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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Education,

#2101

Fritz Hans Schweingruber

#140769

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Fritz Hans Schweingruber was a Swiss dendrochronologist and emeritus professor. Biography Fritz Schweingruber was first a primary school teacher and organist. Until 1965 he taught for nine years at multi-class schools in Emmental. Afterwards he studied botany, zoology, geology as well as prehistory and early history at the University of Bern and then wood biology at the ETH Zurich. An encounter with the Austrian botanist Bruno Huber sparked his interest in dendrochronology. In 1972 he graduated in systematic plant sociology.

#2102

Maysoon Pachachi

#171966

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Maysoon Pachachi is a film director, editor and producer of Iraqi origin. She was educated in Iraq, the U.S., Britain and can speak English, Arabic, French and Italian. She studied Philosophy at University College London and Film under Thorold Dickinson at the Slade School of Art, where visiting lecturers included Jean Renoir and Gillo Pontecorvo. She has made documentaries in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Aside from making films, Maysoon has also taught film directing and editing in Britain, Iraq and Palestine . She now lives in Britain where she co-founded Act Together: ...

#2103

Stepan Beril

#181971

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stepan Beril is the president of T. G. Shevchenko University in Tiraspol, the capital of the partially recognised state of Transnistria. He has presided over the university with 14 faculties and 84 chairs, offering 54 different majors, since 1996.

#2104

Zhai Xiangjun

#177661

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Zhai Xiangjun was a Chinese translator and educator, particularly known for his translation of Gone with the Wind and his university-level English textbooks. He was a professor and vice chair of foreign languages at Fudan University and served as vice president of Shanghai Translators' Association.

#2105

Michael Gough

#172898

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Michael Gough is an American voice actor and musician. He is known for providing the voices of Deckard Cain in the Diablo series of video games, Gopher in the Winnie the Pooh franchise, The Carmine Brothers in the Gears of War series of video games, many Nords in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Ulrich Vogel in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Zorro in The New Adventures of Zorro, Captain James "Jim" Gordon in Batman: Arkham Origins, Jambalaya Jake in Darkwing Duck, Colonel Spigot in TaleSpin, Osmund Saddler in Resident Evil 4, Officer Pete in Doc McStuffins, Parasite in All-Star Superman, Scarec...

#2106

Mary Sheriff

#142888

Overall Influence

1950 - 2016 (66 years)

Mary Diana Lee Sheriff was an American art historian, and W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specialized in eighteenth-century French art, decorative arts, gender studies, and material culture.

#2107

Pilar Pedraza

#102381

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Pilar Pedraza Martínez is a Spanish professor and writer. Her work has two main aspects: horror narrative and essay. Biography After earning her doctorate in History at the University of Valencia, Pilar Pedraza has been teaching Film and avant-garde cinema there since 1982. She was Councilor of Culture of the Generalitat Valenciana from 1993 to 1995, during the last term of Joan Lerma, and member of the Board of Directors of RTVV. Throughout her career, she has combined teaching and research with literary creation.

#2108

Peggy Ahwesh

#187923

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She received her B.F.A. at Antioch College. A bricoleur who has created both narrative works and documentaries, some projects are scripted and others incorporate improvised performance. She makes use of sync sound, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include genre; women, sexuality and feminism; reenactment; and artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Créteil, France.

#2109

Victoria Whitworth

#136079

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Victoria Whitworth is a British writer, archaeologist and art historian. Her published writings, which focus on Britain in the later first millennium AD, include novels, academic works and a memoir.

#2110

Laura Kissel

#186109

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Laura K. Kissel is an American educator and documentary filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Kissel's work explores contemporary social and political landscapes, the representation of history and the use of orphan films.

#2111

Julie Buck

#189696

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Julie Anne Buck is an American film producer, collage artist, photographer, experimental filmmaker, and film archivist. Life Buck studied at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. After graduating, she became the manager for the Harvard Film Archive at Harvard University. While sorting and preserving films in the Archive's collection, she and her friend and co-archivist Karin Segal became interested in the images of women which often appear on the leaders of older films. Buck and Segal began the long process of digitally cleaning, restoring and printing these enigmatic images for...

#2112

Wendy Wassyng Roworth

#152456

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Wendy Wassyng Roworth is professor emerita of art history at the University of Rhode Island. Roworth is a specialist in eighteenth century British and Italian art and the art of Angelica Kauffman. Roworth curated the exhibition "Angelica Kauffman: A continental artist in Georgian England" which was held at the Royal Pavilion Art Gallery & Museums, Brighton in 1992 and also in York. She edited the accompanying book.

