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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#501
Joan Rivers
#11819
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Joan Alexandra Molinsky , known professionally as Joan Rivers, was an American comedian, actress, producer, writer, and television host. She was noted for her blunt, often controversial comedic persona that was heavily self-deprecating and acerbic, especially towards celebrities and politicians, delivered in her signature New York accent. She is considered a pioneer of women in comedy. She received an Emmy Award and a Grammy Award, as well as nomination for a Tony Award.
Go to Profile#502
Jackie Collins
#12875
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Jacqueline Jill Collins was an English romance novelist and actress. She moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and spent most of her career there. She wrote 32 novels, all of which appeared on The New York Times bestsellers list. Her books have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. Eight of her novels have been adapted for the screen, either as films or television miniseries. She was the younger sister of Dame Joan Collins.
Go to Profile#503
Carol Rumens
#45733
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Carol Rumens FRSL is a British poet. Life Carol Rumens was born in Forest Hill, South London. She won a scholarship to grammar school and later studied Philosophy at London University, but left before completing her degree. She gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for the Stage from City College Manchester in 2002.
Go to Profile#504
Merle Collins
#25039
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Merle Collins is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Life Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#505
Margarita Carrera
#50335
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Margarita Carrera Molina was a Guatemalan philosopher, professor and writer. She was a member of the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua and the 1996 laureate of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.
Go to Profile#506
Germaine Brée
#32260
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Germaine Brée was a French-American literary scholar, who wrote extensively on Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Life Born in Paris, Germaine Brée grew up in the English-speaking Channel Islands. After graduating from the University of Paris, she taught in Algeria from 1932 to 1936. Appointed to teach at Bryn Mawr in 1936, she returned to France to fight for the Free French when World War II broke out. She joined a volunteer ambulance unit, rising to the rank of lieutenant, and was assigned to the intelligence section of the Free French in Algiers. She received a Bronze Star and was named to the Legion of Honor.
Go to Profile#507
Ruth Behar
#15030
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.
Go to Profile#508
Megan Marshall
#48562
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Megan Marshall is an American scholar, writer, and biographer. Her first biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism earned her a place as a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Go to Profile#509
Sylvie Richterová
#62179
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sylvie Richterová is a Czech educator and writer living in Italy. She was born in Brno and was educated as an interpreter at Charles University in Prague. In 1971, she moved to Italy, where she lectured in Czech and was a researcher at the Institute of Slavonic Philology. She went on to lecture on Czech language and literature in Padua and Viterbo.
Go to Profile#510
Mary Robison
#35101
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Mary Cennamo Robison is an American short story writer and novelist. She has published four collections of stories, and four novels, including her 2001 novel Why Did I Ever, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Her most recent novel, released in 2009, is One D.O.A., One on the Way. She has been categorized as a founding "minimalist" writer along with authors such as Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, and Raymond Carver. In 2009, she won the Rea Award for the Short Story.
Go to Profile#511
Sarah Silverman
#21426
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Sarah Kate Silverman is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. Silverman first rose to prominence for her brief stint as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live during its 19th season between 1993 and 1994. She then starred in and produced The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran from 2007 to 2010 on Comedy Central. For her work on the program, Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
Go to Profile#512
Susan Straight
#31475
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Susan Straight is an American writer. She was a National Book Award finalist for the novel Highwire Moon in 2001. Biography Susan Straight attended John W. North High School in Riverside, California and took classes at Riverside Community College while in high school. She went on to earn a scholarship to the University of Southern California and, in 1984, earned her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. She co-founded the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts program at University of California, Riverside, ...
Go to Profile#513
Lee Smith
#28994
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Lee Smith is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Go to Profile#514
Jesmyn Ward
#29379
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and a professor of English at Tulane University, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel Salvage the Bones and won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. She also received a 2012 Alex Award for the story about familial love and community in facing Hurricane Katrina. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. All of Ward's first three novels are set in the fictitious Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.
Go to Profile#515
Jane Hirshfield
#30676
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen language...
Go to Profile#516
Ainehi Edoro
#43609
Overall Influence
Ainehi Edoro is a Nigerian writer, critic and academic. She is the founder and publisher of the African literary blog Brittle Paper. She is currently an assistant professor of Global Black Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research include 21st-century fiction, literature in digital/social media, The Global Anglophone Novel, African Literature, Contemporary British Fiction, Novel Theory, Political Philosophy, and Digital Humanities.
Go to Profile#517
Tatyana Kasatkina
#49680
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Tatyana Aleksandrovna Kasatkina is a Russian philosopher, philologist, culture expert, religious scholar and writer. She is an expert in the field of theory of culture, theory of literature, philosophy, religious studies, the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Russian literature of the 19th-21st centuries. She is Doctor of Philology , Head Researcher at the Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS, Head of the Centre “Dostoevsky and World Culture” at the Gorky Institute of World Literature RAS, president of the Research Committee for Dostoyevsky's Artistic Heritage within the Scientific Council for the History of World Culture, RAS.
