The Most Influential People Across History
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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List of the most influential female people in Political Science,
#1
Angela Davis
#123
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American revolutionary Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
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Elinor Ostrom
#264
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
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Jiang Qing
#294
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Jiang Qing , also known as Madame Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, actress, and major political figure during the Cultural Revolution . She was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. She used the stage name Lan Ping during her acting career , and was known by many other names. Jiang was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution and for forming the radical political alliance known as the "Gang of Four".
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Samantha Power
#1015
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#5
Rigoberta Menchú
#1489
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War , and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
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Agnès Callamard
#3226
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Agnès Callamard is a French human-rights activist who is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. She was previously the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the former Director of the Columbia University Global Freedom of Expression project.
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Betty Friedan
#177
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women , which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#669
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
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Susan Rice
#1548
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Susan Elizabeth Rice is an American diplomat, policy advisor, and public official. A member of the Democratic Party, Rice served as the 22nd Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council from 2021 to 2023, as the 27th U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2009 to 2013, and as the 23rd U.S. National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017.
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Dolores Huerta
#1518
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, is a co-founder of the United Farmworkers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers . Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California and was the lead negotiator in the workers' contract that was created after the strike.
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Robin Morgan
#585
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robin Morgan is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century.". She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.
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Theda Skocpol
#2253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
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J. Patrice McSherry
#5589
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joan Patrice McSherry is a professor of political science at Long Island University. She specializes in the study of Latin American politics and she wrote the book Predatory States, which detailed the United States involvement in the Operation Condor. McSherry is founding chair and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the LIU campus. She won LIU's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008 and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Political Science MA-Ph.D Program of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2009. She has been awarded several Fulbright grants , and has authored several books and coedited another.
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Maya Angelou
#188
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
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Maria Zakharova
#2442
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova is the Director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation since 2015. She has a degree of Candidate in Historical Sciences, the Russian equivalent of a PhD.
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Germaine Greer
#252
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.
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Susan Strange
#4702
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Susan Strange was a British scholar who was "almost single-handedly responsible for creating international political economy." Notable publications include Sterling and British Policy , Casino Capitalism , States and Markets , The Retreat of the State , and Mad Money .
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Victoria Nuland
#3755
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Victoria Jane Nuland also known as Toria Nuland is an American diplomat currently serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs since 2021. A former member of the US Foreign Service, she served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017 and the 18th U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008. Since July 2023, Nuland has served as acting Deputy Secretary of State following the retirement of Wendy Sherman.
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Condoleezza Rice
#3262
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Condoleezza Rice is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and as the 19th U.S. national security advisor from 2001 to 2005. Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch .
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Ekaterina Schulmann
#7549
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Ekaterina Mikhailovna Schulmann is a Russian political scientist specializing in legislative processes. Schulmann is an associate professor of the RANEPA, an associate professor of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, and an associate fellow of Chatham House.
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Marian Wright Edelman
#2302
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist for civil rights and children's rights. She is the founder and president emerita of the Children's Defense Fund. She influenced leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.
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Kathryn Bolkovac
#8577
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Kathryn Bolkovac is a human rights advocate, consultant, former police investigator with the Lincoln Police Department, and former monitor with United Nations International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She came to prominence when she sued her employers for unfair dismissal after she lost her job following her attempts to expose sex trafficking in Bosnia. Her story was shown in the film The Whistleblower and told in the nonfiction book, The Whistleblower.
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Irina Bokova
#2024
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Irina Georgieva Bokova is a Bulgarian politician and the former Director-General of UNESCO . During her political and diplomatic career in Bulgaria, she served, among others, two terms as a member of the National parliament, and deputy minister of foreign affairs and minister of foreign affairs ad interim under Prime Minister Zhan Videnov. She also served as Bulgaria's ambassador to France and to Monaco, and was Bulgaria's Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. Bokova was also the personal representative of Bulgaria's president to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie .
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Yevgenia Albats
#3378
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. In 1986—1992, Albats worked as a columnist for Moskovskie Novosti. Since 1995, she has worked with the newspapers Izvestia, Novaya Gazeta and Kommersant. From 2004 to February 2022, she was the host of the author's program "Full Albats" on Echo of Moscow radio station. As of 2022, she works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine.
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Audre Lorde
#522
Overall Influence
1934 - 1992 (58 years)
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions".
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Bianca Jagger
#2950
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Bianca Jagger is a Nicaraguan social and human rights advocate and a former actress. Jagger currently serves as a Council of Europe goodwill ambassador, founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, member of the Executive Director's Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA, and a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust.
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Kathryn Sikkink
#6078
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kathryn Sikkink is an author, human rights academic, and scholar of international relations working primarily through the theoretical strain of constructivism. She is currently a professor at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Gesine Schwan
#6775
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Gesine Schwan is a German political science professor and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The party has nominated her twice as a candidate for the federal presidential elections. On 23 May 2004, she was defeated by the Christian Democrat Horst Köhler. On 23 May 2009, Köhler beat her again to win his second term.
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Pippa Norris
#5036
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Pippa Norris is a British American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and she has served as the Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project.
