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.

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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Political Science,

#301

Helen Margetts

#34862

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Helen Zerlina Margetts , is Professor of Internet and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute , University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2018 was Director of the OII. She is currently Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, and has published over a hundred books, journal articles and research reports in this field.

#302

Nancy Soderberg

Nancy Soderberg

#30256

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Nancy Elisabeth Soderberg is an American foreign policy strategist who currently serves as Resident Director for National Democratic Institute in Kosovo. Soderberg served as the third-ranking official on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council from 1993 to 1997 and as an Alternate Representative to the United Nations as a Presidential Appointee, with the rank of Ambassador, from 1997 to 2001. She has also held positions at the International Crisis Group, Connect U.S. Fund, and the Public Interest Declassification Board. In 2012 she ran unsuccessfully for Florida Senate District 4.

#303

Tara McCormack

#70997

Overall Influence

Tara McCormack is an academic and author. She is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Leicester. Education and career McCormack graduated with a BA in politics from Queen Mary University of London, and an MSc in International Relations and Government from the London School of Economics. She completed her PhD in international security at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. She specialises in security, foreign policy and democratic legitimacy; intervention and Britain's war powers. Before taking up her post at the University of Leicester McCorm...

#304

Jean C. Oi

#53077

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Jean C. Oi is an American political scientist and expert in the politics of China. She is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics in the department of political science at Stanford University. She is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies there. She studies political economy and fiscal reform, particularly in rural China.

#305

Anna Leander

#37128

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Anna Leander is a sociologist and political scientist. Leander is currently a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She previously taught at the Copenhagen Business School and the Inst. de Relacoes Internacionais, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Leander is well known for her work in critical security studies and international political sociology. Theoretically, Leander has played an important role in bringing the work of Pierre Bourdieu into conversation with the discipline of International Relations, as well as more recently working with materialist and pragmatist sociologies.

#306

Susan M. Collins

Susan M. Collins

#42237

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Susan M. Collins is an American economist who has served as the 14th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston since July 1, 2022. She is the first African American woman and first woman of color to lead any of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks. Collins previously served as the 16th provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of the University of Michigan from 2020 to 2022.

#307

Sheena Chestnut Greitens

#43703

Overall Influence

Sheena Elise Chestnut Greitens is an American political scientist who is an associate professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She was First Lady of Missouri from 2017 to 2018.

#308

Lavinia Stan

#47153

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Lavinia Stan is a professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. She currently lives in Montreal. Education and career After obtaining a degree from the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, she emigrated to Canada in 1991. She then earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Between 2001 and 2003 she taught at Dalhousie University in Halifax, while from 2006 to 2008 she taught at Concordia University in Montreal. Since 2004, Stan has been a Professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

#309

Lisa Baldez

#74431

Overall Influence

Lisa Baldez is an American political scientist and scholar of Latin American Studies. She is a professor of government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth College, where she was also Cheheyl Professor and director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth College from 2015 until 2018. She studies the relationship between political institutions and gender equality, and has written about the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, women's protests in Chile, gender quota laws, and the Equal Rig...

#310

Michele Betsill

#72544

Overall Influence

Michele Betsill is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where she has also been the chair of the department. She studies climate change and sustainability policies, with a particular focus on how non-governmental actors and sub-national governments respond to climate change. She is a co-founder of the Earth System Governance Project.

#311

Beatrice Heuser

#24599

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Beatrice Heuser , is an historian and political scientist. She holds the chair of International Relations at the University of Glasgow. Life Heuser has a B.A. in History from Bedford College, a M.A. in International History from the London School of Economics and a D.Phil. in Political Science from the University of Oxford. In addition, she holds a Higher Doctorate from the University of Marburg. From 1989 to 1991, she worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Subsequently, she became a lecturer and later a professor of Strategic Studies at King's College London. She ha...