Go to Profile#518
Ulla-Lena Lundberg
#20811
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ulla-Lena Lundberg is a Finland-Swedish author living in Porvoo, Finland. Her Swedish-language books have been translated into several languages, including Finnish, Danish, German, Russian and Dutch.
Go to Profile#519
Alice Fulton
#13337
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alice Fulton is an American author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Fulton is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Emerita at Cornell University. Her awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Go to Profile#520
Jane Tompkins
#44180
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jane Tompkins is an American literary scholar who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism. She has also coined and developed the notion of cultural work in literary studies and contributed to the new historicist form of literary criticism that emerged in the 1980s. She earned her PhD at Yale in 1966 and subsequently taught at Temple University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is married to cultural critic Stanley Fish.
Go to Profile#521
Esther Kinsky
#34593
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Esther Kinsky is a German literary translator and the author of novels and poetry. Life and works Esther Kinsky grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia and read Slavonic studies at Bonn. She works as a literary translator from the Polish, English and Russian languages into German and as the author of prose and poetry. After spending some years in London, she settled in Berlin.
Go to Profile#522
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
#39300
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
Go to Profile#523
Penina Muhando
#21999
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Penina Muhando, also known as Penina Mlama , is a Tanzanian Kiswahili playwright, a theorist and practitioner of Theatre for Development in Tanzania. Life and literary career Muhando was born in Berega, Morogoro Region in Tanzania in 1948. She gained a BA in theatre arts, a BA in education, and a PhD in language and linguistics from the University of Dar es Salaam.
Go to Profile#524
Kimberly M. Blaeser
#59219
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kimberly M. Blaeser is a Native American poet and writer enrolled in the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. She was the Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015–16. Background Kimberly Blaeser was born in 1955 in Billings, Montana. Being of German and Anishinaabe Heritage, she grew up the White Earth reservation. In 2024 she will take up an appointment as the Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College.
Go to Profile#525
Doris Sommer
#46519
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Doris Sommer is a literature scholar. She is Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard. Sommer received her PhD from Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#526
Jean Valentine
#40832
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Jean Valentine was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
Go to Profile#527
Angie Cruz
#47335
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Angie Cruz is an American novelist and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches in the M.F.A. program. Early life and education Cruz was born on February 24, 1972, in Washington Heights, New York City. She is of Dominican descent, and regularly travelled from New York City to the Dominican Republic as a child.
Go to Profile#528
Mary Ruefle
#42826
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce , was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow .
Go to Profile#529
Marita Mathijsen
#71843
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Marita Theodora Catharina Mathijsen-Verkooijen is professor of modern Dutch literature at the University of Amsterdam, with her speciality as the literature of the nineteenth century in the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#530
Jennifer Chang
#53453
Overall Influence
Jennifer Chang is an American poet and scholar. Life and career Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago in 1998, and an MFA from University of Virginia in 2002, where she returned to pursue a PhD and received her degree in 2017.
Go to Profile#531
Margit Frenk
#56762
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Margit Frenk Freund , sometimes known by her married name, Margit Frenk Alatorre , is a German-Mexican philologist, folklorist and translator. She has been an Academic Numerary of the Mexican Language Academy since 1993. She is also a Doctor Honoris Causa at the National Autonomous University of Mexico .
Go to Profile#532
Nitza Ben-Dov
#38428
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nitza Ben-Dov is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Winner of the 2021 Israel Prize Biography Nitza Ben-Dov was born in Tel Aviv to parents who were Holocaust survivors. Her father, Dov Fruchtman, was a teacher of literature and wrote a series of research studies on the oeuvre of S.Y. Agnon. Ben-Dov completed her secondary studies at the New High School in Tel Aviv in 1968. She served in the Israel Defense Forces in the Nahal Brigade, at Nahal Golan.
Go to Profile#533
Sheri Reynolds
#41998
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sheri Reynolds is an author of contemporary Southern fiction. She was born and raised in rural South Carolina and lives on Virginia's eastern shore. She graduated from Conway High School in 1985, Davidson College in 1989, and Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992.
Go to Profile#534
Mohja Kahf
#38076
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Mohja Kahf is a Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor. She authored Hagar Poems which won honorable mention in the 2017 Book Awards of the Arab American National Museum. She is the recipient of Pushcart Prize for her creative nonfiction essay, "The Caul of Inshallah" and the Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2002 for poetry. Her poetry has been featured in the installments of American neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer.
Go to Profile#535
Leonie Kramer
#22622
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Dame Leonie Judith Kramer, was an Australian academic, educator and professor. She is notable as the first female professor of English in Australia, first woman to chair the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the first female chancellor of the University of Sydney. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Companion of the Order of Australia.
Go to Profile#536
Supriya Chaudhuri
#40422
Overall Influence
Supriya Chaudhuri is an Indian scholar of English literature. She is Professor Emerita at Kolkata's Jadavpur University. Biography She was born in Delhi, India and grew up in Europe and India. She was educated at South Point High School, Presidency College, Calcutta and then University of Oxford, where she was a State Scholar from 1973 to 1975, taking a First in English. After serving a few years at Presidency as Assistant Professor of English, she returned to Oxford on an Inlaks Scholarship for doctoral research in Renaissance Studies. She was awarded D.Phil. in 1981. She joined the faculty of Jadavpur University after having taught at Presidency College and Calcutta University.
Go to Profile#537
Fatou Diome
#30990
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Fatou Diome is a French-Senegalese writer known for her best-selling novel The Belly of the Atlantic, which was published in 2001. Her work explores immigrant life in France, and the relationship between France and Africa. Fatou Diome lives in Strasbourg, France.
Go to Profile#538
Jill McCorkle
#52337
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jill Collins McCorkle is an American short story writer and novelist. She graduated from University of North Carolina, in 1980, where she studied with Max Steele, Lee Smith, and Louis D. Rubin. She also attended Hollins College now Hollins University with Lee Smith where she received her MA. She taught at Tufts University, University of North Carolina, Duke University, Harvard University and Bennington College. She teaches at North Carolina State University.
Go to Profile#539
Marilyn Nelson
#28499
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former poet laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994 she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of over twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Be...
Go to Profile#540
Gertrud Höhler
#25886
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Gertrud Höhler is a German literary scholar, management consultant and political consultant. Early life Höhler was born in Wuppertal, Germany, and is the second of four children of parish priest Heinrich Höhler and his wife Helene, daughter of the theologian Fritz Horn. The German cardiologist Mia Helene Höhler was her sister; the German architect Ernst Höhler was her brother.
Go to Profile#541
Diana Abu-Jaber
#32538
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Diana Abu-Jaber is an American author and a professor at Portland State University. Early life and education Abu-Jaber was born in Syracuse, New York. Her father was Jordanian with a Palestinian Jerusalemite mother; Diana's mother was American, descended from Irish and German roots. At the age of seven, she moved with her family for two years to Jordan. She received a BA in English and Creative Writing from the State University of New York at Oswego, an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. She ...
Go to Profile#542
Claudia Emerson
#23493
Overall Influence
1957 - 2014 (57 years)
Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008. Early life Emerson was born on January 13, 1957, in Chatham, Virginia, and graduated from Chatham Hall preparatory school in 1975. She received her BA in English from the University of Virginia in 1979 and her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991.
Go to Profile#543
Ellen McLaughlin
#27760
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ellen McLaughlin is an American playwright and actress. Early years McLaughlin attended The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia for elementary school . She subsequently attended Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1976. She graduated from Yale University in 1980, summa cum laude.
Go to Profile#544
Lisel Mueller
#17828
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Lisel Mueller was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.
Go to Profile#545
Ellen Bryant Voigt
#33227
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont. Biography Voigt was born May 9, 1943, in Danville, Virginia. She grew up in Chatham, Virginia, graduated from Converse College, and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has taught at M.I.T. and Goddard College where in 1976 she developed and directed the nation's first low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Since 1981 she has taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Go to Profile#546
Cleonice Berardinelli
#70502
Overall Influence
1916 - 2023 (107 years)
Cleonice Serôa da Motta Berardinelli was a Brazilian academic. Berardinelli was born in Rio de Janeiro on 28 August 1916, to Emídio Serôa da Motta and Rosina Coutinho Serôa da Motta. Her father was in the Army and was frequently transferred around the country. As a result, Cleonice lived in many parts of Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In Rio, she studied at the National Institute of Music under the guidance of Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, who was also her piano teacher. She interrupted her studies to move to Sao Paulo, where she finished her secondary school. She attended the University of Sao Paulo, where she studied literature under Fidelino de Figueiredo, among others.
Go to Profile#547
Anne Boyer
#48102
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Anne Boyer is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers , The 2000s , My Common Heart , Garments Against Women , and The Handbook of Disappointed Fate . In 2016, she was a featured blogger at the Poetry Foundation, where she wrote an ongoing series of posts about her diagnosis and treatment for a highly aggressive form of breast cancer, as well as the lives and near deaths of poets. Her essays about illness have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute with the poets Cyrus Console and Jordan Stempleman.
Go to Profile#548
Elsa Cross
#52986
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Elsa Cross , is a contemporary Spanish-language Mexican writer perhaps best known for her poetry. She has also published translations, philosophical essays and is known as an authority on Indian philosophy.
Go to Profile#549
Sarah Mkhonza
#30622
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sarah Mkhonza is a Swazi writer, educator and women's rights activist living in the United States. Mkhonza received a PhD from Michigan State University. She worked as a journalist for the Times of Swaziland and The Swazi Observer and taught English and Linguistics at the University of Swaziland. Because her writing was critical of the authorities in Swaziland, she was ordered to stop writing. Subsequent threats and assaults led her to seek political asylum in the United States in 2005.
Go to Profile#550
Meg Cabot
#19333
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Meggin Patricia Cabot is an American novelist. She has written and published over 50 novels of young adult and adult fiction and is best known for her young adult series The Princess Diaries, which was later adapted by Walt Disney Pictures into two feature films. Cabot has been the recipient of numerous book awards, including the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, the American Library Association Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, the Tennessee Volunteer State TASL Book Award, the Book Sense Pick, the Evergreen Young Adult Book Award, the IRA/CBC Young Adult Choice, and many others.
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