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,
#651
Thrity Umrigar
#26469
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Thrity Umrigar is an Indian-American journalist, critic, and novelist. Early life Umrigar was born in Mumbai, India to a Parsi family, and relocated to the United States at the age of 21. Career Umrigar received a Bachelor of Science from Bombay University, an M.A. From Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in English from Kent State University.
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Deb Olin Unferth
#49505
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Deb Olin Unferth is an American short story writer, novelist, and memoirist. She is the author of the collection of stories Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation, both published by McSweeney's, and the memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, published by Henry Holt. Unferth was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Revolution.
Go to Profile#653
Tomris Uyar
#49496
Overall Influence
1941 - 2003 (62 years)
Tomris Uyar was a Turkish writer and translator. She was born in Istanbul, the daughter of two lawyers and granddaughter of Republican People's Party politician Süleyman Sırrı Gedik. She was educated at the British Girls' Secondary School and at Arnavutköy American Girls' College, now called Robert College . She graduated from the Journalism Institute affiliated to the Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University .
Go to Profile#654
Halyna Kruk
#69064
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Halyna Kruk is a Ukrainian writer, translator, educator and literary critic. Her surname also appears as Krouk. Life She was born in Lviv, Ukraine and was educated at the University of Lviv, earning a PhD in Ukrainian literature in 2001. She is a professor of literary studies at the university; her research focuses on medieval literature in the Ukraine.
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Marguerite Duras
#33128
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras , was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
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Gina Arnold
#43076
Overall Influence
Gina Arnold is an American author, music critic, and academic. A lecturer at Stanford University and an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, she is the author of four books, including the 33⅓ book on Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville.
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Flavia Bujor
#55333
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Flavia Bujor is a French novelist of Romanian origin. She lived in Romania until the age of two when she moved to Paris, France. She had a passion for stories from an early age. She lives with her parents in Paris.
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Kerstin Hensel
#77716
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kerstin Hensel is a German writer. Biography Hensel was born in 1961 in Karl-Marx Stadt in the former GDR. A trained nurse, she also studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature in Leipzig. She has published numerous books in a variety of genres including novels, short stories, poetry and plays. She has won several literary prizes, among which the most notable are the Anna Seghers Prize in 1987 and the Lessing Prize in 1997.
Go to Profile#659
Toeti Heraty
#28745
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Toeti Heraty was an Indonesian poet. She has been singled out as the "only woman amongst the leading contemporary Indonesian poets". Biography Toeti Heraty was born in Bandung, Java on 27 November 1933. Her father was a well-known engineering expert Roosseno Soerjohadikoesomo and her siblings all work in the hard sciences. Following her family tradition, she pursued medicine at the University of Indonesia from 1951 until 1955. Then she took an advanced degree in psychology in 1962 and wrote her thesis on Simone de Beauvoir. At Leiden University, Netherlands she took her degree in Philosophy and produced a dissertation on "The I/Ego in Culture" or "Aku Dalam Budaya".
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Heid E. Erdrich
#58875
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Early life and education Heid Ellen Erdrich was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She comes from a family of seven siblings including sisters Louise Erdrich and Lise Erdrich . Their father Ralph and mother Rita taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school for the Turtle Mountain Band. Their maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe from 1953 to 1959 and fought against Indian termination.
Go to Profile#661
Lucy Ellmann
#61190
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Lucy Ellmann is an American-born British novelist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Biography Her first book, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. She is the daughter of the American biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann and the feminist literary critic Mary Ellmann. She is married to the American writer Todd McEwen. Her fourth novel, Dot in the Universe, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Believer Book Award. Her latest book, Ducks, Newburyport was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2019. It won the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and the 2020 Jam...
Go to Profile#662
Kim Hyesoon
#38947
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kim Hyesoon is a South Korean poet. Life Kim Hyesoon was born in Uljin County, North Gyeongsang Province. She was raised by her grandmother and had tuberculous pleurisy as a child. She received her Ph.D. in Korean literature from Konkuk University and began her career as a poet in 1979 with the publication of the poem "Dead body Smoking a Cigarette" along with four other of her poems in the literary magazine Literature and Intellect . Kim Hyesoon is Poet, essayist, and critic. She is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She has published fourteen poetry books and four books on poetics.
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Annette Kolodny
#42246
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Annette Kolodny was an American feminist literary critic and activist, held the position of College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her major scholarly writings examined the experiences of women on the American frontiers and the projection of female imagery onto the American landscape. Her other writings examined some aspects of feminism after the 1960s; the revision of dominant themes in American studies; and the problems faced by women and minorities in the American academy.
Go to Profile#664
Kathleen Rooney
#58744
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Kathleen Rooney is an American writer, publisher, editor, and educator. Early life and education Kathleen Rooney was born in Beckley, West Virginia and raised in the Midwest. She earned a B.A. from the George Washington University and an M.F.A. in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. While at Emerson, she was awarded a 2003 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry Magazine.
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Maria Campbell
#30581
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Maria Campbell is a Métis author, playwright, broadcaster, filmmaker, and Elder. Campbell is a fluent speaker of four languages: Cree, Michif, Western Ojibwa, and English. Four of her published works have been published in eight countries and translated into four other languages . Campbell has had great influence in her community as she is very politically involved in activism and social movements. Campbell is well known for being the author of Halfbreed, a memoir describing her own experiences as a Métis woman in society and the difficulties she has faced, which are commonly faced by many o...
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Yoriko Shono
#45435
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Yoriko Shono, born 16 March 1956, is a Japanese writer who describes her writing as 'avant-pop'. Biography Yoriko Shono was born in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, grew up in Ise and studied in the Law Department at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She started writing while she was at university, and made her debut with the story "Gokuraku" in 1981, but was not published again until her 1991 collection Nani mo Shitenai, which won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers. She really began to draw attention in 1994 when her story "Ni Hyaku Kaiki" won the Yukio Mishima Prize, and another story, "Time Slip Kombinat" won the Akutagawa Prize in the same year.
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Elissa Schappell
#68223
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Elissa Schappell is an American novelist, short-story writer, editor and essayist. She was a co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Tin House. Writing career Schappell graduated from New York University with an MFA in creative writing. Her first job in publishing was with Spy magazine in the 1980s.
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Tayari Jones
#37177
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emo...
Go to Profile#669
Jane Asher
#27516
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jane Asher is an English actress and author. She achieved early fame as a child actress and has worked extensively in film and TV throughout her career. Asher has appeared in TV shows and films such as Deep End , The Masque of the Red Death , Alfie , The Mistress, Crossroads, Death at a Funeral , and The Old Guys. She also appeared in two episodes of the 1950s TV series The Buccaneers alongside Robert Shaw. She was well known as the partner of Paul McCartney from 1963 to 1968.
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Mary Caponegro
#72315
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mary Caponegro is an American experimental fiction writer whose collections include Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. Her stories appear regularly in Conjunctions and in other periodicals. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature in 1992, and is also the recipient of The General Electric Award for Younger Writers, the Bruno Arcudi Prize, and the Charles Flint Kellog Award in Arts and Letters. She has taught at Brown University, RISD, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Syracuse University.
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Christine Montalbetti
#54391
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Christine Montalbetti is a French novelist, playwright and professor of literature at the University of Paris. In her writing, Montalbetti practices what Warren Motte calls "intrusive narration," or a narrative style that engages the reader directly in dialogue. Thus in one of her short stories, Montalbetti remarks to the reader, "you are the one person who many imagine flawlessly the particular trouble that the unlucky hero of this story experiences."
Go to Profile#672
Joyce Reynolds
#33009
Overall Influence
1918 - 2022 (104 years)
Joyce Maire Reynolds was a British classicist and academic, specialising in Roman historical epigraphy. She was an honorary fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She dedicated her life to the study and teaching of Classics and was first woman to be awarded the Kenyon medal by the British Academy. Among Reynolds' most significant publications were texts from the city of Aphrodisias, including letters between Aphrodisian and Roman authorities.
Go to Profile#673
Monica Youn
#40152
Overall Influence
Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer. Life Youn was raised in Houston, Texas. She graduated from St. Agnes Academy , Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
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Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
#43730
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan writer who is the author of novels, short stories and essays. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers". Education and professional life Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Owuor studied English at Kenyatta University, before taking an MA in TV/Video development at Reading University. She obtained an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, Australia.
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Mayumi Inaba
#70835
Overall Influence
1950 - 2014 (64 years)
was a Japanese writer and poet. She won the Tanizaki Prize in 2011 for her memoir To the Peninsula . Her short story was translated into English by Lawrence Rogers for the collection Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll.
Go to Profile#676
Beverly Smith
#24322
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Beverly Smith in Cleveland, Ohio, is a Black feminist health advocate, writer, academic, theorist and activist who is also the twin sister of writer, publisher, activist and academic Barbara Smith. Beverly Smith is an instructor of Women's Health at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
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Joy Connolly
#44528
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Joy Connolly is an American scholar of classics and the president of the American Council of Learned Societies. She was previously interim president and provost of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was formerly a professor of classics and the dean for humanities at New York University. Connolly's main research interests are Roman republicanism, rhetoric, civic discourse, classical reception, and the role that aesthetic experience plays in the formation of political judgement.
Go to Profile#678
Siba Shakib
#23799
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Siba Shakib is an Iranian/German filmmaker, writer and political activist. She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Her international bestseller Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep has been translated into 27 languages and won a P.E.N. prize
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Rita Lejeune
#62287
Overall Influence
1906 - 2009 (103 years)
Rita Lejeune was a Belgian philologist who became a leading expert in the study of medieval French literature. Life Lejeune was born in Herstal on 22 November 1906. Her father, Jean Lejeune, was a local government clerk and also a poet under the pen name Jean Lamoureux. He died in the 1918 influenza pandemic shortly before her twelfth birthday. After secondary school she became a student and then a researcher at the University of Liège, obtaining her doctorate in 1928 with a thesis on Jean Renart. She married Fernand Dehousse in 1929 and together they had two children. In the meantime she also studied at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.
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Katherine Duncan-Jones
#46650
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Katherine Dorothea Duncan-Jones, was an English literature and Shakespeare scholar and was also a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge , and then Somerville College, Oxford . She was also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2001. She was a scholar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
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Maria Tallchief
#7923
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Elizabeth Marie Tallchief, "Two-Standards" was an American ballerina. She was considered America's first major prima ballerina. She was the first Native American to hold the rank, and is said to have revolutionized ballet.
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Ann Lauterbach
#37013
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ann Lauterbach is an American poet, essayist, art critic, and professor. Early life Lauterbach was born and raised in New York City, and earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin. She lived in London for eight years, working in publishing and for art institutions, including London's Thames and Hudson art publishing house. On her return to the U.S., she worked in art galleries in New York before she began teaching.
Go to Profile#683
Marita Golden
#48107
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
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Thanhha Lai
#50859
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Thanhha Lai is a Vietnamese-American writer of children's literature. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was published by HarperCollins.
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Stephanie Strickland
#55051
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.
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Kao Kalia Yang
#26140
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Go to Profile#687
Keiko Takemiya
#38215
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Keiko Takemiya is a Japanese manga artist and the former president of Kyoto Seika University. Career Keiko Takemiya is included in the Year 24 Group, a term coined by academics and critics to refer to a group of female authors in the early 1970s who helped transform manga from being created primarily by male authors to being created by female authors. As part of this group, Takemiya pioneered a genre of manga about love between young men called . In 1970, she published a historical short story titled Sunroom Nite in Bessatsu Shōjo Comic, which is possibly the first manga ever published....
Go to Profile#688
Dhonielle Clayton
#62294
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Dhonielle Clayton is an American author and chief operating officer of We Need Diverse Books. Early life and education Clayton was born in Washington, D.C. She went to Our Lady Of Good Counsel in Wheaton, Maryland. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Wake Forest University in 2005, a Master of Arts from Hollins University in 2008, and Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from The New School in 2012.
Go to Profile#689
April Bernard
#55378
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
April Bernard is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.
Go to Profile#690
Celia Brayfield
#41496
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Celia Brayfield is an English author, academic and cultural commentator. Biography Brayfield was born in the north London suburb of Wembley Park. She won a place at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, West London, and spent a year as a foreign student in France, at the Universitaire de Grenoble, studying French language and literature.
Go to Profile#691
Serenella Iovino
#52990
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Serenella Iovino is an Italian cultural and literary theorist, and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is considered one of the main environmental philosophers of Italy.
Go to Profile#692
Jo Ann Beard
#64552
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jo Ann Beard is an American essayist. Life Beard was born in 1955, Moline, Illinois. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a BFA in art, and from The Nonfiction Writing Program with an MFA in creative nonfiction. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Catherine Conybeare
#44671
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Catherine Mary Conybeare is an academic and philologist and an authority on Augustine of Hippo. She is currently Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Academic career Conybeare was born in 1966 at Bristol in the United Kingdom and was educated at Oxford High School , Simon Langton Girls' Grammar School , and The King's School, Canterbury . She read classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and did graduate work in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Brian Stock. From 1996 to 2002 she was at the University of Manc...
Go to Profile#694
Natalia Makarova
#7073
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Natalia Romanovna Makarova is a Russian prima ballerina and choreographer. The History of Dance, published in 1981, notes that "her performances set standards of artistry and aristocracy of dance which mark her as the finest ballerina of her generation in the West."
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Kirstin Valdez Quade
#66292
Overall Influence
Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer. Early life and education Quade was born to a white father and a Hispanic mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her father was a desert geologist and her family lived throughout the Southwestern United States, as well as in Australia. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy and earned her BA from Stanford University and her MFA from the University of Oregon. From 2009 to 2011 she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. In 2014–15, she was the Delbanco Visiting professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#696
Robin Schone
#50893
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robin Schone is a best-selling American author of erotic romance novels. Biography Schone read her first romance novel, These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer, at age twelve, and began reading erotic novels when she was fifteen. Although she has always written stories for herself, Schone was determined to be a painter, and studied art, classics, and world religion at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois. Schone claims to have begun writing after she was married because it was too messy to set up an easel and paint in a small apartment.
Go to Profile#697
Cole Swensen
#48553
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown Universi...
Go to Profile#698
Tina Chang
#72189
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Tina Chang is an American poet, professor, editor, organizer, and public speaker. In 2010, she was named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. Early life Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma to Taiwanese immigrants, who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics. The family moved to Queens, New York, when she was a year old, where she was raised except for a period during her youth, when Chang and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. "I started questioning even at a very young age, well, what is language?" she said.
Go to Profile#699
Izabela Filipiak
#61185
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Izabela Filipiak is a Polish writer, an essayist, a columnist, and a scholar. Biography She debuted in the beginning of the 90s as one of the most distinct figures of Polish literary life. In her short stories and essays, she promoted the new literature in democratic Poland as open to voices previously excluded from cultural discourse. Her novel Absolutna Amnezja published in 1995, critiques the communist past from the point of view of socially maladjusted young women. The book mixes satirical representation of authoritarian schools and dysfunctional families with historical events from the p...
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Martha Nell Smith
#48718
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Martha Nell Smith is a professor of English and founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work's main focus is on the life and works of the poet Emily Dickinson.
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