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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#551

Sherley Anne Williams

#56885

Overall Influence

1944 - 1999 (55 years)

Sherley Anne Williams was an American poet, novelist, professor, vocalist, jazz poet, playwright and social critic. Many of her works tell stories about her life in the African-American community. Biography Sherley Anne Williams was born in Bakersfield, California, to Lena Leila Marie Siler and Jessee Winston Williams, who were migrant farm workers. She was the oldest of three sisters: Ruby, Lois, and Jesmarie. The family suffered from poverty and struggled to make ends meet most their lives. The kids would often have to help out with farming in order to get by.

#552

Elisabeth Bronfen

Elisabeth Bronfen

#30880

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Elisabeth Bronfen is a Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic and academic. She is a professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich as well as a global distinguished professor at New York University. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century American and British literature, gender studies, psychoanalysis as well as the intersection and interaction between different cultural media.

#553

Nicholasa Mohr

#40556

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Nicholasa Mohr is one of the best known Nuyorican writers, born in the United States to Puerto Rican parents. In 1973, she became the first Nuyorican woman in the 20th century to have her literary works published by the major commercial publishing houses, and has had the longest creative writing career of any Nuyorican female writer for these publishing houses. She centers her works on the female experience as a child and adult in Puerto Rican communities in New York City, with much of writing containing semi-autobiographical content. In addition to her prominent novels and short stories, she...

#554

Jasmine Guillory

#41685

Overall Influence

Jasmine Guillory is an American romance novelist. Her works' protagonists are often African-American professionals. In February 2019, her book, The Proposal, was ranked on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback trade fiction.

#555

Sarah Moss

#63871

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Sarah Moss is an English writer and academic. She has published six novels, as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin's School of English, Drama and Film in the Republic of Ireland with effect from September 2020.

#556

Moto Hagio

#34047

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Moto Hagio is a Japanese manga artist. Regarded for her contributions to shōjo manga , Hagio is considered the most significant artist in the demographic and among the most influential manga artists of all time, being referred to as the "god of shōjo manga" by critics.

#557

Susan Rubin Suleiman

#29242

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Susan Rubin Suleiman is a Hungarian-born American literary scholar. She is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

#558

Margot Livesey

#45300

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Margot Livesey is a Scottish-born writer. She is the author of nine novels, a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on writing and the co-author, with Lynn Klamkin, of a textbook. Among other awards, she has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the PEN New England Award, and the Massachusetts Book Award.

#559

Naoko Takeuchi

#27224

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Naoko Takeuchi is a Japanese manga artist. She is best known as the author of Sailor Moon, one of the most popular manga series of all time. She has won several awards, including the 1993 Kodansha Manga Award for Sailor Moon.

#560

Maureen Howard

#32665

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.

#561

Phyllis Eisenstein

#28637

Overall Influence

1946 - 2020 (74 years)

Phyllis Eisenstein was an American author of science fiction and fantasy short stories as well as novels. Her work was nominated for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. Early life Eisenstein was born Phyllis Leah Kleinstein in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, and lived there most of her life. While studying psychology at the University of Chicago in 1963, she met her future husband Alex at a weekly gathering of Chicago's science fiction fandom. In 1966, shortly after attending Tricon, the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, they were married. She continued college until Alex entered the U. S....

#562

Maria Tymoczko

#46219

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Maria Fleming Tymoczko is a scholar of comparative literature who has written about translation, medieval Celtic literature, and modern Irish literature including the works of James Joyce. She is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the former president of the Celtic Studies Association of North America. She is known for her calls for a more international and multicultural perspective on translation.

#563

Kelly Cherry

#21138

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia . She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.

#564

Silvia Bovenschen

Silvia Bovenschen

#51665

Overall Influence

1946 - 2017 (71 years)

Silvia Bovenschen was a German feminist literary critic, author and essayist. History Bovenschen was the daughter of a public limited company director. She grew up in Frankfurt am Main, where she later studied literature, sociology and philosophy. In the course of the protests of 1968, she co-founded the women's council of the Socialist German Student Union. In 1979, she earned a doctorate from the Goethe University Frankfurt with her work Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit . This essay is regarded as a standard work of feminism.

#565

Susan Neville

#38373

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Susan Neville is a short story writer, essayist and professor, known for her work exploring Indiana and the Midwest. Life She graduated from DePauw University in 1973. In 1976, she graduated from Bowling Green State University with an M.F.A. She taught at St. Petersburg Junior College, Ball State University, and Indiana University East. She teaches at Butler University and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in North Caroline.

#566

Edna Longley

#57444

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Edna Longley is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry. Early life and education Born in Cork in 1940, the daughter of mathematics professor T.S. Broderick and a Scottish Presbyterian mother, she was baptised a Catholic but brought up in "the Anglican compromise" . She went up to Trinity College Dublin in 1958 where her contemporaries included the poets Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland.

#567

Carolyn Collette

#27850

Overall Influence

Carolyn P. Collette is an American literary critic and a specialist in medieval literature, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. She is Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College, and a research associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, in England.

#568

Danzy Senna

#48120

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Danzy Senna is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of five books and numerous essays about gender, race and motherhood, including her first novel, Caucasia , and her most recent novel, New People . Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

#569

Rebecca Gould

#38020

Overall Influence

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, translator, and Distinguished Professor, Comparative Poetics & Global Politics at SOAS University of London. Her interests range across the Caucasus, Comparative Literature, Islam, Islamic Law, Islamic Studies, Persian literature, poetry, and poetics. Her PhD dissertation focused on Persian prison poetry, and was published in revised form as The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination . Her articles and translations have received awards from English PEN, the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize, the Mode...

#570

M. C. Bradbrook

#50077

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Muriel Clara Bradbrook , usually cited as M. C. Bradbrook, was a British literary scholar and authority on Shakespeare. She was Professor of English at Cambridge University, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge.

#571

Léonora Miano

#53182

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Léonora Miano is a Cameroonian author. Biography Léonora Miano was born in Douala in Cameroon. She moved to France in 1991, where she first settled in Valenciennes and then in Nanterre to study American Literature. She published her first novel, Dark Heart of the Night, which was well received by French critics, receiving six prizes: Les Lauriers Verts de la Forêt des Livres, Révélation , the Louis Guilloux prize , the Prix du Premier Roman de Femme , the René-Fallet prize , the Bernard-Palissy prize ,and the Cameroonian Excellence prize . The Lire magazine awarded it with the title of the b...

#572

Karen Russell

#35987

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.

#573

Jenny Strauss Clay

#21333

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jenny Strauss Clay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. After completing studies at Reed College and the University of Chicago, Strauss Clay completed her doctorate at the University of Washington. She taught at the University of California at Irvine and Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a member of the Nominating Committee of the Society for Classical Studies , until 2018.

#574

Sigrid Weigel

#36093

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sigrid Weigel is a German scholar of literary studies, critical theory, a specialist of cross-disciplinary research, and a leading scholar of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and the cultural science around 1900. She held professorships at Hamburg, Zürich, and Berlin and established the internationally noted Advanced Studies “Center for Literary and Cultural Research” in Berlin. In 2016, she received the renowned Aby Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg.

#575

Françoise Gaillard

#31212

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Françoise Gaillard is a French literary critic, philosopher and professor at University of Paris VII specializing in fin-de-siècle French literature, aesthetics and art and is a regular visiting professor at New York University.

#576

Caryl Churchill

#29073

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Caryl Lesley Churchill is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 , Top Girls , Serious Money , Blue Heart , Far Away , and A Number , she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage". In a 2011 dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, five out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.

#577

Elaine Fantham

#51838

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian, German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, and Australia.

#578

Molly Mahood

#14675

Overall Influence

1919 - 2017 (98 years)

Molly Maureen Mahood was a British literary scholar, whose interests ranged from Shakespeare to postcolonial African literature. She taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford , the University of Ibadan in Nigeria , the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania , and the University of Kent at Canterbury .

#579

Valerie Sayers

#54765

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Valerie Sayers is an American writer and the author of six novels: The Powers ; Brain Fever ; The Distance Between Us ; Who Do You Love ; How I Got Him Back, or, Under the Cold Moon’s Shine ; and Due East . Brain Fever and Who Do You Love were named New York Times "Notable Books of the Year", and the 2002 film Due East is based on her first two novels. Reviewing Who Do You Love, The Chicago Tribune declared: "To say that Valerie Sayers is a natural-born writer wildly underestimates the facts…. She has carved out for herself a corner of the South as clearly delineated as Faulkner’s famous Yokn...

#580

Joan Hambidge

#45205

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Joan Helene Hambidge , is an Afrikaans poet, literary theorist and academic. She is a prolific poet in Afrikaans, controversial as a public figure and critic and notorious for her out-of-the-closet style of writing. Her theoretic contributions deal mainly with Roland Barthes, deconstruction, postmodernism, psychoanalysis and metaphysics.

#581

Anna Mitgutsch

#51903

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Anna Mitgutsch is an Austrian writer and educator. Her name also appears as Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch. Biography She was born in Linz and studied German and English literature at the University of Salzburg. Originally a Roman Catholic, Mitgutsch converted to Judaism and worked on a kibbutz in Israel. She taught at the Institute for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck and, after going to England, at the University of Hull and University of East Anglia. Next, She taught for a year in Seoul, South Korea and then at colleges and universities in the United States from 1979 until 1985, when Mitgutsch returned to Austria.

#582

Katharine Weber

#32624

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.

#583

Vesna Goldsworthy

#30427

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Vesna Goldsworthy FRSL , is a Serbian writer and poet. She is from Belgrade and obtained her BA in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from Belgrade University in 1985. She has lived in England since 1986. Goldsworthy became a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter in 2017. She previously worked at Kingston University where she was Director of the Centre for Suburban Studies. Goldsworthy is a Professor Emeritus of the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

#584

Bell hooks

#63124

Overall Influence

1952 - 2021 (69 years)

Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures.

#585

Maria Irene Ramalho

#32893

Overall Influence

Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, usually known as Maria Irene Ramalho, is a Portuguese professor emerita of American Studies and Feminist Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra , in Portugal, as well as a former Assistant Professor International in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the USA. In 2008, she was the first non-American to be awarded the Mary C. Turpie Prize by the American Studies Association for outstanding abilities and achievement in American studies teaching, advising, and program development, and in 201...

#586

Jacqueline Risset

#48831

Overall Influence

1936 - 2014 (78 years)

Jacqueline Risset was a French poet noted for her work on the board of the literary journal Tel Quel along with Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, and for her translations of Italian poetry into French. Risset's books include Sleep's Powers and The Translation Begins.

#587

Jenny Sharpe

#41308

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA . Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, theories of allegory, the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the effect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.

#588

Nina Auerbach

#28541

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Her special area of concentration was nineteenth-century England. She published, lectured, and reviewed widely in the fields of Victorian literature, theater, cultural history, and horror fiction and film.

#589

Kim Barnes

#52558

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Kim Barnes is a contemporary American author of fiction, memoir, and personal essays. She served as Poet Laureate of Idaho. Life She returned with her mother to their logging camp on Orofino Creek in the Clearwater National Forest, where her father worked as a lumberjack. For the next twelve years, she and her family lived in small communities and cedar camps in northern IdahoPierce, Headquarters, and a number of places along the North Fork of the Clearwater River. In 1970, her family moved to Lewiston, Idaho, where Barnes graduated from Lewiston High School in 1976.

#590

Chinelo Okparanta

Chinelo Okparanta

#36798

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.

#591

Sidney Wade

#33367

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sidney Wade is an American poet. She currently holds the position of Professor of creative writing at the University of Florida, where she has taught since 1993. Biography Wade was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1951. She attended the University of Vermont, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 1974 and an M.Ed. in counseling in 1978. She earned a Ph.D in English from the University of Houston in 1994.

#592

Bani Basu

#36086

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Bani Basu is a prolific Bengali Indian author, essayist, critic, poet, translator and professor. Life She received her formal education from the well-known Lady Brabourne College, Scottish Church College and at the University of Calcutta where she received M.A. in English.

#593

Selina Tusitala Marsh

Selina Tusitala Marsh

#51612

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Selina Tusitala Marsh is a New Zealand poet, academic and illustrator, and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2017–2019. Early life Marsh was born in 1971 in Auckland, New Zealand. Through her mother, Sailigi Tusitala, Marsh is of Samoan and Tuvaluan ancestry and through her father James Crosbie she is of English, Scottish and French descent.

#594

Aisha Abd al-Rahman

Aisha Abd al-Rahman

#36510

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Aisha Abd al-Rahman was an Egyptian author and professor of literature who published under the pen name Bint al-Shaṭiʾ . Life and career She was born on 18 November 1913 in Damietta in the governorate of Domyat, Egypt, where her father taught at the Domyat Religious Institute. When she was ten, her mother, though illiterate, enrolled her in school while her father was traveling. Though her father objected, her mother later sent Aisha to El Mansurah for further education. Later, Aisha studied Arabic at Cairo University earning her undergraduate degree in 1939, and an M.A. degree in 1941.

#595

Bonnie Zimmerman

#53296

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Bonnie Zimmerman is an American literary critic and women's studies scholar. Her works explore women's roles, lesbian history and criticism, and women's literature. She has received numerous prestigious awards. Zimmerman retired from teaching in 2010. Her contributions to academia include classes, articles, and several books.

#596

Hattie Gossett

#23504

Overall Influence

Hattie Gossett is an African-American feminist playwright, poet, and magazine editor. Her work focuses on bolstering the self-esteem of young black women. Biography Born in New Jersey, Gossett gained a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University in 1993, where she was a Yip Harburg Fellow. She was a David Randolph Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at The New School in 2001.

#597

Larissa Lai

#40683

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Larissa Lai is an American-born Canadian novelist and literary critic. She is a recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and Lambda Literary Foundation's 2020 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.

#598

Goli Taraghi

#36353

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Zohreh Taraghi-Moghadam, better known as Goli Taraghi is an Iranian novelist and short story writer. Life Goli Taraghi's father Lotfollah Taraghi was a member of parliament, publisher and journalist, and her mother was from a widely cultured family. Born and raised in Tehran, she attended Drake University in the United States, gaining an undergraduate degree in philosophy. Returning to Iran, she obtained a master's degree from Tehran University in 1967 and worked throughout the 1960s as a specialist in international relations for the Plan Organization. In the 1970s she taught courses in philosophy, mythology and symbolism at Tehran University.

#599

Misty Copeland

#13714

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre , one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.

#600

Alice Adams

#27966

Overall Influence

1926 - 1999 (73 years)

Alice Adams was an American short story writer and novelist. In 1982 she became the third author of only four to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories .

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