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,

#1351

Florența Albu

#111172

Overall Influence

1934 - 2000 (66 years)

Florența Albu was a Romanian poet. Biography She was born in Floroaica, Călărași County. She studied at the Gheorghe Șincai High School in Bucharest from 1948 to 1952, and then pursued her studies at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Bucharest, from 1952 to 1957. She worked at the newspaper Scînteia tineretului from 1963 to 1965; and the journal Viața Românească from 1965 to 1995.

#1352

Joyce Ackroyd

#79445

Overall Influence

1918 - 1991 (73 years)

Joyce Irene Ackroyd, was an Australian academic, translator, author and editor. She was a scholar of Japanese language and literature. Early life Ackroyd apparently acquired an interest Japan during her childhood, but she was not permitted to study Japanese at the University of Sydney on a teacher’s scholarship in 1936 because there was insufficient demand for Japanese in secondary schools. She graduated with honours in English and history and a major in mathematics . Ackroyd studied Japanese part-time at the University of Sydney while teaching mathematics at a Sydney boys’ school. In 1944 she began teaching Japanese at the Royal Australian Air Force language school in Sydney.

#1353

Debora Greger

#99355

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Debora Greger is an American poet as well as a visual artist. She was raised in Richland, Washington. She attended the University of Washington and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She then went on to hold fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida until retiring.> She now works as Poet in Residence at the Harn Museum of Art.

#1354

Bronwyn Lea

#100706

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Bronwyn Lea is a contemporary Australian poet, academic and editor. Biography Born in Tasmania, Lea grew up in Queensland and Papua New Guinea, moving to San Diego to study at California State University. She completed a PhD titled "The way into stone; To dwell in possibility: Social roles of the poet" at University of Queensland in 2005 and as of 2021 is a full professor and head of the School of Communication and Arts at UQ.

#1355

Jane Shore

#81171

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jane Shore is an American poet. Life She graduated from Goddard College, and moved from Vermont to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1972, where she was a student of Elizabeth Bishop.

#1356

Ethyle R. Wolfe

#65751

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Ethyle Renee Wolfe was an American classics professor who taught at Brooklyn College. During her many years at the college, she developed the Humanities Institute and was awarded the Charles Frankel Prize in 1990.

#1357

Aileen Ward

#78234

Overall Influence

1919 - 2016 (97 years)

Aileen Ward , was an American professor of English literature who won both a National Book Award and a Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for her book "John Keats: The Making of a Poet". Early life and education Aileen Coursen Ward was born on April 1, 1919, in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Summit, N.J. Her father, Waldron, was a lawyer; her mother was the former Aline Coursen.

#1358

Deborah Wiles

#91512

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Deborah Wiles is a children's book author. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Her documentary novel, Revolution, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2005. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and often deals with historical events , social justice issues, and childhood reactions to those events, as well as everyday childhood moments and mysteries, most taken directly from her childhood. She often says, ...

#1359

Victoria Redel

#88955

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Victoria Redel is an American poet and fiction writer who lives in New York City. She is the author of five books of fiction: Before Everything, Make Me Do Things, The Border of Truth, Loverboy and Where the Road Bottoms Out and four books of poetry: 'Paradise,'Woman Without Umbrella, Swoon, and Already the World. She has taught at Columbia University, Vermont College and is currently on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. She has two sons.

#1360

Ruth Scodel

#123693

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Ruth Scodel is an American classicist. She is the D.R. Shackleton-Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. Scodel specialises in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in Homer, Hesiod and Greek Tragedy. Her research has been influenced by narrative theory, cognitive approaches, and politeness theory.

#1361

Beth Henley

#71832

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Elizabeth Becker Henley is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actress. Her play Crimes of the Heart won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 1981 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play, and a nomination for a Tony Award. Her screenplay for Crimes of the Heart was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

#1362

Linda Svendsen

#99452

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Linda Svendsen is a Canadian screenwriter and author. Biography She has lived in her birth city for most of her life. Her works include many critically acclaimed short stories. Her stories were anthologized and published in magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Night. She won first prize in the American Short Story Contest in 1980, and was a three-time finalist for the O. Henry Awards.

#1363

Kathleen Fraser

#107305

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Kathleen Fraser was a contemporary poet. She was a Guggenheim Fellow. Early years Fraser was born in 1935 and grew up in Oklahoma, Colorado, and California. She graduated from Occidental College. Career During her teaching career at San Francisco State University from 1972 to 1992, she directed The Poetry Center and founded The American Poetry Archives; she also wrote and narrated the one-hour video Women Working in Literature.

#1364

Lucy Taxis Shoe Meritt

#93008

Overall Influence

1906 - 2003 (97 years)

Lucy Taxis Shoe Meritt was a classical archaeologist and a scholar of Greek architectural ornamentation and mouldings. Biography Born in Camden, New Jersey, Lucy Shoe Meritt was the daughter of William Napoleon Shoe and Mary Esther Dunning Shoe. She studied at Bryn Mawr College . She continued her studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1929 to 1934. From 1937 to 1950 Meritt taught at Mount Holyoke College. She was twice a fellow of the American Academy in Rome . She married Benjamin Dean Meritt at Princeton, New Jersey, on November 2, 1964. She worked at the Roman site of Cosa and at Serra Orlando in Sicily.

#1365

Jenefer Shute

#107674

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jenefer Shute is an author of four novels: Life-Size, Sex Crimes, Free Fall and User I.D.. She has also written for Harper's, The Nation, salon.com, The Guardian, Tikkun, the Boston Review, and Modern Fiction Studies.

#1366

Anna Smaill

#93625

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Anna Smaill is a New Zealand poet and novelist, and a former violinist. Early life and education Smaill was born in Auckland in 1979. She started playing the violin aged seven. She studied musical performance at the University of Canterbury in the late 1990s and during her time at Canterbury, she decided to not become a professional violinist, but pursue a career in writing instead. She began studying English and music theory, before changing to the University of Auckland, from where she graduated with a master's degree in English. She spent the following year in Wellington at Victoria Univer...

#1367

Mary Kinzie

#84784

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Mary Kinzie is an American poet. Life She received her B.A. from Northwestern University in 1967, and returned there to teach in 1975. She won Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson fellowships to do graduate work at the Free University of Berlin and Johns Hopkins University.

#1368

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

#97005

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a Greek poet, translator and lecturer. Life Anghelaki-Rooke was born in Athens, the daughter of Eleni from Patras and Yannis Anghelakis from Asia Minor. Her godfather was the Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis, a close friend of her parents. She married Rodney Rooke in 1963. While a very young child she contracted a bacterial infection that ate affected her bones and left her with a severe limp and a stunted arm. She attended primary and secondary school in Athens. She followed courses at the Universities of Athens and Nice, completing her studies with a degree in t...

#1369

Yvonne Craig

#56446

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

Yvonne Joyce Craig was an American actress who was renowned for her role as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl in the 1960s television series Batman. Other notable roles in her career include Dorothy Johnson in the 1963 movie It Happened at the World's Fair, Azalea Tatum in the 1964 movie Kissin' Cousins and as the green-skinned Orion Marta in the Star Trek episode "Whom Gods Destroy" .

#1370

Raffaella Barker

#95903

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Raffaella Flora Barker is an English author. Born in London, she moved when she was three and was brought up in the Norfolk countryside. She is the one of the poet George Barker's fifteen children, the eldest of the five he had with novelist Elspeth Barker. She lives in Norfolk, England with her family.

#1371

Meg Bateman

#56646

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Vivienne Margaret 'Meg' Bateman is a Scottish academic, poet and short story writer. She is best known for her works written in Scottish Gaelic; however, she has also published work in the English language.

#1372

Joanna Ruocco

#116204

Overall Influence

Joanna Ruocco is a prize-winning American author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took" and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Ruocco received her MFA at Brown, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. Her most recent novel is Dan, published by Dorothy, a publishing project. She also serves as assistant professor in creative writing at Wake Forest University.

#1373

Nancy Thomson de Grummond

#83787

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Nancy Thomson de Grummond is the M. Lynette Thompson Professor of Classics and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She specializes in Etruscan, Hellenistic and Roman archaeology. She serves as the director of archaeological excavations at Cetamura del Chianti in Tuscany, Italy. Her current research relates to Etruscan and Roman religion, myth and iconography.

#1374

Betsy Colquitt

#85081

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Elizabeth "Betsy" Colquitt was an American professor of English and a poet known for themes and poetic structures which reflect a modernist sensibility. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, United States in 1926 and died on 7 April 2009.

#1375

Jenny Xie

#123094

Overall Influence

Jenny Xie is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Eye Level, winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018, and of The Rupture Tense, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2022.

#1376

Saviana Stănescu

#55197

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Saviana Stănescu is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in Ithaca, New York. Hailed as one of the most exciting voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Stănescu has received numerous accolades for her work, including the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Script and the Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award . She has been inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame and was named the Indie Theater Person of the Year in 2010. Richard Schechner wrote on the cover of Stănescu's poetry book Diary of a Clone: "Saviana Stănescu is for and of the 21st century.

#1377

Allison Joseph

#100723

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Allison Joseph is an American poet, editor and professor. She is author of eight full-length poetry collections, most recently, Confessions of a Bare-Faced Woman . Biography Born in London, England, to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the Bronx, New York. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale , and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of S...

#1378

Marleen S. Barr

#77983

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Marleen S. Barr teaches communication and media studies at Fordham University, New York City. She is notable for her significant contributions to science fiction studies, for which she won a Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 1997. Her primary contributions have been her foundational work in the field of feminist science fiction criticism; her 1981 anthology Future Females: A Critical Anthology "served as an introduction and eye-opener to the field of Feminist Science Fiction."

#1379

Catherine Millot

Catherine Millot

#16064

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Catherine Millot is a French Lacanian psychoanalyst and author, professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris-VIII. Millot studied philosophy before turning to psychoanalysis. In 1971 she started an eight-year analysis with Lacan, and attended his seminars from 1971 until his death. Her thesis, turned into the book Freud anti-pédagogue, argued that pedagogy could not be based on psychoanalysis, since the role of analyst involved a radical openness to lack which was incompatible with the role of teacher. In 1975 she started teaching in the department of psychoanalysis at Paris VIII.

#1380

Ma Ruifang

#90642

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ma Ruifang is a Chinese author, scholar and professor at the School of Literature, Shandong University. Biography Ma was born in 1942 in Qingzhou, Shandong. Her grandfather Ma Defu and father Ma Chuzhen were doctors. She belonged to the Hui ethnic group. Her mother was educated. Ma read books in Yidu County Library when she studied at primary school. She was accepted into Shandong University and graduated in 1965. In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural revolution and she was persecuted. In 1980, Ma started to study the literature of Pu Songling.

#1381

Michelle Huneven

#89195

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Michelle Huneven is an American novelist and journalist. Huneven was born and raised in Altadena, California, where she returned to live in 2001. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and attended the Methodist Claremont School of Theology to become a UU minister, but she quit after two years to write novels.

#1382

Manju Jaidka

#113531

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Manju Jaidka is former Faculty Dean and Head of Department at Shoolini University's Department of English. She was formerly a professor at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Books Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English. Co-edited with Tej N. Dhar. Slated for September 2023.When Cato Played Cupid and Other Stories. Petals Publishers, 2022.Gumshoe Mania: A Novel. Vishwakarma Publishing House, November 2021.Covid’s Metamorphosis: Stories from our Corona Times. Amazon Kindle publication, Sept 2020. https://www.amazon.in/COVIDS-METAMORPHOSIS-STORIES-CORONA-TIMES-ebook/dp/B08HQR3W85Saudade.

#1383

Mary Gallagher

#60645

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher. For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher. These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play. In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010. ...

#1384

Elaine Terranova

#95329

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Elaine Terranova is an American poet. Life She grew up in Philadelphia, the daughter of Nathan and Sadie Goldstein. She remained in her home town gaining her education at Temple University where she graduated in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in English. She also married her first husband Philip Terranova that same year. Twelve years later in 1973, she worked as a manuscript editor for J. B. Lippincott & Co. While working there, she attended Vermont's Goddard College culminating in earning her master's degree in 1977. Her career shifted from editing to education and she began teaching English ...

#1385

Zheng Min

#39820

Overall Influence

1920 - 2022 (102 years)

Zheng Min was a Chinese scholar and modernist poet. Early life and career Zheng Min was born on 18 July 1920 in Minhou County, China. She attended the Southwestern University of Kunming, where she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1943. She first began publishing work during The War of Resistance, one of few female modernist poets doing so at the time. Zheng attended Brown University in the United States and earned her Master's in literature in 1951, before returning to China in 1955. She is one of nine prolific modernist poets considered to be in the "Nine Leaves" school of poetry.

#1386

Nicole Garcia

#59214

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Nicole Garcia is a French actress, film director and screenwriter. Her film Charlie Says was entered into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Her film Going Away was screened in the Special Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. She was the President of the Jury for the Caméra d'Or section of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

#1387

Zoë Skoulding

#91215

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Zoë Skoulding FLSW is a poet, living in Wales, whose work encompasses translation, editing, sound-based vocal performance, literary criticism and teaching creative writing. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, translated into over 25 languages and presented at numerous international festivals.

#1388

Julia Leigh

#89831

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Julia Leigh is an Australian novelist, film director and screenwriter. In 2011 her debut feature film Sleeping Beauty was selected to screen in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. She is an author of two award-winning novels, The Hunter and Disquiet, for which she has been described as a "sorceress who casts a spell of serene control while the earth quakes underfoot".

