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

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Education,

#1901

T.J. Thomson

#183567

Overall Influence

T.J. Thomson is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a chief investigator at its Digital Media Research Centre, where he leads its News, Media, and Journalism Research Group. He teaches and researches on visual communication topics, especially media representation, the production and reception of visual journalism, and visual culture. He has been an officer in several national and international societies and has served as the associate editor of Visual Communication Quarterly since 2017.

#1902

Carl Bode

#83065

Overall Influence

1911 - 1993 (82 years)

Carl Bode was an author, poet, professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland, and officer of several literary and cultural organizations. He wrote and edited over 30 books, including The American Lyceum, Antebellum Culture, Mencken, the first full biography to be published after H.L. Mencken's death, as well as Maryland, a 350-year history of the state. Bode edited The Collective Poems of Henry Thoreau, The Best of Thoreau's Journals, and The Portable Emerson among others.

#1903

Catherine Keever

#129851

Overall Influence

1908 - 2003 (95 years)

Catherine Keever was an educator and ecologist focused on ecological succession and highland region ecology. Keever proved that moss is the first plant to grow on bald rock, rather than lichens. Early life Keever was born September 8, 1908, in Iredell County, North Carolina to John C. Keever, a Methodist preacher, and Blanche Moore Keever. Her brother, Homer Keever, was the historian of Irdell County, NC. During her childhood, Keever moved throughout Western North Carolina within the Methodist Conference as her father took on various churches. She attended Davenport College in Lenoir, North Carolina, for two years before transferring to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

#1904

Hildegard Knef

#140652

Overall Influence

1925 - 2002 (77 years)

Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was a German actress, singer, and writer. She was billed in some English-language films as Hildegard Neff or Hildegarde Neff. Early years Hildegard Knef was born in Ulm in 1925. Her parents were Hans Theodor and Friede Augustine Knef. Her father, a decorated First World War veteran, died when she was only six months old, and her mother moved to Berlin and worked in a factory. Knef began studying acting at age 14 in 1940. She left school at 15 to become an apprentice animator with Universum Film AG. After she had a successful screen test, she went to the State Film School at Babelsberg, Berlin, where she studied acting, ballet, and elocution.

#1905

Raufa Hassan al-Sharki

#169318

Overall Influence

1958 - 2011 (53 years)

Amatalrauf "Raufa Hassan" al-Sharki was an educator, feminist and human rights activist from Yemen. She was a professor of mass media and the director of a Women's Studies Center at the University of Sana'a. Al-Sharki was the first female journalist in Yemen and wrote a regular newspaper column for many years.

#1906

Robert F. Chandler

#91324

Overall Influence

1907 - 1999 (92 years)

Robert Flint Chandler Jr. was an American horticulturalist. He obtained a degree in Horticulture from the University of Maine in 1929, and his Ph.D. in Pomology from the University of Maryland in 1934. He first taught at Cornell University and went on to become the Dean of the College of Agriculture, and then the ninth President, of the University of New Hampshire.

#1907

Larry McMurtry

#178243

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Larry Jeff McMurtry was a prolific American novelist, essayist, prominent book collector, bookseller and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By , The Last Picture Show , and Terms of Endearment , which were adapted into films. Films adapted from McMurtry's works earned 34 Oscar nominations .

#1908

Craig Detweiler

#118919

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Craig Detweiler is a writer, filmmaker, and cultural commentator. He is dean of the College of Fine Arts and Production at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. Early life and career Detweiler grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Davidson College with a B.A. in English. He went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema/TV. Later he received a Masters of Divinity and PhD in theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. While at Fuller, he co-founded the Windrider Forum, a "vehicle to promote the presentation and exploration of the human story through film and visual media".

