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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1651

Sandrine Bonnaire

Sandrine Bonnaire

#62610

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sandrine Bonnaire is a French actress, film director and screenwriter who has appeared in more than 40 films. She won the César Award for Most Promising Actress for À Nos Amours , the César Award for Best Actress for Vagabond and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for La Cérémonie . Her other films include Under the Sun of Satan , Monsieur Hire , East/West and The Final Lesson .

#1652

Opal J. Moore

#94155

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Opal J. Moore is an African-American poet, short-story author, and professor. Life and career Moore was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1953. Moore received a BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1974, an MA in fine arts from the University of Iowa School of Art in 1981, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1982.

#1653

Yumna Al-Eid

#152417

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Yumna Al-Eid is a Lebanese writer and literary critic. She is considered a professor in Arabic criticism in more than one university in both the Orient and the Occident. Her original name, according to her identity, is Hikmat Al-Majthoob Al-Sabbagh, and she is also known as Hikmat Al-Khatib. She has tens of publications in both literature and criticism. She received many Arabic honorary certificates and awards, amongst which is Al-Owais Award. She was also chosen as the Cultural Personality of the Year in Sharjah International Book Fair.

#1654

Helen Sword

#133512

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Helen Claire Sword is a New Zealand academic, specialising in modernist poetry and academic writing, and is an emeritus professor at the University of Auckland. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2023.

#1655

Yang Hi Choe-Wall

Yang Hi Choe-Wall

#63204

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Yang Hi Choe-Wall is a Korean Australian academic, writer and researcher specialising in Korean literature of Chosŏn period . She was Associate Professor in the Division of Pacific and Asian History, the Australian National University. Choe-Wall is the winner of the 2013 Daesan Literary Awards, who is now retired and living in Canberra, Australia.

#1656

Constance Beresford-Howe

#112771

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Constance Beresford-Howe was a Canadian novelist. Biography Constance Beresford-Howe was born in 1922 in Montreal and graduated from McGill University with an BA and MA, and from Brown University, where she completed a Ph.D. in 1950. She taught English literature and creative writing at McGill in Montreal and Ryerson University in Toronto until her retirement in 1988.

#1657

Bunty Avieson

#102026

Overall Influence

Carolyn "Bunty" Avieson is an Australian journalist, feature writer, novelist and academic. Career Avieson has a PhD and a Master of Philosophy from Macquarie University, as well as an Associate Diploma of Journalism from RMIT University. In 2008–2009 she worked as a media consultant to newspaper Bhutan Observer, partly funded by the United Nations Development Program and was a consultant to Journalists Without Borders, Asia Pacific Desk.

#1658

Anna Jackson

#136973

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet, fiction and non-fiction writer and an academic. Biography Jackson grew up in Auckland and now lives in Wellington. She has an MA from the University of Auckland and a DPhil from Oxford University. She is currently an associate professor in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

#1659

Susan Hubbard

#117578

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Susan Hubbard is an American fiction writer and professor emerita at the University of Central Florida. She has written seven books of fiction, and is a winner of the Associated Writing Program Prize for Short Fiction and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best prose book of the year by an American woman.

#1660

Carol Lynch Williams

#118602

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Carol Lynch Williams is an author of Young Adult and Middle Grade novels. As of 2016, Williams is the conference director for Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference and is a professor of creative writing at Brigham Young University . She graduated in 2008 from Vermont College of Fine Arts with a degree in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

#1661

Panna Naik

#59803

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Panna Naik is an Indian Gujarati language poet and story writer who has lived in Philadelphia, United States since 1960. Working in the local university, she wrote poetry drawn from the world around her. Her book Pravesh received critical acclaim and she has published several poetry collections since.

#1662

Emily Apter

#107702

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Emily Susan Apter is an American academic, translator, editor and professor. Her areas of research are translation theory, language philosophy, political theory, critical theory, continental philosophy, history and theory of comparative literature, psychoanalysis, and political fiction. She is currently Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University.

#1663

Gale Owen-Crocker

#77432

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Gale Owen-Crocker is a professor emerita of the University of Manchester, England. Before her retirement she was Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies.

#1664

Shahd Alshammari

#113778

Overall Influence

Shahd Alshammari is a Kuwaiti writer, academic scholar and assistant professor of the English language. She is well known for her researches that focus on human and women's rights, disability issues and, recently, illness narrative. She published six books, in total, three of which she was the author, and the other three co-author. Additionally, she participated in over 15 conference, both as attendee and Keynote speaker, and discussed different topics in the fields of literature and culture. In 2019, she was nominated for the British Council Alumni Awards – Social Impact. In 2021 she won Out...

