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,

#401

Lyn Ragsdale

#48652

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Lyn Ragsdale was an American political scientist. She was the Radoslav A. Tsanoff professor of public affairs, professor of political science, and Dean of Social Sciences at Rice University. She specialized in the American presidency, the United States Congress, and electoral behavior. Ragsdale died suddenly at home on December 13, 2020.

#402

Claudine Gay

#24877

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Claudine Gay is an American political scientist serving as the 30th president of Harvard University. Assuming office in 2023, she became the university's first black president 368 years after its founding.

#403

Sophie Meunier

#60856

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Sophie Meunier is a senior research scholar in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs . She is the Director of Princeton's Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society and the Co-director of the European Union Program at Princeton, which she founded with Andrew Moravcsik. She was elected Chair of the European Union Studies Association, the world's premier scholarly association for the study of the European Union and the process of European integration . A Franco-American political scientist, she is an expert in European ...

#404

Alisyn Camerota

Alisyn Camerota

#27247

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Alisyn Camerota is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator for CNN. She formerly was an anchor of CNN's morning show New Day, a co-host of the afternoon edition of CNN Newsroom, she also served as host of CNN Tonight from 2022 to 2023 as well as a presenter at Fox News. Camerota has covered stories nationally and internationally and has twice been nominated for an Emmy Award for news reporting.

#405

Sally Shelton-Colby

#45150

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Sally Angela Shelton-Colby is an American diplomat. She was Ambassador of the United States to Barbados, Grenada and Dominica as well as Minister to St Lucia, and Special Representative to Antigua, St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, and St. Vincent from 1979 to 1981, under Jimmy Carter.

#406

Sue Goldie

#42440

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Sue J. Goldie is the Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health, the Director of the Center for Health Decision Science , Director of the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, and founding Faculty Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute . Goldie has a secondary appointment as Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine . Her professional agenda includes improving women's health in all parts of the world, using evidence-based policy to reduce global health inequities, building bridges between disciplines to tackle critical public health challenges...

#407

Melissa Nobles

#58960

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Melissa Nobles is an American political scientist and academic administrator. She is currently Chancellor and Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She previously served as the Kenan Sahin Dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science.

#408

Anna G. Jónasdóttir

#41833

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Anna Guðrún Jónasdóttir is an Icelandic political scientist and gender studies academic. She is Professor Emerita at the Center for Feminist Social Studies at Örebro University and co-director of the GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, established as a centre of excellence in gender studies in 2006. She is the author and editor of several books. Anna Jónasdóttir is known, i.a., for her theory of "love power." Her book Why Women Are Oppressed was described as a "thorough attempt to revitalize one of the most provocative early themes of America's women's liberation movement" by The New York Times Book Review.

#409

Patty Murray

#33216

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Patricia Lynn Murray is an American politician who has served as president pro tempore of the United States Senate since 2023 and the senior United States Senator from Washington since 1993. A member of the Democratic Party, Murray served in the Washington State Senate from 1989 to 1993. She was Washington's first female U.S. senator and is the first woman in American history to hold the position of president pro tempore. Murray is also the youngest senator to occupy the office of president pro tempore in more than five decades. As president pro tempore, Murray is third in the line of succession to the U.S.

#410

Kate Shaw

#75123

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Dr. Kate Shaw is an Australian academic, planning activist and commentator, currently serving as a research fellow at the University of Melbourne. Background Kate bad Shaw worked in alternative theatre and arts publicity in Melbourne in the 1980s, before undertaking a post-Graduate Diploma in urban policy and planning and a Masters in urban planning , both at RMIT. She then moved to the University of Melbourne and taught planning law, statutory planning, urban design, and ran classes on political economy, gentrification and the cultures of cities.

#411

Hege Skjeie

#36661

Overall Influence

1955 - 2018 (63 years)

Hege Skjeie was a Norwegian political scientist and feminist. Biography She became a Dr. Polit. in political science in 1992 and was hired as associate professor of political science at the University of Oslo in 1997. She was promoted to professor in 2000, and thus became Norway's first female Professor of Political Science. In 2010, she was appointed chairperson of the Equality Commission by the Government of Norway, established by a royal decree of 12 February 2010 in order to report on Norway’s equality policies.

