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,
#751
Valerie Martin
#42563
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Valerie Martin is an American novelist and short story writer. Her novel Property won the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2012, The Observer named Property as one of "The 10 best historical novels". Early life Martin was born in Sedalia, Missouri, to John Roger Metcalf and Valerie Fleischer Metcalf. Her father was a sea captain and her mother was a housewife whose family goes back several generations in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised in New Orleans from the age of three, attending public elementary school and a Catholic high school . She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Univers...
Go to Profile#752
Rebecca Curtis
#69573
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Rebecca Curtis is an American writer. She is the author of Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love & Money and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, NOON, N+1, and other magazines.
Go to Profile#753
Alicia Borinsky
#54237
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alicia Borinsky , is a US-based Argentine novelist, poet and literary critic. Alicia Borinsky is professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. Her critical work has helped frame the discussion about the writers of the Latin American Boom or Boom latinoamericano, an important movement in Latin American literature. Among her other scholarly achievements is the introduction of the figure of Macedonio Fernández—Borges’s master—to a wider reading public, the exploration of the intersection between literary theory, cultural and gender studies and numerous works about poetry, Latino writers and World literature.
Go to Profile#754
Martha Grimes
#26252
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Martha Grimes is an American writer of detective fiction. She is best known for a series featuring Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard inspector, and Melrose Plant, an aristocrat turned amateur sleuth. Biography Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to William Dermit Grimes, Pittsburgh's city solicitor, and June Dunnington, who owned the Mountain Lake Hotel in Western Maryland, where Martha and her brother spent much of their childhood. Grimes earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa. She has taught at the University of Iowa, ...
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Gwendolyn Leick
#66999
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gwendolyn Leick was an Austrian-born British historian and Assyriologist who wrote multiple books and encyclopedias in English about ancient Mesopotamia. Early life Gwendolyn Leick was born on 25 February 1951 in Oberaichwald, Austria, to parents Reginald and Herta Leick. Her father was a physician and her mother was a social worker.
Go to Profile#756
Cate Marvin
#37799
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Cate Marvin is an American poet. Life She graduated from Marlboro College, University of Houston, University of Iowa, and University of Cincinnati with a Ph.D. She has taught at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and Columbia University. She teaches in the English Department of Colby College.
Go to Profile#757
Louise Simonson
#49772
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Louise Simonson is an American comic book writer and editor. She is best known for her work on comic book titles such as Conan the Barbarian, Power Pack, X-Factor, New Mutants, Superman: The Man of Steel, and Steel. She is often referred to by the nickname "Weezie". Among the comic characters she co-created are Cable, Steel, Power Pack, Rictor, Doomsday and the X-Men villain Apocalypse.
Go to Profile#758
Fedwa Malti-Douglas
#68257
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Fedwa Malti-Douglas is a Lebanese-American professor and writer. She is a professor emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington. Malti-Douglas has written several books, including The Star Report Disrobed . She received a National Humanities Medal in 2015.
Go to Profile#759
Vivian Liska
#66393
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Vivian Liska, born in New York City, United States is a professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013 she is also distinguished visiting professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#760
Susan Wheeler
#64072
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. She has also taught at University of Iowa, NYU, Rutgers, Columbia University and The New School.
Go to Profile#761
Mary Mackey
#37570
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Mary Lou Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, four sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. In 2012, her sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Another collection, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems ...
Go to Profile#762
Otta Wenskus
#68805
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Otta Wenskus is a German Classical philologist currently residing in Austria. Wenskus, daughter of historian Reinhard Wenskus, studied Classical philology and linguistics at the Universities of Göttingen, Florence, and Lausanne. She acquired her Ph.D. in Göttingen in 1982. In 1985/86 she was maître de conférences at the University of Caen, and in 1987 Visiting Scholar at the Institute of the History of Mathematics at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Go to Profile#763
Ivonne Bordelois
#55283
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Ivonne Aline Bordelois , is an Argentine poet, essayist, and linguist. Career Ivonne Bordelois graduated from the at the University of Buenos Aires, later studying literature and linguistics at the Sorbonne. She worked at the magazine Sur and conducted interviews and publications with Alejandra Pizarnik for various national and international publications.
Go to Profile#764
Emily Greenwood
#66684
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Emily Greenwood is Professor of the Classics and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She was formerly professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and John M. Musser Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline, and local and transnational black traditions of interpreting Greek and Roman classics. Her work explores the appropriation and rei...
Go to Profile#765
Régine Robin
#22074
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Régine Robin was a historian, novelist, translator and professor of sociology. Her prolific fiction and non-fiction, primarily on the themes of identity and culture and on the sociological practice of literature, earned a number of awards, including the Governor-General's Award in 1986. She was described by Robert Saletti as "Montreal's grande dame of postmodernism".
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King-Kok Cheung
#80623
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
King-Kok Cheung is an American literary critic specializing in Asian American literature and is a professor in the department of English at UCLA. Cheung grew up on Hong Kong Island. Cheung received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.
