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

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1451

Jean Fisher

#81860

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Jean Fisher was a UK-based art critic and writer. Her research explored the intertwined legacies of colonialism and the emergent conflicts of globalization in Ireland, Native America, the Black Atlantic and more recently Palestine. She studied zoology and fine art. In the 1980s in New York City she contributed regularly to Artforum International. At that time she curated exhibitions of contemporary Native American art with the artist Jimmie Durham. In New York she taught in the School of Visual Arts, State University of New York at Old Westbury and the Whitney Independent Study Program.

#1452

Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee

#133842

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Karen An-hwei Lee is an American poet. Life Born in 1973, and raised in Massachusetts, Lee is a Chinese American poet, translator, and critic. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, Berkeley. A former resident writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts in Peterborough, New Hampshire and the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, Lee resided in Santa Ana, California. She became vice provost for Point Loma Nazarene University in 2016. In 2020, she became provost for Wheaton College.

#1453

Elspeth Kennedy

#81864

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Elspeth Mary Kennedy, MA, DPhil, FSA was a British academic and a prominent medievalist. She is best known as the editor and author of works on medieval French literature. Early life and education Elspeth Kennedy was born in Berkshire. Her academic career was delayed by World War II, during which she worked for the government — in 1940, while still 18 years of age she began working for MI5, domiciled initially at Wormwood Scrubs and later at Bletchley Park. Because the work, though essential, was repetitive, Kennedy studied Russian in her spare time, and initially laid plans to become a Russian historian.

#1454

Naomi Schor

#72460

Overall Influence

1943 - 2001 (58 years)

Naomi Schor was an American literary critic and theorist. A pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, she is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory of her time. Naomi's younger sister is the artist and writer Mira Schor.

#1455

Carol Kendall

#70555

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

Carol Seeger "Siggy" Kendall was an American writer of children's books. She has received the Newbery Honor, Ohioana award, Parents choice award, and the Mythopoeic Society Aslan award. Biography Carol Kendall was born in Bucyrus, Ohio, and was a graduate of Ohio University. Some of her first books were directed at adults such as "The Black Seven" and "The Baby Snatcher" . It was her travels across the world that inspired her folk tale stories. She even gathered old folk tales from other countries and translated them into English for children. Despite her love for traveling, she always love...

#1456

A. J. Verdelle

#94567

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

A. J. Verdelle , is an American novelist who is published by Algonquin Books and Harper, with essays published by Crown, the Smithsonian, the Whitney Museum, Random House, and University of Georgia Press. Verdelle has forthcoming novels from Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau.

#1457

Maria Henson

#99243

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Maria Henson is an American journalist and editor, who has worked for several newspapers. She is currently an Associate Vice President at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she lectures in journalism and is editor of the university publication Wake Forest Magazine.

#1458

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly

#112489

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is an Irish Germanist and Founder of WiGS . Biography Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly is Emeritus Fellow and Tutor in German at Exeter College, Oxford, and Professor of German Literature at Oxford University. She specialises in the early modern period, and is a distinguished scholar in this field, and in the field of German literature as a whole. She works in particular on European court culture in the early modern period and on German literature written by women or representing women; from 2005 to 2008 she co-directed the AHRC major research project at Oxford University entitled 'The Representation of Women and Death in German Literature, Art and Media, 1500–present'.

#1459

Patricia Goedicke

#98511

Overall Influence

1931 - 2006 (75 years)

Patricia Goedicke was an American poet. Biography Born Patricia McKenna in Boston, Massachusetts, she grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, where her father was a resident psychiatrist at Dartmouth College. During her high school years she was an accomplished downhill skier. She earned her B.A. at Middlebury College in 1953, where she studied with Robert Frost. She also studied under W. H. Auden at Young Men's Hebrew Association of New York City in 1955.

#1460

Susan Brantly

#104536

Overall Influence

Susan Brantly is an American scholar in Scandinavian literature and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Career Susan Brantly received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in German and Scandinavian from Harvard University in 1980, her Master of Arts Degree in Scandinavian Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1983, and her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literature from Yale University in 1987. That same year, she began working in the Scandinavian Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin, where she is currently a professor. Contemporary Swedish historical fiction remains a central research interest.

#1461

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

#57025

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is an American novelist. Life and work Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1968 to an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother. She grew up in Los Angeles, but as a child in the years before the Lebanese Civil War, she spent summers in Beirut with her mother's family.

#1462

Laura Pavel

#107516

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Laura Pavel is a Romanian essayist and literary critic. Biography Daughter of Dora Pavel, writer, and Eugen Pavel, linguist, scientific researcher. Married to the literary critic Călin Teutişan. She has a BA in Letters of the "Babeş-Bolyai" University in Cluj-Napoca, the Romanian-English section . PhD in Letters , with a thesis dedicated to Eugène Ionesco . She is part of the literary group gathered around the cultural journal Echinox. Research fellowships at the Université Libre de Bruxelles , Indiana University of Bloomington and the University of Amsterdam . Presently she is Professor at ...

#1463

Alexandra Chasin

#70277

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Alexandra Chasin is an American experimental writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She is also an associate professor of literary studies at The Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. Biography Chasin was born in 1961, in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she received her bachelor's degree in European Cultural Studies in 1984. In 1993, Chasin earned her Ph.D in Modern Thoughts and Literature from Stanford University. She received her master's degree in fiction writing, in 2002, from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

#1464

Sarah Gambito

#109520

Overall Influence

Sarah Gambito is an American poet and professor. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Loves You , Delivered , and Matadora . Her first collection, Matadora , was a New England/New York Award winner and won the 2005 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry.

#1465

Mary Rakow

#92347

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mary Rakow is an American novelist. Life She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from University of California, Riverside, in 1970, from Harvard University with a master's degree in Theological Studies, and from Boston College with a Ph.D. in Theology, Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit Honor Society. Her work has appeared in Works & Conversations. She has appeared on Writers on Writing, with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett KUCI-FM.

#1466

Nancy Eimers

#105331

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Nancy Eimers is an American poet. Life She graduated from Indiana University with an M.A., from the University of Arizona with an M.F.A., and from the University of Houston with a Ph.D. She teaches at Western Michigan University. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review.

#1467

Ambelin Kwaymullina

#86269

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Ambelin Kwaymullina is a Palyku novelist, illustrator, and assistant professor of law at the University of Western Australia. She was born as the eldest of three children to Sally Morgan, an author and artist, and Paul Morgan, a teacher. She graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1998 with a Bachelor of Laws with honours. Kwaymullina's academic research focuses on both public law, and on Indigenous peoples and the law. Her works of fiction include both young adult science fiction novels and children's picture books.

#1468

Brigitte Fontaine

#45649

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Brigitte Fontaine, is a singer of avant-garde music. She has employed numerous unusual musical styles, melding rock and roll, folk, jazz, electronica, spoken word poetry, and world. She has collaborated with Stereolab, Michel Colombier, Jean-Claude Vannier, Areski Belkacem, Gotan Project, Sonic Youth, Antoine Duhamel, Grace Jones, Noir Désir, Archie Shepp, Arno, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. She is also a novelist, playwright, poet, and actress.

#1469

Julie Agoos

#124478

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Julie Agoos is an American poet. Life Julie Agoos is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Above the Land and Calendar Year . She received a BA from Harvard University, and an MA from The Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University. She was the 1989 poet in residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH.

#1470

Velma Maia Thomas

#97714

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Reverend Velma Maia Thomas is an author and academic from the United States of America. Background Thomas was born June 18, 1955, in Detroit, Michigan. She received her bachelor's degree from Howard University and master's degree from Emory University. She also holds a graduate certificate in Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University.

#1471

Kathleen Peirce

#109812

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Kathleen Peirce is an American poet. She graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1988. She currently teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, for the Texas State University MFA. She has one son.

#1472

Kathy Lou Schultz

#84269

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Kathy Lou Schultz is an American author and poet from Burke, South Dakota. Early life and education She was born on November 30, 1966, to Lewis and Jeanne Schultz, who soon after moved the family to Kearney, Nebraska.

#1473

Julianna Baggott

Julianna Baggott

#98022

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Julianna Baggott is a novelist, essayist, and poet who also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She is an associate professor at Florida State University's College of Motion Picture Arts. She is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards.

#1474

Frances Sherwood

#70519

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Frances Sherwood was an American writer, novelist, and educator. Sherwood published four novels and one book of short stories. Her 1992 novel, Vindication, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been translated into twelve languages.

#1475

Rona Murray

#121187

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

Rona Jean Murray was a Canadian poet. Life Murray spent her early childhood in India, where her father commanded a Gurkha regiment. When she was eight years old her family immigrated to Canada in 1932.

#1476

Cristanne Miller

#104991

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Cristanne Miller received her PhD in 1980 from the University of Chicago, and was for many years the W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor at Pomona College. Since 2006 she has taught at the University at Buffalo in New York, where she is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English.

#1477

Parneshia Jones

Parneshia Jones

#98199

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Parneshia Jones is an American publisher, poet, and editor. Life Hailing from Evanston, Illinois, Parneshia Jones grew up visiting her neighborhood library frequently. When she was in sixth grade, she wrote her first poem, about her brother. Through writing this first piece of poetry, she found her passion for writing and poetry.

#1478

Elizabeth Wong

#83078

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Elizabeth Wong is a contemporary American playwright, television writer, librettist, theatrical director, college professor, social essayist, and a writer of plays for young audiences. Her critically acclaimed plays include China Doll is a fictional tale of the actress, Anna May Wong; and Letters to A Student Revolutionary, a story of two friends during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Wong has written for television on All American Girl, starring Margaret Cho. She is a visiting lecturer at the College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, where her papers are a...

#1479

Sylvia Lago

#43420

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Sylvia Lago Carzolio is a Uruguayan writer, teacher, and literary critic. She has made a particular focus of women's issues, addressing various conflicts that women encounter in her work. Biography Sylvia Lago was born in Montevideo on 20 November 1932. Her great-aunt was professor Elda Lago, a member of the Generación del 45, who bequeathed her home to the University of the Republic . Lago studied literature at the . She carried out academic and scientific activities at the Department of Uruguayan and American Literature at UdelaR's Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences, eventually...

#1480

Carol Moldaw

#136563

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Carol Moldaw is an American poet, novelist and critic. Her book The Lightning Field won the FIELD Poetry Prize. Biography Carol Moldaw was born in Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moldaw holds an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. from Boston University.

#1481

Julie Sanders

#61065

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Julie Sanders is the Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London. Career Sanders gained her doctorate at the University of Warwick, and studied at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and at University of California, Berkeley. In 1995 she took a lectureship at Keele University and in 2004 joined the University of Nottingham as Chair of English Literature and Drama. She was Head of the School of English from 2010 to 2013 and was subsequently seconded for two years to the Ningbo, China, joint venture campus as Vice Provost, launching the Arts and Humanities Research Council's first centre in China for Digital Copyright and IT research.

#1482

Elena Catena

#78735

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Elena Catena López was a Spanish university professor, philologist, publisher, and feminist. She was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate in at the Complutense University of Madrid, and the first to reach the position of vice dean of that same faculty. In 1960 she co-founded the Seminar on Women's Sociological Studies.

#1483

Nan Cohen

#106864

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Nan Cohen is an American poet and teacher. She has published two poetry collections, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City. Life She was raised in Reisterstown, Maryland, and graduated from Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

#1484

Danielle Pafunda

#109044

Overall Influence

Danielle Pafunda is an American writer and poet. She has taught for the University of Wyoming, University of California San Diego, and is 2018-19 Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Maine. She also teaches for Mississippi University for Women's low-residency MFA. She often lives and works in the Mojave Desert.

#1485

Miranda Mellis

#112783

Overall Influence

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications, The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist. Her fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in various publications including The Believer's The Logger, Harper’s, Conjunctions, the New York Times, Fence and elsewhere. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony. She co-founded and co-edited The Encyclopedia Project and once played in a band called My Invisible. She teaches at Evergreen State College.

#1486

Nur Salman

#137627

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Nur Salman is a Lebanese writer. She was born in Beirut and received a BA in Arabic literature from the Beirut College for Girls, a MA in comparative literature from the American University of Beirut and a state doctorate in Arabic literature from Saint Joseph University. She is a professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University.

#1487

Rosaura Sánchez

#83628

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Rosaura Sánchez is a writer, storyteller, linguist and critic. Sánchez' "most singular and significant contribution to this field [Chicano bilingualism] is the formulation of a theoretical framework for the analysis of Chicano Spanish based on the premise that Spanish use in America must be considered in its social and verbal interactions." As an editor, one of her most relevant works was the novel Who Would Have Thought it? by writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton of California, published by the Arte Público Press in Houston, Texas.

#1488

Aurelie Sheehan

#114416

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Aurelie Sheehan was an American novelist and short story writer. She was the author of two novels, History Lesson for Girls and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects , as well as four collection of stories: Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant , Jewelry Box , Demigods on Speedway , and Once into the Night , winner of FC2's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She was a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

#1489

Hester Kaplan

#96127

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Hester Margaret Kaplan is an American short story writer, and novelist. Life Kaplan was born to a Jewish family, the daughter of novelist Anne and author Justin Kaplan. Her maternal grandparents were Doris Fleischman and Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations" and nephew of Sigmund Freud. She grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Barnard College.

#1490

Robin Behn

#103237

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Robin Behn is an American poet, and professor at University of Alabama and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She grew up in Barrington, Illinois. She graduated from Oberlin College, the University of Missouri, and University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Cortland Review, Perihelion, Poetry, and Kenyon Review.

#1491

Jean Said Makdisi

#97553

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jean Said Makdisi is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing. Life Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine, to a Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England. She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972, where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College. They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Lebanon War.

#1492

Blanche McCrary Boyd

#111164

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Blanche McCrary Boyd is an American author. She is currently the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College. Early life and education Blanche McCrary Boyd was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Charles Fant McCrary and Mildred McDaniel. She says that growing up in South Carolina was the source of her "redneck roots." Boyd started college at Duke University, though left after getting a C+ in her first English class and being asked to leave because she was "drunk all the time". She married a man who "wouldn't put up with her drinking," and t...

#1493

Maria Arrillaga

#99539

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

María Arrillaga is a Puerto Rican poet who has been a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She taught in the Spanish Department on the Rio Piedras campus. She is a member of PEN American Center as well as PEN Club de Puerto Rico. She was a member of the Women's Writing Committee of PEN International, served as its secretary and organizer for Latin America. Arrillaga was president of PEN Club de Puerto Rico during 1989–1991.

#1494

Enriqueta Harris

#65439

Overall Influence

1910 - 2006 (96 years)

Enriqueta Harris Frankfort was a British art historian and writer who specialised in Spanish art. Born into a family with an English father and a Spanish mother, she attended the University College London to read modern languages and later studied a Doctor of Philosophy art degree under Tancred Borenius. Harris travelled to Spain to research Caravaggio's influence on 17th-century Spanish paintings and her first book was published in 1938. She billeted Basque child refugees during the Spanish Civil War and worked with the Ministry of Information to keep Spain neutral during World War II. After...

#1495

Ellen Doré Watson

#98312

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ellen Doré Watson is an American poet, translator and teacher. Career Watson is author of six collections of poems, most recently, pray me stay eager . Her book, Ladder Music, was a New York/New England Award winner from Alice James Books. Other honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant and a 1997 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

#1496

Elana Greenfield

#82437

Overall Influence

Elana Greenfield is an American playwright, and short story writer. Life Greenfield was raised in Israel. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, and from Brown University with an MFA. She was Artistic Director of New Dramatists. Currently, she teaches dramatic writing at The New School, in the Eugene Lang College division. She formerly taught the same subject at New York University.

#1497

Frances McCue

#94353

Overall Influence

Frances McCue is an American poet, writer, and teacher. She has published four books of poetry and two books of prose. Her poetry collection The Bled received the 2011 Washington State Book Award and the 2011 Grub Street National Book prize. Three of her other books, Mary Randlett Portraits , Timber Curtain , and The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs were all finalists for the Washington State Book Award.

#1498

Kang Eun-gyo

#129704

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kang Eun-gyo is a South Korean poet and Professor Emerita at Dong-a University. Life Kang Eungyo was born on December 13, 1945 in Hongwon, Hamgyeongnam-do. She was raised in Seoul, and graduated from Gyeonggi Girls’ Middle School and Gyeonggi Girls’ High School. She went on to earn her bachelor's degree in English Literature and Ph.D. in Korean Literature from Yonsei University. Kang has a daughter. She made her literary debut with the publication of "Night of the Pilgrims" , which earned her the 1968 New Writer Prize, sponsored by the journal World of Thoughts . She was a member of the coter...

#1499

Yvette Biro

#65786

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Yvette Biro is a Hungarian-American essayist, screenwriter and Professor Emeritus at New York University Graduate Film School . Her early books on the aesthetics of film were first published in her native Hungary, which became handbooks for film-schools in the country. Meanwhile, she worked on a dozen of prizewinning films with noted directors . She was both the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Filmkultura, the magazine of the Hungarian Film Institute and Film Archive.

#1500

Elizabeth Chater

#77942

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

Elizabeth Eileen Chater was a Canadian writer of novels and poetry, and a professor at San Diego State University. Biography Chater was born August 22, 1910, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her father was a successful attorney who provided a home with a library filled with books. At a time when women were not encouraged to seek higher education, she attended the University of British Columbia at sixteen. While there, she was the President of the Debating Society, Vice President of the senior class, and graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She was married to Melville Thomas Chater in 1932.

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