#1909

Thomas Seebohm

#128545

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Thomas Seebohm was a phenomenological philosopher whose wide-ranging interests included, among others, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, hermeneutics, and logic. Other areas of Professor Seebohm's interests included the history of philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of the formal sciences, methodology and philosophy of the human sciences, the history of 19th century British Empiricism, American pragmatism, analytic philosophy, philosophy of law and practical philosophy, and the development of the history of philosophy in Eastern Europe. Despite this diverse span of interests, Seebohm w...

#1910

Anurag Kashyap

#176021

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Anurag Kashyap is an Indian filmmaker and actor known for his works in Hindi cinema. He is the recipient of several accolades, including four Filmfare Awards. For his contributions to film, the Government of France awarded him the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2013.

#1911

David Park

#113187

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

David William Park FSA is a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where he is Director of the Conservation of Wall Painting Department. Park is a graduate of Manchester University and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University and has been a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London since 1986.

#1912

Maria de Medeiros

Maria de Medeiros

#164871

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Maria Esteves de Medeiros Victorino de Almeida, DamSE , known professionally as Maria de Medeiros , is a Portuguese actress, director, and singer who has been involved in both European and American film-productions.

#1913

Jeannette Bastian

#178930

Overall Influence

Jeannette Bastian is an archival scholar, academic, author, and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. From 1987 to 1998, she was the Territorial Librarian of the U.S. Virgin Islands and has published widely on topics related to colonial archives and decolonial archival practices.

#1914

Loni Ding

#182496

Overall Influence

1931 - 2010 (79 years)

Isadora Quanehia Ding Welsh , known professionally as Loni Ding, was an documentary film maker, director, television series producer, activist, and university educator. She is known for her work exploring the experiences of Asian Americans. Notably, two of her films played a critical role in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which granted reparations to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.

#1915

Paul Crossley

#96462

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

Paul Crossley, was professor of the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2016. He was a specialist in the architecture of medieval central Europe.

#1916

Craig Harbison

#72510

Overall Influence

1944 - 2018 (74 years)

Craig S. Harbison was an American art historian specialising in 15th and 16th-century Flemish and Northern Renaissance painting. He was Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While attending Princeton University in the early 1970s, he studied iconographic analysis under Erwin Panofsky and Wolfgang Stechow. He had previously studied at Oberlin College, Ohio.

#1917

Petrus Schaesberg

#114548

Overall Influence

1967 - 2008 (41 years)

Petrus Graf von Schaesberg was a German art historian, artist, editor, and teacher. Biography Born to parents Heinrich Wilhelm Viktor Walter Hubertus Maria Graf von Schaesberg and Margarethe Gräfin von Schaesberg Prinzessin von Croy in Munich, Bavaria. Petrus Schaesberg earned, in 2004, his Ph.D. at Munich's Institute of Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University. He taught as an adjunct faculty member at the Institute of Art History at Munich University. At the time of his death, Schaesberg was an adjunct professor in the Art History department at Columbia University. Schaesberg's book Das ...

#1918

John O'Shea

#165955

Overall Influence

1920 - 2001 (81 years)

John Dempsey O'Shea was a New Zealand independent filmmaker; he was a director, producer, writer and actor. He produced the only three feature films that were made in New Zealand between 1940 and 1970.

#1919

Eleanor Tufts

#156490

Overall Influence

1927 - 1991 (64 years)

Eleanor May Tufts was an American art historian, feminist and professor of art history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her work as an author, historian and lecturer was key to the opening of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 1974. The collection gathers her papers on biographical data, correspondence, professional material, essays, articles, student papers, and manuscripts covering the years between 1927 and 1991, with the bulk of the materials from 1970 to 1988.

#1920

Jane Geddes

#188836

Overall Influence

Jane Geddes is a British art historian and academic, specialising in Scottish architecture, British Medieval manuscripts, Pictish sculpture and Medieval decorative ironwork. She is Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Aberdeen.