#2113

Paul Greenhalgh

#87776

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Paul Greenhalgh is a British historian, writer, museologist, and curator of art and design. Training initially as a painter, Greenhalgh entered into academia through the Courtauld Institute of Art, later teaching at the Royal College of Art, and holding the post of deputy keeper of ceramics and glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In November 2010, Greenhalgh was appointed director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the public gallery of the University of East Anglia, where he held the position of professor of art history and museum strategy, roles which he resigned from in 2021 to become, respectively, executive director, and professor emeritus of the same.

#2114

Mark Chamberlain

#171157

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Mark M. Chamberlain was an American educator and the fourth president of Glassboro State College from 1969 to 1984. Life Chamberlain was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Pittsburgh's South Hills High School in 1949, he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and subsequently attended the University of Illinois where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in inorganic chemistry.

#2115

Francesc Fontbona

Francesc Fontbona

#143143

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Francesc Fontbona de Vallescar is a Catalan art historian, writer, exhibition curator and specialist in Romanticism, Catalan Modernism and Noucentisme Arts. Fontbona is the author of many works of Catalan art history. Doctorate in Early modern period from the Universitat de Barcelona in 1987. He was director of Graphic section in National Library of Catalonia , and Chief executive-writer of art section in the Great Catalan Encyclopedia . Francesc Fontbona is member of the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George, member of The Hispanic Society of America, member of the Institut d’E...

#2116

Earl Rogers Sayers

#172348

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Earl Rogers Sayers was an American professor of biology and college administrator. He was educated at University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in 1958. He later received a master's degree in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1964 from Cornell University. He served as president of the University of Alabama from 1988 to 1996.

#2117

George Lundy

#92705

Overall Influence

1947 - 2011 (64 years)

George Francis Lundy, S.J., was an American Jesuit, academic, and university administrator. He served as the President of Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia from 2000 to 2003. Much of Lundy's work in activism and academia centered on issues concerning social justice.

#2118

Chi Jang Yin

#191273

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Chi Jang Yin is an American filmmaker, photographer, curator and educator. She is best known for her experimental films that explore displacement, alienation, the absence of representation, and narrative memory. Yin left China in the latter part of The Cultural Revolution. Her mother, an artist from an aristocratic family, first led the family to Taiwan, and then to Canada. Yin received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Yvonne Rainer and Shellie Fleming. She was the Head of Media Art at the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University.

#2119

Mario Torelli

#67609

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Mario Torelli was an Italian scholar of Italic archaeology and the culture of the Etruscans. He taught at the University of Perugia. Torelli was born in Rome, Italy. He was trained by the art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli as well as by Massimo Pallottino. Torelli completed his laurea degree at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in November 1960, writing a thesis on the site of Falerii Veteres.

#2120

Dylan Valley

#191267

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Dylan Valley is a South African filmmaker, born and raised in Cape Town. He has directed work with SABC, Al Jazeera, and independently. He teaches in the television studies department at Wits University.

#2121

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

#154605

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is a Polish art historian and William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Senior Adviser to the humanities program at the Radcliffe Institute. Her specialties include 18th-century French and contemporary art.

#2122

Helen Willa Samuels

#103772

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Helen Willa Samuels is an American archivist and scholar in archival studies. She is best known for her essay "Who Controls the Past", which introduced the concept of archival documentation strategy, and her book Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities.

#2123

Markus Brüderlin

Markus Brüderlin

#99040

Overall Influence

1958 - 2014 (56 years)

Markus Brüderlin was a Swiss art historian, curator and writer. Brüderlin studied history of art and philosophy in Vienna. In 1996 he was appointed curator at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. In 2006 he became director of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

#2124

Werner Oechslin

#59693

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Werner Oechslin is a Swiss historian and author. Life He was born in 1944. He studied art history, archeology, philosophy and mathematics in Zurich and Rome. Career Since 1985, he has been a professor of history at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

#2125

Henry Keazor

#52347

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Henry Keazor is a German art historian. He is a professor of art history at Heidelberg University. Career Keazor studied art history, German literature, musicology and philosophy at the Heidelberg University and at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1996 obtained his doctoral title with a Ph.D. dissertation on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin. From 1996 to 1999, he was first fellow and then Scientific Assistant at the Istituto Germanico/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Afterwards, from 1999 to 2005, he was assistant professor at the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut of the Goethe Universi...