#312

Nancy-Ann DeParle

#24982

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Nancy-Ann Min DeParle served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the administration of President Obama from January 2011 to January 2013. Previously, she served as the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, leading the administration's efforts on health care issues, including the passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. She served as the director of the Health Care Financing Administration from 1997 to 2000, administering the Medicare program for the Clinton administration, and before then worked at the Office of Management and Budget.

#313

Martha Crenshaw

Martha Crenshaw

#42986

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Martha Crenshaw FBA is a political scientist who is prominent for her research on terrorism. She is professor of political science at Stanford University since 2007, as well as senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Center for International Security and Cooperation .

#314

Virginia Sapiro

#36213

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Virginia Sapiro is an American political scientist and political psychologist. A native of East Orange, New Jersey, Sapiro graduated from Clark University in 1972, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1976, after which she began teaching at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was appointed Sophonisba P. Breckinridge Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies there in 1995, and served through 2007, when she joined the Boston University faculty. Sapiro has served the American Political Science Association as secretary, vice president, and president of the APSA ...

#315

Aletta Norval

#41755

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Aletta Norval is a South African born political theorist. she is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Anglia Ruskin University. A prominent member of the Essex School of discourse analysis, she is mainly known for her deconstructionist analysis of Apartheid discourse, for her methodological contributions to discourse analysis and for her work on decentred, democratic and poststructuralist political theory. Her other research interests include feminist theory, South-African politics, ethnicity and the politics of race. More recently, she has worked on biometrics, focussing on issues of citizen consent t...

#316

Susan Ariel Aaronson

#30075

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Susan Ariel Aaronson is an American author, public speaker and an academic professor whose works are centred on the relationship between economic change and human rights and more recently focuses on data. She is a research professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where she also founded the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub of which she is director.

#317

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook

#61130

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (49 years)

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook is a German-American political scientist. She was the director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations from June 2021 to February 2022. Since August 2022 she has served as an Executive Vice President of the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

#318

Nazli Moawad

#92209

Overall Influence

Nazli Moawad is an Egyptian political science professor at Faculty of Political Science at Cairo University. She was granted the National Legion of Honour , the highest French honor, by France’s President.

#319

Herschelle Sullivan Challenor

#81976

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Herchelle Sullivan Challenor is a foreign policy expert, international civil servant, university administrator, and was one of the key activists in the Atlanta Student Movement, part of the Civil Rights Movement, of the early 1960s.

#320

Jeanne Theoharis

Jeanne Theoharis

#41358

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Jeanne Theoharis is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. Early life Jeanne Theoharis was born to mother and activist Nancy Artinian, and father and professor Athan Theoharis. She was raised in Fox Point, Wisconsin a village in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin near the campus of Marquette University where her father taught. She has two siblings Liz Theoharis co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, and George Theoharis a professor of education, at Syracuse University.

#321

Aileen Baviera

#82821

Overall Influence

1959 - 2020 (61 years)

Aileen San Pablo-Baviera was a Filipino political scientist and sinologist. She was one of the leading China experts in her country. Career In October 1979, Baviera received her Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Service, cum laude at the University of the Philippines. As a student of modern Chinese history at the University of Beijing, she was allowed to do research in China for the first time from 1981 to 1983. She learned the Chinese language, received a diploma from the Beijing Language Institute and traveled to the north and west of the country. In 1987, Baviera received a Master of Arts in Asian studies, specializing in China and East Asia.

#322

Mireia Vehí

#32566

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (40 years)

Mireia Vehí i Cantenys is a Spanish sociologist and politician from Catalonia, who currently serves as Member of the Congress of Deputies of Spain. She was previously a member of the Parliament of Catalonia.

#323

Bethany Albertson

#75028

Overall Influence

Bethany Lee Albertson is an American Political psychologist. She is an Associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin. Her co-authored book Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World received the Robert E. Lane Award for being the best book in political psychology published in 2015.

#324

Alice Kang

#71885

Overall Influence

Alice J. Kang is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Education Kang received her B.A. in Economics from Brown University in 2000 and her Ph.D in Political Science from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010.

