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,

#701

Dai Jinhua

#53092

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Dai Jinhua is a Chinese feminist cultural critic. She is a Professor in the Institute of Comparative Literature and Culture, Peking University. Her research interests include popular culture, film studies, and gender studies.

#702

Lin Wenyue

#66482

Overall Influence

1933 - 2023 (90 years)

Lin Wenyue was a Taiwanese scholar, writer, translator, and professor. Biography Lin was born in Shanghai in 1933, with her ancestral home in Changhua County. Lin primarily studied at a Japanese school. Her grandfather, Lian Heng, was a historian, who was Vice President Lien Chan's grandfather.

#703

Elizabeth Tallent

#85714

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Elizabeth Tallent is an American fiction writer, academic, and essayist. Life Tallent's short stories and essays have been published in literary magazines and journals such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, Zyzzyva, and North American Review, and her work has been reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize collections.

#704

Mary Jo Salter

#64293

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. Life Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was raised in Detroit and Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.A. from Harvard University in 1976 and her M.A. from Cambridge University in 1978. In 1976, she participated in the Glascock Prize contest.

#705

Olga Xirinacs Díaz

Olga Xirinacs Díaz

#76140

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Olga Xirinacs Díaz is a Spanish writer and piano teacher. During her literary career, she has written poetry, drama, tales and essays. She was born in Tarragona , where she still lives and works. Xirinacs often writes in the daily press: her articles have been published in La Vanguardia, Avui, and Foc Nou, amongst others. She has given narrative courses in the Aula de Lletres and in Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University.

#706

Susan Sellers

#63498

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Susan Sellers is a British author, translator, editor and novelist. She was the first woman to be made a Professor in the field of English literature as well as creative writing at the University of St Andrews, and is co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf.

#707

Claire Kahane

#54268

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Claire Kahane is an American writer, scholar and feminist literary critic. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University at Buffalo, where she taught from 1974 to 2000. Kahane is the author of Passions of the Voice, a study of narrative and "the strategies of hysteric discourse." Scholar Christine Wiesenthal, writing in the journal Victorian Review, wrote that "the confluence of feminist, narrative, and psychoanalytic theory" in Passions of the Voice was "an innovative and provocative mix." Kahane is also the co-editor, with Charles Bernheimer, of In Dora's Case, a collection of essay...

#708

Susham Bedi

#27659

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Susham Bedi was an Indian author of novels, short stories and poetry. She was a professor of Hindi language and literature at the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, New York. She wrote predominantly about the experiences of Indians in the South Asian diaspora, focusing on psychological and 'interior' cultural conflicts. Unlike other prominent Indian American novelists she wrote mainly in Hindi rather than in English. She has been widely translated into English, French, Dutch and other languages by artists, academics, and students.

#709

Theresa Williams

#82712

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Theresa Williams is a contemporary fiction writer whose works include The Secret of Hurricanes: A Novel and short stories in such magazines and journals as The Sun, The Chattahoochee Review, and Hunger Mountain. She is the recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council and her novel, The Secret of Hurricanes was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. She teaches literature and creative writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

#710

Hattie Naylor

#33529

Overall Influence

Hattie Naylor is an English playwright. Her 2009 Ivan and the Dogs won the Tinniswood Award for original radio drama and was nominated in the 2010 Olivier Awards for Outstanding Contribution to Theatre. It has since been developed into a film directed by Andrew Kôtting called Lek and the Dogs . Other productions include Weighting Extraordinary Bodies, national tour 2015/16. Her work as a librettist includes Picard in Space with Will Gregory directed by Jude Kelly, for the Electronica Festival at the Southbank 2012. The Night Watch, her adaptation of Sarah Water’s novel, Manchester Royal Ex...

#711

Sianne Ngai

#43358

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Sianne Ngai is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. From 2000 to 2007 she was an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, from 2007-2011 an Associate Professor of English at UCLA, and from 2011 to 2017 Professor of English at Stanford University. She joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in fall 2017. Ngai earned her B.A. from Brown University in 1993 and her Ph.D from Harvard in 2000.

