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 Religious Studies,
#351
Jutta Jokiranta
#191495
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Jutta Maria Jokiranta is a Finnish theologian and, since 2018, a Professor in Hebrew Bible and cognate studies at the University of Helsinki. She is a former university lecturer of the Hebrew Bible at the University of Helsinki and an Academy Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland. Her area of specialization is Qumran studies and Second Temple Judaism. She is currently leader of the team in "Society and Religion in Late Second Temple Judaism" in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in "Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions" . She was elected president of the International Organizat...
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Anne Hege Grung
#135327
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Anne Hege Grung is a Norwegian professor of interreligious studies and feminist, and the President of Norway's preeminent women's and girls' rights NGO, the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights ; she succeeded supreme court justice Karin M. Bruzelius as NKF President in 2020.
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Marianne Sághy
#170825
Overall Influence
1961 - 2018 (57 years)
Marianne Sághy was a Hungarian expert on the religious and social culture of Late Antiquity, with an especial focus on the cult of saints and hagiography. She was associate professor at the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, and at the Department of Medieval and Early Modern Universal History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
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Claudia Camp
#191706
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Claudia V. Camp is an American biblical scholar. She is John F. Weatherly Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University. Camp's scholarship emphasizes feminists interpretation and identity formation in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple period. Her recent scholarship has emphasized the metaphors of the Strange Woman and Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs and the book of Ben Sira.
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Aida Besancon Spencer
#191411
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Aida Besancon Spencer is a Dominican-American New Testament professor and Presbyterian minister. Career Spencer is Professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. She has written on The Apostle Paul, Paul's Literary Style, Women in Christianity and the New Testament from a Hispanic perspective.
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Leila Leah Bronner
#182915
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Rebbetzin Leila Leah Bronner was an American historian and biblical scholar. Biography She was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to the United States in 1937, growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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Jutta Burggraf
#184513
Overall Influence
1952 - 2010 (58 years)
Jutta Burggraf was a German Catholic theologian. Burggraf taught at the University of Navarra, where she wrote books and did research. She was a numerary member of Opus Dei.
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Sissel Undheim
#191232
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sissel Undheim is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen. She is an expert on gender and sexuality in the late Roman period, New Age religion, and the didactics of religion. Education Undheim received her PhD from the University of Bergen in 2011. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Sanctae virginitates: Sacred and Consecrated Virginities in Late Roman Antiquity.
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Ardeth G. Kapp
#79099
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Ardeth Greene Kapp was the ninth Young Women general president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1984 to 1992. Early life Ardeth Greene was born on March 19, 1931, in Cardston, Alberta, to Edwin Kent Greene and Julia Leavitt Greene. Shortly after her birth her family moved to Glenwood, Alberta. She was baptized into the LDS Church on April 4,1939 in the Cardston Temple. In 1947, she underwent life-threatening surgery due to an ear infection.
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Tehilla Lichtenstein
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Tehilla Lichtenstein was a cofounder and leader of Jewish Science, as well as an author. She was born in Jerusalem and immigrated to America when she was eleven years old. Her parents were Hava and Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn. She earned a B.A. degree in Classics from Hunter College and an M.A. degree in literature from Columbia University.
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Edith Stein
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Edith Stein, OCD was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
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Catherine of Alexandria
287 - 305 (18 years)
Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine is, according to tradition, a Christian saint and virgin, who was martyred in the early fourth century at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. According to her hagiography, she was both a princess and a noted scholar who became a Christian around the age of 14, converted hundreds of people to Christianity and was martyred around the age of eighteen. More than 1,100 years after Catherine's martyrdom, Joan of Arc identified her as one of the saints who appeared to and counselled her.
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Faustina Kowalska
1905 - 1938 (33 years)
Maria Faustyna Kowalska, OLM , also known as Maria Faustyna Kowalska of the Blessed Sacrament, was a Polish Catholic religious sister and mystic. Faustyna, popularly spelled "Faustina", had apparitions of Jesus Christ which inspired the Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy and earned her the title of "Secretary of Divine Mercy".
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Mary MacKillop
1842 - 1909 (67 years)
Mary Helen MacKillop RSJ, religious name Mary of the Cross, was an Australian religious sister of Scottish descent who has been declared a saint by the Catholic Church. She was born in Melbourne but is best known for her activities in South Australia. Together with Julian Tenison-Woods, she founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart , a congregation of religious sisterss that established a number of schools and welfare institutions throughout Australia and New Zealand, with an emphasis on education for the rural poor.
