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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Political Science,

#101

Layna Mosley

#28053

Overall Influence

Layna Mosley is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She studies international relations, particularly the relationship between domestic politics and the global economy.

#102

Virginia Page Fortna

#18420

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Virginia Page Fortna is an American political scientist, a specialist in the study of peace negotiations. She is currently the Harold Brown Professor of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the 2010 Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association.

#103

Jenny Hocking

#21379

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jennifer Jane Hocking is an Australian historian, political scientist and biographer. She is the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow with the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University, Emeritus Professor at Monash University, and former Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Her work is in two key areas, counter-terrorism and Australian political biography. In both areas she explores Australian democratic practice, the relationship between the arms of government, and aspects of Australian political history. Her research into the life of former Aus...

#104

Erica Chenoweth

#32894

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Erica Chenoweth is an American political scientist, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. They are known for their research work on non-violent civil resistance movements.

#105

Shantha Sinha

#29052

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Shantha Sinha is an Indian anti-child labour activist. She is the founder of Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya Foundation, popularly known as MV Foundation , and is a professor in the Department of Political science in Hyderabad Central University. She headed the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights for two consecutive terms ; The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights was set up in March 2007 under the Commission for Protection of Child Rights Act, 2005, an Act of Parliament . Sinha was its first chairperson. She was awarded the civilian honour of Padma Shri by the Govern...

#106

Susan Stokes

#21317

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Susan Carol Stokes is an American political scientist and the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science department of the University of Chicago, and the faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her academic focus is on Latin American politics, comparative politics, and how democracies function in developing countries. Stokes is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

#107

Denise Dresser

#12626

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Denise Eugenia Dresser Guerra is a Mexican writer, and university professor. She is currently a faculty member of the Department of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, columnist in Proceso magazine, editorial writer for the newspaper Reforma, and participates in "La Hora De Opinar" TV Forum. She was awarded the Legion of Honor of the French Republic in the rank of Knight, the highest distinction awarded by the French government to citizens and foreigners, for her defense of freedom of expression and human rights. She has been named by Forbes magazine as one of t...

#108

Carolyn Gomes

#37402

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

The Honourable Carolyn Gomes, O.J. is a Jamaican human rights activist. She is also the co-founder and now the past executive director of Jamaicans for Justice. Gomes resigned as the executive director of Jamaicans for Justice due to controversy surrounding the JFJ introducing sex education material into a number of private children's homes in Jamaica that was deemed inappropriate. Since 2014 Carolyn Gomes has been serving as the executive director of Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition .

#109

Cynthia McClintock

#31726

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Cynthia McClintock is a professor at George Washington University and an author. She serves on the Center for International Policy's board of directors. From 1994–1995 she was the president of the Latin American Studies Association. She is an expert on Peruvian relations with the U.S., Andean affairs, the drug trade, and the Tupac Amaru rebel group.

#110

Adom Getachew

#14578

Overall Influence

Adom Getachew is an Ethiopian-American political scientist. She is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

#111

Evelyn Farkas

#22934

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Evelyn Nicolette Farkas is an American national security advisor, author, and foreign policy analyst. She is the current executive director of the McCain Institute, a nonprofit focused on democracy, human rights, and character-driven leadership.

#112

Betty Glad

#23859

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Betty Glad was an American political scientist who specialized in the American presidency and American foreign policy. Her first work on Charles Evans Hughes led to a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.

#113

Chan Heng Chee

#17580

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Chan Heng Chee is a Singaporean academic and diplomat who has been serving as Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2012, Chairwoman of the National Arts Council and Member of the Presidential Council for Minority Rights. She had also served as Singapore Ambassador to the United States between 1996 and 2012.

#114

Lenora Fulani

#13265

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lenora Branch Fulani is an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and political activist. She is best known for her presidential campaigns and development of youth programs serving minority communities in the New York City area. In the 1988 United States presidential election heading the New Alliance Party ticket, she became the first woman and the first African American to achieve ballot access in all fifty states. She received more votes for president in a U.S. general election than any other woman until Jill Stein of the Green Party of the United States in 2012. Fulani's political concern...

#115

Amaney Jamal

#22288

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Amaney A. Jamal is an American scholar of Middle Eastern politics who is currently the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics and Director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University. Jamal earned her bachelor's degree in politics at UCLA in 1993, followed by her PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. A Carnegie Scholar, Jamal specializes in democratization and civic engagement in the Arab world as well as Muslim and Arab civic engagement in the US. She currently directs the Workshop on Arab Political Development at Princeton University, ...

#116

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

#7955

Overall Influence

1916 - 2010 (94 years)

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was a German political scientist. Her most famous contribution is the model of the spiral of silence, detailed in The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. The model is an explanation of how perceived public opinion can influence individual opinions or actions.

#117

Julia Lovell

#16173

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Julia Lovell is a British scholar and prize-winning author and translator focusing on China. Life and career Lovell is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research has been focused principally on the relationship between culture and modern Chinese nation-building.

