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

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1051

Sarah Kane

#67692

Overall Influence

1971 - 1999 (28 years)

Sarah Kane was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action.

#1052

Ling Ma

#76072

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Ling Ma is a Chinese American novelist and assistant professor of practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Severance, won a 2018 Kirkus Prize and was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and shortlisted for the 2019 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her second book, Bliss Montage, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Story Prize.

#1053

Sophie Cabot Black

#68746

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sophie Cabot Black is an American prize-winning poet who has taught creative writing at Columbia University. Early life Cabot was born in New York, New York and raised on a small farm in Wilton, Connecticut. Her father is David Goldmark Black , a Broadway producer, actor, teacher, writer and artistic director. Her mother is Linda Black, cofounder of Opera Company of Boston and Opera New England. She has two siblings: actor Jeremy Black, who appeared as the boy Hitler clones in Boys from Brazil, and Alexander Black. She also has two daughters. Her maternal great-grandfather was industrialist ...

#1054

Suzanne Dracius

#45572

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Suzanne Dracius in Fort-de-France, in the Terres-Sainville district Biography After studying at the Lycée Marie-Curie in Sceaux and at the Sorbonne, Suzanne Dracius taught in Paris, then at the University of the French Antilles and in the United States as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia and the University of Ohio.

#1055

Diana Lewis Burgin

#74067

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Diana Lewis Burgin is an author, and Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts Boston; she received her B.A. in Russian from Swarthmore College, her M.A. & Ph.D. from Harvard University's Slavic Languages and Literatures Department. She has been teaching Russian at University of Massachusetts, Boston since 1975.

#1056

Lydia H. Liu

#60816

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Lydia He Liu is a theorist of media and translation and a scholar of comparative literature. She is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Biography Liu received a BA from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China. She then received an MA from Shandong University and PhD from Harvard University.

#1057

Kirsti Simonsuuri

#110465

Overall Influence

1945 - 2019 (74 years)

Kirsti Katariina Simonsuuri was a Finnish professor, writer, poet, and researcher of ancient literature. Her honors included the J. H. Erkko Award for Best First Book and the Wolfson Fellowship Award from the British Academy .

#1058

Lalitha Lenin

#50790

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Lalitha Lenin is an Indian poet in Malayalam. K. K. Lalitha Bai was also the Head of the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. In addition, she was a member in the Senate and Academic Council of the University of Kerala, General Council of Kerala Sahitya Academy, Jansikshan Sansthan Management Board, Governing Body of the State Institute of Children's Literature, State Resource Centre, Kerala State Core Group on Continuing Education. She was also a member of the Governing Body of the State Institute of Languages.

#1059

Yael Feldman

#61529

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Yael S. Feldman is an American cultural historian and literary critic. She is particularly known for her work in comparative literature and feminist Hebrew literary criticism. Feldman is known for her research on Hebrew culture, history of ideas, gender and cultural studies, and psychoanalytic criticism. She is currently the Abraham I. Katsh Professor Emerita of Hebrew Culture and Education in the Judaic Studies Department at New York University and an affiliated professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies. She is also a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a vis...

#1060

Margaret Ball

#74474

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Margaret Elizabeth Ball is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and historical novels. Under the pseudonym of Catherine Lyndell, she has also written romance. Ball has a B.A. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas. A former Fulbright scholar and UCLA professor, she devotes her time to fabric arts and embeadery. Married with two children, she lives in Austin, Texas.

#1061

Ann Banfield

#11086

Overall Influence

Ann Banfield, is a professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Banfield has taught at Berkeley since 1975 and is a specialist in linguistics, critical theory and the use of philosophy as a cornerstone of modernism. In the field of narratology, Banfield has been given lasting credit for her concepts of narratorless subjectivity and addresseelessness in narration.

#1062

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

#44538

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land. Biography Nezhukumatathil received her BA and MFA from the Ohio State University. In 2016–17 she was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi's MFA program. She has also taught at the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American writers. She is professor of English in the University of Mississippi's MFA program. She is married to the writer Dustin Parsons. They live in Oxford, Mississippi, ...