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Margaret the Virgin
292 - 307 (15 years)
Margaret, known as Margaret of Antioch in the West, and as Saint Marina the Great Martyr in the East, is celebrated as a saint on 20 July in Western Christianity, on 17 July by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and on Epip 23 and Hathor 23 in the Coptic Orthodox Church.
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Elisabeth Schmitz
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
Elisabeth Schmitz was a German Lutheran theologian, teacher, and author of "On the Situation of German Non-Aryans", a memorandum that attempted to persuade those in the Confessing Church to stand against the persecution of Jews in 1930s Germany. She also sheltered Jews and was granted the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" in 2011 by the Commission of Yad Vashem.
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Itala Mela
1904 - 1957 (53 years)
Itala Mela was an Italian Roman Catholic who was a lapsed Christian until a sudden conversion of faith in the 1920s and as a Benedictine oblate virgin assumed the name of "Maria della Trinità". Mela became one of the well-known mystics of the Church during her life and indeed following her death. She also penned a range of theological writings that focused on the Trinity, which she deemed was integral to the Christian faith.
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Anne Zernike
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
Anne Zernike was a Dutch, liberal theologian, who was the first ordained woman minister of the Netherlands. Though she began her career with the Mennonites, which was the only congregation that allowed female ministers at the time, the majority of her career was spent in the Dutch Protestant Association .
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Rosa Gutknecht
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Laura Elisabeth Rosa Gutknecht was a German-born Swiss theologian and cleric. In 1918, together with Elise Pfister, she was one of the first two women to graduate in theology. The same year, both were ordained as pastors of the Reformed Church of Zürich. They are considered to be the first women in Europe to be ordained as pastors.
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Hedwig Jahnow
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Hedwig Jahnow was a German teacher and an Old Testament theologian who studied Rabbinic Dirge, specifically Kinah. In 1919 After winning an election in the first year that women were allowed to vote she became the first woman in the Marburg city council. She later became deputy headmistress of the Marburg Elisabeth School. Hedwig explored women's role in the Old Testament and contributed a number of works on this topic establishing herself as one of Germany's first female biblical scholars. Jahow's work has been cited by modern theologians as foundational to the modern study on the book of La...
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Nelle Morton
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Nelle Katherine Morton was an American theologian, professor, feminist activist, and civil rights leader. She taught Christian Education for fourteen years at Drew University, during which time she became passionate about improving the position of women within the Christian faith. She wrote prolifically on religion, spirituality, feminism, intersectionality, and language. In 1985, she published an anthology of essays titled The Journey Is Home.
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Afua Kuma
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Afua Kuma was a Ghanaian oral theologian. Biography Afua Kuma was born in Obo Kwahu in the Eastern Region of Ghana. In her childhood, she helped her parents in farming and trading and did not go to school. Although she was brought up in the Presbyterian church, where her father was an elder, in her later life she attended a local Catholic Church before joining the Church of Pentecost.
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Valborg Lerche
1873 - 1931 (58 years)
Valborg Lerche was a Norwegian social worker. She was the first female theologian in Norway. Biography She was born in Sem as a ship-owner Vincent Stoltenberg Lerche, Sr. and Christine Marie Rosenvinge , and a much younger half-sister of Vincent Stoltenberg Lerche. She also had four older sisters.
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Mary, mother of Jesus
100 BC - 100 (200 years)
Mary was a first-century Judean woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother of Jesus. She is a central figure of Christianity, venerated under various titles such as virgin or queen, many of them mentioned in the Litany of Loreto. The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Church of the East, Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches believe that Mary, as mother of Jesus, is the Mother of God. Other Protestant views on Mary vary, with some holding her to have considerably lesser status.
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Catherine of Siena
1347 - 1380 (33 years)
Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa , known as Catherine of Siena , was an Italian mystic and pious laywoman who engaged in papal and Italian politics through extensive letter-writing and advocacy. Canonized in 1461, she is revered as a saint and as a Doctor of the Church due to her extensive theological authorship. She is also considered to have influenced Italian literature.
