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,
#101
Jean Franco
#11987
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Jean Franco was a British-born American academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature. Educated at Manchester and London, she taught at London, Essex , and Stanford, and was latterly professor emerita at Columbia University.
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Roxane Gay
#4968
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist , as well as the short story collection Ayiti , the novel An Untamed State , the short story collection Difficult Women , and the memoir Hunger .
Go to Profile#103
Maria Janion
#4869
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Maria Janion was a Polish scholar, literary theorist and critic, as well as a feminist. She was a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, specialising in literary Romanticism.
Go to Profile#104
Bobbie Ann Mason
#7913
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Early life and education A child of Wilburn and Christianna Mason, Bobbie Ann Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky, with four siblings and her great niece Mya Mason. As a child she loved to read with encouragement from her parents; however, choices were limited. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books s...
Go to Profile#105
Tess Gallagher
#11136
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, and short story writer. Among her many honors were a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts award, Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.
Go to Profile#106
Emma Donoghue
#7204
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Go to Profile#107
Lois Duncan
#8449
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Lois Duncan Steinmetz , known as Lois Duncan, was an American writer, novelist, poet, and journalist. She is best known for her young-adult novelss, and has been credited by historians as a pioneering figure in the development of young-adult fiction, particularly in the genres of horror, thriller, and suspense.
Go to Profile#108
Holly Black
#7514
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Holly Black is an American writer and editor best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Her most recent work is the New York Times bestselling young adult Folk of the Air series. She is also well known for The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children's fantasy books she created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and her debut trilogy of young adult novels officially called the Modern Faerie Tales. Black has won an Eisner Award, a Lodestar Award, a Nebula Award, and a Newbery Honor.
Go to Profile#109
Bel Kaufman
#7427
Overall Influence
1911 - 2014 (103 years)
Bella Kaufman was an American teacher and author, well known for writing the bestselling 1964 novel Up the Down Staircase. Early life Bella's father, Michael Kaufman and her mother, Lala Kaufman were both from Russia and married in 1909. Bella Kaufman was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1911, where her father was studying medicine. The family subsequently returned to Russia where her father completed his studies. Her father eventually became a physician, and her mother, the second-oldest daughter of famed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, later established herself as a writer under the name Lala...
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N. Katherine Hayles
#4827
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.
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Susan Howe
#7736
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre . Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
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Lyn Hejinian
#12948
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .
Go to Profile#113
Luisa Valenzuela
#12905
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Luisa Valenzuela Levinson is an Argentine post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective.
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Jacqueline Rose
#3258
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jacqueline Rose, FBA, FRSL is a British academic who is Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Life and work Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and gained her higher degree from the Sorbonne, Paris. She took her doctorate from the University of London, where she was supervised by Frank Kermode. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose.
Go to Profile#115
Diane di Prima
#6020
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Diane di Prima was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.
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Natasha Trethewey
#8151
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
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Rita Felski
#4108
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark .
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Bernardine Evaristo
#7654
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
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Christa Wolf
#6891
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Christa Wolf was a German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany. Biography Wolf was born the daughter of Otto and Herta Ihlenfeld, in Landsberg an der Warthe, then in the Province of Brandenburg. After World War II, her family, being Germans, were expelled from their home on what had become Polish territory. They crossed the new Oder-Neisse border in 1945 and settled in Mecklenburg, in what would become the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
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Yang Jiang
#9045
Overall Influence
1911 - 2016 (105 years)
Yang Jiang was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
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Jessica Mitford
#4496
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics. Jessica married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, who was killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the Communist Party USA and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They resigned from the party in 1958.
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Grace Paley
#8160
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Grace Paley, Goodside was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist. Paley wrote three critically acclaimed collections of short stories, which were compiled in the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Collected Stories in 1994. Her stories home in on the everyday conflicts and heartbreaks of city life, heavily informed by her childhood in the Bronx.
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Sylvia Wynter
#7214
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Sylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.
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Maureen Freely
#7586
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maureen Deidre Freely FRSL is an American journalist, novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the Warwick Writing Programme since 1996. Biography Born in Neptune, New Jersey, she is the daughter of author John Freely, and has a brother, Brendan. Maureen Freely grew up in Turkey. She graduated from Harvard College. She now lives in England.
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Farah Mendlesohn
#9357
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Farah Jane Mendlesohn is a British academic historian, writer on speculative fiction, and active member of science fiction fandom. Mendlesohn is best-known for their 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy, which classifies fantasy literature into four modes based on how the fantastic enters the story. Their work as editor includes the Cambridge Companions to science fiction and fantasy, collaborations with Edward James. The science fiction volume won a Hugo Award. Mendlesohn is also known for books on the history of fantasy, including Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, co-written with Michael Levy.