#2126

Mamoru Miyano

#137670

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

is a Japanese actor and singer. He is best known for his roles on Steins;Gate, Durarara!!, Death Note, Soul Eater, Wolf's Rain, Ouran High School Host Club, Ajin: Demi-Human, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Free!, Mobile Suit Gundam 00, Hunter x Hunter, Chihayafuru, Bungo Stray Dogs, Uta no Prince-sama and Zombieland Saga. He was nominated for the award for Death Note at the 1st Seiyu Awards and won the "Best Voice Actor" award at the 2008 Tokyo International Anime Fair. At the 2nd Seiyu Awards, he won "Best Lead Actor Award" for his role as Setsuna F. Seiei in Mobile Suit Gundam 00 and as Hakugen Rikuson in Kōtetsu Sangokushi.

#2127

Alanna Nobbs

#85069

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Professor Alanna Nobbs is the President of the Society for the Study of Early Christianity. She earned a BA Hons1 and PhD in Latin at the University of Sydney. She taught at Macquarie University and was Head of School. Her specialization being in Greek Early Christian and Byzantine documents.

#2128

Heather Galbraith

#189566

Overall Influence

Heather Galbraith is a New Zealand fine art curator and academic. As of 2018 she is a full professor at Massey University in Wellington. Academic career After a MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, Galbraith worked at City Gallery Wellington and Te Papa before moving to the Massey University, rising to full professor.

#2129

Chris Roberts

#117814

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Chris Roberts is a British-American video game designer, programmer, film producer and film director. He created the Wing Commander series while at Origin Systems and since 2010 has been working on the crowdfunded space simulator Star Citizen.

#2130

Hsio-yen Shih

#87634

Overall Influence

1933 - 2001 (68 years)

Hsio-yen Shih was a Chinese-born Canadian art historian who specialized in early Chinese and Japanese paintings, as well as ancient Chinese pottery and bronzeware. She was director of the National Gallery of Canada from 1977 to 1981.

#2131

Gabrielle Goodman

#181179

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gabrielle Goodman is an American jazz singer, composer, author, and associate professor of voice at Berklee College of Music. She began working as a backup vocalist for Roberta Flack while at the Peabody Institute and later sang with Michael Bublé and Chaka Khan.

#2132

Olivier Asselin

#181374

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Olivier Asselin is a Canadian film director and screenwriter from Quebec. He is most noted for his films The Moving Statue , which was the winner of the Prix L.-E.-Ouimet-Molson from the Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma in 1991, and The Cyclotron , for which he won the Borsos Competition Award for Best Screenplay at the 2016 Whistler Film Festival.

#2133

Marcin Giżycki

#188986

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Marcin Giżycki was a Polish film and art historian, critic, and filmmaker. He was a professor at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw , a Senior Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design , and an Artistic Director of the ANIMATOR International Animated Film Festival Animator in Poznań, Poland . He has authored eight books, co-edited two others, contributed photographs to four books by Agnieszka Taborska, and published around 400 articles on film and art in Polish and foreign publications. In 2016, he received the Award for the Outstanding Contribution to Animat...

#2134

Marvalene Hughes

#109959

Overall Influence

Dr. Marvalene Hughes served as the president of Dillard University from 2005 to 2011. From 1994 to 2005, she was the president of California State University, Stanislaus. Ms. Hughes received a PhD in Counseling and Administration from Florida State University. Her MS, in Counseling, and her BS in English and History, are both from Tuskegee University. She also received an Honorary Doctorate from Brown University.

#2135

Guy Avanzini

#110145

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

Guy Avanzini was a French academic, historian, and philosopher. A professor of social sciences at Lumière University Lyon 2, he was a specialist in the history of pedagogical ideas and a historian of educational theories.

#2136

Antonio Bonet Correa

#172937

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Antonio Bonet Correa was a Spanish art historian.

#2137

Bonna Daix Wescoat

#139452

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Bonna Daix Wescoat is an art historian and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University. Her work focuses on ancient Greek art and architecture, particularly Archaic and Hellenistic architecture and sculpture.

#2138

Angela Rosenthal

#176804

Overall Influence

1963 - 2010 (47 years)

Angela H. Rosenthal was an art historian at Dartmouth College and an expert on the art of Angelica Kauffman. Her masterwork was Angelica Kauffman: Art and sensibility, published by Yale University Press in 2006 which won the Historians of British Art Book Award in the pre-1800 category in 2007.

#2139

Wolfram Hoepfner

#107066

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Wolfram Hoepfner is a German classicist, archaeologist, architectural historian, and Professor of Ancient Architectural History, at the Free University of Berlin. Life He studied at the Free University of Berlin, and at the Technical University of Berlin, in Classical Archaeology and architecture. In 1965, he received his doctorate on the subject of Heraclea Pontica. He received his Dr.-Ing. 's degree, with the thesis, Eine baugeschichtliche Untersuchung. He then became assistant to Heinrich Ernst. He participated in excavations in Alzey, under the direction of Wilhelm Unverzagt, in the Kerameikos in Athens , in Persia , Bithynia and in Commagene .