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Maisie Ward
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Mary Josephine "Maisie" Ward Sheed , who published under the name Maisie Ward, was a writer, speaker, and publisher. Maisie's brother Leo Ward was co-founder of the publishing house Sheed and Ward; Maisie took his place when Leo left to become a priest.
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Young Oon Kim
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Young Oon Kim was a leading theologian of the Unification Church and its first missionary to the United States. Career Kim was a professor of religion at Ewha University in Seoul, South Korea. After she joined the Unification Church, church founder Sun Myung Moon sent her to the United States as a missionary in January 1959. In the 1960s, while a missionary in Oregon and California, she worked to promote Unification Church theology to mainstream Christian churches. She was also the first person to translate the Divine Principle, the basic textbook of Unification Church teaching, from Korean to English.
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Olive Winchester
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Olive May Winchester was an American ordained minister and a pioneer biblical scholar and theologian in the Church of the Nazarene, who was in 1912 the first woman ordained by any trinitarian Christian denomination in the United Kingdom, the first woman admitted into and graduated from the Bachelor of Divinity course at the University of Glasgow, and the first woman to complete a Doctor of Theology degree from the divinity school of Drew University.
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Louise Pettibone Smith
1887 - 1981 (94 years)
Louise Pettibone Smith was an American biblical scholar, professor, translator, author and social activist. She was the first woman published in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1917. She later became chair of the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born and denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee for its "McCarthyism".
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Kathleen Bliss
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Kathleen Mary Amelia Bliss was an English theologian, missionary and official of the World Council of Churches . Early life Bliss was born in Fulham. She attended Girton College, Cambridge, graduating in theology and history . While at university, she participated in the Student Volunteer Movement.
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Marie Huber
1695 - 1753 (58 years)
Marie Huber was a Genevan writer on theology and related subjects, as well as a translator and editor, at a time when it was rare for a female writer to write about theology. Huber was a proponent of universalism, and was considered by some a deist. Her Letters Concerning the Religion Essential to Man are known to have been read, in translation, by Robert Burns.
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Saint Ursula
400 - 385 (-15 years)
Ursula is a legendary Romano-British Christian saint. Her feast day in the pre-1970 Calendarium Romanum Generale is 21 October. There is little information about her and the anonymous group of holy virgins who accompanied and, on an uncertain date, were killed along with her at Cologne. They remain in the Roman Martyrology, although their commemoration does not appear in the simplified General Roman Calendar of the 1970 Missale Romanum.
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Nicolette Bruining
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Nicolette Adriana Bruining was a Dutch theologian and founding president of the Liberal Protestant Radio Broadcasting Corporation . She was also a teacher and humanitarian, assisting Jews during the Second World War. Her aid was acknowledged by the state of Israel, which posthumously awarded her as Righteous Among the Nations in 1990.
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Mila Tupper Maynard
1864 - 1926 (62 years)
Mila Tupper Maynard was an American Unitarian minister, writer, social reformer and suffragist. She is thought to have been the first female minister in Nevada. Early years Born Mila Frances Tupper on January 26, 1864, in Brighton, Iowa, she was the daughter of Allen Tupper and Ellen Smith Tupper. Tupper Maynard was greatly influenced by her sister, Eliza Frances Tupper, who was 20 years older and active in establishing churches throughout the Midwestern United States. Tupper Maynard accompanied her sister on these projects and became actively involved in the Unitarian church.
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Lilian Scholes
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Lilian Lelean Scholes was a Methodist preacher, theologian and author in Melbourne, Australia who in 1934 was the first woman to graduate with the degree of Bachelor of Divinity from the Melbourne College of Divinity.
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Hildegard of Bingen
1098 - 1179 (81 years)
Hildegard of Bingen , also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. She has been considered by scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
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Teresa of Ávila
1515 - 1582 (67 years)
Teresa of Ávila, OCD , also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, was a Carmelite nun and prominent Spanish mystic and religious reformer. Active during the Counter-Reformation, Teresa became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal, reforming the Carmelite Orders of both women and men. The movement was later joined by the younger Carmelite friar and mystic John of the Cross, with whom she established the Discalced Carmelites. A formal papal decree adopting the split from the old order was issued in 1580.
