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.

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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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Political Science,

#51

Janice Stein

#15851

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Janice Gross Stein is a Canadian political scientist and international relations expert. Stein is a specialist in Middle East area studies; negotiation theory; foreign policy decision-making; and international conflict management.

#52

Maria Lipman

#10010

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Maria Alexandrovna Lipman is a Russian journalist, political scientist and Russia expert, who edited the magazine of the Carnegie Moscow Center until 2014. She is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University and Co-Editor of the Institute’s website Russia.Post. She also writes for Foreign Affairs.

#53

Dilma Rousseff

#6957

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Dilma Vana Rousseff is a Brazilian economist and politician who served as the 36th president of Brazil, holding the position from 2011 until her impeachment and removal from office on 31 August 2016. She is the first woman to have held the Brazilian presidency and had previously served as chief of staff to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from 2005 to 2010. She has been chair of the New Development Bank since March 2023.

#54

Terry Karl

#14953

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Terry Lynn Karl is the Gildred Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Political Science specializing in comparative politics in the Political Science Department at Stanford University.

#55

Jodi Dean

#4811

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jodi Dean is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She held the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2013 to 2018. Dean has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author and editor of thirteen books. Her most recent book is titled Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging .

#56

Martha Finnemore

#5389

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Martha Finnemore is an American constructivist scholar of international relations, and University Professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. She is considered among the most influential international relations scholars. Her scholarship has highlighted the role of norms and culture in international politics, as well as shown that international organizations are consequential and purposive social agents in world politics that can shape state interests.

#57

Carol Cohn

#10333

Overall Influence

Carol Cohn is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Cohn is recognised for addressing issues of gender in global politics, particularly conflict and security issues. She has published in academic and policy contexts with major research interests lying in the realm of gender and armed conflict, the gendered discourses of US national security elites and gender mainstreaming in international security institutions. In addition to her research, Cohn facilitates training and workshops ...

#58

Rounaq Jahan

#10592

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Rounaq Jahan is a Bangladeshi political scientist, feminist leader and author. A former faculty of the University of Dhaka, Jahan teaches and researches at the Columbia University since 1990. She was a representative of Bangladesh to the 32nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1977. She founded Women for Women, one of the first feminist research centres in Bangladesh, in 1973, and is the director of Research Initiatives Bangladesh .

#59

Donatella della Porta

#9235

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Donatella della Porta is an Italian sociologist and political scientist, who is Professor of political science and political sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known for her research in the areas of social movements, corruption, political violence, police and policies of public order. In 2022, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#60

Susan Shirk

#17746

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Susan L. Shirk is an American political scientist and China specialist currently serving as a research professor at UCSD's School of Global Policy and Strategy. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs of the US State Department from 1997 to 2000 during the Clinton administration.

#61

Kathleen Thelen

Kathleen Thelen

#11681

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Kathleen Thelen is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies , and a faculty associate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

#62

Lisa Wedeen

#14686

Overall Influence

Lisa Wedeen is Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. In 1995, Wedeen received her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her former advisor is Hanna Pitkin. She has taught courses on nationalism, identity formation, power and resistance, and citizenship. Her work on the Middle East includes Ambiguities of Domination, an ethnographic study of the culture of the spectacle in Syria under Hafez al-Assad.

#63

Zahra Rahnavard

#12480

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Zahra Rahnavard is an Iranian academic, artist and politician. Rahnavard is a university professor, artist, and intellectual who was under house arrest from February 2011 to May 2018. In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine named her one of the world's most distinguished thinkers. She is the wife of former Iran Prime Minister Mir Hussein Musavi. In part of her work, she has underlined the need for men to respect the laws of the hijab in the same way as women, as well as a general activist for women's rights in the Middle East.

#64

Susan Brownmiller

#1881

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Susan Brownmiller is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, which was selected by The New York Public Library as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century.

#65

Renu Khator

#6506

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Renu Khator is the fifth chancellor of the University of Houston System and the thirteenth president of the University of Houston. In 2008, she became the first female chancellor in the state of Texas and the first Indian immigrant to lead a comprehensive research university in the U.S.