#1921

Peter Thornton

#41584

Overall Influence

1925 - 2007 (82 years)

Peter Kai Thornton CBE was a museum curator and writer. The son of eminent scientist Sir Gerard Thornton and Gerda, daughter of Kai Norregaard, of Copenhagen , Thornton was educated at Bryanston, which he left aged 14 to enrol at the de Havilland aeronautical technical school and work on the Mosquito production line at Hatfield, Hertfordshire; after serving during World War II in the Intelligence Corps, he went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read Danish and German .

#1922

Boaz Dvir

#182614

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Boaz Dvir is an Israeli-American professor, journalist, and filmmaker. His main work includes documentaries, most recently Jessie's Dad, Discovering Gloria, and A Wing and a Prayer. Background Filmmaker and Penn State assistant professor Boaz Dvir tells the stories of ordinary people who, under extraordinary circumstances, transform into trailblazers and game changers. For instance, his PBS film, A Wing and a Prayer, recounts a World War II flight engineer's transformation into the leader of a secret operation to save newborn Israel.

#1923

Constance Edith Fowler

Constance Edith Fowler

#137266

Overall Influence

1907 - 1996 (89 years)

Constance Edith Fowler was an American artist known as a painter and printmaker, an author, and an educator who taught at Willamette University and Albion College. Early life and education Constance Edith Fowler was born June 2, 1907, in International Falls, Minnesota. She was the daughter of immigrants George Fowler, a butcher from England, and Matilda Einfeld Fowler, from Hamburg. The family lived in Aitken, Cuyuna, and Crosby, Minnesota, before moving to Pullman, Washington, in 1923, where she finished high school. She earned an A.B. at Washington State College in 1929, studying with the painter William McDermitt.

#1924

Rafael Cardoso

#181549

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Rafael Cardoso is a Brazilian art historian and writer. His published work includes numerous books and essays on the history of art and design in Brazil, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also published four works of fiction, including Entre as Mulheres which first brought him to the attention of an international audience, particularly after its translation into German as Sechzehn Frauen . His novel, O Remanescente was published simultaneously in Brazil, by Companhia das Letras, and Germany, by S. Fischer.

#1925

Sabeth Buchmann

#139013

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sabeth Buchmann is an Austrian art historian and art critic. Currently Buchmann is Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art and the Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She contributes to books, magazines and catalogues. Buchmann's publications include Film, Avantgarde und Biopolitik and Art After Conceptual Art .

#1926

Anne Dunlop

#136456

Overall Influence

Anne Elizabeth Dunlop is a Canadian-born art historian. As of 2022 she is Herald Chair of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. Education Dunlop graduated with a BA from Queen's University at Kingston in Canada. She next completed an MA at the University of British Columbia. She moved to the University of Warwick in Coventry, England where she gained her PhD with a thesis titled "Advocata nostra: Central Italian paintings of Mary as the Second Eve, c.1335–c.1445".

#1927

Alissandra Cummins

Alissandra Cummins

#128216

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Alissandra Cummins is a Barbadian art historian, educator, and scholar; she is a leading expert on Caribbean heritage, museum development, and art. Cummins is Director of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society and she is a lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the West Indies. She is board chair of International Journal of Intangible Heritage. She is on the board of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, and the International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship. She was the Chairperson of the UNESCO Executive Board, from 2011 to 2013.

#1928

Valerie Kinloch

#189580

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Valerie Kinloch is an American writer, educator, and academic administrator. She is the president of the Johnson C. Smith University starting in August 2023. She also served as the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.

#1929

Barbara Baert

#79855

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Barbara Baert is a Belgian art historian, and professor of art history at KU Leuven. In 2016 Baert earned the prestigious , which is yearly awarded by the to a scientist in human, exact and biological-medical sciences.

#1930

Vittorio Sgarbi

#177254

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Vittorio Umberto Antonio Maria Sgarbi is an Italian art critic, art historian, writer, politician, cultural commentator and television personality. He is President of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto. He was appointed curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Several times a member of the Italian Parliament, in 2008 he served as Cabinet Member for Culture, Arts and Sports in Milan's municipal government for six months when Mayor Letizia Moratti terminated his mandate as she saw him 'unfit for the job'. In 2012, he was removed as Mayor of Sal...