#1665

Connie Ann Kirk

#119961

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Connie Ann Kirk is an American author. Her books cover a range of subjects including concise literary biographies for students, bio-critical literary studies, and references. She has also written a fiction picture book for children. Her articles, both in print and online, address topics in literature, poetry, popular culture, history, education, art, television, science, sports, and film.

#1666

Carole Glasser Langille

#139422

Overall Influence

Carole Glasser Langille is a Canadian poet and author of three books of poetry. Life Langille is the author of four books of poetry, two collections of short stories, two children's books, and a non-fiction book, Doing Time: Writing Workshops in Prison.

#1667

Dora Malech

#151659

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Dora Malech is an American poet. Life Malech grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale University in 2003, and received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2005. She has since taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College; and Augustana College. She has served as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California, and she is a co-founder and former director of the arts engagement organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project.

#1668

Summer Edward

#132898

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Summer Edward is a Trinidadian American writer, children's editor, educator, literary activist and children's literature specialist based in the USA. In 2010, at the age of 24, she founded Anansesem ezine, the first children's literature publication in the English-speaking Caribbean and served as its editor-in-chief for 10 years. At 26, she became one of the Caribbean's youngest literary editors. Anansesem has published some of the most distinctive and distinguished voices in Caribbean literature for young people including Floella Benjamin, Gerald Hausman, Ibi Zoboi, Itah Sadu, Lynn Joseph, Margarita Engle, Nadia L.

#1669

Carole E. Newlands

#134654

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Carole Elizabeth Newlands is a scholar of Latin literature and culture. She is a distinguished professor and associate chair of undergraduate studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Career Newlands joined the faculty of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2009, after previously teaching at Cornell University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Wisconsin, Madison. In the summer of 2010, she was selected as the Visiting NEH Professor of Classics at the University of Richmond. Her responsibilities included teaching Ovid's works to students in their classics department.

#1670

Sylvie Bérard

#132343

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sylvie Bérard is a Canadian academic and science fiction writer. Born in Montreal, she studied semiotics at the Université du Québec à Montréal and went on to lecture for the Department of French and perform post-doctoral research at the University of Toronto. She later lectured on Quebec literature at Trent University; she also was director of the Department of languages and modern literature.

#1671

Lynda Myles

#105732

Overall Influence

1939 - 2023 (84 years)

Lynda Myles was an American television writer, actress, playwright, memoirist, and short fiction writer. She attended Michigan State University and was known for her Broadway plays such as Two Gentlemen of Verona, Iphigenia in Aulis, No Exit, Rocking Chair, Trojan Women and Neil Simon's Plaza Suite.

#1672

Bernice Zamora

#118066

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Bernice B. Ortiz Zamora is a Chicana poet, "one of the preeminent poets to emerge from the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s". She received a B.A. in English and French from Southern Colorado State College and an M.A. in English from Colorado State University in Fort Collins in 1972. In 1972, she enrolled in the English doctoral program at Marquette University and transferred to Stanford University the following year, where she ultimately received her Ph.D. in 1976. Besides being an accomplished poet, Zamora also taught classes in ethnic studies, Chicano studies, and literature at Santa Clara University, Stanford University, University of California, and University of San Francisco.

#1673

Vivien Noakes

#99292

Overall Influence

1937 - 2011 (74 years)

Vivien Noakes was a British biographer, editor and critic, an expert on Edward Lear and the literature of the First World War. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life and education She was born Vivien Mary Langley, daughter of aeronautical engineer Marcus Langley and educated at Dunottar School, leaving with A-levels. It was not until later in life that she took her degree at Manchester College, Oxford, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she was subsequently lecturer.

#1674

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

#129953

Overall Influence

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is an American novelist and short story writer from Denver, Colorado. Her short stories have appeared in Electric Literature, The American Scholar, and the Boston Review. In 2020, she was the American Book Award winner for Sabrina & Corina: Stories. Her first novel, Woman of Light: A Novel , is a national bestseller and won the 2023 WILLA Literary Award in Historical Fiction.

#1675

Shi Shuqing

#39688

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Shi Shuqing is a Taiwan-Chinese writer and educator. She was born in Lukang, Changhua and is the sister of writer Li Ang. Shi was educated at Tamkang University and City University of New York. She taught at Taipei's National Chengchi University. In 1978, Shi moved to Hong Kong where she became director of Asian programs at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, later working as a consultant there. She returned to Taiwan in 1997.