#325

Erika Feller

#69978

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Erika Elizabeth Feller is an Australian academic, diplomat and lawyer. From 2006 to 2013, she was Assistant High Commissioner for Protection with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She is currently the Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

#326

Antonia Handler Chayes

Antonia Handler Chayes

#36670

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

Antonia "Toni" Handler Chayes is a United States lawyer and educator who served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force from 1977 to 1979 and as United States Under Secretary of the Air Force from 1979 to 1981.

#327

Merit Janow

#36048

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Merit E. Janow is a professor in the practice of international trade and dean at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs from 2013 to 2021. Biography Janow teaches graduate courses in international economic and trade policy at SIPA and international trade law and international antitrust at Columbia University Law School. Janow has also served on the WTO Appellate Body since November 2003. Since 1997 she has also been an executive director of a new international competition policy advisory committee to the attorney general and assistant attorney general for antitrust at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.

#328

Nicole Bacharan

Nicole Bacharan

#53270

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Nicole Bacharan is a French historian and political scientist specializing in American society and French-American relations. She is a researcher with the National Foundation for Political Science and was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California from 2013 to 2014.

#329

Suzanne Mettler

Suzanne Mettler

#57956

Overall Influence

Suzanne Mettler is an American political scientist and author, known for her research about the way Americans view and respond to the government in their lives, and helping to stimulate the study of American political development.

#330

Bettina Aptheker

#18931

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Bettina Fay Aptheker is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author. Aptheker was active in civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since worked in developing feminist studies.

#331

Joanna Marszałek-Kawa

#76986

Overall Influence

Joanna Marszałek-Kawa is a Polish lawyer, political scientist, professor and lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Biography Joanna Marszałek-Kawa is the Head of the Department of the Political System of the Republic of Poland at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. She is also the Director of the Centre of Eastern Studies and the Vice President of Toruń branch of the Polish Association of Political Science. Marszałek-Kawa is the editor-in-chief of the journals: Polish Politica...

#332

Shireen Hunter

#44947

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Shireen Tahmaaseb Hunter is an independent scholar. Until 2019, she was a Research Professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with which she had been associated since 2005, as Visiting Fellow and then Visiting Professor. She became an honorary fellow of ACMCU in September 2019.

#333

Nina Belyaeva

#78394

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Nina Yurievna Belyaeva is a Russian public policy researcher, PhD, professor and head of the Public Policy Department. at National Research University Higher School of Economics , Moscow 2000 - 2022, Russia, Academic Supervisor of the International Master's Program "Political Analysis and Public Policy" with a specialization in "Human Rights and Democratic Governance" , Russia. Member of Russian Political Science Association,.

#334

Vicky Randall

#73489

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

Vicky Randall was a professor of political science and feminist scholar. Early life and education Randall was born in Birmingham on 3 April 1945, to the novelist Inez Pearn and the poet and sociologist Charles Madge, co-founder of Mass Observation and later Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham.

#335

Faye Wattleton

#17505

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Faye Wattleton is an American reproductive rights activist who was the first African American and the youngest president ever elected of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the first woman since Margaret Sanger to hold the position. She is currently Co-founder & Director at EeroQ, a quantum computing company. She is best known for her contributions to family planning and reproductive health, and the reproductive rights movement.

#336

Sheila Jeffreys

#35838

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality. Jeffreys' argument that the "sexual revolution" on men's terms contributed less to women's freedom than to their continued oppression has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism. She argues that women suffering pain in pursuit of beauty is a form of submission to patriarchal sadism; that transgender people reproduce oppressive gender roles and mutilate their bodies through sex reassignme...

#337

Melissa Hathaway

#24066

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Melissa Hathaway is a leading expert in cyberspace policy and cybersecurity. She served under two U.S. presidential administrations from 2007 to 2009, including more than 8 months at the White House, spearheading the Cyberspace Policy Review for President Barack Obama after leading the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative for President George W. Bush. She is President of Hathaway Global Strategies LLC, a Senior Fellow and member of the Board of Regents at Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada, and a non-resident Research Fellow at the Kosciuszko Institute in Poland.