#412

Rachel Kyte

#63537

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

Rachel Elizabeth Kyte is a British academic who served as the 14th dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University from October 2019 to June 2023, and the first woman to lead the oldest graduate-only school of international affairs in the United States. She was the former Chief Executive Officer of Sustainable Energy for All, and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All.

#413

Yuli Tamir

#60709

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Yael "Yuli" Tamir is an Israeli academic and former politician who served as a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party between 2003 and 2010, and as Minister of Immigrant Absorption and Education, as well as the deputy speaker of the Knesset and a member of the Finance committee, the Education committee and the Security and Foreign Affairs committee. From 2010 to 2020, Tamir was President of Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. Since 2015 she is an adjunct professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford. As of October 2020, Tamir is President of Beit Berl College.

#414

Jane Byrne

#38917

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Jane Margaret Byrne was an American politician who served as the 50th mayor of Chicago from April 16, 1979, until April 29, 1983. Prior to her tenure as mayor, Byrne served as Chicago's commissioner of consumer sales from 1969 until 1977, the only female in the mayoral cabinet.

#415

Irene Eber

#55127

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Irene Eber was an Israeli Orientalist. She was the Louis Frieberg Professor of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Jerusalem , and Senior Fellow of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute. She lived in Jerusalem. She was also a specialist in translations from Chinese.

#416

Deborah J. Yashar

#98733

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Deborah Jane Yashar is an American political scientist. She is a Full Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Her research interests involve politics of children and immigration in the Americas.

#417

Louise Shelley

#41484

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Louise Isobel Shelley is a university professor and Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Endowed Chair at the Schar School of Policy and International Affairs at George Mason University in Virginia. She is also founder and executive director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center .

#418

Anita Isaacs

#84604

Overall Influence

Anita Isaacs is a Canadian political scientist. She is the Benjamin R. Collins Professor of Social Sciences and professor of political science at Haverford College. She studies democracy, democratization, and democratic transitions, with a focus on peace building in Latin America and particularly in Ecuador and Guatemala.

#419

Tamar Hermann

#75517

Overall Influence

Tamar Hermann is an Israeli professor of political science at the Open University and a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute . Biography Hermann is the academic director of IDI's Guttman Center for Surveys, the editor of IDI's annual Israeli Democracy Index, and the co-editor of the monthly Peace Index, a joint project of IDI and Tel Aviv University. The findings of the Peace Index have been published in Haaretz, Yediot Ahronoth, and other news sources, and are currently published in Hebrew every month on the Walla website. The findings of the Index can be found in full at www.peac...

#420

Mieke Verloo

#77306

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Mieke Verloo is a Dutch political scientist and a professor of comparative politics and inequality issues at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and non-residential permanent fellow at the IWM, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. She is considered one of the leading directors of scientific research on feminist politics and opposition to gender+ equality in Europe. In 2015 she won the ECPG Gender and Politics Career Achievement Award.

#421

Ümit Cizre

#93273

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Ümit Cizre is a Turkish academic, and a leading expert on civilian-military relations in Turkey. She is a professor of political science and international relations at Istanbul Şehir University. She is the editor of Almanac Turkey 2005 – Security Sector and Its Democratic Oversight , which gained public attention in Turkey.

#422

Dottie Lamm

#43631

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Dorothy Louise Vennard Lamm is an American feminist, women's rights activist, educator, author, and speaker. She was First Lady of Colorado during her husband Richard Lamm's three terms as Governor of Colorado , and unsuccessfully ran for the United States Senate as the Colorado Democratic candidate in 1998. She wrote a weekly column for The Denver Post from 1979 to 1996 and later published three books. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1985.

#423

Suraiya Faroqhi

Suraiya Faroqhi

#41558

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Suraiya N. Faroqhi , is a German scholar, Ottoman historian and a leading authority on Ottoman history. She was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy for the year 2022, under the "Early Modern History to 1850" category.