#1931

James M. Acton

#83447

Overall Influence

James M. Acton is a British academic and scientist. He is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Early life Acton was awarded his PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge University.

#1932

Walter Liedtke

#50020

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Walter Arthur Liedtke, Jr. was an American art historian, writer and Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was known as one of the world's leading scholars of Dutch and Flemish paintings. He died in the 2015 Metro-North Valhalla train crash.

#1933

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson

#118745

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is a Korean–American documentary filmmaker and author. Her films and writing focus on humanizing "the voiceless" within issues of human rights, overlooked periods in history, and Asian-American diaspora.

#1934

Ronald Pickvance

#94795

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Ronald Pickvance was a British art historian. His specialty was French art of the late 19th century. Pickvance studied art history at the University of Cambridge until 1953 and then moved to the Courtauld Institute of Art in London for two years. From 1957 to 1965 he lectured for the Arts Council of Great Britain and acted as curator for the art collections of the University of London. From 1966 he taught art history at the University of Nottingham and in 1976 moved to the University of Glasgow, where he held the Richmond Chair of Fine Arts as professor from 1977 to 1984. Pickvance curated s...

#1935

Nancy Mowll Mathews

#134295

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Nancy Mowll Mathews is a Czech-American art historian, curator and author. She was the Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the Williams College Museum of Art from 1988 to 2010. She is currently an independent scholar, curator, professor and host of the television show Art World with Nancy Mathews.

#1936

Pierre Capretz

#62978

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Pierre Jean Capretz was a French educator and writer, noted for his audio-visual methods for teaching French. A graduate of the University of Paris, he began teaching French in 1949 at the University of Florida and joined the faculty of Yale University in 1956, eventually becoming Director of the Language Laboratory and then Director of the Language Development Studio. He is best known as the creator and host of the PBS television series French in Action. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Middlebury College in August 1993. He died in 2014 at the age of 89.

#1937

Gloria Jean

#158174

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Gloria Jean was an American actress and singer who starred or co-starred in 26 feature films from 1939 to 1959, and made numerous radio, television, stage, and nightclub appearances. She may be best remembered for her appearance with W. C. Fields in the film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break .

#1938

Trine Dyrholm

#178461

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Trine Dyrholm is a Danish actress, singer and songwriter. Dyrholm received national recognition when she placed third in the Dansk Melodi Grand Prix as a 14-year-old singer. Four years later, she again achieved national recognition when she won the Bodil Award for Best Actress in her debut film: the teenage romance Springflod. Dyrholm has won the Bodil Award for Best Actress five times and a Bodil award for Best Supporting Actress twice as well as six Robert Awards in her acting career.

#1939

Michael Kauffmann

#120636

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Claus Michael Kauffmann, FBA was an English art historian who was Director of the Courtauld Institute, London, from 1985–95. He was succeeded by Eric Fernie. Kauffmann was a Fellow of the British Academy.

#1940

Barbara Hammer

#114393

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Barbara Jean Hammer was an American feminist film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She is known for being one of the pioneers of the lesbian film genre, and her career spanned over 50 years. Hammer is known for having created experimental films dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships, coping with aging, and family life. She resided in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York, and taught each summer at the European Graduate School.

#1941

Birgit Dahlenburg

#171854

Overall Influence

1959 - 2017 (58 years)

Birgit Dahlenburg, née Handschel was a German art historian. She worked as custodian for the art collections of the University of Greifswald and was instrumental in digitising art. Life Born in Heldburg, she studied German studies, art history and art didactics at the University of Greifswald. She received her doctorate in art history there in 1986 with a dissertation on the history of romantic art in Northern Germany. She worked as a research assistant for the Chair of Contemporary Art History from 1987.