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Chantal Mouffe
#1359
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist, formerly teaching at University of Westminster. She is best known for her contribution to the development—jointly with Ernesto Laclau, with whom she co-authored her most frequently cited publication Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis, a type of post-Marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Leftist politics in terms of radical democracy. She is also the author of influential works on agonistic political theory, including Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically and The Democratic Paradox.
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Seyla Benhabib
#2392
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-born American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008.
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Carole Pateman
#3805
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Carole Pateman FBA FAcSS FLSW is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007. Biography Pateman was born in Maresfield, Sussex, England. Educated at Lewes County Grammar School for Girls, she left at age 16. She entered Ruskin College, Oxford in 1963 studying economics, politics, history and sociology, achieving a distinction. She won a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read PPE, staying on to earn a DPhil.
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Andrea Dworkin
#838
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
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Donna Brazile
#2324
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Donna Lease Brazile is an American political strategist, campaign manager and political analyst who served twice as acting Chair of the Democratic National Committee . She is currently an ABC News contributor, and was previously a Fox News contributor until her resignation in May 2021. Brazile was also previously a CNN contributor, but resigned in October 2016, after WikiLeaks revealed that she shared two debate questions with Hillary Clinton's campaign during the 2016 United States presidential election.
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Svetlana Gannushkina
#12104
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Svetlana Alekseevna Gannushkina is a mathematician and human rights activist in Russia who was reported to have been a serious contender for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Gannushkina became well-known in Russia as a human rights defender in 1990s when many conflicts broke in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Her human rights work dedicated especially to help refugees, internally displaced persons, victims of war.
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Mehrangiz Kar
#11898
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Mehrangiz Kar , a human rights lawyer from Iran, is an internationally recognized writer, speaker and activist who advocates for the defense of women’s and human rights in Iran and throughout the Islamic world. A common theme in her work is the tension between Iranian law and the core principles of human rights and human dignity. She is also author of the book Crossing the Red Line, and an activist of women's rights in Iran. Born in 1944 at Ahvaz, in southern Iran, she attended the College of Law and Political Science at Teheran University. After graduating, she worked for Sazman-e Ta’min-e Ej...
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Kellyanne Conway
#2224
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Kellyanne Elizabeth Conway is an American political consultant and pollster, who served as Senior Counselor to the President in the administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020. She was previously Trump's campaign manager, having been appointed in August 2016; Conway is the first woman to have run a successful U.S. presidential campaign. She has previously held roles as campaign manager and strategist in the Republican Party, and was formerly president and CEO of the Polling Company/WomanTrend.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter
#5707
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist and public commentator. From 2002 to 2009, she was the dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 university professor of politics and international affairs. Slaughter was the first woman to serve as the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and the current p...
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Adrienne Rich
#513
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
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Patricia M. Shields
#5873
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Patricia M. Shields is a Regents' Professor in the Political Science Department at Texas State University. Since 2001 she has been Editor-in-Chief of the international and interdisciplinary journal Armed Forces & Society. She is also a Contributing Editor to Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly and the Section Editor of the Military and Society section to the Handbook of Military Sciences. Shields is notable for her publications focusing on research methods, civil military relations, gender issues, pragmatism in public administration, peace studies, and the contributions of Jane Addams to public administration and peace theory.
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Cynthia Enloe
#6681
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.
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Valerie Amos, Baroness Amos
#5878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Valerie Ann Amos, Baroness Amos, is a British Labour Party politician and diplomat who served as the eighth UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Before her appointment to the UN, she served as British High Commissioner to Australia. She was created a life peer in 1997, serving as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council from 2003 to 2007.
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Marta Harnecker
#8318
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Marta Harnecker was a Chilean journalist, author, psychologist, sociologist, and Marxist intellectual. She studied the analysis of labor movements and acted as an advisor to the government of Cuba, and worked with left-wing political movements within Latin America. She was active in the government of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973, and provided advice to Hugo Chávez between 2004 and 2011.
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Luce Irigaray
#201
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman , which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One , which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions can be read as a res...
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Lisa Anderson
#16443
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lisa Anderson is an American political scientist and the former President of the American University in Cairo . Research and career A specialist on Middle Eastern and North African politics, Anderson served as the President of AUC from 2011 to 2016 and as Provost from 2008 to 2010. Prior to joining AUC, Anderson served as the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, the chair of the political science department and the director of the Middle East Institute. Previously, she was an assistan...
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Sheri Berman
#5793
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sheri E. Berman is a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of scholarly books and articles on European social democracy, fascism, populism and the development of democracies and dictatorships.
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Ngaire Woods
#9329
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Ngaire Tui Woods CBE is the founding dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and professor of Global Economic Governance at the University of Oxford. She founded the Global Economic Governance Programme and is the co-founder of the Oxford–Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship programme. She was born in New Zealand.
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Susan Waltz
#17171
Overall Influence
Susan E. Waltz is an American political scientist and faculty member at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. Waltz is also involved with Amnesty International, having served as chair of its International Executive Committee from 1996 to 1998. From 2009 to 2013 she served as a board member at Amnesty's U.S. branch.
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Jane Mansbridge
#6130
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jane Jebb Mansbridge is an American political scientist. She is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
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Sara Roy
#9322
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sara M. Roy is an American Zona, Magiila Vemehoeret. Zona shel ARAVIM. political economist and scholar. She is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
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