#424

Donna Robinson Divine

#49057

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor in Jewish Studies and Professor of Government at Smith College. She holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, 1963, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, 1971, in Political Science. Divine has worked in the fields of Comparative Politics, Middle Eastern Politics, and Political Theory.

#425

Lorella Cedroni

Lorella Cedroni

#60043

Overall Influence

1961 - 2013 (52 years)

Lorella Cedroni was a political philosopher. Cedroni studied political science and philosophy , receiving a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences . She has taught and lectured in many European and American universities, and mainly at Sapienza University of Rome.

#426

Judith Kelley

#66575

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Judith Green Kelley is a Danish-born American political scientist. Judith Green Kelley is Kevin D. Gorter Professor of Public Policy and Political Science and, since January 2018, Dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She received her BA from Stanford University in 1995, her MPP in Public Policy from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government in 1997, and her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University in 2001. She studies democracy promotion, human rights, and international influences on domestic politics. She is well known for her early work on conditionali...

#427

Marion Maddox

#23454

Overall Influence

Marion Maddox is an Australian author, academic and political commentator. She is a professor in the department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University. Maddox is a regular commentator on issues of religion and politics in the Australian media and is a member of the Uniting Church. She authored the book God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics which compared the Howard Government with the religious right in the United States and criticised the decline of mainstream Christianity in Australia.

#428

Selma James

#21267

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (95 years)

Selma James is an American writer, and feminist and social activist who is co-author of the women's movement book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community , co-founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and coordinator of the Global Women's Strike.

#429

Shirin M. Rai

#59508

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Shirin M. Rai , is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across the political science and international relations boundaries. She is known for her research on the intersections between international political economy, globalisation, post-colonial governance, institutions and processes of democratisation and gender regimes. She was a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, and is the founding director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development .

#430

Marie R. Griffin

#108300

Overall Influence

Marie R. Griffin is an American vaccine researcher. She is a Professor of Medicine and holds the Endowed Directorship in Public Health Research and Education at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Early life and education Griffin earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Immaculata University, her medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine, and Master's in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.

#431

Jill Manthorpe

#111258

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

#432

Claudia Sheinbaum

#62186

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo is a Mexican politician, scientist, and academic. Sheinbaum served as Head of Government of Mexico City, a position equivalent to that of a state governor, from 2018 to 2023. Elected as the candidate of the leftist Juntos Haremos Historia coalition, she was both the first woman and first Jewish person to be elected to the position. She is a candidate for President of Mexico in the 2024 Mexican general election.

#433

Virginia Eubanks

#82742

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Virginia Eubanks is an American political scientist, professor, and author studying technology and social justice. She is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. Previously Eubanks was a Fellow at New America researching digital privacy, economic inequality, and data-based discrimination.

#434

Kathryn Newcomer

Kathryn Newcomer

#89324

Overall Influence

Kathryn Newcomer is an American Political Scientist, author and professor of public policy and public administration. She was previously the director of the George Washington University's Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration.

#435

Martha Brill Olcott

#39440

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Martha Brill Olcott is an American expert on Central Asia and the Caspian. She was a senior associate with the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, co-directing the Carnegie Moscow Center's Project on Ethnicity and Politics in the former Soviet Union from 1995 to 2014. Dr. Olcott taught political science at Colgate University from 1975 until 1998. She previously served as a special consultant to Acting United States Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and as director of the Central Asian American Enterprise Fund. Dr. Olcott is currently a visitin...

#436

Melani Cammett

#100693

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (56 years)

Melani Claire Cammett is an American political scientist; she is currently the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government at Harvard University and the Director of the university's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Cammett's research focuses on ethnoreligious violence and the politics of development, particularly in the Middle East.

#437

Yvonne Svanström

#54284

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Yvonne Svanström, , is an associate professor and head of the Department of Economic History at Stockholm University. Career She earned her PhD in 2000, with a dissertation on prostitution in the 19th century. An expanded and popularized version of her thesis was published in Swedish as "Offentliga kvinnor. Prostitution I Sverige 1812–1918".

#438

Deborah Avant

#99255

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Deborah Denise Avant is an American political scientist and faculty member at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Avant is also the Director of the university's Sie Cheou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy and the president of the International Studies Association.

#439

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

#88836

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, FBA is a British-American professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She served as the LSE's Head of the Department of Government from 2019 to 2022.

#440

Marian Sawer

#103512

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Philippa Marian Sawer is an Australian political scientist. She is a professor emeritus at the Australian National University . Early life Sawer was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the daughter of Ralph and Marjorie Goodwin. She moved to Australia to attend Ascham School in Sydney, and subsequently attended the Australian National University in Canberra. She graduated B.A. in 1968, M.A. in 1970 and Ph.D. in 1975. Her doctoral thesis was titled "The question of the Asiatic mode of production: towards a new Marxist historiography".

#441

Anne de Tinguy

#97237

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Anne de Tinguy is a French historian and political scientist. Since 2005 she has been a University Professor of contemporary history at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales. She studies international relations, specializing in the foreign policy of Russia and Ukraine, as well as migration studies.

#442

Nicole Wong

#22470

Overall Influence

Nicole A. Wong is an American attorney, specializing in Internet, media and intellectual property law. In May 2013, she was selected by the Barack Obama administration to be the White House deputy chief technology officer of the United States. She earned the nickname "the Decider" while she was vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, where she was responsible for arbitrating issues of censorship for Google. Wong stepped down as Deputy US CTO on August 16, 2014, to return with her family to California. She currently serves as a Senior Advisor to Albright Stonebridge Group, a globa...

#443

Joy James

#48487

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Joy James is an American political philosopher, academic, and author. James is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College. Her books include Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals, Shadowboxing, Imprisoned Intellectuals, The New Abolitionists, Resisting State Violence, and The Angela Y. Davis Reader. She was a Senior Research Fellow at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she developed the Harriet Tubman Digital Repository.

#444

Susan Welch

#85617

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Susan Welch was an American political scientist who served as the Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University from 1991 to 2019, the longest serving dean in Penn State's history.

#445

Olga Poblete

#91537

Overall Influence

1908 - 1999 (91 years)

Olga Poblete de Espinosa was a long-time women's rights activist and feminist in Chile. She was a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. Poblete and Elena Caffarena were later honored as "founding matriarchs" by the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de las Mujeres de Chile of '83 or MEMCH '83. This relates to them being important members of the original MEMCH that existed in the 1940s. Along with women's rights, she was concerned with individual development and welfare issues.

#446

Gretchen Ritter

#52866

Overall Influence

Gretchen Ritter is an American political scientist and academic administrator who is the current vice chancellor, provost and chief academic officer of Syracuse University. She was previously the executive dean and vice provost of Ohio State University's College of Arts and Sciences from 2019 to 2021.

#447

Mary Lyndon Shanley

#51624

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Mary Lyndon Shanley is a feminist legal scholar specializing in issues of the American family and reproductive technologies. Her book Just Marriage weighed into the controversy around gay marriage with a historical and political science perspective. She has written on the idea of the "ethic of care" in US political science.

#448

Lene Hansen

#57253

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Lene Hansen is an international relations scholar who is a full professor at the University of Copenhagen. Hansen is most well known within academia for her critique of the absence of gender within the thinking of the Copenhagen School of security studies. Her article "The Little Mermaid's Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School" is most commonly referenced for that argument. The Feminist scholar Christine Sylvester describes Hansen as the 'leading European feminist doing Critical Security Studies'.

#449

Sharyn O'Halloran

#61994

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Sharyn O’Halloran is the Strategic Academic Leadership Initiative Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin and Trinity Professorial Fellow. In 2006 she was named the George Blumenthal Professor of Political Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York City., where she served as the Senior Vice Dean and Chief Academic Officer at the School of Professional Studies at Columbia University in New York City.[1] A political scientist and economist by training, O’Halloran has written extensively on issues related to the political economy of internat...

#450

Dalia Dassa Kaye

#110597

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Dalia Dassa Kaye is an American academic. She serves as the Director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Early life Dalia Dassa Kaye received a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

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