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.

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#951

Lynn Freed

#64061

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lynn Freed is a writer known for her work as a novelist, essayist, and writer of short stories. Life Lynn Freed was born and grew up in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York City as a graduate student, receiving her M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University.

#952

Carol Lee Sanchez

#65325

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Carol Lee Sanchez was a Native American poet, visual artist, essayist, and teacher. Biography Carol Lee Sanchez was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She describes her cultural heritage as Lebanese-American and Laguna Pueblo. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art Administration from San Francisco State University in 1978.

#953

Lise Gauvin

#55025

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Lise Gauvin is a Canadian writer and literary critic from Quebec. Biography She was born in Quebec City and pursued literary studies at Université Laval and the University of Vienna. She went on to earn a doctorate from the Paris-Sorbonne University in 1967. In 1969, she began teaching in the French studies department at the Université de Montréal; in 1998, she became department director. She was director for the review from 1994 to 2000. She also contributed to various publications including Le Devoir.

#954

Annamarie Jagose

Annamarie Jagose

#53378

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Annamarie Jagose is an LGBT academic and writer of fictional works. Life and career Jagose was born in Ashburton, New Zealand in 1965. She gained her PhD in 1992, and worked in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne before returning to New Zealand in 2003, where she was a Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland and Head of the Department from 2008 to 2010.

#955

Kim Echlin

#74701

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Kim Echlin is a Canadian novelist, translator, editor and teacher. She has a PhD in English literature for a thesis about the translation of the Ojibway Nanabush myths. Echlin has worked for CBC Television and several universities. She currently works as a creative writing instructor at the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies. Her 2009 novel, The Disappeared, featured on the shortlist for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

#956

Sarah Polley

#51809

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Sarah Ellen Polley is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, political activist and retired actress. She first garnered attention as a child actress for her role as Ramona Quimby in the television series Ramona, based on Beverly Cleary's books. This subsequently led to her role as Sara Stanley in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea . She has starred in many feature films, including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , Exotica , The Sweet Hereafter , Guinevere , Go , The Weight of Water , No Such Thing , My Life Without Me , Dawn of the Dead , Splice , and Mr. Nobody .

#957

S. Georgia Nugent

#72051

Overall Influence

Susan Georgia Nugent is the president of Illinois Wesleyan University. She was president of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio from 2003 to 2013, and interim president of the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio for the 2015-16 academic year. She was succeeded at Kenyon by Sean M. Decatur, former dean of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin College, and at Wooster by Sarah Bolton, former dean of Williams College. In November of 2019, Nugent became the first woman to serve as President of Illinois Wesleyan University.

#958

Janisse Ray

#43349

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Janisse Ray is an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist. Early life and education Ray was born in a small town, Baxley, Georgia, the county seat of Appling County, in the southeast region of the state. She is the daughter of loving parents, Franklin D. and Lee Ada Branch Ray. She grew up with one sister, Kay, and two brothers, Steve and Dell. Ray’s family was deeply rooted in the area where she grew up, going back at least six generations. Ray’s ancestors were listed in the first census in Appling county in 1820 and the town of Baxley was named for an ancestor as well. From ...

#959

Amina Gautier

#64581

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Amina Gautier is an American writer and academic. She is the author of three short story collections, many individual stories, as well as works of literary criticism. Early life and education Gautier was born and raised in New York. After participating in Prep for Prep, she attended the Nightingale Bamford School before graduating from Northfield Mount Hermon. She then went to Stanford, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature. She continued her education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in English literature.

#960

Grace Schulman

#68131

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Grace Schulman is an American poet. She received the 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Society of America. In 2019, she was inducted as member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

#961

Irène Heidelberger-Leonard

#76213

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Irène Heidelberger-Leonard is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She was Professor of German Literature at the Université Libre de Bruxelles , where she taught for nearly 30 years, before she moved to London in 2009. She was married to Dick Leonard, the British writer and journalist, and is the mother of Mark Leonard, an expert on foreign policy, and Miriam Leonard, a classical scholar.