#118

Kalypso Nicolaïdis

Kalypso Nicolaïdis

#22963

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kalypso Aude Nicolaïdis is a Franco-Greek academic, currently Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Studies at Oxford University, England. She teaches in the areas of European integration, international relations, international political economy, negotiation and game theory and research methods as University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations. In 2020, Nicolaïdis joined the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute as a full time professor.

#119

Cheryl Benard

#35975

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Cheryl Benard is an academic scholar, writer, political scientist and novelist. She is the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan and Iraq. She and Khalilzad have two sons, Alexander Benard and Maximilian Benard.

#120

Susan George

#10316

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Susan George is an American and French political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is the president of the Transnational Institute, a think-tank located in Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the International Monetary Fund , World Bank and what she calls their 'maldevelopment model'. She similarly criticizes the structural reform policies of the Washington Consensus on Third World development. She is of U.S. birth but now resides in France, and has had dual citizenship since 1994.

#121

Fran Hosken

#13488

Overall Influence

1919 - 2006 (87 years)

Fran P. Hosken was an American designer, writer, feminist, and social activist. She founded the Women's International Network in 1975, and published a quarterly journal on women's health issues that became known, in particular, for its research into female genital mutilation .

#122

C. Christine Fair

C. Christine Fair

#22845

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Carol Christine Fair is an American political scientist. She is an associate professor in the Security Studies Program within the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her work is primarily focused on counter-terrorism and South Asian topics.

#123

Amrita Narlikar

#20045

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Amrita Narlikar is the president of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is also an Honorary Fellow of Darwin College , a non-resident senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation , a Distinguished International Fellow of the Indian Association of International Studies .

#124

Meg Russell

#26797

Overall Influence

Meg Russell is a constitutional scholar of British politics. She is Professor of British and Comparative Politics at University College London. Biography Russell worked in the House of Commons and for the British Labour Party before taking up a role with UCL at the Constitution Unit. In 2006 she was awarded the Richard Rose Prize from the Political Studies Association. She has served as an advisor to the Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee. Russell is a senior fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe research institute and an Associate of the Institute for Government.

#125

Linda Bilmes

#20505

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Linda J. Bilmes is an American economist who is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer Chair in Public Policy and Public Finance at Harvard University. She is a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School where she teaches public policy, budgeting and public finance. She served as Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the US Department of Commerce during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

#126

Judy Rebick

#18407

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Judy Rebick is a Canadian writer, journalist, political activist, and feminist. Early life Born in Reno, Nevada, Rebick and her family moved to Toronto when she was 9. She became a socialist activist in the 1970s, joining the Revolutionary Marxist Group. She was a member of its successor, the Revolutionary Workers League, and wrote articles for the RWL's newspaper, Socialist Voice, until she left the organization in the early 1980s.

#127

Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès

#15860

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Françoise Vergès is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism. Vergès was born in Paris, grew up in Réunion and Algeria before returning to Paris to study and become a journalist.

#128

Rita Laura Segato

Rita Laura Segato

#19604

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rita Laura Segato is an Argentine-Brazilian academic, who has been called "one of Latin America's most celebrated feminist anthropologists" and "one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this era". She is specially known for her research oriented towards gender in indigenous villages and Latin American communities, violence against women and the relationships between gender, racism and colonialism. One of her specialist areas is the study of gender violence.

#129

Catherine Bertini

#15796

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Catherine "Cathy" Bertini is an American public servant. She is the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. She was the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. She served as the UN Under-Secretary for Management from 2003 to 2005. Currently she is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and the Chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust.

#130

Soledad Loaeza

#24190

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dr. María Soledad Loaeza Tovar is a Mexican academic who specializes in the process of democratization and the transformations of society in Mexico. Biography Soledad Loaeza completed her high school studies at UNAM's Vidal Castañeda y Najera National "Plantel 4" high school. She received a degree in international relations from the College of Mexico , obtaining the title in 1972 with the thesis La política exterior del general Charles de Gaulle, 1962-1970 . She traveled to Europe to study for an international relations specialization at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut in Munich and a doctora...

#131

Alison Dundes Renteln

#21807

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Alison Dundes Renteln is an American college professor. She is a Professor of Political Science, Anthropology, Law, and Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Education She holds a B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe, a J.D. from USC's Gould School of Law, and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence & Social Policy and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1981 to 1982 she studied International Law at the London School of Economics.

#132

Gloria Álvarez

#16358

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Gloria Álvarez Cross is a Guatemalan radio and television presenter, author, and libertarian political commentator. She is the host of the Viernes de Gloria radio program in Guatemala. Álvarez is also the program director of the National Civic Movement of Guatemala, an organization that advocates for political participation in the national politics of Guatemala. She has also published books on political topics for a popular audience.

#133

Margaret Canovan

#11775

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Margaret Canovan was an English political theorist. Born in Carlisle in 1939, Canovan studied history at Girton College, Cambridge, where she subsequently completed a PhD on Joseph Priestley. She became a professor in the Politics Department at Lancaster University not long after its inception, later moving to Keele University where she remained until her retirement in 2002.