#1389

Emmy Pérez

#90877

Overall Influence

Emmy Pérez is a Chicanx poet and writer originally from Santa Ana, California, United States. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 2017. She has lived in the borderlands of Texas since 2000, where she has taught creative writing in college and MFA programs, as well as in detention facilities and as part of social justice projects. Her latest collective is Poets Against the Border Wall. She was also a fellow and organizing committee member of CantoMundo and is a long-time member of Macondo Writers Workshop.

#1390

Pattiann Rogers

#82031

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry. Life Pattiann Rogers is an American poet living in Colorado with her husband and has two sons and three grandsons. She was born in Joplin, Missouri, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri in 1961. She received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Houston in 1981. She taught as a visiting writer at the University of Texas, the University of Montana, and at Washington University in St.

#1391

Brighde Mullins

#92651

Overall Influence

Brighde Mullins is an American playwright and poet. Biography She graduated from the Yale School of Drama and the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa , with MFAs. She taught at San Francisco State University, Brown University, Harvard University, CalArts, and currently teaches at University of Southern California where she is also the director of USC's Master of Professional Writing Program. In 2012, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

#1392

Fahmida Hussain

#91928

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Dr Fahmida Hussain was born in a literary family on July 5, 1948, in Tando Jam in district Hyderabad Sindh, Pakistan. Her father Mohammad Yakoon "Niaz" was also a scholar who had translated poetry of Hafiz Shirazi from Persian to Sindhi language. Her brother Sirajul Haq Memon was also a well-known author and researcher. She is a well-known author, scholar, linguist and intellectual of Pakistan. Her fields of work have been: Literature, Linguistics, Woman studies and Anthropology. Her specialization is in the study of the great classical mystic poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Dr Fahmida was the Chairperson of Sindhi Language Authority from May 2008 to March 2015.

#1393

Karen Head

#26945

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Karen Head is an American poet, educator and editor. She is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she is the executive director of the Communication Center. Head is known for her contributions to Massive Open Online Courses

#1394

Mercedes Arriaga Flórez

#111837

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Mercedes Arriaga Flórez is a Spanish philologist. Full professor in Italian philology at the University of Seville , with a degree on Italian philology from the University of Salamanca and modern and contemporary Italian Writings by the University of Bari . She achieved her first PhD at the University of Seville in 1993 and the second in language sciences and theory of signs from the University of Bari in 1995. Nowadays, she holds a chair at the Asociación Universitaria de Estudios de las Mujeres . From 2012, she is also a member of the board of the Sociedad Española de Italianistas .

#1395

Maureen Seaton

#81712

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Maureen Seaton is an American LGBTQ poet, activist, and professor emeritus of English/Creative Writing at the University of Miami. She is the author of fourteen solo books of poetry, thirteen co-authored books of poetry, and her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls. Throughout her writing career, Seaton has often collaborated with fellow poets Denise Duhamel, Neil de la Flor, Kristine Snodgrass, Samuel Ace, Aaron Smith, Nicole Tallman, Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias.

#1396

Catherine Cusset

Catherine Cusset

#75533

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Catherine Cusset is a best-selling French novelist and the author of Life of David Hockney: A Novel , The Story of Jane , and 12 other novels published by Éditions Gallimard between 1990 and 2018. Some of her novels are described as autofiction, a French literary movement that is a hybrid of fiction and autobiography. Others are more romantic, but all share some recurring themes: the family, desire, and cultural conflicts between France and America. She stands out from her contemporaries with a direct, incisive, visual form of writing, marked by the influence of Anglo-Saxon novelists. ...

#1397

Nasrin Rahimieh

#61558

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nasrin Rahimieh is an Iranian-born American literary critic, editor, and educator. Rahimieh is the Howard Baskerville Professor of Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Director of the Humanities Core program at the University of California, Irvine .

#1398

Simona Škrabec

#61873

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Simona Škrabec is a Slovene literary critic, essayist and translator who lives and works in Barcelona. She spent her childhood in the small town of Ribnica in the region of Lower Carniola. She has lived in Barcelona since 1992. Skrabec has translated several books from Slovenian to Catalan and from Catalan to Slovenian. In addition to these two languages, she is fluent in Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, German, English and French.

#1399

Nicola Monaghan

#96607

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Nicola Monaghan is an English novelist and author of The Killing Jar, Starfishing and The Okinawa Dragon. She grew up in Nottingham, England, and gave up a career in finance to pursue an MA in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University.

#1400

Angela Hur

#111256

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Angela Mi Young Hur is a Korean American writer based in Sweden. Her debut novel, The Queens of K-Town, was published in 2007 by MacAdam/Cage. Her second novel, Folklorn, is forthcoming from Erewhon in 2021.

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