#338

Angie Brooks

#33740

Overall Influence

1928 - 2007 (79 years)

Angie Elizabeth Brooks was a Liberian diplomat and jurist. She was the only African female President of the United Nations General Assembly. She was also the second woman from any nation to head the U.N. body.

#339

Laurie Brand

#76628

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Laurie Ann Brand is a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California School of International Relations. Professor Brand specializes in the international relations of the Middle East, including political economy of the region and inter-Arab relations. She received her B.S. in French from Georgetown University, her M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Politics from the same institution. She served as president of Middle East Studies Association of North America in 2004.

#340

Lotika Sarkar

#26607

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Lotika Sarkar was a noted Indian feminist, social worker, educator and lawyer, who was a pioneer in the field of women's studies and women's rights in India. She was a founding member of Centre for Women's Development Studies , Delhi, established in 1980, and also Indian Association for Women Studies, established in 1982. Starting in 1951, she taught law at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi till 1983, and also remained the head of the law faculty; thereafter she taught at Indian Law Institute. She was the first Indian woman to graduate from Cambridge University, and later in 1951 she also b...

#341

Carol Z. Perez

#27965

Overall Influence

Carol Zelis Perez is a career Foreign Service Officer, who previously served as the Director General of the Foreign Service. Perez served as the U.S. Ambassador to Chile from October 2016 to January 2019.

#342

Sara Hagemann

#63788

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Sara Hagemann is a Danish academic and an expert on international and European politics. She has published extensively on issues related to political processes and representation in the European Union, transparency in politics, and the role of national parliaments in international affairs. Sara is currently Professor of Political Science and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Copenhagen University, where she joined in September 2021. Before then she was associate professor at the London School of Economics and Associate Dean at the LSE School of Public Policy and a faculty member of the LSE European Institute.

#343

Susan Pharr

#56476

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Susan J. Pharr is an academic in the field of political science, a Japanologist, and Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, director of Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University. Her current research focuses on the changing nature of relations between citizens and states in Asia, and on the forces that shape civil society over time.

#344

Vera Schwarcz

#42940

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Vera Schwarcz was the Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. Her BA was from Vassar College, with a MA from Yale, where she studied with Jonathan Spence, a MAA from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. From 1979 to 1980, she studied at Peking University as part the first group of American students admitted after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China. In addition to works of history, Schwarcz writes poetry.

#345

Hannah McGlade

#44761

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Hannah McGlade CF is an Australian academic, human rights advocate and lawyer. She is a Kurin Minang Noongar woman of the Bibulman nation and is an associate professor at Curtin University's law school. She was appointed Senior Indigenous Fellow at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2016 and has been a member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues since 2020.

#346

Susan Baker

#59318

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Susan Baker is a Professor Emerita in the School of Social Sciences and former co-director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University. Her research concerns environmental governance in the European Union and ecofeminism, gender and the environment.

#347

Deepa M. Ollapally

#88719

Overall Influence

Deepa M. Ollapally is research professor of international affairs and the associate director of the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. She is also the director of the Rising Powers Initiative launched by the Elliott School in 2009.

#348

Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga

#41642

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga is a Latvian politician who served as the sixth President of Latvia from 1999 to 2007. She is the first and to date only woman to hold the post. She was elected President of Latvia in 1999 and re-elected for the second term in 2003.

#349

Monica Toft

#61227

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Monica Duffy Toft is an American international relations scholar. Her research interests include international security and strategy, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and the relationship between demography and national security. Among her researches, her theory of indivisible territory explains how certain conflicts turn violent while others not, and when it is likely for a conflict to become a violent. Since 2017 she holds the position of Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Director of the Fletcher School's Center ...

#350

Jocelyn Benson

#22408

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (48 years)

Jocelyn Benson is an American democracy advocate, politician, and former academic administrator. Since 2019, she has been the 43rd Secretary of State of Michigan. She is a former dean of Wayne State University Law School, a co-founder of the Military Spouses of Michigan, and a board member of the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality. Benson is the author of State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process.

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