#2140

Olga Sviblova

#181046

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Olga Lvovna Sviblova is a Russian curator, film director, and arts administrator. In 1996, she founded the Moscow House of Photography, which later became the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; she has been a director there since the institution's establishment.

#2141

Leonello Tarabella

#191664

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Leonello Tarabella is an Italian researcher, musician and composer. His activity runs on the academic/artistic double track. Biography Graduated in Computer Science at University of Pisa, during the '70s he started his research work under the direction of M° Pietro Grossi who was pioneering Computer Music at the CNR in Pisa, Italy. Later, as a study grant holder, he specialized on the technology of computer music at the EMS , MIT-Boston and at CCRMA , Stanford University.

#2142

Stephen K. Lafer

#191976

Overall Influence

#2143

Gottfried Boehm

#18735

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gottfried Boehm is a German art historian and philosopher. Life Boehm studied art history, philosophy and German in Cologne, Vienna and Heidelberg. He obtained his Promotion in philosophy in 1968 and his Habilitation in 1974 in art history. From 1975 to 1979 he taught art history at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In 1979 he was made professor of art history at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. In 1986 Boehm moved to the University of Basel, where since 2005 he has also been director of the Swiss national research project "Eikones / NCCR Iconic Criticism".

#2144

Thomas O'Regan

#162395

Overall Influence

1956 - 2020 (64 years)

Thomas Andrew O'Regan was a Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Queensland. Early years and background Tom O'Regan was born in , Queensland, Australia, in 1956. He was in the first intake of students to Griffith University in Brisbane in 1975, graduating with a BA in 1978 and a PhD in 1986. He has taught at Murdoch University, Griffith University, and, since 2004, had been at the University of Queensland before his death. At the time of his death, O'Regan had been an Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts from 2010–2020. He had also been Head of the Schoo...

#2145

Diane-Monique Daviau

#130987

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Diane-Monique Daviau is a Quebec educator, writer, translator and journalist. Biography She was born in Montreal. Daviau wrote literary columns for Le Devoir, Lettres québécoises and Liberté, also contributing to the radio programs En toutes lettres, Littératures actuelles and Paysages littéraires on Radio Canada FM. She has taught literature, German and translation at McGill University, at the Université de Montréal and at the Goethe-Institut. Daviau was an editor for several publishing houses and also worked as a translator from German to French and from French to German. She served on the editorial committees for Lettres québécoises and for XYZ, la revue de la nouvelle.

#2146

Paul Davies

#126373

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Paul Davies is professor of the history of art at the University of Reading. Davies is a specialist in the architecture of Italy 1350–1650, centrally planned churches and the architectural response to miracles, architecture in Venice and the Veneto, and Italian Renaissance architectural drawings.

#2147

Uranchimeg Tsultem

#190889

Overall Influence

Uranchimeg Tsultem is a scholar of the art and culture of Mongolia. She has served as a curator of Mongolian art at the international level since 1997. Her curated exhibits have been shown at Kasumi Tsukuba Center in Tsukuba, Japan, Frauen Museum in Bonn, Germany, E&J Frankel Gallery in New York City, Worth Ryder Gallery and Institute of East Asian Studies at University of California Berkeley, Venice Beinnale, Shanghai Beinnale, the Modern Art Gallery in Ulaanbaatar, and the Sapar Contemporary in New York City. Uranchimeg is the author four books on Mongolia and is the recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship , John W.

#2148

Martin S. James

#110811

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Martin Samuel James was an English-American art historian known primarily for his translations, with Harry Holtzman, of the writings of Piet Mondrian into English. James was born in London, but was raised in Paris, where he attended Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. He later attended Columbia University for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees, where he studied under Meyer Schapiro. He received his B.A. from Columbia College in 1943, M.A. in 1962, and Ph.M. in 1973 from Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He taught at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, NY from 1949 to 1985, where he create...

#2149

Gilbert Charles-Picard

#79031

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Gilbert Picard, called Gilbert Charles-Picard, was a 20th-century French historian and archaeologist, a specialist of North Africa during Antiquity. The son of Hellenist Charles Picard , he was born at Nercillac. He was married to Colette Picard, also an historian of antiquity and curator of the site of Carthage, and was the father of Olivier Picard, also an Hellenist, former director of the French School at Athens and a member of the Institut de France.

#2150

Leah Gilliam

#191322

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

L. Franklin Gilliam is an American filmmaker and media artist. Her work explores issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Gilliam was the director of projects and community catalyst at gamelab's Institute of Play and a visiting faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. They are currently vice president of strategy and innovation at Girls Who Code.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions