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

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#601

Elizabeth Willis

Elizabeth Willis

#38374

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Elizabeth Willis is an American poet and literary critic. She currently serves as Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Willis has won several awards for her poetry including the National Poetry Series and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Susan Howe has called Elizabeth Willis "an exceptional poet, one of the most outstanding of her generation."

#602

Alicia Erian

#52804

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Alicia Erian is an American novelist. She was born to an Egyptian father and American mother of Polish descent. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Binghamton University and a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Vermont College. A writer of short stories, some of her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All Story and the Iowa Review. She has published one collection of short stories and one novel. Erian lived in Brooklyn, New York, for a time with ex-husband David Franklin, but now lives in Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Wellesley College . She has worked as a film ...

#603

Else Mundal

#75366

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Else Olaug Mundal is a Norwegian philologist. She was born in Vanylven and graduated with the cand.philol. degree in 1971. She was appointed as a docent in Norse philology at the University of Oslo in 1977. Being promoted to professor in 1985, she was a professor at the University of Bergen from 1994. She is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2017 she was appointed a knight of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon in connection with the state visit of Iceland's president to Norway.

#604

Elia Barceló

#57423

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Elia Barceló or Elia Eisterer-Barceló is a Spanish academic and author who lives in Austria. Life Barceló was born in Elda in 1957. She became an academic and earned her doctorate in Innsbruck, Austria in 1995. She remained in Austria, working as a professor of Spanish literature. She also writes science fiction novels and works for children. She has won a number of awards.

#605

Julie Rivkin

#62182

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Julie H. Rivkin is an American literary critic and professor of English at Connecticut College since 1982. She is best known for her publications on literary theory and Henry James, and has published several works on both subjects. Rivkin received her B.A. and PhD from Yale University and is currently the Associate Dean of Faculty at Connecticut College, a member of the Modern Language Association, and Vice President of the Henry James Society. Her other specializations include American literature and gender studies .

#606

Anne Edwards

#36687

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Anne Edwards is an American writer best known for her biographies of celebrities that include Princess Diana, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Mitchell, Ronald Reagan, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Temple and Countess Sonya Tolstoy.

#607

Mineke Schipper

Mineke Schipper

#40179

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Mineke Schipper is a Dutch author of non-fiction and fiction. As a scholar she is best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies. Description of the author Thanks to her critical global perspective, Schipper has given an important impulse to the field of intercultural literary studies. Making her views accessible to both academic and non-academic audiences, she lectures not only at universities and scientific institutes , but also to audiences outside the academy, such as policy makers in The Hague or Brussels.

#608

Luz María Umpierre

#42419

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Luz María "Luzma" Umpierre-Herrera is a Puerto Rican human rights advocate, New-Humanist educator, poet, and scholar. Umpierre works on the topics of activism and social equality, the immigrant experience, bilingualism in the United States, and LGBT issues. Umpierre has published six poetry books and two books of literary criticism and has had numerous essays published in academic journals.

#609

Deborah A. Miranda

#37743

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Deborah A. Miranda is an American writer, poet, and professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Her father, Alfred Edward Robles Miranda, claims descent from the Esselen and Chumash people, native to the Santa Barbara/Santa Ynez/Monterey, California, area. Her mother, Madgel Eleanor Miranda, was of French and Jewish ancestry. Miranda claims descent from what are known as "Mission Indians," Indigenous peoples of many Southern California tribes who were forcibly removed from their land into several Franciscan missions. She is a member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation.

#610

Carmen Boullosa

Carmen Boullosa

#28955

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Carmen Boullosa is a Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. It has been praised by a number of writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto, Roberto Bolaño and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly.

#611

Sefi Atta

#39229

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Sefi Atta is a Nigerian-American novelist, short-story writer, playwright and screenwriter. Her books have been translated into many languages, radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC, and her stage plays have been performed internationally. Awards she has received include the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.

#612

Opal Palmer Adisa

#32511

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaican and American poet, novelist, performance artist and educator. Anthologized in more than 400 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally. Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts, Adisa is also the current Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica, where she currently resides.

#613

Camille Laurens

Camille Laurens

#23348

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Laurence Ruel , known by her pen name Camille Laurens, is a French writer and winner of the 2000 Prix Femina for Dans ces bras-là. Laurens is a member of the Académie Goncourt. Career A graduate of humanities, Camille Laurens taught in Rouen in Normandy. In 1984, she began teaching in Morocco, where she spent twelve years. Since September 2011, she has taught at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris .

#614

Frances Wilson

#53022

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Frances Wilson is an English author, academic, and critic. Biography Born in Malawi, she attended The Mount School, York, and read English literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She received a DPhil on Henry James and Freud from Sussex University. She taught English literature at Reading University for ten years, leaving in 2005 to become a full-time writer. She reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Oldie, New Statesman, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph, and has been a judge for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, and was chair of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.

#615

Maria Àngels Anglada

#63525

Overall Influence

1930 - 1999 (69 years)

Maria Àngels Anglada was a Catalan poet and novelist. She was born in Vic, Spain, in 1920. She received a degree in Classical Philology at the University of Barcelona. Her first novel, Les closes, won the Josep Pla Award. Her 1985 novel Sandàlies d'escuma won the Lletra d'Or Prize. She died in 1999.

#616

Kelly Murphy

#48828

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Kelly Murphy is an American author, illustrator and educator. She is based in Providence, Rhode Island. Early life Murphy was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in southeastern Massachusetts. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Her student work receiving distinction from the Society of Illustrators of New York. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration in 1999, Murphy started a freelance career as an editorial and children's books illustrator.

#617

Shahidha Bari

#49327

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Shahidha Bari is a British academic, critic and broadcaster in the fields of literature, philosophy and art. She is a professor at the University of the Arts London based at London College of Fashion. She is a host of the topical arts television programme Inside Culture on BBC Two, standing in for Mary Beard, one of the presenters of the BBC Radio 3 arts and ideas programme Free Thinking , and an occasional presenter of BBC Radio 4's Front Row.

#618

Julijana Matanović

#58761

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Julijana Matanović is a Bosnian Croat short story writer and novelist. She is also a professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she teaches contemporary Croatian literature.

#619

Rebecca Goldstein

Rebecca Goldstein

#3814

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.

#620

Thisbe Nissen

#61822

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Thisbe Nissen is an American author. Originally from New York City, she lived in Iowa for eleven years. Among her works are Osprey Island, The Good People of New York, and Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night. She has taught a fiction course at least once a year since the inception of the Iowa Young Writers' Workshop, a two-week intensive creative writing workshop "camp" for talented high school students, except in 2006. She has also taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Iowa Elderhostel.

#621

Dorianne Laux

#37025

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Dorianne Laux is an American poet. Biography Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. Laux taught at the University of Oregon. She is a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program, and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review.

#622

Margot Singer

#36391

Overall Influence

Margot Singer is an American short story writer and novelist. Her book The Pale of Settlement won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2006 and her novel Underground Fugue was listed as "one of the most anticipated books by women in 2017" by Elle Magazine.

#623

Rumiko Takahashi

#29577

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

is a Japanese manga artist. With a career of several commercially successful works, beginning with Urusei Yatsura in 1978, Takahashi is one of Japan's best-known and wealthiest manga artists. Her works are popular worldwide, where they have been translated into a variety of languages, with over 200 million copies in circulation. She has won the Shogakukan Manga Award twice, once in 1980 for Urusei Yatsura and again in 2001 for Inuyasha, and the Seiun Award twice, once in 1987 for Urusei Yatsura and again in 1989 for Mermaid Saga. She also received the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême in 2019, becoming the second woman and second Japanese to win the prize.

#624

Sheenagh Pugh

#49533

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sheenagh Pugh is a British poet, novelist and translator who writes in English. Her book, Stonelight won the Wales Book of the Year award. Pugh was born in Birmingham. She was a creative writer educator at the University of Glamorgan until her retirement. She has written several poetry collections, and two novels. She has also written The Democratic Genre: fan fiction in a literary context , a literary study of fan fiction.

#625

Vira Ageyeva

#45193

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Vira Ageyeva is a Ukrainian literary critic and philologist. In 1990, she and other scholars established the first feminist seminars in the country as an initiative of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and she was a co-founder of the Kyiv Institute for Gender Studies in 1998. She was honored as a joint winner of the Shevchenko National Prize in 1996 and the Petro Mohyla Prize, an award given by Academic Council of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, in 2008.

#626

Marie Redonnet

#69742

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Marie Redonnet is the nom de plume of Martine L'hospitalier who is a French writer of poems, novels, essays, short stories, and plays. Her works have been translated into eleven languages. Biography Martine L'hospitalier was born in 1948, her mother's birth name was Redonnet. She studied literature, particularly Jean Genet, and she became a teacher and began writing in the late 1970s. Her first published work was Le Mort & Cie, a collection of poems released in 1985. The following year, she published a collection of short stories entitled Doublures. She followed that with a trilogy of novels...

#627

Susanna Jones

#73188

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Susanna Jones is a British writer. Her debut novel, The Earthquake Bird won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize a Betty Trask Award and the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy Dagger. Biography Born in Hull, Jones spent her childhood in Hornsea in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Her father was a University Professor and her mother a teacher then School Inspector. She studied drama at Royal Holloway University in London where she became interested in Japanese culture through her study of Noh theatre. After graduating in 1988 she then travelled to Japan where she taught English in Nagoya on the JET...

#628

María Dueñas

#65144

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

María Dueñas Vinuesa is a Spanish writer and professor. She rose to fame in 2009 with El tiempo entre costuras, her first novel, which became one of the best-selling works of Spanish literature in recent years and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

#629

Cathy Park Hong

Cathy Park Hong

#38606

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Cathy Park Hong is an American poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative. She was named on the 2021 Time 100 list for her writings and advocacy for Asian American women.

#630

Rebecca Wells

#49255

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Rebecca Wells is an American author, actor, and playwright known for the Ya-Ya Sisterhood series, which includes the books Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Little Altars Everywhere, Ya-Yas in Bloom, and The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder.

#631

Helen Damico

#51647

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Helen Damico was a Greek-born American scholar of Old English and Old English literature. Life and career Born in Chios, Greece, Damico emigrated to the United States in 1937. She earned her B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1952, and was on the faculty of Brooklyn College, followed by the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1980.

#632

Cordelia Candelaria

#64388

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria is an American educator and writer of Hispanic descent. Early life and education Candelaria was born in Deming, New Mexico, to Ray J. Chávez and Eloida Trujillo. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Fort Lewis College, where she studied English and French. She then earned a Master of Arts in English and a PhD in American literature and structural linguistics from the University of Notre Dame.

#633

Catherine Fisher

#46287

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Catherine Fisher is a Welsh poet and children's novelist. She has also worked as a school and university teacher. Work experience Catherine Fisher has worked as a primary-school teacher and as an archaeologist. She also taught writing for children at the University of Glamorgan.She has been a full-time writer of fiction and poetry since 2002.

#634

Myung Mi Kim

#50096

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Myung Mi Kim is a Korean American poet noted for her postmodern writings. Kim and her family immigrated to the United States when she was nine years old. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa and lectured for some years on creative writing at the San Francisco State University. She is currently Professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

#635

Genevieve L. Asenjo

#44038

Overall Influence

Genevieve L. Asenjo is a Filipino poet, novelist, translator and literary scholar in Kinaray-a, Hiligaynon and Filipino. Her first novel, Lumbay ng Dila, received a citation for the Juan C. Laya Prize for Excellence in Fiction in a Philippine Language in the National Book Award.

#636

Betty Louise Bell

#53635

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Betty Louise Bell is an American author and educator. Biography Bell was born on November 23, 1949, in Davis, Oklahoma. She is a scholar and fiction writer of Cherokee ancestry. She earned her PhD in 1985 from Ohio State University.

#637

Ai

#39120

Overall Influence

1947 - 2010 (63 years)

Ai Ogawa was an American poet and educator who won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems. Ai is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. About writing in the dramatic monologue form, she's said: "I want to take the narrative 'persona' poem as far as I can, and I've never been one to do things in halves. All the way or nothing. I won't abandon that desire."

#638

Tilar J. Mazzeo

#38126

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Tilar J. Mazzeo is an American-Canadian cultural historian, wine writer, and author of several bestselling works of narrative nonfiction. She was the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College in Maine from 2004-2019. she is Professeure Associée in the Département de Littératures et Langues du Monde at the Université de Montréal in Canada.

#639

Astrid Ivask

#55125

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Astrid Ivask was a Latvian-American poet. Biography She was born Astrīde Helēna Hartmane in Riga, the daughter of Mārtiņš Hartmanis, a Latvian Army General, and Irma Marija Hartmane. Her brother was computer scientist Juris Hartmanis. Following the 1940 Soviet occupation of Latvia, General Hartmanis was imprisoned by the Soviet Union. He was executed in 1941, but his family would not learn of his fate until after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

#640

Nikky Finney

#39275

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Nikky Finney is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short-story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split.

#641

Leela Gandhi

#21394

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Leela Gandhi is an Indian-born literary and cultural theorist who is noted for her work in postcolonial theory. She is currently the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English and director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.

#642

Robin Coste Lewis

#67064

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection “A masterpiece…” “Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle…” “remarkable hopefulness…in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse...” “formally polished,...

#643

Benedetta Craveri

Benedetta Craveri

#48402

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Adele Benedetta Craveri is an Italian literary critic, academic and writer. She was born in Rome, the daughter of the historian and political activist Raimondo Craveri and the writer and translator Elena Croce . She studied literature at the University of Rome, graduating in 1969, and went on to teach at Tuscia University in Viterbo. Since 2005 she has taught at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples.

#644

Louise Cowan

#50420

Overall Influence

1916 - 2015 (99 years)

Mary Louise Cowan was an American critic and teacher, and wife of the physicist and University of Dallas president Donald Cowan . She taught at Texas Christian University and Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Cowan lived in Dallas, where she taught at both at the University of Dallas and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She was a prominent figure in Dallas society as a mentor and friend to many Dallas dignitaries and as one of the city's leading intellectuals.

#645

Dara Horn

#44857

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Dara Horn is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature. She has written five novels and in 2021, released a nonfiction essay collection titled People Love Dead Jews, which was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. She won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 2002, the National Jewish Book Award in 2003 and 2006, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize in 2007.

#646

Norma Fox Mazer

#52712

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Norma Fox Mazer was an American author and teacher, best known for her books for children and young adults. Her novels featured credible young characters confronting difficult situations such as family separation and death.

#647

Reetika Vazirani

Reetika Vazirani

#56169

Overall Influence

1962 - 2003 (41 years)

Reetika Gina Vazirani was an Indian-American immigrant poet and educator. Life Vazirani was born in Patiala, India in 1962. She was six-years-old when her family left Punjab in 1968 as part of a wave of Indians coming to the United States after its immigration laws loosened in 1965. The family settled, after a few interim stops, in White Oak, Illinois. Her father, Sunder Vazirani, was an oral surgeon who received his graduate education at the University of Illinois, later to become the assistant dean at Howard University’s dental school. Reetika graduated from Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland and continued her education at Wellesley College, graduating in 1984.

#648

Elinor Shaffer

#45518

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Elinor Shaffer FBA is a professor at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, honorary professor at University College, London, editor of the Comparative Literature series of Legenda , and editor of Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, a book series published by Continuum Books.

#649

Maja Haderlap

#28819

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Maja Haderlap Life Her grandmother who was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. At ten years old, Haderlap's father was tortured by the Nazis to disclose where his father, who joined Slovene Partisans, was hiding. Her father often wanted to kill himself because of the way Austrian majority treated him. The family waited until he passed out, then pried his fingers from the gun. After reading her grandmother’s diary, she was “afraid of being overrun by the past, of being crushed by its weight.” She made a conscious decision to write about her family’s history in a novel.

#650

Carolin Duttlinger

#57779

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Carolin Duttlinger is a German academic and Germanist. She studied at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctorate in 2003. She is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor of Wadham College. In 2016 and 2019-20 she was external senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

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