#962

Joan Anim-Addo

#67650

Overall Influence

Joan Anim-Addo is a Grenadian-born academic, poet, playwright and publisher, who is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

#963

Nazik Saba Yared

#77673

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Nazik Saba Yared is a Lebanese novelist and academic, a former professor, and a writer. She is the daughter of Alexander and Hala Saba. She was married to the late Ibrahim Yared and has three children and four grandchildren.

#964

Nuala Archer

#49821

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Nuala Archer is an American poet of Irish descent, author of five books, most recently, Inch Aeons . Her first book, Whale on the Line, won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1980. She has published poems in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Mid-American Review and Seneca Review. Until 2011, she was an associate professor in the English Department at Cleveland State University. During the 1990s, she briefly served as the director of Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She has taught literature and edited the Midland Review at Oklahoma State University.

#965

Ania Walwicz

#83382

Overall Influence

1951 - 2020 (69 years)

Ania Walwicz was an Australian poet, playwright, prose writer and visual artist. Early life Walwicz was born in Swidnica, Poland where she spent her childhood, before migrating to Australia in 1963. She attended the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.

#966

Helen Ivory

#82080

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Helen Ivory is an English poet, artist, tutor, and editor. Career Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her fifth Bloodaxe Books collection is The Anatomical Venus , which centres on women and otherness. She has co-edited with George Szirtes In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on their Poetry Salt 2012. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches online for UEA/ National Centre for Writing online creative writing. In 2020 she became a Versopolis poet and has work translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek.

#967

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

#79495

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an American poet. Life Maria Mazziotti Gillan was born March 12, 1940, in an Italian enclave in Paterson, New Jersey's Riverside neighborhood. She attended Paterson public schools and is a graduate of Eastside High School.

#968

Evie Shockley

#66430

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Evie Shockley is an American poet. Shockley received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry for her book the new black and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

#969

Nicoletta Vallorani

#84649

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Nicoletta Vallorani is an Italian science fiction writer. Born in Offida, in the Marche region, she holds a degree in Foreign Languages with a dissertation on Contemporary American Literature, honed her writing skills as a translator and currently teaches English Language and Literature in the University of Milan, Milan.

#970

Kate Zambreno

#83732

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Kate Zambreno is an American novelist, essayist, critic, and professor. She teaches writing in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and at Sarah Lawrence College. Zambreno is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.

#971

Aida Bamia

#81583

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Aida Adib Bamia is professor emeritus of Arabic language and literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She is a specialist in North African literature. Her work on Arabic literature has helped to bring quality translations to English readers.

#972

Zsuzsanna Gahse

#108376

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Zsuzsanna Gahse is a Hungarian-born German-language writer and translator who lives in Switzerland. Life and works Gahse is the daughter of Hungarian parents and Hungarian is her mother tongue. Her family fled to the West after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and settled in Vienna, where Gahse attended high school and learnt the German language. She began publishing literary works in 1969, and from 1978, encouraged by her mentor Helmut Heißenbüttel, translating works from Hungarian. She has published German translations of works by István Eörsi, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, as well as producing a range of essays and fiction under her own name.

#973

Uta Hagen

#35775

Overall Influence

1919 - 2004 (85 years)

Uta Thyra Hagen was a German-American actress and theatre practitioner. She originated the role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, who called her "a profoundly truthful actress." Because Hagen was on the Hollywood blacklist, in part because of her association with Paul Robeson, her film opportunities dwindled and she focused her career on New York theatre.

#974

Tordis Ørjasæter

#92253

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Tordis Ørjasæter is a Norwegian literary critic, biographer, former professor of educational science, and novelist. She has been particularly engaged in culture and literature for children. She has written biographical works on Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlöf, Tove Jansson, and Nini Roll Anker. She was awarded the Brage Prize in 1993.