#1063

Michele Leggott

#59199

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Michele Joy Leggott is a New Zealand poet, and an emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. She was the New Zealand Poet Laureate between 2007 and 2009. Biography Leggott was born in Stratford, New Zealand, and received her secondary education at New Plymouth Girls' High School, before attending the University of Canterbury where she completed an MA in English in 1979. She then moved to Canada to do a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation was on the American poet Louis Zukofsky and was published as Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers .

#1064

Rossy Evelin Lima

Rossy Evelin Lima

#57022

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Rossy Evelin Lima-Padilla is a United States-based Mexican writer, scholar, translator and activist. She has published her work in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies in Europe, North America and South America.

#1065

Jennifer Doyle

#47238

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jennifer Doyle is a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is a queer theorist, art critic and sports writer. Doyle is the author of Campus Sex, Campus Security , which explores the intersection of discourse on sexual harassment and campus security, Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art , which examines how artists work with emotion, and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire , which considers how artworks are about sex. Along with José Esteban Muñoz and Jonathan Flatley, Doyle is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol . She is also wi...

#1066

Zoe Fairbairns

#84124

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Zoe Fairbairns is a British feminist writer who has authored novels, short stories, radio plays and political pamphlets. Biography Zoe Fairbairns was born in 1948, and educated at St. Andrews University, Scotland, and the College of William and Mary, US. She was the poetry editor for Spare Rib, in the same decade working as part of a collective of women writers to produce Tales I Tell My Mother. Fairbairns has worked as a freelance journalist and a creative writing tutor; she has also held appointments as Writer in Residence at Bromley Schools , Deakin University, Geelong, Australia , Sunderland Polytechnic and Surrey County Council .

#1067

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

#86910

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Barbara Josephine Lewalski was an American academic, an authority on Renaissance literature particularly known for her work on John Milton. Early life Born in Topeka, Kansas, to John Kiefer, a farmer, and Vivo , an elementary schoolteacher and speech therapist, she received her BSE at Emporia State University in 1950 and her AM in 1951. She went on to earn a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1956.

#1068

Karyna McGlynn

#90809

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Karyna McGlynn is an American poet and editor associated with spoken-word, New Sincerity, and Gurlesque. Biography McGlynn earned a BA from Seattle University, a MFA from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from University of Houston with a certificate in literary translation.

#1069

Catherine Mavrikakis

Catherine Mavrikakis

#74152

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Catherine Mavrikakis is a Canadian academic and writer living in Quebec. The daughter of a Greek father who grew up in Algeria and a French mother, she was born in Chicago and grew up in Anjou, Montréal-Nord, St. Leonard, in France and in the United States. She settled in Montreal in 1979. From 1993 to 2003, she taught at Concordia University. In 2003, she joined the department of French language literature at the Université de Montréal.

#1070

Lia Purpura

#86753

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems , four collections of essays and one collection of translations . Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.

#1071

April Ossmann

#80774

Overall Influence

April Ossmann is an American poet, teacher, and editor. She is author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music , and has had her poems published in many literary journals including Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review, Passages North, Mid-American Review, and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse , and Contemporary Poetry of New England . Her awards include a 2000 Prairie Schooner Reader's Choice Award. Her essays have been published in Poets & Writers, and by the Poetry Foundation.

#1072

Poopak NikTalab

#24320

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Poopak Niktalab is an Iranian education theorist, author, and literary researcher, especially of children's literature. Life She was born in 1970 in Tehran in a cultural and literary family. She is a member of Niktalab family and one of the daughters of Ahmad Niktalab. After receiving a diploma in mathematics and physics, she was immediately accepted to Al-Zahra University in the field of mathematics. She married Ali Latifiyan in 1999. The result of this marriage is two children named Parniya and Pouya.

#1073

Pip Adam

#82008

Overall Influence

Pip Adam is a novelist, short story writer, and reviewer from New Zealand. Background Adam was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. She attended the New Zealand Film and Television School in Christchurch before moving to Dunedin. Adam has an MA in Library and Information Studies and an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington. In 2012 she completed her PhD, also from Victoria University, supervised by Damien Wilkins.

#1074

Andrea Hairston

#82165

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Andrea Hairston is an African-American science fiction and fantasy playwright and novelist. Her novel Redwood and Wildfire won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for 2011. Mindscape, Hairston's first novel, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Hairston was one of the Guests of Honor at the science fiction convention Wiscon in May 2012.

#1075

Gesine Manuwald

#90772

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Gesine Manuwald is currently a Professor of Latin and Head of the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London. She focuses on Roman drama, epic and oratory and the reception of Roman literature, especially Neo-Latin poetry.

#1076

Seo-Young Chu

#98674

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Seo-Young Chu is a queer Korean American scholar, feminist, poet, #MeToo activist, and associate professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of A Refuge for Jae-in Doe and Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation.

#1077

Merrill Joan Gerber

#90574

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Merrill Joan Gerber is an American writer. She is an O. Henry Award winner. Biography Gerber was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1959, and a Masters in English from Brandeis University.

#1078

Jena Osman

#37206

Overall Influence

Jena Osman is an American poet and editor, who graduated from Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a Ph.D. She teaches at Temple University. Biography Osman's work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, Hambone, Verse, and XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics.

#1079

Nnedi Okorafor

#77938

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.

#1080

Sandra Benitez

#99987

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sandra Benitez is an American novelist. Life Sandra Benitez was born in Washington, D.C., and spent ten years of her childhood in El Salvador while her father was based there as a diplomat. She attended high school in Missouri from age 14 and subsequently graduated with a B.S. and M.A. from Northeast Missouri State University.

#1081

Joan Houlihan

#76385

Overall Influence

Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of six books, most recently It Isn't a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest , winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. Her other books are Shadow-feast , described by the Los Angeles Review as "...a tour de force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances"; The Us described by Lucie Brock-Broido as: "...like nothing I have ever read or seen...wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon.…both syntactically inventive and radically simple"; Ay , the sequel to The Us, described by ...

#1082

Barbara Henning

#103422

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Barbara Henning is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her recent novelized biography of her mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story, was named by the Library of Michigan as a Notable Book of 2023. She is also the editor of a collection of interviews, [Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works] and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Her work has been published in numerous journals. Some recent books of poetry and prose are Digigram ; a novel, Just Like That ; and...

#1083

Lucy Corin

#68004

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Lucy Corin is an American novelist and short story writer. The winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize, Corin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in 2015.

#1084

Giulia Sissa

#35543

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Giulia Sissa is an Italian classical scholar and historian of philosophy. She is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Classics at UCLA. The majority of her works deal specifically with the role of women in the Ancient Mediterranean.

#1085

Shelly Oria

#107942

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Shelly Oria is an Israeli-American author, notable for short stories featuring queer characters. Personal life and achievements Oria was born in Los Angeles, California, but grew up in Israel. She features queer characters in her stories. She received the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, a Sozopol Fiction Seminars Fellowship in Bulgaria and was an artist in residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council between 2014 and 2015.

#1086

Ruthanne Lum McCunn

#51280

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ruthanne Lum McCunn is an American novelist and editor of Chinese and Scottish descent. Early life Ruthanne Lum McCunn was born as Roxey Drysdale on February 21, 1946, in Chinatown, San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong. Her father was a Scottish American merchant seaman from Idaho, and her mother was from Hong Kong. Her parents met in the late 1930s when her mother came to San Francisco with a cousin to visit the World's Fair, where she met Ruthanne's father, fell in love with him and got married. Interracial marriage was illegal in California at the time so they drove to Washington, where a minister, who was a friend of her father's family, married them.

#1087

Suzanne Berne

#72247

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Suzanne Berne is an American novelist known for her foreboding character studies involving unexpected domestic and psychological drama in bucolic suburban settings. Berne's debut novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, won the 1999 Orange Prize for Fiction.