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Mikita Brottman
#52436
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mikita Brottman, née Mikita Hoy, is a British American non-fiction author, scholar, and psychologist known for her interest in true crime. Her writing blends a number of genres, often incorporating elements of autobiography, psychoanalysis, forensic psychology, and literary history.
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Carolyn Chute
#44260
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Carolyn Chute is an American writer and populist political activist who is strongly identified with the culture of poor, rural western Maine. Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, has referred to Chute as "a Maine novelist and gun enthusiast who, along with her husband, lives an aggressively unorthodox life in the Yankee backwoods." She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
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Anne Duden
#84746
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Anne Duden is a German writer who moved with her family to West Germany in 1954. Her poetry and prose cover experiences involving violence, pain and despair. A member of the German Academy for Language and Literature, she has been a guest professor at the University of Hamburg and has lectured on poetry in Paderborn and Zurich. Her many awards include the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 2003.
Go to Profile#770
Anne Bernays
#59695
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Anne Fleischman Bernays is an American novelist, editor, and teacher. Life Bernays attended the Brearley School on New York City's Upper East Side, graduating in 1948. A 1952 graduate of Barnard College, she was managing editor of discovery, a literary magazine, before moving from New York City to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959 when she began her career as a novelist.
Go to Profile#771
Hana Wirth-Nesher
#49530
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hana Wirth-Nesher is an American-Israeli literary scholar and university professor. She is Professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, where she is also the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, and director of the Goldreich Family Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.
Go to Profile#772
Eleni Sikelianos
#52713
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eleni Sikelianos is an American experimental poet with a particular interest in scientific idiom. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. Early life Sikelianos is the great-granddaughter of the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, a former candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Eva Palmer-Sikelianos. She was raised in California. A high school dropout, she grew up on food stamps in California with a single mom, and graduated from the Naropa Institute with an MFA in Writing & Poetics.
Go to Profile#773
Rochelle Owens
#51027
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Rochelle Bass Owens is an American poet and playwright. Life and career Owens is the daughter of Maxwell and Molly Bass. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, then studied at the New School for Social Research and the University of Montreal.
Go to Profile#774
Ilma Rakusa
#77408
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ilma Rakusa is a Swiss writer and translator. She translates French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian into German. Biography Ilma Rakusa was born in 1946 in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia to a Slovenian father and a Hungarian mother. She spent her early childhood in Budapest, Ljubljana and Trieste. In 1951, her family moved to Zürich, Switzerland. Ilma Rakusa attended the Volksschule and the Gymnasium in Zürich. After the Matura, she studied Slavic and Romance Languages and Literature in Zürich, Paris and Leningrad between 1965 and 1971.
Go to Profile#775
Jaquira Díaz
#68852
Overall Influence
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time , The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at the Kenyon Review and a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg ...
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Susanna Braund
#82734
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Susanna H. Morton Braund is a professor of Latin poetry and its reception at the University of British Columbia. Education Braund received her BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge in 1978, followed by a PhD in 1984 from the same institution.
Go to Profile#777
Namwali Serpell
#60081
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Namwali Serpell is an American and Zambian writer who teaches in the United States. In April 2014, she was named on Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. Her short story "The Sack" won the 2015 Caine Prize for African fiction in English. In 2020, Serpell won the Belles-lettres category Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2019 for her debut novel The Old Drift.
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Helen H. Bacon
#62593
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Helen Hazard Bacon was professor of classics at Barnard College. She was known in particular for her work on Greek tragedy, especially Aeschylus. Bacon was also well known for her work on classical themes in the poetry of Robert Frost and in the mythological writing of Edith Hamilton. Bacon was president of the American Philological Association in 1985.
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Mary Jo Bang
#44723
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mary Jo Bang is an American poet. Life Bang grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor's and Master's in sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London with a Bachelor's in Photography, and from Columbia University, with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing . Previously, she has taught at Columbia College, Yale University, The New School for Social Research, University of Montana, Columbia University and at Iowa's Writing Workshop. Bang is currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Chana Bloch
#46388
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. Life and work Born as Florence Ina Faerstein in the Bronx, New York, she was a second-generation American, the daughter of Benjamin and Rose Faerstein; her parents were both observant Jews who had immigrated from Ukraine. Bloch later identified herself as a Jewish humanist. Her father was a dentist, and her mother a homemaker.
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Jean D'Costa
#55505
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jean Constance D'Costa is a Jamaican children's novelist, linguist, and professor emeritus. Her novels have been praised for their use of both Jamaican Creole and Standard English. Early life and education Jean Constance Creary was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica, the youngest of three children to parents who were school teachers. Her father was also a Methodist minister. They moved to the capital, Kingston in 1944, and then to St. James and Trelawny. She attended rural elementary schools, and then St. Hilda's High School in Brown's Town, St. Ann from 1949 to 1954 on a government merit scholarship.
Go to Profile#782
George Ella Lyon
#46016
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
George Ella Lyon is an American author from Kentucky, who has published in many genres, including picture books, poetry, juvenile novels, and articles. Biography George Ella Lyon was born April 25, 1949, in Harlan, Kentucky, a coal mining town in southeastern Kentucky, to Robert Vernon, Jr. and Gladys Hoskins. She married Stephen C. Lyon, a musician, on June 3, 1972, and has since had two children with him.
