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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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1551

Kathleen Cambor

#67827

Overall Influence

Kathleen Cambor is an American author. Her novels include The Book of Mercy, which received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 for her second novel, In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden. The novel was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2001.

#1552

Elizabeth Sewell

#94822

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Elizabeth Sewell was a British-American critic, poet, novelist, and professor who often wrote about the connections between science and literature. Among her published works were five books of criticism, four novels, three books of poetry, and many short stories, essays, and other work in periodicals in North America and Europe. Of her books, the most widely held by libraries is The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History.

#1553

Deborah Brevoort

#66194

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Deborah Brevoort is an American playwright, librettist and lyricist best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie. She teaches Creative Writing at several universities. Early years Brevoort was born in Columbus, Ohio to Virginia and Gordon Brevoort. She is the oldest of three children. She graduated from Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, NJ. She attended Kent State University where she received a BA in English and Political Science, and an MA in Political Science.

#1554

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

#139592

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jeanne Marie Beaumont is an American poet, author of four poetry collections, most recently, "Letters from Limbo" ,Burning of the Three Fires , Curious Conduct , and "Placebo Effects" . Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Court Green, Harper’s, Harvard Review, Manhattan Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Witness, and World Literature Today, and she has had poems featured on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. In 2006, San Francisco film-maker Jay Rosenblatt, made a film based on her poem "Afraid So" as narrated by Garrison Keillor.

#1555

Felicity Riddy

#111557

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Felicity Riddy is an academic, author and specialist in late-medieval English and Scottish literature. Educated at Auckland University College/the University of Auckland , New Zealand and the University of Oxford , Riddy taught at Ahmadu Bello University and the University of Stirling .

#1556

Judith Vollmer

#107452

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Judith Vollmer is an American poet and editor. She teaches privately, and in The Drew University MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation; and is Emerita Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh/Greensburg.

#1557

Katie Trumpener

#101360

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Katie Trumpener is the Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University. She won a Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, and Berlin Prize. Life She received a B.A. in English from the University of Alberta in 1982, an A.M. in English and American literature from Harvard University in 1983, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University in 1990. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale in 2002, Trumpener taught at the University of Chicago from 1990. At Yale, Trumpener has served as acting director of the Whitney Humanities Center and the director of graduate studies in comparative literature.

#1558

Camille Martin

#100942

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Camille Martin is a Canadian poet and collage artist. After residing in New Orleans for fourteen years, in 2005 she moved to Toronto following Hurricane Katrina. Biography Early life and education Camille Martin was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1956 and spent most of her childhood in Lafayette, Louisiana. In 1980 she earned a Master of Music in Piano Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music. In 1996 she received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of New Orleans. Her thesis, a collection of poems entitled at peril, passed with distinction. In 2003 she received a PhD in English from Louisiana State University.

#1559

Rimgaila Salys

#100480

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Rimgaila "Rima" Salys is Professor Emerita of Russian Program at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert in 20th century Russian literature, film, and culture. Her research interests include Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, 20th century Russian art and culture, theory and praxis of literary modernism, and Soviet cinematic musical.

#1560

Kim Haengsook

#126995

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Kim Haengsook is a South Korean poet. Life Kim Haengsook was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1970. She studied Korean language education at Korea University, where she also earned her master's and doctoral degree in Korean literature. She made her literary debut in 1999 when the journal Hyundae Munhak published “Ppul” and a few other poems. She is primarily associated with the Korean Futurism school of poetry, which emerged in the 2000s when young poets began writing experimental works that broke with the lyrical tradition of South Korea. Kim published her first poetry collection Sachungi in ...

#1561

Joan Silber

#81911

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement. Biography Joan Silber was born in 1945. She grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and obtained an M.A. from New York University. She taught at NYU and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

#1562

Judy Juanita

#37979

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Judy Juanita is an American poet, novelist and playwright. She is a Lecturer in the College Writing Programs at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly a writing teacher at Laney College. In 1968, while attending San Francisco State, Juanita served as editor-in-chief of The Black Panther, the newspaper of the Black Panther Party. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Virgin Soul, , a black teen starts community college in Oakland, struggles to matriculate and then joins the Black Panther Party . The story of the female foot soldier in the black power movement, Virgin Soul expose...

#1563

Kathryn Gutzwiller

#131923

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Kathryn J. Gutzwiller is a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. She specialises in Hellenistic poetry, and her interests include Greek and Latin poetry, ancient gender studies, literary theory, and the interaction between text and image. Her contribution to Hellenistic epigram and pastoral poetry has been considered particularly influential.

#1564

Kim Namjo

#103569

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Kim Namjo was a South Korean poet. Biography Kim Namjo was born on 25 September 1927, in Daegu, Japanese-occupied Korea. She attended a girls' school in Kyushu, Japan, and graduated from Seoul National University's College of Education in 1951 with a degree in Korean Language Education. Kim made her official literary debut in 1950 while still in college, publishing the poetry collection Constellations. Kim taught at Masan High School and Ewha Girls' High School. She became a professor at Sookmyung Women's University in 1954 and was a professor emerita there. Kim served as chairperson of Socie...

#1565

Ruth B. Bottigheimer

#114185

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ruth B. Bottigheimer is a literary scholar, folklorist, and author. She is currently Research Professor in the department of English at Stony Brook University, State University of New York where she specializes in European fairy tales and British children’s literature. She is also interested in the history of illustration and the religious socialization of children through edited Bible narratives. She “has been hailed as one of America’s foremost Grimm scholars”.

#1566

Edie Meidav

#107408

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Edie Meidav is an American novelist. Life She graduated with a B.A., Yale University, and M.F.A., Mills College. Her works include Kingdom of the Young, a collection of fiction with a nonfiction coda; Lola, California, a novel concerning death penalty, motherhood, female friendship, and the cultural aftermath of 1960s idealism; Crawl Space, a novel written in the voice of a Vichy criminal reckoning with the commodification of wartime memory; The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon, set in Sri Lanka and concerning the effects of the Western gaze on the East.

#1567

Joanne Dobson

#105373

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Joanne Dobson is a writer of mystery novels and features in Great Women Mystery Writers . Biography Dobson graduated in 1963 from The King's College, New York gaining a degree in English. She later earned a master's from the University of New York at Albany in 1977 and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985. She taught at Amherst College and Tufts University before becoming a tenure-track professor at Fordham University. She founded a scholarly society devoted to Emily Dickinson and was a founding editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. She has taught Fulbri...

#1568

Killarney Clary

#139489

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Killarney Clary is an American poet who was recently awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. Her first book, Who Whispered Near Me, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Clary received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1992.

#1569

Mariya Litovskaya

Mariya Litovskaya

#102421

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Mariya Arkadevna Litovskaya, née Yeremeyeva is a Soviet and Russian philologist, literary critic, Professor of the Ural Federal University, one of the leading scholars at the Institute of History and Archaeology under the Russian Academy of Sciences . She is a specialist in the fields of the 20th century Russian literature, sociology of literature and education, Ural literature.

#1570

Fawzia Assaad

#99794

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Fawzia Assaad is an Egyptian novelist writing in French. Life Fawzia Assaad was born in Cairo. Educated at French schools, she gained a doctorate in philosophy in Paris. Her autombiographical novel L'Égyptienne portrays the effects of the 1952 Egyptian revolution and the Arab–Israeli conflict on an Egyptian Coptic woman.

#1571

Stella Pope Duarte

#80106

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Stella Pope Duarte is a Latina American novelist. Life She graduated from Arizona State University with a B.A. and MA in Educational Counseling. She taught at Arizona State University from 1999–2008, and South Mountain Community College. She was a member of the Arizona Commission on the Arts from 2006 to 2010.

#1572

Nancy Huddleston Packer

#81314

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (99 years)

Nancy Huddleston Packer is an American writer of short fiction and memoir, who is the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Stanford University. Early life and education Packer was born in 1925 in Washington, D.C., where her father, George Huddleston, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Alabama’s 9th congressional district. She was one of five children, and as a child lived in both Washington and Birmingham, Alabama. She graduated from Birmingham–Southern College in 1945, and gained a master's degree in theology from the University of Chicago in 1947.

#1573

Jean McGarry

#126804

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jean McGarry is an author of fiction and a professor at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Early life and education Jean McGarry was born in Providence, Rhode Island, was educated at Regis and Radcliffe Colleges, the University of California-Irvine and Johns Hopkins University, where she received an M.A. in The Writing Seminars in 1983.

#1574

Anne Landsman

#145360

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Anne Landsman is a novelist. She was born in Worcester, South Africa, the daughter of a country doctor, and is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and Columbia University. Until 2001, she lectured at The New School university in New York, where she still lives with her husband, architect James Wagman, and children.

#1575

Barbara Goldberg

#111711

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Barbara Goldberg is an American poet, author, translator, and editor from Maryland. Early life and education Goldberg grew up in Forest Hills, Queens> New York. She is a first generation American. Her parents were immigrants from Europe after fleeing from the Holocaust. The language her family spoke in their home was German. She attended Russell Sage Junior High.

#1576

Judy Blunt

#77607

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Judy Blunt is an American writer from Montana. Her most notable work to date is Breaking Clean, a collection of linked essays exploring her rural upbringing. Biography Blunt was raised on a cattle ranch in a remote area of Phillips County, Montana, near Regina, south of Malta, Montana. In 1986 she moved with her three small children to Missoula to attend the University of Montana.

#1577

Judith Woodsworth

Judith Woodsworth

#57154

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Judith Weisz Woodsworth is a Canadian academic and university administrator, having formerly served as President of Concordia University and Laurentian University. Early life and education Born in Paris, France, in 1948, she grew up in Winnipeg. She received a BA in French and Philosophy from McGill University, a licence ès lettres from the Université de Strasbourg in France, and a Ph.D. in French Literature from McGill.

#1578

Cécile Cloutier

#92719

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Cécile Cloutier was a Canadian writer and educator. The daughter of Adrien Cloutier and Maria Lantagne, she was born in Quebec City and studied at the Collège Jésus-Marie de Sillery, at Laval University and at the Université de Paris, going on to earn a doctorate from the Sorbonne and a Master of Philosophy from McMaster University. She studied a variety of languages including Sanskrit and Inuktitut. From 1955 to 1958, she taught French literature, Latin, Greek and Spanish at the Collège des Ursulines and at Marymount College in Quebec City. She was a professor in the French department at the University of Ottawa from 1958 to 1964.

#1579

Anne Élaine Cliche

#126841

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Anne Élaine Cliche is a Canadian writer living in Montreal, Quebec. Biography She was born in Val-d'Or and was educated there. She went on to study music at the École de musique Vincent d'Indy in Montreal. She continued her studies at the University of Ottawa, receiving a bachelor's degree in music, then a bachelor's and master's degree in French literature and a doctorate in French and Quebec literature. She taught in the French literature department at the University of Ottawa and then was an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Since 1992, she has been a professor in the literary studies department at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

#1580

Thamarai

#36740

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Thamarai is a Tamil poet and lyricist. She is a prominent figure in the Tamil literary world. She made her debut in the Tamil film industry through the 1998 film Iniyavale, which was directed by Seeman and music composed by Deva.

#1581

Tracy Barrett

#96291

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Tracy Barrett is an American author of children’s books and young adult novels. She has published twenty-three books for young readers and one for adults. Life Tracy Barrett was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but grew up just outside New York CIty, New York.

#1582

Tracy Clayton

#104763

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Tracy Clayton is an American writer whose work has been recognized by Fast Company, Ebony, and The Root, who described her as "a superstar” who “writes big, funny things." She served as the co-host of the BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, which has been on hiatus since 2017. Clayton left BuzzFeed in September 2018 amid company-wide downsizing. She hosts the Netflix podcast Strong Black Legends, for which she interviews African Americans in the entertainment industry about their craft. Clayton and Josh Gwynn co-host Pineapple Street Studio podcast “Back Issue” which reminisces on how moments in ...

#1583

Joanna Klink

#80033

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Joanna Klink is an American poet. She was born in Iowa City, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and for many years taught in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana. She currently teaches at UT Austin's Michener Center for Writers. Her most recent book, The Nightfields, was published July 7, 2020 by Penguin.

#1584

Fleda Brown

#92793

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Fleda Brown is an American poet and author. She is also known as Fleda Brown Jackson. Biography Fleda Brown was born in Columbia, Missouri, and raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In 1978 she joined the University of Delaware English Department. There she founded the Poets in the Schools Program, which she directed for more than twelve years. She served as poet laureate of Delaware from 2001 to 2007, when she retired from the University of Delaware and moved to Traverse City, Michigan. She currently teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

#1585

Milena Minkova

#40407

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Milena Minkova is a Bulgarian scholar of the Latin language. She has lived, studied and taught in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. She is now a resident of the United States and teaches Latin and Classics at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Since the last decade of the 20th century, she has been one of the leading figures in the revival of the use of Latin among Latin scholars and teachers. She earned two Ph.Ds in Classics and Latin, one from the University of Sofia and the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome .

#1586

Traci Brimhall

#100875

Overall Influence

Traci Brimhall is a poet and professor in the United States. She teaches creative writing at Kansas State University. Life Brimhall was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1982. She graduated from Florida State University with a BA, and completed an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She received a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University, where she was a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

#1587

Sue Parrill

#111312

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Dr. Anna Sue Parrill is a scholar of 19th-century English literature. She has published articles and books on film and television productions set in the Tudor and Napoleonic periods, as well as on adaptations of Jane Austen's novels.

#1588

JaHyun Kim Haboush

#64676

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

JaHyun Kim Haboush was a Korean American scholar of Korean history and literature. Haboush was the King Sejong Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University when she died in New York City in 2011.

#1589

Laura Mullen

#108488

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Laura Mullen , is an American poet who has published 8 books of poetry. Life and work Mullen received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, before going to teach at, among other places, Colorado State University, where her courses included seminars on Modernism, Postmodernism, and Cross-Genre Writing. She’s also been invited as a guest author to teach at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program , Columbia College – Chicago - , Brown University , and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop Summer Program, . She was awarded a N...

#1590

Carolyn Dinshaw

#113203

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context. Education and career Dinshaw was born to an Indian father, Dudley Dinshaw a Parsi from Lucknow and an American mother.

#1591

Jane Harris

#132504

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages . Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.

#1592

Yuko Taniguchi

#82976

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Yuko Taniguchi is a Japanese American poet and novelist. Life She graduated from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University and from the University of Minnesota with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

#1593

Patricia Broderick

Patricia Broderick

#70392

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Patricia Biow Broderick was an American playwright and painter. She was the wife of actor James Broderick and the mother of actor Matthew Broderick. Early life and career Broderick was born Patricia Biow in New York City, the daughter of Sophie and Milton H. Biow , president of an advertising firm. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland. When she was 18, her mother died in 1943 at the age of 48. Her father died 33 years later. In Mexico, Broderick studied painting with Rufino Tamayo who had been her art teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan. She began writing plays in the 1940s and several of them were performed in New York and London.

#1594

Anne Pippin Burnett

#90694

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Anne Pippin Burnett was an American classical scholar and academic who specialised in Greek literature, especially tragedy and the lyric poetry of the archaic and early classical periods. Career She earned her BA from Swarthmore College in 1946 and followed this with an MA in 1947 at Columbia University. In 1953 she gained her PhD from Berkeley. She subsequently taught at Vassar College and was an editor and translator for the publishing house Hachette. She joined the University of Chicago, in 1961 as an assistant professor, becoming a professor in 1970. She was chair of the Department of Cl...

#1595

Natalie Kusz

#65216

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Natalie Kusz is an American memoirist. Life She graduated from University of Alaska Fairbanks with a B.A. and an M.F.A. She taught at Bethel College, and Harvard University. She teaches at Eastern Washington University. Her work appeared in O, Harper's, Threepenny Review, McCall's, Real Simple, and The New York Times.

#1596

Gina Luria Walker

#100445

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Gina Luria Walker is Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The New Historia at The New School in New York City. She teaches Women's Intellectual History and is one of world's foremost scholars on eighteenth-century feminist intellectual Mary Hays and her circle.

#1597

Jeremy Ingalls

#104822

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Mildred Dodge Jeremy Ingalls was an American poet and scholar of Chinese literature. In 1943, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on her major poem, The Thunder Saga of Tahi, which was published in 1945 by Alfred Knopf.

#1598

Cleopatra Mathis

#124172

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Cleopatra Mathis is an American poet who since 1982 has been the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the English department at Dartmouth College, where she is also director of the Creative Writing Program. Her most recent book is White Sea . She is a faculty member at The Frost Place Poetry Seminar.

#1599

Helju Rebane

#73443

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Helju Rebane is an Estonian writer. She writes mainly prose and science fiction in the Estonian and Russian languages. She was born in Tallinn. Her father was philosopher and her uncles were physicist and former president of the Academy of Sciences of the ESSR Karl Rebane, physicist , and mathematician . She graduated from Tartu State University Tartu with a degree in theoretical mathematics in 1971. From 1972 until 1973, she worked in the department of logic and psychology at the university. Later she studied logic at Moscow University. In Moscow, she was as a lecturer at the Institute of ...

#1600

Maria Semple

#110238

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of This One Is Mine , Where'd You Go, Bernadette , and Today Will Be Different . Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan, and Ellen. She is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards.

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