#134

Beth A. Simmons

Beth A. Simmons

#25007

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Beth A. Simmons is an American academic and notable international relations scholar. She is the Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is a former Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at the Department of Government. Her research interests include international relations, political economy, international law, and international human rights law compliance.

#135

Shalanda Young

#12737

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Shalanda Delores Young is an American political advisor who is the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, previously serving in an acting capacity from March 24, 2021, through March 17, 2022 concurrently as deputy director. She previously worked for the United States House Committee on Appropriations as its staff director.

#136

Nannerl O. Keohane

Nannerl O. Keohane

#15459

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Nannerl "Nan" Overholser Keohane is an American political theorist and former president of Wellesley College and Duke University. Until September 2014, Keohane was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is now a professor in social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where she is researching the theory and practice of leadership in democratic societies.

#137

Cheryl Rubenberg

#22925

Overall Influence

1946 - 2017 (71 years)

Cheryl A. Rubenberg was a writer and researcher specializing in the Middle East, formerly an associate professor in the department of political science at Florida International University. Life Born in Pennsylvania, Rubenberg specialized in political science and obtained her B.A. at Hunter College, and then earned an M.A. in international relations at Johns Hopkins University. The latter topic was the object of her Ph.D. at the University of Miami. Soon after, she joined the political science faculty at Florida International University. Her initial research focus was on Latin America where he...

#138

Marie Mendras

#34485

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dr. Marie Mendras is a political scientist in the field of Russian and post-Soviet studies. She is a research fellow with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and a professor at Sciences Po University’s School of International Affairs in Paris.

#139

Zephyr Teachout

#10249

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Zephyr Rain Teachout is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and associate professor of law at Fordham University. In 2014, Teachout ran for the Democratic Party nomination for governor of New York and lost to incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo, receiving 34% of the primary vote. In 2016, Teachout was a candidate for the United States House of Representatives in New York's 19th congressional district. Teachout won the Democratic primary before losing to Republican John Faso. In 2018, Teachout was a candidate for New York State attorney general in the 2018 elections but lost the Democratic nomination to Letitia James.

#140

Valerie M. Hudson

#25496

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Valerie M. Hudson is an American professor of political science in the Department of International Affairs at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University as of January 2012. Prior to coming to Texas A&M, Hudson was a professor of political science at Brigham Young University for over 24 years. She is most noted for having co-authored the book Bare Branches which discussed the effects of China's demographic decisions on sex ratios in China and other countries.

#141

Dina Powell

#11851

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Dina Powell, also known as Dina Powell McCormick is an American financial executive, philanthropist, and political advisor, best known for having been the United States Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy to President Donald Trump.

#142

Vivien A. Schmidt

Vivien A. Schmidt

#42751

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Vivien A. Schmidt is an American academic of political science and international relations. At Boston University, she is the Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration Professor of International Relations in the Pardee School of Global Studies, and Professor of Political Science. She is known for her work on political economy, policy analysis, democratic theory, and new institutionalism. She is a 2018 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been named a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor.

#143

Nancy Bermeo

#47298

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Nancy Bermeo is an American political scientist, and senior research fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She previously held the position of Nuffield Chair of Comparative Politics at Oxford.

#144

Mary Hawkesworth

#12871

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mary Hawkesworth is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She is a political scientist trained in feminist theory and has conducted extensive research in women and politics, gender, and contemporary feminist activism. Hawkesworth was previously the Editor-in-Chief of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, an internationally recognized journal in feminist scholarship.

#145

Melina Abdullah

Melina Abdullah

#20001

Overall Influence

Melina Abdullah is an American academic and civic leader. She is the former chair of the department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and is a co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter Grassroots, where she is also the co-director.

#146

Nivedita Menon

#15031

Overall Influence

Nivedita Menon is a writer and a professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She previously taught at Lady Shri Ram College and the Department of Political Science at Delhi University.

#147

Diana Schaub

#16773

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Diana J. Schaub is professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland. Schaub received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She teaches and writes on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and American political thought. Schaub was also a member of The President's Council on Bioethics.

#148

Cynthia Weber

#44523

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Cynthia Weber is a Professor of International Relations at Sussex University, UK, and co-Director of the media company Pato Productions. Cynthia Weber was born in New Jersey, USA, and raised in Pennsylvania. She received a BA in Political Science from West Virginia University , an MA from Sussex University , and a PhD from Arizona State University . She held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California and has held visiting appointments at numerous universities including the New School University, the University of Arizona, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

#149

Djamila Ribeiro

Djamila Ribeiro

#32890

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Djamila Taís Ribeiro dos Santos is a Brazilian Black feminist philosopher and journalist. She graduated in political philosophy from the Federal University of São Paulo, where she also earned a master's degree on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Ribeiro is a collaborating editor of weekly magazine CartaCapital, as well as a columnist for CartaCapital and Folha de S.Paulo.

#150

Erna Solberg

#29087

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Erna Solberg is a Norwegian politician and the current Leader of the Opposition. She served as the 35th prime minister of Norway from 2013 to 2021, and has been Leader of the Conservative Party since May 2004.

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