor of Museum Studies and Art History at New York University. Basilio's intellectual interests include Latin American art, political art, and other issues of politics, art, and identity.
Go to Profile#1842
Jonathan Harris
#158966
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jonathan Harris is professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of London. Harris's research is in the area of "Byzantine History 900–1460; relations between Byzantium and the west, especially during the Crusades and the Italian Renaissance; the Greek diaspora after 1453".. His first novel, Theosis, was published in 2023.
Go to Profile#1843
Peter Sollett
#128790
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Peter Sollett is an American film director and screenwriter known for his feature films Raising Victor Vargas and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist . Early life Sollett was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Bensonhurst in an Italian, Jewish neighborhood where he claims his childhood "was spent on one side of the street" because of racial tensions. His father is a newspaper photographer, which he says inspired him to pick up a camera.
Go to Profile#1844
Khadija Mushtaq
#184613
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Khadija Mushtaq is a Pakistani academic administrator and educator. She is the chancellor of Roots Ivy International University and chief executive officer of the Roots School System. Education Mushtaq completed a Master of Economics degree with a specialization in development studies and monetary policy from Quaid-i-Azam University.
Go to Profile#1845
Daniel P. Biebuyck
#90368
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Daniel P. Biebuyck was a Belgian scholar of Central African art. Biography Biebuyck was born in 1925 in Deinze, Belgium. He studied classical philology, law, cultural anthropology, and African art at the State University of Ghent, where he obtained his doctorate in Philosophy and Letters . He conducted post-graduate study in social anthropology and Bantu Linguistics at University College London, LSE, SOAS. Under the auspices of the Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique central , he was involved in field research from 1949–1957 among ethnic groups in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Go to Profile#1846
Philippe Daverio
#181330
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Philippe Daverio was an Italian art historian, gallerist, teacher, writer, author, politician, and television personality. Biography Daverio was born in Mulhouse, Alsace in 1949 from an Italian father, builder Napoleone Daverio, and an Alsatian mother, Aurelia Hauss. He was the fourth of six children. Daverio attended the European School in Varese, and then studied economics and commerce at the Bocconi University in Milan. Despite completing his cycle of studies, Daverio refrained from writing his final dissertation. As he said, "I was enrolled at Bocconi in 1968–1969, but I don't hold a degree.
Go to Profile#1847
Peter Davis
#132220
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter Frank Davis , is an American filmmaker, author, novelist and journalist. His film Hearts and Minds, about American military action in Vietnam, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1974.
Go to Profile#1848
Kruno Prijatelj
#115624
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Kruno Prijatelj , was a Croatian art historian, art critic and University professor. He introduced many artists who contributed to art in Dalmatia. Prijatelj's efforts answered many unsolved topics in Dalmatian art history.
Go to Profile#1849
Walter Horn
#31846
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Walter William Horn was a German-American medievalist scholar noted for his work on the timber vernacular architecture of the Middle Ages. Horn was born in Germany, but fled Nazism and spent most of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the university system's first art historian and co-founded the History of Art department. A naturalized citizen of the United States, Horn served in the U.S. Army during World War II and then in the special intelligence unit that tracked down art works plundered by the Nazis. His most celebrated exploit was the recovery of the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, also known as Charlemagne's Imperial Regalia.
Go to Profile#1850
Tony Conrad
#137014
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Anthony Schmalz Conrad was an American video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer. Active in a variety of media since the early 1960s, he was a pioneer of both drone music and structural film. As a musician, he was an important figure in the New York minimalist scene of the early 1960s, during which time he performed as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music . He became recognized as a filmmaker for his 1966 film The Flicker. He performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists over the course of his career.
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