#975

Latifa Ben Mansour

#38549

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Latifa Ben Mansour is an Algerian writer, psychoanalyst, and linguist. Her work deals with issues such as the role of women in Algerian society, Islamic extremism, storytelling, trauma, and memory.

#976

Anique Poitras

#107194

Overall Influence

1961 - 2016 (55 years)

Anique Poitras was an award-winning writer in Quebec, Canada, whose work was aimed mostly at adolescent readers. She was born in L'Épiphanie and lived there until the age of 13. Poitras received a bachelor's degree in literary studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

#977

Miriam Leonard

#67545

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Miriam Anna Leonard is Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception at University College, London. She is known in particular for her work on the reception of Greek tragedy in modern intellectual thought.

#978

J. E. Franklin

#44128

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

J. E. Franklin is an American playwright, best known for her play Black Girl, which was broadcast on public television in 1969, staged Off-Broadway in 1971, and made into a feature film in 1972. She has written and adapted eleven plays for television, theater, and film.

#979

Lisa Jarnot

#86942

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Lisa Jarnot is an American poet. She was born in Buffalo, New York and studied literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1994 she received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. She has lived in San Francisco, Boulder, Providence, and London. Since the mid-1990s she has been a resident of New York City. She has taught creative writing and literature at Brooklyn College, Long Island University, Naropa University, and the Poetry Project in New York City.

#980

Anna Journey

#74347

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin and three books of poems: The Atheist Wore Goat Silk , Vulgar Remedies , and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting , the latter of which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is an assistant professor of English.

#981

Julie Orringer

#66564

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The nove...

#982

Shabnam Shakeel

Shabnam Shakeel

#74911

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Shabnam Shakeel was a Pakistani poet, writer, and academician. Shabnam spent her early life in Lahore, Pakistan, and received a master's degree in Urdu literature. During her career, she worked as a lecturer at several colleges in Pakistan. Her first book Tanqeedi Mazameen, was published in 1965. She won numerous awards, honours and titles for her contributions to Urdu literature including the prestigious presidents' Pride of Performance award in 2005.

#983

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

#45797

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is a British academic and writer, best known as a biographer and critic of First World War poets and poetry. A lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London, she has written a two-volume biography of Siegfried Sassoon, as well as works on Virginia Woolf, Charles Sorley, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and William Watson. Her husband was the publisher Cecil Woolf .

#984

Deborah Eisenberg

#75040

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Deborah Eisenberg is an American short story writer, actress and teacher. She is a professor of writing at Columbia University. Early life Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family is Jewish. She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.

#985

Cathryn Hankla

#77196

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Cathryn Hankla is an American poet, novelist, essayist and author of short stories. She is professor emerita of English and Creative Writing at Hollins University in Hollins, Virginia, and served as inaugural director of Hollins' Jackson Center for Creative Writing from 2008 to 2012.

#986

Deb Margolin

#28590

Overall Influence

Deb Margolin is an American performance artist and playwright. She came to prominence in the 1980s in the feminist political theatre troupe Split Britches, which she co-founded with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. Margolin has since created a string of one-woman shows. A compilation of her texts, Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO, was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press. Literary theorist Lynda Hart edited and wrote a commentary on each piece.

#987

Jennifer Haley

#64214

Overall Influence

Jennifer Haley is an American playwright. She grew up in San Antonio, Texas and studied acting at the University of Texas at Austin for her undergraduate degree. Haley also received a MFA in playwriting at Brown University in 2005, where she worked under American playwright and professor, Paula Vogel. Now living in Los Angeles, Haley is pursuing a career in theatre, film and television.

#988

Rita Mae Brown

#61157

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Rita Mae Brown is an American feminist writer, best known for her coming-of-age autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. Brown was active in a number of civil rights campaigns and criticized the marginalization of lesbians within feminist groups. Brown received the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement at the Lambda Literary Awards in 2015.

