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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1001

Barbara Tate

#39657

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Barbara Tate was a British artist and writer, perhaps best known for her bestselling book West End Girls, which was published shortly after her death. Career in Art Born in Uxbridge as Barbara June Peddle, her father Charles Jonathan Peddle was a carpenter and lorry-driver. A violent man, he once tied a noose around her neck when she was aged 3 and balanced her on her toes until she was rescued hours later when her mother came home. Abandoned soon after by her mother Elsie Irene, née Williams , she was brought up by her maternal grandparents. In 1944 aged 17 she won a scholarship to Ealing S...

#1002

Betsy Sholl

#71805

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Elizabeth "Betsy" Sholl is an American poet who was poet laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011 and has authored nine collections of poetry. Sholl has received several poetry awards, including the 1991 AWP Award, and the 2015 Maine Literary Award, as well as receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission.

#1003

Melanie Rae Thon

#68055

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Melanie Rae Thon is an American fiction writer known for work that moves beyond and between genres, erasing the boundaries between them as it explores diversity, permeability, and interdependence from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives.

#1004

Hazel Rowley

#32884

Overall Influence

1951 - 2011 (60 years)

Hazel Joan Rowley was a British-born Australian author and biographer. Born in London, Rowley emigrated with her parents to Adelaide at the age of eight. She studied at the University of Adelaide, graduating with Honours in French and German. Later she acquired a PhD in French. She taught literary studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, before moving to the United States.

#1005

Teresia Teaiwa

#61542

Overall Influence

1968 - 2017 (49 years)

Teresia Teaiwa was a distinguished award winning I-Kiribati and African-American scholar, poet, activist and mentor. Teaiwa was well-regarded for her ground-breaking work in Pacific Studies. Her research interests in this area embraced her artistic and political nature, and included contemporary issues in Fiji, feminism and women's activism in the Pacific, contemporary Pacific culture and arts, and pedagogy in Pacific Studies. An "anti-nuclear activist, defender of West Papuan independence, and a critic of militarism", Teaiwa solidified many connections across the Pacific Ocean and was a hug...

#1006

Joan Larkin

#85550

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.

#1007

Joyelle McSweeney

#82028

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Toxicon & Arachne from Nightboat Books, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults from University of Michigan Press, Salamandrine: 8 gothics and Nylund, the Sarcographer , both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Percussion Grenade , Flet , The Commandrine and Other Poems , and The Red Bird , the latter four published by Fence Books. In addition to her books, she has published two plays; Dead Leaks, or, the Youths performed by Runaway Labs Theater in 2017, and The C...

#1008

Diana Kleiner

#54572

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Diana Elizabeth Edelman Kleiner was an American art historian and educator. A scholar of Ancient Roman art and architecture, Kleiner was the Dunham Professor of the History of Art Emerita at Yale University.

#1009

Idra Novey

#83725

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Career Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the author of the novels Take What You Need , a New York Times Notable Book, Ways to Disappear and Those Who Knew , which received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Those Who Knew was also a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine.

#1010

Mercedes Valdivieso

Mercedes Valdivieso

#71615

Overall Influence

1924 - 1993 (69 years)

Mercedes Valdivieso was a Chilean writer, known since her earliest writings for the subversive nature of her texts. She was born in Santiago, Chile. She first wrote La Brecha in 1961, which is considered to be a landmark feminist Latin-American novel. This novel caused dismay from the reactionary segment of society and loud applause from the critics and is considered a revolutionary departure from the traditional treatment of the feminine role in marriage. Breakthrough is a novel that ends with the heroine's awareness that she didn't really need to depend upon a man in order to lead a fulfilling life.

#1011

Fiona Macintosh

#80308

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception at the University of Oxford, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Curator of the Ioannou Centre, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.

#1012

Helen King

#17413

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Helen King is a British classical scholar and advocate for the medical humanities. She is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University. She was previously Professor of the History of Classical Medicine and Head of the Department of Classics at the University of Reading.