#712

Darcey Bussell

#14568

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Dame Darcey Andrea Bussell, is an English retired ballerina and a former judge on the BBC television dance contest Strictly Come Dancing. Trained at the Arts Educational School and the Royal Ballet School, Bussell started her professional career at Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet, but after only one year she moved to the Royal Ballet, where she became the youngest-ever principal dancer at the age of 20 in 1989. Bussell is widely acclaimed as one of the great British ballerinas.

#713

Alison Light

#38899

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Alison Light, is a writer, critic and independent scholar. She is the author of five books to date. In 2020 A Radical Romance, was awarded the Pen Ackerley prize, the only prize for memoir in the UK. Common People: The History of an English Family was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. She has held a number of academic posts and is currently an Honorary Fellow in History and English at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College, London and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of English, Edinburgh University.

#714

Tanya Grae

#58867

Overall Influence

Tanya Grae is an American poet and essayist, whose debut collection Undoll was awarded the Julie Suk Award and a Florida Book Award and was a National Poetry Series finalist. Her poems and essays have been widely published in literary journals, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and The Massachusetts Review. Grae was born in Sumter, South Carolina, while her father was stationed at Shaw AFB. She grew up traveling the United States as her father relocated for the military every few years and often writes about those early experiences. Her family is from Nashville, Tennessee and is of Irish, Dutch, and Cherokee descent.

#715

Alison Fell

#73062

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Alison Fell is a Scottish poet and novelist with a particular interest in women's roles and political victims. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies. Her children's books also pass on social messages.

#716

Lucie Brock-Broido

#48051

Overall Influence

1956 - 2018 (62 years)

Lucie Brock-Broido was an American author of four collections of poetry. Biography She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she was Director of Poetry in the Writing Division at Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City.

#717

Sheila Murphy

#64098

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sheila E. Murphy is an American text and visual poet who has been writing and publishing since 1978. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. Green Integer Press. 2003. Murphy was awarded the Hayku Poetry Book Prize from Meritage Press and xPress in 2017 for her book Reporting Live from You Know Where. 2018. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

#718

Kimberly Johnson

#71247

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Kimberly Johnson is an American poet and Renaissance scholar. Life Johnson was raised in Utah. She earned her MA in 1995 from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, her MFA in 1997 Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in 2003 from University of California, Berkeley.

#719

Diablo Cody

#51961

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Brook Maurio , known professionally by the pen name Diablo Cody, is an American writer and producer. She gained recognition for her candid blog and subsequent memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper . Cody received critical acclaim for her screenwriting debut film, Juno , winning the Academy Award, and the BAFTA Award.

#720

Laura Walls

#34186

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Laura Dassow Walls is an American professor of English literature and currently the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Areas of research Walls has researched the intersections of literature and science in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander von Humboldt and related authors. She specializes in American Transcendentalism—especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, transatlantic romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism.

#721

Julie Vargas

#16967

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Julie Skinner Vargas is an American educator who has written extensively on the science of behavior. Vargas is the daughter of B.F. Skinner and is the president of the B. F. Skinner Foundation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is an officer of The International Society for Behaviorology.

#722

Safinaz Kazem

#36197

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Safinaz Kazem, also written Safynaz Kazem , is an Egyptian author and literary critic. After obtaining her Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Cairo University in 1959, she wrote many articles.

#723

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

#24809

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer was an American novelist and poet who was a Professor of English at Brooklyn College for more than thirty years. She won numerous national writing awards and contributed book reviews for The New York Times.

#724

Renee Gladman

#67821

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Renee Gladman is a poet, novelist, essayist, and artist who describes herself as "preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersection of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture." Her fourteen publications include the Ravicka cycle, crime novel Morelia, essay collection Calamities, and three books of drawings, beginning with Prose Architectures.

#725

Donika Kelly

#65655

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations .

#726

Jennifer Ingleheart

Jennifer Ingleheart

#54308

Overall Influence

Jennifer Ingleheart is a British classical scholar, who is known for her work on Ovid, Classical reception, and the influence of Rome on the modern understanding of homosexuality. She is Professor of Latin at the University of Durham.