Go to Profile#126
Alanna Nash
#5956
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alanna Kay Nash is an American journalist and biographer. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Nash holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of several acclaimed books. She is a 1972 graduate of Stephens College. A feature writer for The New York Times, Stereo Review, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Weekend, she was named the Society of Professional Journalists' National Member of the Year in 1994. In 1977, Nash's job afforded her the opportunity to become one of the journalists to view the remains of Elvis Presley. In her dust jacket biograp...
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Jane Gallop
#3934
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jane Anne Gallop is an American professor who since 1992 has served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990.
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Eavan Boland
#8138
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Go to Profile#129
Margo Glantz
#11882
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Margo Glantz Shapiro is a Mexican writer, essayist, critic and academic. She has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1995. She is a recipient of the FIL Award. Biography Margo Glantz's family immigrated to Mexico from Ukraine in the 1920s. Her father, Jacobo Glantz, met her mother, Elizabeth Shapiro in Odessa, where they married. They tried to emigrate to the United States of America, where they had relatives, but were denied entry and had to remain in Mexico. Although they stayed faithful to Jewish traditions, they soon moved in Mexican artistic circles. Her father was...
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Patti Smith
#4575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the R...
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Salma Khadra Jayyusi
#11508
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Salma Khadra Jayyusi was a Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist. She was the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic , which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English.
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Gillian Clarke
#7909
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales. Life Gillian Clarke was born on 8 June 1937 in Cardiff.
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Edna O'Brien
#9486
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Josephine Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2019, whilst France made her Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021.
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Ann Charters
#8715
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ann Charters is Professor Emerita of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar. Early life and career Charters was born on November 10, 1936, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major at the University of California, Berkeley she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading...
Go to Profile#135
Ana Maria Machado
#10461
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ana Maria Machado is a Brazilian writer of children's books, one of the most significant alongside Lygia Bojunga Nunes and Ruth Rocha. She received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2000 for her "lasting contribution to children's literature". She also won the SM Ibero-American Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature in 2012.
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Yūko Tsushima
#19208
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
Satoko Tsushima , known by her pen name Yūko Tsushima , was a Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. Tsushima won many of Japan's top literary prizes in her career, including the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize and the Tanizaki Prize. The New York Times called Tsushima "one of the most important writers of her generation." Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
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Amrita Pritam
#8854
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. A prominent figure in Punjabi literature, she is the recipient of the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award. Her body of work comprised over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.
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Mary Karr
#7738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
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Rosemary Sutcliff
#12078
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Rosemary Sutcliff was an English novelist best known for children's books, especially historical fiction and retellings of myths and legends. Although she was primarily a children's author, some of her novels were specifically written for adults. In a 1986 interview she said, "I would claim that my books are for children of all ages, from nine to ninety."
Go to Profile#140
Anne Carson
#12243
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton.
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Elizabeth Hardwick
#12618
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer. Early life and education Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born as the eighth of eleven children in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 27, 1916, to strict Protestant parents, the daughter of Eugene Allen Hardwick, a plumbing and heating contractor, and Mary Hardwick.
Go to Profile#142
Suzan-Lori Parks
#6940
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Go to Profile#143
Sharon Olds
#13234
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Go to Profile#144
Emily Wilson
#6988
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Emily Rose Caroline Wilson is a British American classicist, author, translator, and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023.
Go to Profile#145
Anne Tyler
#10019
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , The Accidental Tourist , and Breathing Lessons . All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker P...
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Maxine Kumin
#8539
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Maxine Kumin was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982. Biography Early years Maxine Kumin was born Maxine Winokur on June 6, 1925 in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents, and attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe College. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, an engineering consultant; they had three children, two daughters and a son. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education....
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Fleur Adcock
#12260
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Go to Profile#148
Joy Harjo
#10715
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms . Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv . She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the ...
Go to Profile#149
Anne K. Mellor
#10537
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Anne Kostelanetz Mellor is an American academic working as a Distinguished Professor of English Literature and Women's Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in Romantic literature, British cultural history, feminist theory, philosophy, art history and gender studies. She is most known for a series of essays and books that introduced forgotten female Romantic writers into literary history, and she edited the first volume of feminist essays on Romantic writers in 1988, entitled Romanticism and Feminism.
Go to Profile#150
Azar Nafisi
#8173
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008. Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University.
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