#1676

Felicity Nussbaum

#124719

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Felicity A. Nussbaum is Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include 18th-century literature and culture, critical theory, gender studies and postcolonial and Anglophone studies. In the past she taught at Syracuse University and Indiana University South Bend.

#1677

Kathleen Graber

#75960

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kathleen Graber is an American poet and professor of creative writing and poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has also taught at New York University. Early life and education Graber was raised in Wildwood, New Jersey where she still owns a home. She studied under poet Stephen Dunn and went on to earn her BA in philosophy from New York University. She quit teaching middle school English to afford herself the ability to enroll in an MFA program and pursue a career in poetry. Kathleen said of the experience, "Most poets live humble lives, I think, and maybe that is by temperament or d...

#1678

Amber Dermont

#152033

Overall Influence

Amber Dermont is an American author. She has a bachelor's degree from Vassar College, an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, and she is a faculty member at Rice University.

#1679

Dzvinia Orlowsky

Dzvinia Orlowsky

#68053

Overall Influence

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of six poetry collections including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry.

#1680

Josiane Balasko

Josiane Balasko

#45882

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Josiane Balasko is a French actress, writer, and director. She has been nominated seven times for César Awards, and won twice. Career One of Balasko's most recognized roles among English speakers is as a lesbian in 1995's . She won the 1996 César Award for best screenplay, and was also nominated as best director. The movie itself was nominated for best film. Balasko's other César nominations for best actress were for Too Beautiful for You , , and That Woman .

#1681

Maxine Scates

#119568

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Maxine Scates is an American poet. Life Born and raised in Los Angeles, she received a B.A. in English from California State University, Northridge, where she studied with the poet Ann Stanford, whose selected poems Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford she later co-edited with another former student of Stanford's, the poet David Trinidad. She moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1973 to pursue an M.F.A. at the University of Oregon which she received in 1975.

#1682

Mary La Chapelle

#111438

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Mary La Chapelle , is an American short story writer. Life La Chapelle graduated from University of Minnesota, and from Vermont College with an MFA. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Lumina, Nimrod, Northern Lit Review, Redbook, and First.

#1683

Dee L. Clayman

#55436

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Dee L. Clayman is an American classical scholar and a professor of Classics at the City University of New York. She is a pioneer in the effort to digitize the humanities and served as president of the Society for Classical Studies.

#1684

Stephanie Young

#135206

Overall Influence

Stephanie Young is an American poet, activist, and scholar who lives in Oakland, California. Young teaches at Mills College, where she is also the Director of Strategic Initiatives and Programs. At Mills College, Young participated as labor organizer in a successful adjunct unionization campaign. Institutional politics in the university have been a theme in her work.

#1685

Susan L. Taylor

Susan L. Taylor

#25102

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Susan L. Taylor is an American editor, writer, and journalist. She served as editor-in-chief of Essence from 1981 through 2000. In 1994, American Libraries referred to Taylor as "the most influential black woman in journalism today".

#1686

Wendy Scase

#116841

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Wendy Scase is the Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is currently researching the material histories of English medieval literature, studying a range of material from one-sheet texts to the largest surviving Middle English manuscript.

#1687

Maureen Medved

#101426

Overall Influence

Maureen Medved is a Canadian writer and playwright. She is also an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. She has been published in literary journals and magazines and has had her plays produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, Waterloo, Ontario and Toronto, Ontario. She wrote a screenplay based on her first novel The Tracey Fragments, which was made into a film of the same name directed by Bruce McDonald and starring Elliot Page.

#1688

Michelle Grattan

Michelle Grattan

#18129

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Michelle Grattan is an Australian journalist who was the first woman to become editor of an Australian metropolitan daily newspaper. Specialising in political journalism, she has written for and edited many significant Australian newspapers. She is currently the chief political correspondent with The Conversation, Australia's largest independent news website.

#1689

Samantha Thornhill

#83260

Overall Influence

Samantha Felisha Thornhill is a poet, author, educator and producer from the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Biography Thornhill's interest in poetry began in 6th grade when she wrote a poem about Christmas in Trinidad. This established a connection with her Trinidadian roots. She attended Wellington High School in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she was assisted by her 10th grade English teacher to develop her writing skills. Thornhill later began to contribute to the school's literary magazine, Poetry Justice. By her senior year, she became the editor-in-chief of the magazine. She atte...