#1013

Louise Murphy

#77141

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Louise Murphy was born in 1943 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her ethnicity is Scottish, Irish, and German. Murphy's hobbies include playing the flute, classical music, and the opera. Ms. Murphy began writing when she was five because as she puts it, “I wrote because of the joy of holding in my hand something that I had made, something that could never disappear again the way all my thoughts did”. Louise Murphy also loved reading and still today tells her students to read anything possible.

#1014

Gloria Bird

#95950

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Gloria Bird is a Native American poet, essayist, teacher and a member of the Spokane Tribe in Washington State. Gloria spreads her work not only by writing for her but all Native American people. In her work, Bird’s main priority is to question and diminish harmful stereotypes placed on Native American people. Her focus in on educating about her community in accurate scripts without exploiting the culture.

#1015

Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy

#77762

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers-Newark.

#1016

Alicia Kozameh

#77809

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alicia Kozameh is an Argentine novelist, short story writer and poet, and Professor in the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, at Chapman University in Southern California. Kozameh has published seven novels, a collection of short stories and six books of poetry. She has also edited two anthologies and wrote a book in collaboration with other authors, former political prisoners from the last Argentine military dictatorship in her country.

#1017

Erika J. Waters

#38972

Overall Influence

Erika J. Waters is an Americann editor, academic and critic. She was the founding editor of the literary journal The Caribbean Writer in 1986 and has published critical works on Caribbean literature and on women's literature, notably on writers including Caryl Phillips, Una Marson and Jean Rhys.

#1018

Patricia Meyer Spacks

#55973

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks is an American literary scholar. She is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia and former President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Modern Language Association. She specializes in eighteenth-century English Literature and also writes cultural criticism on varied subjects such as boredom, gossip, and feminism. "With remarkable breadth of reference, Spacks has written more extensively than any other feminist critic on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English narrative".

#1019

Sally Shuttleworth

#29666

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Sally Ann Shuttleworth is a British academic specialising in Victorian literature. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. From 2006 to 2011, she was Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. From 2014 to 2019 she was a principal investigator on the Diseases of Modern Life project, a multidisciplinary research initiative exploring nineteenth century scientific and cultural ideas related to stress and information overload.

#1020

Gina Gionfriddo

#58349

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Gina Gionfriddo is an American playwright and television writer. Her plays Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn were finalists for the 2009 and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. She has written for the television series Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, FBI: Most Wanted, The Alienist, and House of Cards.

#1021

Ana Merino

#57413

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ana Merino is a Spanish poet. Biography Ana Merino was born in Madrid in 1971, daughter of José María Merino. Ana Merino was between 2004 and 2009 an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Dartmouth College. She left Dartmouth in 2009 to create and develop the Spanish MFA at the University of Iowa that was inaugurated on 2011. She is a Full Professor of Spanish Creative Writing and Cultural Studies at The University of Iowa and was the founder director of their MFA in Spanish Creative Writing between 2011 and 2018. She has published two scholarly books on comics: El Comic Hispánico ,Diez ensayos p...

#1022

Sylvia Huot

#83121

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Sylvia Huot is a professor of Medieval French Literature at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Pembroke College. She is the author of several internationally renowned books on Medieval French Literature and the leading expert on the manuscripts of Roman de la Rose, having published extensively on its iconography.

#1023

Alicia Partnoy

#24665

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Alicia Mabel Partnoy is a human rights activist, poet, college professor, and translator. After Argentinian President Juan Perón died, the students from the left of the Peronist political party organized with fervor within the country's universities and, along with workers, were persecuted and imprisoned. There was a military coup in 1976 and people began to disappear. Partnoy was one of those who suffered through the ordeals of becoming a political prisoner. She became an activist of the Peronist Youth Movement while attending Southern National University .

#1024

Barbara Goff

#82815

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Barbara Elizabeth Goff is a Classics Professor at the University of Reading. She specialises in Greek tragedy and its reception; women in antiquity; postcolonial classics and reception of Greek political thought.

#1025

Zoé Jiménez Corretjer

Zoé Jiménez Corretjer

#72161

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Zoé Jiménez Corretjer is an author from Puerto Rico. She is a professor in the Department of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. Life Jiménez Corretjer born in San Juan, Puerto Rico has a Doctorate Degree from Temple University in Philadelphia and has taken several professional seminars at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain, and at the Ateneo de Madrid. Since 1996, she has taught literature and humanities at the University of Puerto Rico. She is the director of The Journal of Humanistic Studies and Literature from her department. Dr. Jiménez contributes as External Ev...