#1088

Clare Pollard

#82679

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Clare Pollard is a British writer , literary translator and critic. Early life and education Pollard was raised in Bolton. She was educated at Turton School in Bromley Cross. She read English at Cambridge University.

#1089

Marion L. Starkey

#92926

Overall Influence

1901 - 1991 (90 years)

Marion Lena Starkey was an American writer of history books, including The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. She was born April 13, 1901 in Worcester, MA to Arthur and Alice T. Starkey. She earned a bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1922, and a master's degree from Harvard University in 1935.

#1090

Noha Radwan

#60682

Overall Influence

Noha Mohamed Radwan is an assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis. She was an Egyptian literary scholar and assistant professor of Arabic Literature at Columbia University and has also taught at U. C. Berkeley. She teaches "Introduction to Islamic Civilization". Her interests include modern Middle Eastern literature in Arabic and Hebrew, and she has a particular interest in modern Arabic poetry.

#1091

Diane Elam

#59994

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Diane Michelle Elam is an American feminist writer, the author of Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme , Romancing the Postmodern , and co-editor of Feminism Beside Itself . A recurrent theme in her work is an argument against the possibility of a complete and definitive representation of women.

#1092

Lisa D'Amour

#66448

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Lisa D'Amour is a playwright, performer, and former Carnival Queen from New Orleans. D'Amour is an alumna of New Dramatists. Her play Detroit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Biography

#1093

Julia Britton

#80577

Overall Influence

1914 - 2012 (98 years)

Julia Britton was an Australian playwright. Britton was perhaps best known for her literary adaptations and biographical plays. Life Julia Britton was born Hilda Hartt in Romiley, Cheshire in 1914, the daughter of Richard and Elizabeth Hartt . She attended Withington Girls' School and later, the University of Manchester graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1930. She moved to South Africa six years later, where she worked as a journalist. It was during these years that she began to experiment with writing for the theatre, beginning with her un-produced play The Jacky Hangman. In 1939 she ma...

#1094

Katherine Harloe

Katherine Harloe

#44921

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Katherine Harloe is Professor of Classics and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Previously she was Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is an expert on the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the eighteenth-century German classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. She is the first black professor of Classics in the UK, and the first woman director of the ICS.

#1095

Ada Salas

#96815

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Ada Salas or AdaMc is a Spanish poet and author. She has worked as a teacher. Her poetry is known for its inclusion of pauses. Life Ada Salas was born in Cáceres, Spain in 1965. She earned a doctorate in philology at the University of Extremadura. She taught in France at the University of Angers. Juan Manuel Rozas was meant to have been her teacher, but he died in 1987. Salas entered the competition named in his memory and won the award in 1988

#1096

Marianne Katoppo

Marianne Katoppo

#83396

Overall Influence

1943 - 2007 (64 years)

Henriette Marianne Katoppo was an Indonesian novelist and internationally known Asian feminist theologian. She was a recipient of the S.E.A. Write Award. Career Born in Tomohon, North Sulawesi, on 9 June 1943, Katoppo studied theology from 1963 at the Jakarta Theological Seminary, Sekolah Tinggi Teologi.

#1097

Zhenia Vasylkivska

#95454

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Zhenia Vasylkivska was a Ukrainian poet and translator, literary critic, member of The New York Group of Poets. Biography She was born in Kovel in 1929. Vasylkivska left Ukraine in 1944. She first lived in the Austrian city of Linz, where she graduated from high school. In 1951, she moved to the United States, where she settled in New York City.

#1098

Ada Palmer

#17391

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Ada Palmer is an American historian and writer and winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, was published in May 2016. The work has been well received by critics and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

#1099

Eda Ahi

#101782

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (34 years)

Eda Ahi is an Estonian poet, translator and diplomat. She graduated from Tallinn University, where she received master's degree; specialty was Russian culture. After graduation, she worked as a diplomat in Ukraine.

#1100

Connie Porter

#82289

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Connie Rose Porter is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court , and Imani All Mine .

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