#66

Linda Arrigo

#16547

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Linda Gail Arrigo is an American political activist, human rights activist, and academic researcher in Taiwan. She formerly served as the international affairs officer of Green Party Taiwan. Early life and education Born in the United States to Joseph and Nellie Arrigo, she went to Taiwan as a teenager in 1963 with her father, formerly a United States Army logistics officer who was assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Taiwan. Arrigo attended Taipei American School and after graduating as valedictorian in 1966, eloped with her Taiwanese-American husband, George Chen, to the U.S.

#67

Nonna Mayer

#16070

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Nonna Mayer is an academic French political scientist and researcher in political science. She is a research director at the CNRS, and a specialist of electoral sociology and of far right movements in France. She was president of the Association Française de Science Politique from 2005 to 2016.

#68

Barbara Harff

#14223

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Barbara Harff is professor of political science emerita at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2003 and again in 2005 she was a distinguished visiting professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her research focuses on the causes, risks, and prevention of genocidal violence.

#69

Helen Wallace

#15934

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dame Helen Sarah Wallace, Lady Wallace of Saltaire, DBE, CMG, FBA, MAE, FAcSS , née Rushworth, is a British expert in European studies and, by marriage to William Wallace, Baron Wallace of Saltaire, a peeress. She was Foreign Secretary of the British Academy from 2011 to 2015.

#70

Deborah Bräutigam

#11178

Overall Influence

Deborah Bräutigam is an American political scientist, currently the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Bräutigam studies international development policies and foreign aid, focusing on Chinese projects in Africa.

#71

J. Ann Tickner

#9281

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Judith Ann Tickner is an Anglo-American feminist international relations theorist. Tickner is a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC.

#72

Radhika Coomaraswamy

#16160

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Deshamanya Radhika Coomaraswamy is a Sri Lankan lawyer, diplomat and human rights advocate who served as the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict until 13 July 2012. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed her to the position in April 2006. She was nominated to the Constitutional Council as a civil representative on 10 September 2015. In 2017, after atrocities against the Rohingya people, she was appointed a Member of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar.

#73

Judith N. Shklar

#13785

Overall Influence

1928 - 1992 (64 years)

Judith Nisse Shklar was a philosopher and political theorist who studied the history of political thought, notably that of the Enlightenment period. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1980.

#74

Ann Elizabeth Mayer

#10675

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Ann Elizabeth Mayer is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Ann E. Mayer has taught law courses on subjects comprising law and policy in international business, globalization and human rights, introductions to U.S. law, comparative law, and Islamic law in contemporary Middle Eastern legal systems.

#75

Susan Estrich

#4612

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Susan Estrich is an American lawyer, professor, author, political operative, and political commentator. She is known for serving as the campaign manager for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and for serving in 2016 as legal counsel to the former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.

#76

Barbara F. Walter

#17520

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Barbara F. Walter is an American political scientist who is the Rohr Professor of International affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terrorism. Walter is the author of numerous books and articles on these subjects. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and PBS, and has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. Walter has consulted for the World Bank, the Departments of Defense and State, the United Nations, and the January 6th Committee.

#77

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

#15482

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin was an American political theorist. She was best known for her seminal study The Concept of Representation, published in 1967. Pitkin's diverse interests ranged from the history of European political thought from ancient to modern times, through ordinary language philosophy and textual analysis, to issues of psychoanalysis and gender in political and social theory.

#78

Lilia Shevtsova

Lilia Shevtsova

#20801

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lilia Fyodorovna Shevtsova is a Kremlinology expert. Biography Shevtsova received B.A. and M.A. in history and journalism from Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1971. She also received Ph.D. in political science from the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1976. She served as director of the Center for Political Studies in Moscow, and as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies.

#79

Jendayi Frazer

#20929

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jendayi Elizabeth Frazer is the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, heading the Bureau of African Affairs. She was a Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Department of Social and Decision Sciences.

#80

Margaret Levi

#24051

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Margaret Levi is an American political scientist and author, noted for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory, notably on the origins and effects of trustworthy government.

#81

Patricia Crone

#2898

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specialised in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.

#82

Meredith Jung-En Woo

Meredith Jung-En Woo

#15304

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Meredith Jung-En Woo is an American academic and author. She is a Professor of Practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. She served as President of Sweet Briar College, and is the former director of the International Higher Education Support Program at the Open Society Foundation in London. She also served as the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.

#83

Géraldine Muhlmann

#10265

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Géraldine Muhlmann is a French political scientist and political journalist. She is a former host of the France 5 program C politique . Education and positions Muhlmann received the 1er accessit in the philosophy concours général in 1989.