#1026

Leslie Dick

#78431

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Leslie Dick is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, based in Los Angeles. Her work explores feminist themes, especially in relation to queer theory and Lacanian discourse. Dick has published two novels, a collection of short stories, and several critical essays. She is a member of the editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, a Los Angeles-based, internationally distributed journal of art. She has been faculty at the California Institute of the Arts since 1992, and is currently co-director of the CalArts Program in Art. Since 2012 she has also held a position as a c...

#1027

Marilyn Arnold

#81733

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Marilyn Arnold is an American emeritus professor of English at Brigham Young University . She served as assistant to President Dallin H. Oaks and as dean of graduate studies. A native of Salt Lake City, Utah, Arnold received bachelor's and master's degrees from BYU. Arnold also holds a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a leading scholar on the work of Willa Cather having written among other works A Reader's Companion to the Fiction of Willa Cather and Willa Cather's Short Fiction. Arnold also studied the works of other authors who set their works in the great plains states.

#1028

Camille Dungy

#84788

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor. Career Born in Denver, Colorado, Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA.

#1029

Jean Sprackland

#85201

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and two books of essays about place and nature. Biography Originally from Burton upon Trent, Jean Sprackland studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury, then taught for a few years before beginning to write poetry at age 30. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was Chair of the Poetry Archive from 2016 to 2020.

#1030

Danielle Wood

#45229

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Danielle Wood is a Tasmanian journalist, writer and academic. Her first book, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2002. Biography Wood was born in Hobart, Tasmania. She was educated at The Friends' School in Hobart and went on to complete a Bachelor of Arts with honours from the University of Tasmania, before working as a cadet journalist. At age 26, Wood moved to Western Australia and enrolled in a PhD through Edith Cowan University, starting work on her book at the same time. She has since returned to Tasmania where she is a lecturer at University of T...

#1031

Sylvia Molloy

#77863

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Sylvia Molloy was an Argentine professor, author, editor and essayist based in New York. Biography Molloy was born to an Irish father and a French mother on 19 August 1938 in Buenos Aires and raised in Argentina, where she grew up speaking English, French and Spanish. She moved to Paris in 1958 and graduated with her PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne in 1967. Molloy then became a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She was chair of the Modern Language Association of America in 2001 and the International Institute of Latin American Studies.

#1032

Alexis De Veaux

#75070

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Alexis De Veaux is a black, lesbian American writer and illustrator. She chaired the Department of Women's Studies, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her surname also appears as DeVeaux.

#1033

Milada Blekastad

#83845

Overall Influence

1917 - 2003 (86 years)

Milada Blekastad was a Norwegian literary historian. Personal life She was born in Prague. Her grandfather František Topič was one of the most prominent publishers in that town and often published Nordic literature; her father Jaroslav Topič was a publisher as well and her mother Milada Topičová was a translator. As a fifteen-year old, Milada Blekastad received an invitation from Gunnvor Krokann, wife of the writer Inge Krokann, to travel to Norway. There she met the artist Hallvard Blekastad whom she married in 1934. She was quick to learn nynorsk and spoke fluent Gausdal dialect, but she ...

#1034

Marilyn Kaye

#57696

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Marilyn Kaye is an American children's writer. She taught children's literature at St. John's University, New York. She is the author of over 100 children's and young adult novel series, including the successful Replica and Gifted series.

#1035

Selima Hill

#73480

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Selima Hill is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize , the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

#1036

Elmaz Abinader

#51165

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Elmaz Abinader is an American author, poet, performer, English professor at Mills College and co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation . She is of Lebanese descent. In 2000, she received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams....

#1037

Marina Semyonova

Marina Semyonova

#39467

Overall Influence

1908 - 2010 (102 years)

Marina Timofeyevna Semyonova was the first Soviet-trained prima ballerina. She was born in Saint-Petersburg. She was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1975. Early life The first great dancer formed by Agrippina Vaganova, she graduated from the Vaganova School in 1925, which "is registered in the annals of Soviet ballet as the year of the unprecedented triumph of Marina Semyonova".