#989

Pyun Hye-young

#59522

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Pyun Hye-young is a South Korean writer. Life Pyun Hye-young was born in Seoul in 1972. She earned her undergraduate degree in creative writing and graduate degree in Korean literature from Hanyang University. After receiving these degrees, Pyun worked as an office worker, and many office workers appear in her stories.

#990

Carolyn Cooper

#54508

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carolyn Cooper CD is a Jamaican author, essayist and literary scholar. She is a former professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. From 1975 to 1980, she was an assistant professor at Atlantic Union College in South Lancaster, Massachusetts. In 1980, she was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies , where she continued to work until her retirement as a professor in 2017. Also a newspaper journalist, Cooper writes a weekly column for the Sunday Gleaner.

#991

Rukhsana Ahmad

#73996

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Rukhsana Ahmad is a Pakistani writer of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and a translator, who after marriage migrated to England for further studies and pursue a career in writing. She has campaigned for Asian writers, particularly women.

#992

Christine Aventin

#76595

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Christine Aventin is a French-language Belgian writer. When she was just 15, she published Le Cœur en poche, which sold over 100,000 copies. Bibliography The daughter of a Dutch teacher, Aventin was born in Hermalle-sous-Argenteau near Liège in southwestern Belgium. She studied French language and literature at University of Liège and English literature at Leeds University. She went on to teach Belgian literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. In 1988, when she was 15, she published Le Cœur en poche. It tells the story of Alexandre, a prostitute's daughter, whose life is split between days with her friends at high school and nights in the world of prostitution.

#993

Catherine Driscoll

#75943

Overall Influence

1900 - Present (124 years)

Catherine Driscoll is an Australian professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She grew up in Wauchope, New South Wales and was educated at Wauchope High School, the University of Newcastle , and the University of Melbourne. She has worked at the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide, and joined the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney in 2003. She has held visiting fellow positions at Duke University, Columbia University, Cardiff University, and the Australian National University.

#994

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#60149

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Bonnie Jo Campbell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her most recent work is Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, published with W.W. Norton and Company. Life and work Campbell attended Comstock High School , and received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1984. From Western Michigan University, she received an MA in mathematics in 1995 and an MFA in creative writing in 1998. She has traveled with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, and has organized adventure bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and Russia.

#995

Graciela Palau de Nemes

#83517

Overall Influence

1919 - 2019 (100 years)

Graciela Palau de Nemes was a Cuban literary critic who specialized in critiquing Spanish and Latin American literature, with a particular focus on the works of the Nobel laureate poet Juan Ramón Jiménez.

#996

Leah Blatt Glasser

#81369

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Leah Blatt Glasser is an American literary critic and Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman scholar at Mount Holyoke College. She was Dean of First-Year Studies and is currently a lecturer in English at Mount Holyoke College. Her former student would later credit Glasser for her success.

#997

Maria Dzielska

#55573

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

Maria Celina Dzielska was a Polish classical philologist, historian, translator, biographer of Hypatia, and political activist. She was a Professor of Ancient Roman History at Jagiellonian University.

#998

Jane Chapman

#12725

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jane Chapman is a British academic, professor of communications at the University of Lincoln, a research associate and a former fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. She is the author of twelve books and over 35 academic articles and book chapters.

#999

Rebecca Brown

#56378

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Rebecca Brown is an American novelist, essayist, playwright, artist, and professor. She was the first writer in residence at Richard Hugo House, co-founder of the Jack Straw Writers Program, and served as the creative director of literature at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington from 2005 to 2009. Brown's best-known work is her novel The Gifts of the Body, which won a Lambda Literary Award in 1994. Rebecca Brown is an Emeritus faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont and is also a multi-media artist whose work has been displayed in galle...

#1000

Laura Howes

#54666

Overall Influence

Laura Howes is an American scholar of Middle English literature. She is the author of Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention and the editor, with Marie Borroff, of the Norton Critical Edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Howes received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee.

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