#727

Choe Yun

#29049

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Choe Hyeon-mu , better known by her pen name Choe Yun , is a South Korean writer, translator, and professor of French literature. Life Choe was born in Seoul in 1953. She received her Ph.D. from Sogang University, graduating in 1978 and travelling to France, where she received the doctorate de 3ème Cycle de l'Université de Provence D.E.A. in Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles. She made her literary debut at the relatively late age of 40, with the publication of the short story collection There a Petal Silently Falls. After her debut, however, Choe was quickly recognized as one of the most importan...

#728

Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel

#74803

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel is an Italian philologist, linguist and scholar of Celtic studies. Biography Patrizia de Bernardo was born on 5 April 1953 in Milan, Italy, the daughter of Mario de Bernardo and Adriana Marra. She studied classics at the University of Milan, where she earned a PhD in 1977. Between 1977 and 1981, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Linguistics of the University of Bonn, then as a lecturer in Italian at the Romance Department until 1986. In 1984, she married the German linguist Reinhard Stempel. The following year, she earned a PhD summa cum laude...

#729

Carolyn Rodgers

#74438

Overall Influence

1940 - 2010 (70 years)

Carolyn Marie Rodgers was a Chicago-based writer, particularly noted for her poetry. The youngest of four, Rodgers had two sisters and a brother, born to Clarence and Bazella Rodgers. Rodgers was also a founder of one of America's oldest and largest black presses, Third World Press. She got her start in the literary circuit as a young woman studying under Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks in the South Side of Chicago.

#730

Akiko Kiso

#23368

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Akiko Kiso is a Japanese classical scholar who specialises in Greek literature. She is a professor emeritus at Osaka University. She is the first Japanese scholar to publish on Sophocles. Her work included reconstructions of the lost plays of Epigoni and Tereus. She also worked on comparative approaches to Greek tragedy with emphasis on Japanese classical drama.

#731

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly

#76563

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. Biography She was born in New Jersey and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. She attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, graduating in 1989. She earned a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. After graduation, she taught English for a year in a coal mining city on the Czech/Polish border. She later earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, followed by the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. She taught poetry at Knox College for two years.

#732

Roberta Seelinger Trites

#65914

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Roberta Seelinger Trites is a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Illinois State University, specializing in children's literature. Trites graduated from Texas A&M University in 1983, and earned a master's degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1985. She received her Ph.D. in 1991 from Baylor University with a dissertation entitled Twain's innocence, Clemens' experience : narrative inconsistencies in The Innocents Abroad under the direction of James R. LeMaster. She joined the Illinois State faculty as an assistant professor in 1991, and became Distinguished Professor ...

#733

Patricia Demers

#55010

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dr. Patricia A. Demers, is a Canadian humanist and academic. She was the first female president of the Royal Society of Canada serving from 2005 to 2007. Early life and education Demers grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French and a Master of Arts degree from McMaster University. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa.

#734

Kit Reed

#57574

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Kit Reed, also known as Lillian Hyde Craig or Lilian Craig Reed , was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.

#735

Julie Kane

#63014

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Julie Kane is a contemporary American poet, scholar, and editor and was the Louisiana Poet Laureate for the 2011–2013 term. Although born in Massachusetts, Kane has lived in Louisiana for over three decades and writes about the region with the doubled consciousness of a non-native. Her work shows the influence of the Confessional poets; indeed, she was a student in Anne Sexton's graduate poetry seminar at Boston University at the time of Sexton's suicide. She is also associated with the New Formalist movement in contemporary poetry, although she has published free verse as well as formal verse.

#736

Nancy Lee

#62206

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Nancy Lee is a Welsh-born Canadian short story writer and novelist. Early life Born in Cardiff, Wales to parents of Chinese and Indian descent, she moved with her family to Vancouver, British Columbia, in childhood.

#737

Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé

#7180

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Frances Moore Lappé is an American researcher and author in the field of food and democracy policy. She is the author of 20 books including the 2.5-million-copy selling 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, which the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes as "one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She has co-founded three organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty, and environmental crises, as well as solutions emerging worldwide through what she calls "living democracy". Her latest work is a report entitled Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies? with Max Boland and Rachel Madison.

#738

Mary Carruthers

#33668

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Mary J. Carruthers is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature and Professor of English, emerita, at New York University. She also teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is formerly a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Illinois.

