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,

#1151

Daria Galateria

#81430

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Daria Galateria is an Italian writer and professor. Biography Daria Galateria was born in Rome, Italy, in 1950. She graduated in Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on monologue in Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. She has taught French Literature and Language at the Sapienza University of Rome since 1975. Over the years her research has focused in particular on the female memoir. She also edited the first Italian commented edition of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

#1152

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

#62645

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila is a Finnish writer, translator, and researcher. She was the recipient of the Eino Leino Prize in 2002 along with her husband Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, for their work in translating and promoting multicultural literature. In addition to being a best-selling novelist, she is a translator and non-fiction writer. She also teaches Sanskrit and the history of Indian art at Helsinki University.

#1153

Lynn Emanuel

#71134

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lynn Collins Emanuel is an American poet. Some of her poetry collections are Then, Suddenly— and Noose and Hook . She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also won the 1992 National Poetry Series Open Competition for The Dig, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and journals including Parnassus, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Slate and Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best...

#1154

Francesca Coppa

#71300

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook . She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organi...

#1155

Laurie Ann Guerrero

#33405

Overall Influence

Laurie Ann Guerrero is a Chicana poet from San Antonio, Texas. She was the poet laureate of San Antonio from 2014 to 2016 and the Poet Laureate of Texas from 2016 to 2017. In the fall semester of 2017, she became the first writer-in-residence at Texas A&M University San Antonio and a "fully immersed faculty member. She will teach a contemporary American woman poets course, host numerous University writing workshops and mentor students while working on her next writing project."

#1156

Leslie Pietrzyk

Leslie Pietrzyk

#36040

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Leslie Pietrzyk is an American author who has published three novels, Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl, as well as two books of short stories, This Angel on My Chest and Admit This To No One. An additional historical novel, Reversing the River, set in Chicago on the first day of 1900, was serialized on the literary app, Great Jones Street.

#1157

Cynthia Cruz

#100356

Overall Influence

Cynthia Cruz is a contemporary American poet. She is the author of seven published poetry collections, and two works of cultural criticism. She currently teaches classes in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.

#1158

Delia Jarrett-Macauley

Delia Jarrett-Macauley

#33691

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Delia Jarrett-Macauley , also known as Dee Jarrett-Macauley, is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her debut novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize. She has devised and presented features on BBC Radio, as well as being a participant in a range of programmes. As a multi-disciplinary scholar in history, literature and cultural politics, she has taught at Leeds University, Birkbeck, University of London, and other educational establishments, most recently as a fellow in English at the University of Warwick.

#1159

Emily Grosholz

#39615

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Emily Rolfe Grosholz is an American poet and philosopher. She is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, African American Studies and English, and a member of the Center for Fundamental Theory / Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, at the Pennsylvania State University.

#1160

Kim Addonizio

#56561

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kim Addonizio is an American poet and novelist. Life Addonizio was born in Washington, D.C., United States. She is the daughter of tennis champion Pauline Betz and sports writer Bob Addie . She briefly attended Georgetown University and American University before dropping out of both. She later moved to San Francisco and received a B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University. She has taught at San Francisco State University and Goddard College.

#1161

Elena Passarello

Elena Passarello

#99778

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Elena Passarello is an American writer, actor, and professor. In 2018, she became the announcer for the PRI variety show and podcast Live Wire with Luke Burbank. Career Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Passarello studied nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Audubon and Oxford American. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award in nonfiction.

#1162

Deirdre Osborne

#87508

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Deirdre Osborne Hon. FRSL is an Australian-born academic who is Reader in English Literature and Drama in the Theatre and Performance Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and also co-convenes the MA degree in Black British Writing.

#1163

Diane Francis

#23999

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Diane Marie Francis is a Canadian journalist, author and editor-at-large for the National Post newspaper since 1998. Background Francis was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 14 November 1946. She immigrated to Canada in 1966 and became a naturalized Canadian citizen. She is married and has two adult children.

#1164

Barbara Graziosi

#83776

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Barbara Graziosi is an Italian classicist and academic. She is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her interests lie in ancient Greek literature, and the way in which readers make it their own. She has written extensively on the subject of Homeric literature, in particular the Iliad, and more generally on the transition of the Twelve Olympians from antiquity to the Renaissance. Her most recent research was a project entitled 'Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry, which was funded by the European Research Council.

#1165

Jan Heller Levi

#58134

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jan Heller Levi is a poet who teaches at CUNY Hunter College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. Life She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Levi is the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for her first book, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. She has also received two awards form the Poetry Society of America, the George Bogin Memorial Award, and the Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.

#1166

Cynthia Huntington

#83953

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Cynthia Huntington is an American poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. Life and career Huntington has published numerous books of poetry, including Heavenly Bodies , a finalist for the National Book Award. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including TriQuarterly, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present an...

#1167

Janice Gould

#74051

Overall Influence

1949 - 2019 (70 years)

Janice Gould was a Koyangk'auwi Maidu writer and scholar. She was the author of Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather and co-editor with Dean Rader of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Her book Doubters and Dreamers was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.

#1168

Irene McKinney

#71616

Overall Influence

1939 - 2012 (73 years)

Irene McKinney was an American poet and editor, and served as the Poet Laureate of the state of West Virginia from her appointment by Governor Gaston Caperton in January 1994 until her death. Biography Third oldest of her parents' six children, Irene McKinney was born and grew up in Belington, Barbour County, WV on a 300-acre farm that had been in her family for generations. She had 5 siblings . Her family grew most of their food on their farm due to the struggle of living on one income and having to feed 8 mouths in the house.

#1169

Debra Magpie Earling

#66250

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Debra Cecille Magpie Earling is a Native American novelist, and short story writer. She is a member of the Bitterroot Salish . She is the author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which was on display at the Missoula Museum of Art in late 2011. Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares, the Northeast Indian Quarterly, and many anthologies.

#1170

Liliane Weissberg

#56894

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Liliane Weissberg is an American literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in German-Jewish studies and German and American literature. She is currently the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She received, among others, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Research Award for her research on German-Jewish literature and culture and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, and holds an honorary degree from the University of Graz.

#1171

Mazarine Pingeot

Mazarine Pingeot

#25295

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Mazarine Marie Pingeot who changed her name to Mazarine Marie Mitterrand Pingeot in November 2016, is a French writer, journalist and professor. Biography Pingeot is the daughter of former French president François Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot. She is said to be named after the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest library in France, because of her parents' love for books. She could also be named after cardinal Mazarin, who was admired by her father. Her existence was long hidden from the press but was once almost revealed by the French writer Jean-Edern Hallier. Keeping Mazarine Ping...

#1172

Lauren Michele Jackson

#73676

Overall Influence

1991 - Present (33 years)

Lauren Michele Jackson is an American culture critic and assistant professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University. Her first book, White Negroes , is a nonfiction collection of essays that explores cultural appropriation.

#1173

Kathleen Coburn

#73338

Overall Influence

1905 - 1991 (86 years)

Kathleen Hazel Coburn was a Canadian academic and a leading authority on the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born in Stayner, Ontario, a fourth generation Canadian of Scottish–Irish descent, Coburn was one of six children born to John Coburn, a Methodist minister, and Susannah Wesley Emerson, Coburn was educated at Harbord Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and later studied at the University of Toronto, taking a BA in 1928 and an MA in 1930. Having been awarded an Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire War Memorial Scholarship to Oxford in 1930, she obtained a BLitt fro...

#1174

Fawziyya Abu Khalid

#41603

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Fawziyya Abu Khalid is a Saudi Arabian poet, essayist, sociologist, and professor. Her poetry is noted for its prominent political motifs and focus on women's ability to attain education and freedom. Her literary reputation was established by the publication of her first poetry collection, Until When Will They Abduct You on Your Wedding Night? . She went on to publish two other poetry collections, entitled the Secret Readings in the History of Arab Silence and Mirage Water .

#1175

Whitney "Strix" Beltrán

#59721

Overall Influence

Whitney "Strix" Beltrán is a narrative designer and Project Narrative Director at Hidden Path Entertainment. Her writing and design career includes the indie game Bluebeard's Bride. She also founded the advocacy initiative Gaming as Other to promote inclusivity in the gaming community.

#1176

Tetiana Yakovenko

#51915

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Tetiana Vasylivna Yakovenko is a Ukrainian poet, literary critic, and teacher. Since 1988, she has been a member of the National Writers' Union of Ukraine. Her awards include Honored Worker of Ukraine Culture , and Excellent Education of Ukraine .

#1177

Michèle Perret

#26468

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Michèle Perret is a French linguist and novelist who was born in 1937 in Oran in Algeria. Background and education She lived in Algeria until 1955, first on a farm near to Sfissef , and then in Oran. Towards the end of her secondary education she settled in Paris. After qualifying as an agrégée in modern literature, she went on to a doctorate in literature and humanities.

#1178

Anne Oterholm

#104560

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Anne Oterholm is an American-born Norwegian novelist and literary critic. Among her novels are Ikke noe annet enn det du vil from 1995 and Avbrutt selskap from 1996. From 2005 to 2012 she was the leader of the Norwegian Authors' Union. She was awarded the Aschehoug Prize in 2010.

#1179

Francesca Orsini

#90615

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Francesca Orsini, FBA is an Italian scholar of South Asian literature. She is currently Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London. She previously lectured at the University of Cambridge, before joining SOAS in 2006. For the 2013/2014 academic year, she was Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

#1180

Maggie Anderson

#67407

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Maggie Anderson is an American poet and editor with roots in Appalachia. Education and beginning of career Anderson attended West Virginia Wesleyan College from 1966–68 and earned a bachelor's degree in English, with high honors, from West Virginia University in 1970. Her M.A. in English in 1973 and an M.S.W. in 1977 were also from WVU. She worked as a rehabilitation counselor for blind and visually impaired clients at the West Virginia Rehabilitation Center from 1973-77. Beginning in 1979, she worked as poet-in-residence for ten years, in schools, senior centers, correctional facilities and libraries in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

#1181

Sheba Karim

#83103

Overall Influence

Sheba Karim is an American author who writes literature and young adult fiction. Early life Sheba Karim was born and raised in Catskill, New York. She graduated from the New York University School of Law and received a M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#1182

Constance Reid

#10503

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Constance Bowman Reid was the author of several biographies of mathematicians and popular books about mathematics. She received several awards for mathematical exposition. She was not a mathematician but came from a mathematical family—one of her sisters was Julia Robinson, and her brother-in-law was Raphael M. Robinson.

#1183

Selena Millares

Selena Millares

#118181

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Selena Millares is a Spanish writer and professor. She was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and got her Ph.D. in Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has lived in Minneapolis, Paris, Berlin, Santiago de Chile and Alghero. Since 1996, she is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is the author of numerous essays as well as creative works , which suggest an interdisciplinary dialogue and the return to the original humanism, based on the integral conception of art and thought.

#1184

Lucy Treloar

#88335

Overall Influence

Lucy Treloar is an Australian novelist. Her first novel, Salt Creek, won the 2016 Dobbie Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin Award and the 2016 Walter Scott Prize. Her second novel, Wolfe Island, won the 2020 Barbara Jefferis Award and was shortlisted for both the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction in 2020.

#1185

Molly Antopol

#53905

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Molly Antopol is an American fiction and nonfiction writer. As of 2016, she is the Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her primary research interests include the Cold War and the Middle East. She is married to author Chanan Tigay and lives in San Francisco.

#1186

Linda McCarriston

#55964

Overall Influence

Linda McCarriston and holding dual citizenship of Ireland and the United States, is a poet and Professor in the Department of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Alaska Anchorage, teaching creative writing and literary arts since 1994.

#1187

Sissel Lie

#66168

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sissel Lie is a Norwegian novelist, translator, playwright and professor in Romance languages and literature at the University of Trondheim since 1992. Biography Sissel Lie was born in Kristiansand, in Vest-Agder county, Norway. Her literary début, the short story collection Tigersmil, won Tarjei Vesaas' debutantpris for 1986. Her works have been translated into eight languages as of 2004. She has edited anthologies of French poets and translated poetry, short stories and novels from the French language. She has also been co-editor of Kvinnenes kulturhistorie .