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Charlotte von Kirschbaum
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Charlotte von Kirschbaum was a German theologian who assisted Karl Barth in writing his Church Dogmatics. She was born in Ingolstadt. In 1916 her father died in the war, which inspired her to be trained as a nurse. In 1924 she met Karl Barth, and became his pupil; she later contributed to all of Karl Barth's academic publications. Historians have discussed at length her romantic relationship with Barth, and its possible impact on his theology. The letters between von Kirschbaum and Barth express "the deep, intense, and overwhelming love between these two human beings."
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Julian of Norwich
1342 - 1500 (158 years)
Julian of Norwich , also known as Juliana of Norwich, the Lady Julian, Dame Julian or Mother Julian, was an English anchoress of the Middle Ages. Her writings, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, are the earliest surviving English language works by a woman, although it is possible that some anonymous works may have had female authors. They are also the only surviving English language works by an anchoress.
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Georgia Harkness
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Georgia Elma Harkness was an American Methodist theologian and philosopher. Harkness has been described as one of the first significant American female theologians and was important in the movement to legalize the ordination of women in American Methodism.
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Táhirih
1817 - 1852 (35 years)
Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.
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Rose of Lima
1586 - 1617 (31 years)
Rose of Lima, TOSD was a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic in Lima, Peru, who became known for both her life of severe penance and her care of the poverty stricken of the city through her own private efforts. Rose of Lima was born to a noble family and is the patron saint of embroidery, gardening and cultivation of blooming flowers. A lay member of the Dominican Order, she was declared a saint by the Catholic Church, being the first person born in the Americas to be canonized as such.
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Kateri Tekakwitha
1656 - 1680 (24 years)
Kateri Tekakwitha , given the name Tekakwitha, baptized as Catherine, and informally known as Lily of the Mohawks , is a Catholic saint and virgin who was an Algonquin–Mohawk. Born in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in present-day New York State, she contracted smallpox in an epidemic; her family died and her face was scarred. She converted to Catholicism at age nineteen. She took a vow of perpetual virginity, left her village, and moved for the remaining five years of her life to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. She was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II ...
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Lady Amin
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Hajiyeh Seyyedeh Nosrat Begum Amin, also known as Banu Amin, Lady Amin , was Iran's most outstanding female jurisprudent, theologian and great Muslim mystic of the 20th century, a Lady Mujtahideh. She received numerous ijazahs of ijtihad, among them from Ayatollahs Muḥammad Kazim Ḥusayni Shīrāzī and Grand Ayatullah ‘arif , the founder of the Qom seminaries . She also granted numerous ijazahs of ijtihad to female and male scholars, among them Sayyid Mar'ashi Najafi.
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Margaret Dunlop Gibson
1843 - 1920 (77 years)
#396
Liselotte Richter
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Liselotte Richter was a German philosopher and theologian. She was the first female professor of philosophy in Germany. Early life Luise Charlotte Richter was born in 1906 and grew up with her twin brother Fritz in a middle-class family, first in Berlin-Tegel and then in Charlottenburg.
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Augusta Emma Stetson
1842 - 1928 (86 years)
Augusta Emma Stetson was an American religious leader. Known for her impressive oratory skills and magnetic personality, she attracted a large following in New York City. However, her increasingly radical theories, conflicts with other church members including a well-known rivalry with Laura Lathrop, and attempts to supplant Mary Baker Eddy as the leader of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, led to her eventually being excommunicated from the church on charges of insubordination and of false teaching. Afterwards she began preaching and publishing various works on her theories which she n...
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Marie Dentière
1495 - 1561 (66 years)
Marie Dentière was a Walloon Protestant reformer and theologian, who moved to Geneva. She played an active role in Genevan religion and politics, in the closure of Geneva's convents, and preaching with such reformers as John Calvin and William Farel. In addition to her writings on the Reformation, Dentière's writings seem to be a defense and propagation of the female perspective in the rapidly changing world. Her second husband, Antoine Froment, was also active in the reformation.
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Margaret Benn, Viscountess Stansgate
1897 - 1991 (94 years)
Margaret Eadie Benn, Viscountess Stansgate was a British theologian, the President of the Congregational Federation, and an advocate of women's rights. Life Margaret Holmes was the daughter of Scottish politician Daniel Holmes. In her youth, in the 1920s, she was a member of the League of the Church Militant which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women and was rebuked by Randall Thomas Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women.
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Antoinette Butte
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Antoinette Butte, was the French Protestant founder of French Girl Guiding from 1916, then Head of the Pomeyrol Community from 1938.
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