#739

LeAnne Howe

#38695

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

LeAnne Howe (born April 29, 1951) is an American author and Eidson Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia , Athens. She previously taught American Indian Studies and English at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. LeAnne Howe attended Oklahoma State University–Tulsa where she majored in English. Afterwards, Howe worked toward pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Norwich University in 2000. Over the next couple of ...

#740

Brenda Marie Osbey

#43072

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Brenda Marie Osbey is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2005 to 2007. Life She graduated from Dillard University, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, and from the University of Kentucky, with an M.A. She has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Loyola University New Orleans, and at Dillard University. She was Visiting Writer-in-residence at Tulane University and Scholar-in-residence at Southern University. She teaches at Louisiana State University.

#741

Sarah Bond

#55869

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Sarah Emily Bond is a Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on late Roman history, epigraphy, law, topography, GIS, and digital humanities. Education Bond received her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Criers, Impresarios, and Sextons: Disreputable Occupations in the Roman World. Her PhD was supervised by Professor Richard Talbert. Bond received a master's degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2007. She was awarded a BA in Classics and History from the University o...

#742

Solomiia Pavlychko

#33115

Overall Influence

1958 - 1999 (41 years)

Solomiia Dmytrivna Pavlychko was a Ukrainian literary critic, philosopher, feminist, and translator. She is considered as one of the pioneering scholars to introduce gender studies and feminist analysis to Ukraine.

#743

Amy Boesky

#75684

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Amy Boesky is an American author and a professor of English at Boston College. Life Born in Detroit, Boesky studied her undergraduate degree at Harvard College before completing a M.Phil in Renaissance English at the University of Oxford. After completing her master's degree and returning to the United States, Boesky worked as an editorial assistant and also began work as one of the principal ghostwriters for the Sweet Valley High series originated by Francine Pascal. Boesky's first contribution to the series was the sixteenth novel, Rags to Riches; she would go on to write fifty books for the Sweet Valley franchise while completing a PhD at Harvard University.

#744

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

#53999

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL , is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia.

#745

Maria Galina

#52068

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Maria Galina is a Russian writer. She was born in Kalinin and studied marine biology in Odessa. She lived in Bergen for a while, studying salmon. She started publishing fiction in the 1990s under the pseudonym Maxim Golitsyn. She has since published novels under her own name as well. Two of her novels, Little Boondock and Mole-Crickets, were nominated for the Big Book Award in 2009 and 2012. She is also a prize-winning poet and literary critic, writing regular columns for the literary journal Novy Mir.

#746

Joanna Brooks

#31829

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Joanna Brooks is an American author and professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Brooks is currently the associate vice president of faculty advancement and professor of English and comparative literature. She is a frequent media commentator on faith in American life, particularly in relation to her own Mormonism. Politico named her one of 2011's "50 politicos to watch" for her Twitter feed, @askmormongirl.

#747

Evelyn McDonnell

Evelyn McDonnell

#62640

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Evelyn McDonnell is an American writer and academic. Writing primarily about popular culture, music, and society, she "helped to forge a new kind of feminism for her generation." She is associate professor of journalism and new media at Loyola Marymount University.

#748

Cate Kennedy

#73331

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Cate Kennedy is an Australian author based in Victoria. Life and career Kennedy graduated from the University of Canberra and has also taught at several colleges, including The University of Melbourne. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People's Choice Award in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2010. It was also shortlisted for The Age fiction prize 2010 and the ASA Barbara Jefferis Award 2010, among others. She is a short-story writer whose work has twice won The Age Short Story Competition and has appeared in a range of publications, including The New Yorker.

#749

Samah Selim

#37476

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Samah Selim is an Egyptian scholar and translator of Arabic literature. She studied English literature at Barnard College, and obtained her PhD from Columbia University in 1997. At present she is an associate professor at the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has also taught at Columbia, Princeton and Aix-en-Provence universities.

#750

Debra Adelaide

#74827

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Debra Adelaide is an Australian novelist, writer and academic. She teaches creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney. Biography Adelaide was born in Sydney and grew up in the Sutherland Shire. A contemporary of writers Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, she attended Gymea High School and then via a teacher's scholarship, she completed a BA and MA in English literature at the University of Sydney. She then completed a PhD in Australian women’s literature in 1991, and in the process completed her first book, a bibliography of Australian women's literature. While studying, Debra Ad...

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