#1188

Frances Leviston

#98745

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Frances Leviston is a British poet. Biography Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Frances Leviston later moved to Sheffield. She studied at St Hilda's College in Oxford University, where she read English. Leviston then began an MA in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University, winning their Ictus Prize in 2004, which led to the publication of her first pamphlet, Lighter. She won an Eric Gregory Award, for poets under 30 years of age, in 2006. Her first collection, Public Dream, was published by Picador in 2007 and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her second collection, Disinformation, also from Picador, was published in February 2015.

#1189

Sandra Bermann

#71149

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sandra Bermann is an American literary scholar. She is the Cotsen Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her research and writing focuses on poetry, translation, and literary theory. She served as president of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2007 to 2009, and chaired Princeton's Comparative Literature department from 1998 to 2010. In 2011, she succeeded Harvey S. Rosen as the Head of Whitman College. Bermann was succeeded by Claire F. Gmachl on July 1, 2019.

#1190

Constance Hunting

#85303

Overall Influence

1925 - 2006 (81 years)

Constance Hunting was an American poet and publisher, widely known in the Northeastern United States. She taught English literature and creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono until her death on April 5, 2006.

#1191

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin

#30750

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Marjorie Anaïs Housepian Dobkin was an author and an English professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. Her books include the novel A Houseful of Love and the history Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City.

#1192

Flora Veit-Wild

#106428

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Flora Veit-Wild is a German literary academic, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and on the body and madness in African literature.

#1193

Angela Leighton

#76479

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Angela Leighton, FBA is a British literary scholar and poet, who specialises in Victorian and twentieth-century English literature. Since 2006, she has been a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Previously, from 1979 to 2006, she taught at the University of Hull, rising to be Professor of English.

#1194

Maria Tumarkin

#105148

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Maria Tumarkin is an Australian cultural historian, essayist and novelist., and is senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, teaching creative writing.

#1195

Juliane Okot Bitek

#78157

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Juliane Okot Bitek , also known as Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, is a Kenyan-born Ugandan-raised diasporic writer and academic, who lives, studies and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is perhaps best-known for her poetry book 100 Days, a reflection on the 100-day 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu people were killed. She has been a contributor to several anthologies, including in 2019 New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby.

#1196

Amy Kaplan

#92381

Overall Influence

1953 - 2020 (67 years)

Amy Kaplan was an American academic working in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, her work focused on the critical study of the culture of imperialism, prison writing, mourning, memory, and war. Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and president of the American Studies Association in 2003.

#1197

Sharon Mesmer

#79110

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch , The Virgin Formica , Vertigo Seeks Affinities , Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue . Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago , In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter . She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the Amer...

#1198

Gail Jones

#74731

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Gail Jones is an Australian novelist and academic. Early life and career Gail Jones was born in Harvey, Western Australia. She grew up in Broome and Kalgoorlie. She studied fine arts briefly at the University of Melbourne before returning to Western Australia where she took her undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Western Australia in 1994. Her thesis was titled Mimesis and alterity: postcolonialism, ethnography and the representation of racial 'others'. She is currently Professor of Writing in the Writing and Society Research School at the Western Sydney University.

#1199

Annette Pehnt

#95281

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Annette Pehnt is a German writer and literary critic. She lives in Freiburg in Baden-Württemberg. After graduating from school in 1986 Pehnt performed voluntary social work in Belfast. After a year living in Scotland, she studied English, Celtic studies and German language and literature at the University of Cologne, University of Galway, University of California, Berkeley and University of Freiburg. After her master's degree and the first national examination in 1994, graduation followed in 1997 at the University of Freiburg with a work on Irish literature.

#1200

Heather Watts

#50343

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Heather Watts is a ballet dancer, most known for her time with the New York City Ballet. Biography Born in Long Beach, California, her dream as a little girl was to be an actress. An acting coach advised her taking ballet classes, seeing as she was incredibly dramatic . So she started dancing at the age of 10, to "develop poise." She came to New York at the age of 13 on a Ford Foundation summer scholarship to attend the School of American Ballet, the official school of the New York City Ballet. She moved permanently to New York at age 15, again on a Ford Foundation scholarship to the School o...

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