#1942

Doris Troy

#149619

Overall Influence

1937 - 2004 (67 years)

Doris Troy was an American R&B singer and songwriter, known to her fans as "Mama Soul". Her biggest hit was "Just One Look", a top 10 hit in 1963. Life and career She was born as Doris Elaine Higginsen, in the Bronx, the daughter of a Barbadian Pentecostal minister. She later took her grandmother's name and grew up as Doris Payne. Her parents disapproved of "subversive" forms of music like rhythm & blues, so she cut her teeth singing in her father's choir. At age 16, she was working as an usherette at the Apollo where she was discovered by James Brown. Under the name Doris Payne, she began so...

#1943

Karen Sosnoski

#157604

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Karen Sosnoski is an American author, radio contributor, and documentary filmmaker. Career Sosnoski is working on a novel, Rosemary's Models, about the intimate secrets, hopes, and fears that cause men, women, and even children to plunge hopefully into artistic relationships with a wood engraver, craving, and in some cases commissioning her unsettling vision. This literary fiction is inspired by the real art of Rosemary Feit Covey.

#1944

António de Macedo

#123441

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

António de Macedo was Portuguese filmmaker, writer, university professor and lecturer. He gave up filmmaking in the 1990s as he felt systematically excluded from the state support programs of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, the only financial source for film production in Portugal in that time. As a consequence, he dedicated himself entirely to writing, investigation and teaching. He published several books, essays, philosophy and fiction.

#1945

Jonathan Weinberg

#63197

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jonathan Weinberg is an American artist and art historian. He is a critic at the Yale School of Art. Early life Weinberg grew up in New York City and attended the Fieldston School. He studied as an undergraduate at Yale University with Vincent Scully, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University's Department of Fine Arts in 1990, where he studied under T. J. Clark. He began teaching at Yale in 1991.

#1946

Thalia Gouma-Peterson

#122749

Overall Influence

1933 - 2001 (68 years)

Thalia Gouma-Peterson was Professor Emerita of Art History and museum curator at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Born in Athens, Greece she came to the U.S. as a Fulbright student in 1952. Education She earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in Art History at Mills College and her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

#1947

Shaggy 2 Dope

#122619

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Joseph William Utsler , known by his stage name Shaggy 2 Dope, is an American rapper, record producer, DJ, podcast host of Shaggy and The Creep Show, and professional wrestler. He is part of the hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. He is the co-founder of the record label Psychopathic Records, with fellow Insane Clown Posse rapper Violent J and their former manager, Alex Abbiss. Along with Bruce, Utsler is the co-founder of the professional wrestling promotion Juggalo Championship Wrestling, where he currently acts as color commentator.

#1948

Silvia Malagrino

#130968

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Silvia A. Malagrino is an American multimedia artist, independent filmmaker and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for interdisciplinary work that explores historical and cultural representation, and the intersections of fact, fiction, memory and subjectivity. Her experimental documentary, Burnt Oranges , interwove personal narrative, witness testimony, interviews, and both documentary and re-created footage to examine the long-term effects of Argentina's Dirty War. Malagrino's art has been featured at The Art Institute of Chicago, Palais de Glace and Centro Cultural Recoleta ,...

#1949

Kana Hanazawa

#124168

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (35 years)

is a Japanese actress, voice actress and singer. A prolific voice performer in anime, she has amassed several film and television credits since her debut in 2003. She won the Seiyu Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2015, and won the Newtype Anime Awards for Best Voice Actress three times in 2015, 2017 and 2018.

#1950

Maria Lluïsa Borràs i Gonzàlez

#181109

Overall Influence

1931 - 2010 (79 years)

Maria Lluïsa Borràs i González , doctorate in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona, was a Spanish writer, critic, exhibition curator and specialist in the avant-garde and Dadaism. "The critic is not a judge, but a bridge between artist and audience". –Maria Lluïsa Borràs–

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