#84

Wendy Brown

#6141

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#85

Lara Brown

#13669

Overall Influence

Lara M. Brown is an American political scientist who served as director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University between 2016 and 2022. Early life and education Brown was born and brought up in California. She obtained a BA, MA and PhD in political sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles. Subsequently she also obtained an MA in American politics and public policy from the University of Arizona.

#86

Elizabeth J. Perry

#25896

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Elizabeth J. Perry, FBA is an American scholar of Chinese politics and history at Harvard University, where she is the Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as Director of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research from 1999 to 2003 and as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 2007.

#87

Eliz Sanasarian

#22939

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Eliz Sanasarian is an Iranian-American professor of political science at the University of Southern California. She is best known for her expertise and books on ethnic politics and feminism, particularly regarding the Middle East and Iran. Sanasarian joined the faculty in 1985.

#88

Carol M. Swain

#12124

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Carol Miller Swain is an American political scientist and legal scholar who is a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. A frequent television analyst, she is the author and editor of several books. Her interests include race relations, immigration, representation, evangelical politics, and the United States Constitution.

#89

Nadiya Svitlychna

#36480

Overall Influence

1936 - 2006 (70 years)

Nadiya Oleksiyivna Svitlychna was a Ukrainian dissident and human rights activist, and an active member of the Ukrainian Helsinki group. She was a writer and editor and for a time was a political prisoner of the Soviet regime.

#90

Amy Zegart

#22432

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Amy Zegart is an American political scientist currently serving as the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies , and professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a contributing writer to The Atlantic. From 2013 to 2018, she served as co-director of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation and founder and co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program.

#91

Meghan O'Sullivan

Meghan O'Sullivan

#21896

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Meghan L. O'Sullivan is a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. She is Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Kennedy School. She is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Raytheon, and the North American chair of the Trilateral Commission.

#92

Abigail Thernstrom

#8983

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Abigail Thernstrom was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education. She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit,...

#93

Yuen Yuen Ang

#15427

Overall Influence

Yuen Yuen Ang is a Singaporean-American professor of political science and the author of two books: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , named one of the "Best Books of 2017" by Foreign Affairs, and China's Gilded Age . She is the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University.

#94

S. Laurel Weldon

S. Laurel Weldon

#17795

Overall Influence

#95

Sarah Sewall

#15563

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Sarah Sewall is Executive Vice President for Policy at In-Q-Tel, a strategic investor for the national security community. A national security expert whose career spans government service and academia, she most recently served as Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, where she was the key architect of the Obama Administration's preventive approach to combatting violent extremism abroad. At both the Pentagon and State Department, she built and led organizations that integrated security and human rights in their policy and operational work. She spent ten y...

#96

Helen Milner

#20516

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Helen V. Milner is an American political scientist and the B. C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she is also the Director of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. She has written extensively on issues related to international political economy like international trade, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization and regionalism, and the relationship between democracy and trade policy.

#97

Barbara Geddes

#24175

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Barbara Geddes is an American political scientist. One of the main important theorists of authoritarianism and empirical catalogers of authoritarian regimes, she is currently a full professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her 2003 book Paradigms and Sand Castles is an influential research design book in comparative politics.

#98

Camilla Stivers

#32621

Overall Influence

Camilla Stivers is a scholar and professor of Public Administration who is also known for her contributions in the fields of Urban Studies and Public service. Known primarily for her influential work “Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era”, Stivers has been published frequently and consistently throughout the years, and is seen as somewhat of an icon in the field of Public Administration. Although partially retired, Stivers currently serves as a professor and lecturer at Cleveland State University.

#99

Liesbet Hooghe

#27452

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Liesbet Hooghe is a Belgian political scientist, currently serving as the W. R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also a research fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. In a list of 400 top political scientists at Ph.D. granting institutions in the US, published in Political Science & Politics , she was ranked as the fifth most-cited woman scholar in political science.

#100

Hope Hicks

#4973

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Hope Charlotte Hicks is an American public relations executive and political advisor who served in President Donald Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2018 and 2020 to 2021. She served as White House director of strategic communications from January to September 2017, as White House communications director from 2017 to 2018, and returned to serve as a counselor to the president from 2020 to 2021.

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