#1038

Kathleen Coleman

#81580

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Kathleen M. Coleman is an academic and writer who is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Her research interests include Latin literature, history and culture in the early Roman Empire, and arena spectacles. Her expertise in the latter area led to her appointment as Chief Academic Consultant for the 2000 film Gladiator.

#1039

Julie Sheehan

#68535

Overall Influence

Julie Sheehan is an American poet. Life She graduated from Yale University, and Columbia University. She lives in Long Island, New York, with her son, and is currently Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program as well as an assistant professor at Stony Brook Southampton.

#1040

Rachel Hadas

#64515

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Rachel Hadas is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose , and her most recent poetry collection is Love and Dread . Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

#1041

Inocência Mata

#63463

Overall Influence

Inocência Luciano dos Santos Mata is a Lisbon-based essayist and academic from São Tomé and Príncipe. Her work as a professor and researcher at the University of Lisbon's School of Letters is focused on Portuguese-language literature and post-colonial studies.

#1042

Diane Seuss

#54360

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022. She was born in Michigan City, Indiana and grew up in Michigan in Edwardsburg and Niles. Seuss received a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University.

#1043

Jaimy Gordon

#71295

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jaimy Gordon is an American writer. She is a winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. Biography She was born in Baltimore. She graduated from Antioch College in 1966, received an MA in English from Brown University in 1972, and earned a Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1975, also from Brown. She currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she previously taught in the MFA and PhD program of Western Michigan University.

#1044

Kathy Barker

#57135

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Kathy Barker is a scientist/writer who focuses on science management and on communicating science to society. She authored At the Bench, which teaches laboratory practice to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences, and At the Helm, which educates new principal investigators in laboratory management. She received a PhD in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a faculty member at The Rockefeller University before embarking on her writing career.

#1045

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

#62292

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Early life and education Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is the daughter of Janet and Herman DeKoven. Her mother was a social worker born in Ostrowiec, Poland, who at age 12 immigrated to the United States with her family. Her father was a lawyer born in Chicago, Illinois.

#1046

Martine Leavitt

Martine Leavitt

#75623

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Martine Leavitt is a Canadian-American writer of young adult novels and a creative writing instructor. Biography Leavitt was born in 1953 in Canada. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree, first class honours, from the University of Calgary and a Master of Fine Arts from Vermont College. She has seven children, twenty-one grandchildren, and lives with her husband in Alberta, Canada.

#1047

Gertrud Pätsch

#69568

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Gertrud Pätsch was a German ethnologist and philologist, who rendered service in the area of Kartvelian studies. In 1937 she graduated in Munster with a degree in the Old Georgian language. After the Second World War she left the western sector of Germany for East Berlin, where she earned a habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin in Indonesian linguistics. She taught in Berlin until she moved to the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena in 1960, where she founded the Kartvelologian faculty. After her retirement she worked for two years at the Tbilisi State University in Georgia. She published books and many articles in journals, such as Bedi Kartlisa.

#1048

Vona Groarke

#100062

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Vona Groarke is an Irish poet. Groarke was born in Mostrim in the Irish midlands in 1964, and attended Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Cork. Groarke has published five collections of poetry with the Gallery Press : Shale , Other People's Houses , Flight , Juniper Street and Spindrift . She is also the author of a translation of the eighteenth-century Irish poem, Lament for Art O'Leary .

#1049

Eleanor Wilner

#35876

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Eleanor Rand Wilner is an American poet and editor. Life Wilner obtained her bachelor's from Goucher College and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Her graduate dissertation concerned the topic of imagination and was later published as Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society .

#1050

Maaike Meijer

#54941

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Maaike Meijer is a Dutch literary scholar. She is a Professor emeritus of Maastricht University. Life Meijer was born in Eindhoven in 1949, and gained her doctorate cum laude from Utrecht University in 1988 with a thesis entitled De lust tot reading. She argued that women poets had been overlooked and that a less technical review of their work was required. She then worked for ten years at the same university, where she led the post graduate women's studies doctoral students. From 1997 to 1999, as endowed professor, she was the first professor of the Opzij chair at Maastricht University. She ...

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