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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1201

Angela Flournoy

Angela Flournoy

#87783

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Angela Flournoy is an American writer. Her debut novel The Turner House won the First Novelist Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. She was also listed on the National Book Awards' 5 under 35 list, nominated by her former teacher ZZ Packer.

#1202

Jasmine Warga

#86836

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Jasmine Warga is an American children's and young adult book author. Her free verse book Other Words for Home received a Newbery Honor in 2020. Early life and education Warga was born in Cincinnati to an American mother and immigrant Jordanian father. She graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in history and art history. She also earned her MFA in creative writing at Lesley University. After graduating college, Warga worked as a sixth grade science teacher in Texas. While still teaching, she began writing stories.

#1203

Sybille Haynes

#84741

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Sybille Edith Haynes, is a British expert on Etruscology. She grew up and was educated in Germany and Austria before moving to the UK in the 1950s. She worked with Etruscan artefacts at the British Museum for many years as well as publishing numerous books, for fellow scholars and also for the general public. In the 1980s she joined the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

#1204

Yael Renan

#75018

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Yael Renan was an Israeli writer and translator. Biography Renan was born and grew up in Tel Aviv and attended Tel Aviv University, where she received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a doctorate in English literature in 1978, for her work on "Figurative Language in the Prose of Modernism". She was a senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature at Tel Aviv University until her retirement in 2007, and also volunteered in the Department of Women's Studies.

#1205

Shirley Barlow

#79093

Overall Influence

Shirley Ann Barlow is a classicist specialising in the study of Classical drama and was one of the founding members of the Department of Classics at the University of Kent. One of her former students is comedian Alan Davies. She was an Honorary Fellow of University College London.

#1206

Fausta Garavini

#105476

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Fausta Garavini is an Italian writer and translator. She studied French and Occitan literature at the University of Florence She later worked as a literature professor at this university and as an essayist in several publications like "Paragone", "Nuovi Argomenti", "Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France" and "Littérature".

#1207

Lia Schwartz

#120341

Overall Influence

1941 - 2020 (79 years)

Lia Schwartz was an Argentine-American historian of Spanish and Comparative Literature. Biography Lia Schwartz was born in Corrientes, Argentina, 1941. She served as a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Schwartz taught Spanish and Comparative Literature at Fordham University and at Dartmouth College , and since 2000 is Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She was Executive Officer of its Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages from...

#1208

Ann Bannon

#81639

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Ann Weldy , better known by her pen name Ann Bannon, is an American author who, from 1957 to 1962, wrote six lesbian pulp fiction novels known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. The books' enduring popularity and impact on lesbian identity has earned her the title "Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction". Bannon was a young housewife trying to address her own issues of sexuality when she was inspired to write her first novel. Her subsequent books featured four characters who reappeared throughout the series, including her eponymous heroine, Beebo Brinker, who came to embody the archetype of a butch lesbian.

#1209

Lorna Reynolds

#96047

Overall Influence

1911 - 2003 (92 years)

Lorna Reynolds was an Irish writer, editor, and professor. Early life and education Reynolds was born in Jamaica in 1911 to staff sergeant Michael Reynolds in the Royal Engineers and his wife Teresa Hickey. She was one of five children. Her father died when she was ten.

#1210

Rebecca Miller

#65185

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rebecca Augusta Miller, Lady Day-Lewis is an American filmmaker and novelist. She is known for her films Angela , Personal Velocity: Three Portraits , The Ballad of Jack and Rose , The Private Lives of Pippa Lee , and Maggie's Plan , all of which she wrote and directed, as well as her novels The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob's Folly. Miller received the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Personal Velocity and the Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Director for Angela.

#1211

Kelly Le Fave

#95706

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kelly Le Fave is an American poet. Childhood and personal life Le Fave was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Virginia and Maryland. She has also spent time living in Western Massachusetts. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children.

#1212

Alma Luz Villanueva

#99651

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Alma Luz Villanueva is an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. Life Her Mexican grandfather edited a newspaper in Hermosillo, Mexico, and was a published poet. Her maternal grandmother, a Yaqui Indian curandera/healer from Sonora, raised her in the Mission District of San Francisco.

#1213

Geri Doran

#96843

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Geri Doran was born in Kalispell, Montana in 1966. Doran has attended Vassar College, the University of Cambridge, the University of Florida , and Stanford University, where she held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry. She lives in Eugene, Oregon where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.

#1214

Jessica Helfand

#21499

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jessica Helfand is a designer, author, and educator. She is a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, and founding editor of the website Design Observer. She is Senior Critic at Yale School of Art since 1994, a lecturer in Yale College, and Artist-in-Residence at Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Named the first Henry Wolf Resident in design at the American Academy in Rome in 2010, she is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

#1215

Barbara Santucci

#75325

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Barbara Jean Santucci is an American artist, poet and author of several children's books. Santucci is best known as a children's book author and traveling lecturer. Her stories and lectures deal with the struggle of children to adapt to an adult world.

#1216

Sharon M. Draper

Sharon M. Draper

#65652

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Sharon Mills Draper is an American children's writer, professional educator, and the 1997 National Teacher of the Year. She is a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for books about the young and adolescent African-American experience. She is known for her Hazelwood and Jericho series, Copper Sun, Double Dutch, Out of My Mind and Romiette and Julio.

#1217

Lee Maracle

#77959

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

Bobbi Lee Maracle was an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation. Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, she left formal education after grade 8 to travel across North America, attending Simon Fraser University on her return to Canada. Her first book, an autobiography called Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel, was published in 1975. She wrote fiction, non-fiction, and criticism and held various academic positions. Maracle's work focused on the lives of Indigenous people, particularly women, in contemporary North America. As an influential writer and speaker, Maracle fought for ...

#1218

Evangelina Vigil-Piñón

#75651

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Evangelina Vigil-Piñón is a Chicana poet, children's book author, director, translator, and television personality. Life Her mother's family emigrated to Texas in the early 1900s from Parras, Mexico. As a child, Vigil-Piñón lived with her maternal grandmother. Her interest in literature started since she was a little girl. As a sixth grader, her principal sent her to the Inman Christian Center, a private art school in San Antonio, where she was in attendance with people in their twenties. Vigil-Piñón earned a scholarship for business administration and started school at Prairie View A&M University.

#1219

Ellen Akins

#88149

Overall Influence

Ellen Akins is an American novelist from South Bend, Indiana. Early life and education After graduating from LaSalle Intermediate Academy in 1977, Akins earned a Bachelor of Arts in film production at the University of Southern California. As a young adult, Akins participated in Beyond Our Control, a youth-produced community television program.

#1220

Robyn R. Warhol

#103813

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.

#1221

Lorna Hardwick

#103168

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Lorna Hardwick is professor emerita of classical studies at the Open University. She is a leading authority on classical reception studies and has published several books and articles on the subject, as well being the first editor of the Classical Receptions Journal.

#1222

Jo-Ann Mapson

#76513

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jo-Ann Mapson is an American author. She is the author of twelve works of fiction, set mainly in the American Southwest. Biography She was born on March 29, 1952, in Pasadena, California, and now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Johnston College at the University of Redlands, graduated with a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from California State University Long Beach, and received her M.F.A. in both Poetry and Prose from Vermont College in 1992.

#1223

Mariasun Landa

#76067

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mariasun Landa Etxebeste is a Spanish writer. Most of her literary production has been developed in the Basque language in the field of children's and young people's literature. She is one of the writers in Basque language more translated to other languages.

#1224

Jane Kurtz

#92501

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jane Kurtz is an American writer of more than thirty picture books, middle-grade novels, nonfiction, ready-to-reads, and books for educators. A member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in children's and adult literature, Kurtz is an international advocate for literacy and writing. She was also part of a small group of volunteers who organized the not-for-profit organization, Ethiopia Reads, which has established more than seventy libraries for children, published books, and built four schools in rural Ethiopia.

#1225

Caroline Randall Williams

Caroline Randall Williams

#46381

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Caroline Randall Williams is an American author, poet and academic best known for the 2015 cookbook Soul Food Love, co-written with her mother, author Alice Randall, and published by Random House. In February, 2016, Soul Food Love received the NAACP Image Award in Literature .

#1226

M. Miriam Herrera

#90693

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

M. Miriam Herrera is an American author and poet. She teaches at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and currently teaches Introduction to Mexican Studies as well as Composition and Rhetoric and Creative Writing. She is a Lecturer with the Department of Writing Language Studies, and a Mexican American Studies Program Affiliate. Her poetry often explores Mexican-American or Chicano life and her Crypto-Jewish and Cherokee heritage, but mainly the universal themes of nature, family, myth, and the transcendent experience.

#1227

Kasia Boddy

#90922

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kasia Boddy is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Fitzwilliam College. She was born in Aberdeen in 1966 and grew up in Glasgow, where she attended Hyndland Secondary School. She did an MA in English and Philosophy at Edinburgh and a PhD on American short fiction at Cambridge. She has also taught at the universities of York, Dundee and University College London.

#1228

Phillis Levin

#100574

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Phillis Levin is an American poet. Life Levin is the daughter of Charlotte E. Levin and Herbert L. Levin of Yardley, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1976, and Johns Hopkins University in 1977. She was an Associate Professor of English at The University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently a visiting professor in the graduate writing program at New York University and a teaching poet-in-residence at Hofstra University. She is also an elector of the American Poets' Corner of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, and the co-director of the Sarah Lawrence Language Exchange.

#1229

Dulce María González

#101329

Overall Influence

1958 - 2014 (56 years)

Dulce María González was a Mexican writer and educator. In 2003, she was awarded the UNAL's Premio a las Artes for her work. Biography She was born in Monterrey and studied Spanish literature at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León . González was editor for the literary column of the newspaper El Norte. She also contributed to the newspaper El Porvenir, to the UANL journals Deslinde and Vida Universitaria and was founder and editorial advisor for the magazines Otra Orilla, El Correo Chuan and Papeles de la Mancuspia. She was a fellow of the Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Nuevo León.

#1230

Mindy Aloff

#85355

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Mindy Aloff is an American editor, journalist, essayist, and dance critic. Aloff's writing on dance, literature, film, and culture have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other articles and publications worldwide.

#1231

Diana Mashkova

#98084

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Diana Vladimirovna Mashkova is a Russian journalist, writer and author. Early life and education Mashkova was born in Kazan. She was born in the family of a professor and engineer. Mashkova graduated from Kazan State Pedagogical University and was a postgraduate at Kazan State University where she learnt the English language and foreign literature. In 2002 Mashkova obtained her Ph.D. for foreign literature.

#1232

Carol Senf

#95257

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Carol A. Senf is professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. With four books, two critical editions, one edited essay collection, and various critical essays, she is a recognized expert on the biography and works of Irish author Bram Stoker. She received the Lord Ruthven Award in 1999.

#1233

Tiffany Atkinson

#88450

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Tiffany Atkinson is a British academic and award-winning poet. In 1993, she moved to Wales, where after completing her studies in Cardiff, she became a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. In 2014, she was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was the recipient of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award.

#1234

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga

#77481

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga was a Romanian comparatist and essayist. A native of the national capital Bucharest, she was educated at its main university, going on to become a professor there. Together with a focus on interdisciplinary studies, she was noted for devoting several studies to Mihai Eminescu. Meanwhile, Dumitrescu was a dignitary of the Romanian Communist Party. Following the Romanian Revolution, after several years spent in Rome, she retired to a monastery.

#1235

Elisa Pérez Vera

#27534

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Elisa Pérez Vera is a Spanish jurist, a professor of Private International Law at the National University of Distance Education and magistrate of the Constitutional Court of Spain from 2001 to 2012. In 1982 she was appointed Rector of the UNED, becoming the first woman rector at a Spanish public university. The UNED has instituted the Elisa Pérez Vera Award to recognize research work on gender or feminism.

#1236

Wendy Law-Yone

#39660

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Wendy Law-Yone is the critically acclaimed Burmese-born American author of A Daughter's Memoir of Burma , Golden Parasol , The Road to Wanting , Irrawaddy Tango , and The Coffin Tree . Biography The daughter of notable Burmese newspaper publisher, editor and politician Edward Michael Law-Yone, Law-Yone was born in Mandalay but grew up in Rangoon. Her background is diverse, with one grandfather a merchant from Yunnan and another a colonial officer from Great Britain. Law-Yone states that she is "half Burman, a quarter Chinese and a quarter English".

#1237

E. J. Levy

#32933

Overall Influence

Ellen J. Levy is an American writer and academic who is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University. Her collection of short stories, Love, In Theory, was published in 2012, and her first novel, The Cape Doctor, in 2021 to positive reviews.

#1238

Tatiana Nicolescu

#124515

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (101 years)

Tatiana Nicolescu is a Romanian historian of literature and translator, born in Chişinău on 9 July 1932. She was a professor at the University of Bucharest, also teaching at Moscow University during the 1970s. She specialized in Russian literature in Bucharest and in Romanian literature and language in Moscow. Since 1988 she has been a visiting professor at the University Institute of Modern Languages in Milan, Italy. She is the wife of George Cristea Nicolescu.

#1239

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

#67399

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge is an English actress, screenwriter and producer. As a creator, head writer, and star of the comedy series Fleabag , she won three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globess and a British Academy Television Award. She received further Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for writing and producing the spy thriller series Killing Eve .

#1240

Leza Lowitz

#82836

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.

#1241

Katherine Angel

#102139

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Katherine Angel is a British academic and writer whose 2012 work of literary non-fiction, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, attracted worldwide attention. Life Angel was born in Brussels and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy. She studied at Harvard University on a JH Choate Fellowship, and earned a Ph.D. in the history of psychiatry and sexuality from the University of Cambridge. She has been a postdoctoral fellow in the history of medicine at Warwick University. Angel is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.

#1242

Rebecca Wolff

#97489

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Rebecca Wolff is a poet, fiction writer, and the editor and creator of both Fence Magazine and Fence Books. Wolff has won the 2001 National Poetry Series Award and 2003 Barnard Women Poets Prize for her literature.

#1243

Chang Ch'ung-ho

Chang Ch'ung-ho

#87922

Overall Influence

1914 - 2015 (101 years)

Chang Ch'ung-ho or Zhang Chonghe , also known by her married name Ch'ung-ho Chang Frankel, was a Chinese-American poet, calligrapher, educator and Kunqu opera singer. She is hailed as "the last talented woman of the Republic of China" .

#1244

Marjorie Garber

#79667

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Marjorie Garber is an American professor at Harvard University and the author of a wide variety of books, most notably ones about William Shakespeare and aspects of popular culture including sexuality.

#1245

Karen King-Aribisala

#35363

Overall Influence

Karen Ann King-Aribisala is a Nigerian novelist, and short story writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of Lagos. Education She was educated at the International School Ibadan, St. George's British International School, Italy , and the London Academy of Dramatic Arts.

#1246

Emily Barton

#71666

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Emily Barton is an American novelist, critic and academic. She is the author of three novels: The Testament of Yves Gundron , Brookland and The Book of Esther . Background and education Barton was raised in New Jersey, where she attended Kent Place School. She attended Harvard College, from which she graduated summa cum laude and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society. She also earned an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#1247

Fern Kupfer

#47121

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Fern Lee Kupfer is an American author and retired professor of creative writing at Iowa State University. She has written several novels and as well as memoirs reflecting on her life experiences, the discovery that she is a carrier of the BRCA gene, and the loss of her son to Canavan disease.

#1248

Liv Bliksrud

#98954

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Liv Bliksrud is a Norwegian philologist. She took the cand.philol. degree in 1973 and the dr.philos. degree in 1987. She is a professor at the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages, University of Oslo. Among her literary interests are Nobel Prize laureate Sigrid Undset. She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature.

#1249

Lucia Perillo

#58708

Overall Influence

1958 - 2016 (58 years)

Lucia Maria Perillo was an American poet. In 2000, Perillo was recognized with a "genius grant" as part of the MacArthur Fellows Program. Life and career Perillo was born in Manhattan on September 30, 1958 and grew up in Irvington.

#1250

Pearl Abraham

#39773

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Pearl Abraham is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. She was the third of nine children in a Hasidic family. Her father was a rabbi. At age five, the family moved to New York City and two years later returned to Israel. Following several moves back and forth between New York and Israel, the family settled in New York when she was 12. She studied first in Yiddish, then in English and then again in Yiddish.

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