Go to Profile#783
Paisley Rekdal
#68174
Overall Influence
Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as six books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both 2009 and 2013, Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and several other awards from the state arts council.
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Avril Pyman
#71617
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Avril Pyman is a British scholar and translator of Russian literature. Avril was a Reader in Russian at Durham University and was the first female scholar of the University to be elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.
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María Negroni
#90421
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
María Negroni is an Argentinian poet, essayist, novelist and translator. She graduated from Columbia University, with a PhD in Latin American Literature. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She was a visiting professor at New York University, in 2008.
Go to Profile#786
Jacqueline Taylor
#37893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jacqueline Taylor was the provost and vice president for academic affairs at The College of New Jersey from 2013-2018. Biography Jacqueline Taylor was born in Kentucky, 1951. After receiving her bachelor's in English and communications arts from Georgetown College and her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas in Austin, Taylor completed the Management Development program at Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1996.
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Dinah Birch
#61457
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dinah Lynne Birch is an English literary critic. She is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact, and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She was a student at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and also undertook her doctorate at the University of Oxford. In 1980, she became the first woman to be elected to the Governing Body of Merton College.
Go to Profile#788
Carole Maso
#55489
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Carole Maso is a contemporary American novelist and essayist, known for her experimental, poetic and fragmentary narratives which are often called postmodern. She is a recipient of a 1993 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.
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Lavonne J. Adams
#80237
Overall Influence
Lavonne J. Adams is a published poet and writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Adams grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, but has lived in North Carolina for over 30 years. Adams taught and was the MFA Coordinator in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Go to Profile#790
Ellen Douglas
#58797
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Ellen Douglas was the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton , an American author. Her 1973 novel Apostles of Light was a National Book Award nominee. Biography Douglas was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and grew up in Hope, Arkansas, and Alexandria, Louisiana. She graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1942 and later settled in Greenville, Mississippi with her husband Kenneth Haxton. She had three sons with Haxton: Richard, Ayres, and Brooks Haxton, the latter a notable, award-winning poet and writer.
Go to Profile#791
Terese Marie Mailhot
#59782
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Terese Marie Mailhot is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher. Early life and education Mailhot grew up in Seabird Island, British Columbia, on the Seabird Island First Nation reservation. Her mother, Wahzinak, was a healer, social worker, poet, and radical activist, and her father, Ken Mailhot, was an artist. Her father had been incarcerated and was an alcoholic who molested Mailhot when she was young, and was often violent. Mailhot's mother had a letter-writing relationship with Salvador Agron, and shared the correspondence with musician Paul Simon, who used them for his Broadway musical, The Capeman.
Go to Profile#792
Joanna Scott
#43441
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Joanna Scott is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her award-winning fiction is known for its wide-ranging subject matter and its incorporation of historical figures into imagined narratives.
Go to Profile#793
Anne Norton
#22522
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Anne Norton is an American professor of political science and comparative literature. She is also known for her controversial anti-Semitic views. Early life As a child, Norton lived and traveled throughout the world with her family because her father was an officer in the U.S. Navy.
Go to Profile#794
Erica Jong
#64291
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to The Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Go to Profile#795
Mila Pavićević
#95104
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Mila Pavićević is a Croatian writer. She was born and raised in Dubrovnik, and studied at the University of Zagreb. Active in writing from an early age, she won the EU Prize for Literature for her book Ice Girl and Other Fairy-tales.
Go to Profile#796
Menna Elfyn
#70430
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Menna Elfyn , FLSW is a Welsh poet, playwright, columnist, and editor who writes in Welsh. She has been widely commended and translated. She was imprisoned for her campaigning as a Welsh-language activist.
Go to Profile#797
Patricia Spears Jones
#79432
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Patricia Spears Jones is an American poet. She is the author of five books of poetry. Jones is the editor of "The Future Differently Imagined", an issue of About Place Journal, the online publication of Black Earth Institute. Previously, she was the co-editor for Ordinary Women: Poems of New York City Women. Her poem "Beuys and the Blonde" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Jones was the winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize for 2017, and she will serve as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.
Go to Profile#798
Catriona Seth
#44167
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Catriona Jane Seth, FBA is a British scholar of French literature and the history of ideas. Since 2015, she has been Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#799
Ruth Yeazell
#57150
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is an American literary critic. Ruth Bernard Yeazell was born on April 4, 1947, in New York City. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1967, then attended Yale University. Yeazell taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Boston University before returning to Yale in 1991, where she was named the Chace Family Professor of English. Yeazell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, and granted membership into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. As of 2018, she is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale, the highest honor bestowed on Ya...
Go to Profile#800
Sarah Joseph
#45610
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sarah Joseph is an Indian novelist and short story writer in Malayalam. She won the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award and the Vayalar Award for her novel Aalahayude Penmakkal . She is a leader of the feminist movement in Kerala and is the founder of the activist organization Manushi. She joined the Aam Aadmi Party in 2014 and contested the 2014 parliament elections from Thrissur.
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