#1690

Mia Slavenska

#60930

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Mia Slavenska, née Čorak was a Croatian-American soloist of the Russian Ballet of Monte Carlo in 1938–1952 and 1954–1955. Biography Mia was born in Slavonski Brod in the Croatian family of the pharmacist Milan Čorak and his wife, housewife Gedwiga Čorak. When their daughter was one year old, the family moved to Zagreb. There Mia studied ballet at the "Josephine Weiss school" and the Russian émigré, ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater and Diaghilev's Russian Seasons Margarita Frohman. Taking the stage from the age of five, at the age of sixteen she became the prima ballerina of the ballet troupe of the HNK in Zagreb.

#1691

Carmen Castillo García

Carmen Castillo García

#137981

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Carmen Castillo García is a Spanish Professor Emeritus of Classical Philology at the University of Navarra in Pamplona. She is the second woman to obtain a Latin Philology Chair in Spain. She is an expert on the Roman province of Baetica in southern Iberia.

#1692

Joan Chissell

#91774

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Joan Olive Chissell was an English writer and lecturer on music, and music reviewer for The Times 1948–79. She made a special study of the life and works of Robert Schumann. Career Joan Chissell was born in Cromer, and was educated at the Manor School in Sheringham. She gained a scholarship at Royal College of Music in 1937, where she studied piano and composition with Kendall Taylor, theory under Herbert Howells and history and criticism under Frank Howes. Her pianistic career was cut short by an injury. Despite this, while at the RCM she gave the first UK performance of Maurice Ravel's P...

#1693

Kirstin Cronn-Mills

Kirstin Cronn-Mills

#97208

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Kirstin Cronn-Mills is an American author of children's books including the Minnesota Book Award finalist The Sky Always Hears Me And the Hills Don't Mind and Beautiful Music for Ugly Children which was a Stonewall Book Award winner and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her third novel, Original Fake , was a Minnesota Book Award finalist in 2017, along with her third nonfiction volume for high school libraries, LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field. Her fourth novel, Wreck, will be published in 2019.

#1694

Kerry Madden

#89789

Overall Influence

Kerry Madden is an American author of teen novels and a professor of creative writing at Antioch University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Personal life and education Madden was born November 22, 1961, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

#1695

Naomi Lebowitz

#101164

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Naomi Gordon Lebowitz is a literary philosopher, author, critic, and scholar of American, English, Scandinavian, and continental European literature, as well as a translator of Danish fiction. Her seven book-length critical studies of authors and thinkers have focused on the difficulties of spiritual and religious passion in the face of modern belief systems. Lebowitz's studies were sometimes eclipsed by the concentration of American academics on deconstructionist theory during the latter decades of the twentieth-century. More recent approaches that value intersectionality and historicism, h...

#1696

Naomi Lindstrom

#75993

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Naomi Eva Lindstrom is an American literary critic and translator who has published books and articles on Latin American narrative and poetry and Jewish writing from Latin America. Background Lindstrom studied at the University of Chicago and is the Gale Family Foundation Professor in Jewish Arts and Culture and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is co-director of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies. Lindstrom is the daughter of the noted sociologist Frederick B. Lindstrom , best kn...

#1697

Rilla Askew

#93026

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rilla Askew is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in Poteau, in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Early life and education Askew graduated from the University of Tulsa with a B.F.A. in Theatre Performance in 1980. She moved then to New York where she studied acting at HB Studio with Herbert Bergoff in New York and later Curt Dempster at Ensemble Studio Theatre. She began writing—plays first, then fiction—with her theatre background supporting the use of language and rhythm in her works. She went on to stu...

#1698

Leona Gom

#34132

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Leona Gom is a Canadian poet and novelist. Born on an isolated farm in northern Alberta, she received her B.Ed. and M.A. from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She has published six books of poetry and eight novels and has won both the Canadian Authors Association Award for her poetry collection Land of the Peace in 1980 and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her novel Housebroken in 1986.

#1699

Dolors Bramon

#94467

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Maria Dolors Bramon Planes is a Spanish philologist, historian, and university professor specializing in the Muslim world. Biography Dolors Bramon married Ernest Lluch in 1966, with whom she had three daughters – Eulàlia, Rosa, and Mireia – and whom she accompanied to Valencia in 1970 when he joined its University. They lived there for a decade, until 1977.

#1700

Grace Bauer

#97308

Overall Influence

Grace Bauer is an American poet. She lives in Nebraska, grew up in Pennsylvania and has also lived in New Orleans, Montana, Virginia and Massachusetts. Biography Bauer received her BA in journalism from Temple University. She received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions