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.

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1751

Candace Slater

#144314

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Candace Slater is an American academic and researcher specializing in Brazilian literature and culture. She was born in Mineola, New York. Slater received a PhD from Stanford University. She is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary area of research has been folk and popular traditions in Brazil, in other countries in Latin America and on the Iberian Peninsula.

#1752

Mónica Echeverría

Mónica Echeverría

#118344

Overall Influence

1920 - 2020 (100 years)

Monica Echeverría Yáñez was a Chilean journalist, writer, actress and a Literature professor. She defined herself as a feminist since "before people called it that" and called herself a "rebel" and "anarchist" in the face of the neoliberal economic course of the Chilean government.

#1753

Lynn Sukenick

#145359

Overall Influence

1937 - 1995 (58 years)

Lynn Luria Sukenick was an American poet. She is also credited with coining the terms "daughter centric", and "matrophobic". Life She received her undergraduate education at Brandeis University. She received a doctorate in English from City University of New York.

#1754

Zhana Nikolova-Gŭlŭbova

#130416

Overall Influence

1908 - 2009 (101 years)

Zhana Nikolova-Gŭlŭbova was a Bulgarian philology scientist, essayist and publicist. She was an author of literary and linguistic research, and philosophical essays. Her main scientific interests were in the field of literary criticism and lexicography. She was also a certified translator and editor. She was the first woman teaching at Sofia University. She was awarded the highest honorary degree of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 'Doctor Honoris Causa'. She died in 2009, aged 101.

#1755

Grażyna Vetulani

Grażyna Vetulani

#59622

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Grażyna Małgorzata Vetulani née Świerczyńska is a Polish philologist and linguist, professor of the humanities, professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.

#1756

Patricia Garfield

#63347

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Patricia L. Garfield was an American academic specializing in the study of dreams, specifically the cognitive processes underpinning them. She was the author of 10 books covering a broad range of dream topics. These topics include: nightmares, children’s dreams, healing through dreams and dream-related art. Her best-known work is “Creative Dreaming.” Originally published in 1974 it was revised and reprinted again in 1995. She holds a Ph.D in psychology from Temple University.

#1757

Nora-Eugenie Gomringer

Nora-Eugenie Gomringer

#45073

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Nora-Eugenie Gomringer is a German and Swiss poet and writer. She has won a number of awards, including the 2013 Literaturpreis des Kulturkreises der deutschen Wirtschaft, the 2015 Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis and the Carl Zuckmayer Medal by Rhineland-Palatinate.

#1758

Dorothy J. Thompson

#110178

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Dorothy Joan Thompson, is an ancient historian and classicist who specialises in the culture and society of Hellenistic Egypt, the early Hellenistic world, and documentary papyrology. Career In her research and writing Thompson employs the evidence of papyri to look at social and economic questions; she is further concerned with relations between the different ethnic groups of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. She has taught extensively at Cambridge with a visiting professorship in 1996 at Princeton University. She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1982–1983 as well as a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina in 1993–1994.

#1759

Margaret Scott

#119043

Overall Influence

1934 - 2005 (71 years)

Margaret Daphne Scott was an Australian author, poet, comedian, educator and public intellectual. Background Margaret, her first husband, playwright Michael Boddy and her first son, Daniel, migrated to Tasmania from the United Kingdom in 1959. Two more children, Kate and Marcus, were born in Tasmania. From 1979, she lived with legal scholar Michael Scott and had her final child, Sarah, as well as becoming the step mother to Jane, Christian and Katharine Scott. In 1978, Margaret received her PhD from the University of Tasmania, and was head of the English department at the university until 1989.

#1760

Lucia Prauscello

#133438

Overall Influence

Lucia Prauscello is a Classicist who works on Greek Philology and Literature. She is a professor at the University of Oxford. Education Prauscello completed her undergraduate degree at Pisa University in 1999, followed by a postgraduate degree at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa in 2003.

#1761

Samantha Harvey

#77344

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Samantha Harvey is an English novelist. She is the author of several critically acclaimed novels and has been shortlisted for various literary prizes. Education Harvey completed the Bath Spa University Creative Writing MA course in 2005, and has also completed a postgraduate course in philosophy and a PhD in creative writing.

#1762

Obioma Nnaemeka

Obioma Nnaemeka

#17574

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Obioma Nnaemeka is a Nigerian-American academic. She is the Chancellor’s Professor of French at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Education Born in Agulu, Nigeria, Nnaemeka earned her BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she studied African Studies, French and German. In 1989 she obtained her PhD in French and Francophone studies from the University of Minnesota.

#1763

Hwang Seon-mi

#134170

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Hwang Seon-mi is a South Korean author and professor who is best known for her fable The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, which has also been made into a successful animated film in South Korea, Leafie, A Hen into the Wild.

#1764

Devon J. Moore

#91443

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Devon Jean Moore is an American poet and author. Biography Moore a native of Buffalo, NY, USA. She currently lives in Syracuse, NY, USA where she teaches writing at Syracuse University and SUNY Oswego. A former Syracuse University Fellow, she has an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University.

#1765

Jennifer Natalya Fink

Jennifer Natalya Fink

#104869

Overall Influence

Jennifer Natalya Fink is an American author working in experimental feminist and queer fiction. She is best known for her novels Burn, V, and The Mikvah Queen, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her novel, Bhopal Dance , won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize in 2017.

#1766

Doris Davenport

#90677

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Doris Davenport, sometimes styled as doris davenport , is a writer, educator, and literary and performance poet. She wrote an essay featured in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color entitled "The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin." She also focuses her efforts on poetry and education.

#1767

Cecilia Galante

#142222

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Cecilia Galante is a twenty-first century American author. Background Galante has a BA from King's College in Pennsylvania, and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. Prior to becoming a successful author, she taught high school English and wrote a monthly book column for the Times Leader newspaper. In 2011, at a fundraising event for St. Martin's Ministry , Ms. Galante revealed that she was "once a needy mother with an infant daughter in a battered women’s shelter.”

#1768

Agnes Bushell

#93184

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Agnes Bushell is an American fiction writer and teacher. She has published steadily since her work first appeared in print in the mid-1970s. She is the author of fourteen novels and innumerable essays and book reviews most of which have appeared in Maine newspapers and publications, including Down East Magazine. She has taught literature and writing at Maine College of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of Southern Maine, and lives in Portland, Maine with her husband, James Bushell, a criminal defense lawyer.

#1769

Caroline Aherne

Caroline Aherne

#69496

Overall Influence

1963 - 2016 (53 years)

Caroline Mary Aherne was an English actress, comedian, writer, producer and director. She was best known for performing as the acerbic chat show host Mrs Merton, in various roles in The Fast Show, and as Denise in The Royle Family , a series which she co-wrote. She won BAFTA awards for her work on The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.

#1770

Jen Hofer

#169299

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Jen Hofer is an American poet, translator, and interpreter. Awards Hofer won the 2012 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, for the poem Negro Marfil/Ivory Black. The PEN Award judges refer to Hofer's translation of Negro Marfil/Ivory Black as a work that "articulates writing as a gesture hovering between binaries, bodies, languages, modes of perception, cultures...[and is] reflexively about translation.

#1771

Ann Townsend

#123574

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and a professor of English and director of the creative writing at Denison University, She has published three original poetry collections and co-edited a collection of lyric poems.

#1772

Diana Der Hovanessian

Diana Der Hovanessian

#75930

Overall Influence

1934 - 2018 (84 years)

Diana Der Hovanessian , Armenian American poet, translator, and author. Much of the subject of her poetry was about Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. She wrote and published over twenty-five books. Life and career Diana Der Hovanessian was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an Armenian family. She received her education at Boston University, majoring in English, and then continued her education at Harvard University, studying under Robert Lowell. She became an American literature professor at Yerevan State University, and twice a Fulbright Professor of Armenian Poetry. She led many worksho...

#1773

Michelle Hoover

#54302

Overall Influence

Michelle Hoover is an American writer and college instructor. She is the author of The Quickening, a 2010 novel. Biography She was born in Ames, Iowa, but currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She was selected as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University. She was a MacDowell Fellow from the MacDowell Colony. She has taught writing at Boston University and, since 2014, teaches at Brandeis University as the Fannie Hurst writer-in-residence. She also teaches at GrubStreet, where she co-founded the Novel Incubator program. She has an MFA from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#1774

Kathy Fagan

#91111

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Kathy Fagan Grandinetti is an American poet. Biography Fagan earned a B.A. in English from California State University, Fresno in 1980. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She teaches at Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Shenandoah and The Missouri Review.

#1775

Zofia Agnieszka Kłakówna

Zofia Agnieszka Kłakówna

#152551

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Zofia Agnieszka Kłakówna is a Polish philologist, educational theorist, academic, schoolteacher of Polish language with practice at all levels of school teaching and author of school textbooks. A lecturer at the Pedagogical Academy in Kraków and the Jan Długosz Academy in Częstochowa , a teacher of Polish language at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg , she also worked as a teacher and director of the Polish School in Rabat, Morocco . She was the editor-in-chief of a methodical journal for Polish language teachers Wisełka, later renamed Ojczyzna Polszczyzna and Nowa Polszczyzna...

#1776

Betsy Prioleau

#122431

Overall Influence

Betsy Prioleau is an American author and cultural historian. Prioleau's books include Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them and Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love, and Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and A Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age.

#1777

Cordelia Gundolf

#167912

Overall Influence

1917 - 2008 (91 years)

Cordelia Gundolf was an Italian Language educator in Australia, and an expert in Italian Literature, publishing a number of works on the topic. Background Born in Munich, Germany on 31 November 1917, Gundolf came from a famous literary family, being the daughter of Friedrich Gundolf and godchild of Melchior Lechter, a noted graphic artist. She originally worked in Rome as a translator. Gundolf's grandfather was Jewish; her mother was concerned this would make problems for the family following Adolf Hitler's accession to power in Germany, so she asked Albert Einstein, a family friend for advice.

#1778

Donna Masini

#135486

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Donna Masini is a poet and novelist who was born in Brooklyn and lives in New York City. Life She graduated from Hunter College and New York University. Her work frequently deals with urban life and the working-class. Her first book of poems, That Kind of Danger, received the Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Mona Van Duyn. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her poem, "Anxieties," recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2015.

#1779

Michèle Sarde

#111642

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Michèle Sarde, is a French writer , born in 1939. She taught French literature and culture, together with gender and intercultural studies at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., from 1970 to 2000. She is now a Professor emerita at that university and lives in Chile and France.

#1780

Maite Carranza

#153206

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Maite Carranza Gil-Dolz del Castellar is a Spanish writer and educator, mainly writing in Catalan. She is a recipient of the Premio Crítica Serra d'Or, TP de Oro award, Premio Ondas award, and the Spanish National Prize for Children's and Juvenile Literature.

#1781

Daphne Athas

#111551

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Daphne Athas was an American author, best known for the 1971 novel Entering Ephesus, which was included on Time magazine's Ten Best Fiction List of 1971. Her other books include The Weather of the Heart, The Fourth World, and Greece by Prejudice. Athas was the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and the University of North Carolina's Lifetime Mentor Award.

#1782

Kathleen George

#142233

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Kathleen Elizabeth George is an American professor and writer best known for her series of crime novels set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She teaches theatre arts at the University of Pittsburgh and fiction writing at the Chatham University Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

#1783

Yang Chia-hsien

#153540

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Yang Chia-hsien is a contemporary Taiwanese writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is also an assistant professor of Department of Chinese Literature at the National Tsing Hua University. Yang sees Lu Xun, Zhang Ai-ling and Yang Mu as the influences of her writings. Yang is regarded as an iconic poet of the cyber-age. Her works, including The Civilization of Holding One’s Breath and Sea Breeze and Sparks, are described as incorporating classical concepts and modern perceptions. Yang was also the youngest poet to be included in the Comprehensive Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Lit...

#1784

Evelyn Lord Smithson

#170433

Overall Influence

1923 - 1992 (69 years)

Evelyn Lord Smithson was a noted twentieth-century scholar of classics and Classical archaeology and an expert on Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece. Evelyn Lord Smithson was educated at the University of Washington and at Bryn Mawr College where she took her Master's degree and her doctorate in Classical archaeology and ancient Greek in 1956. She was a student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1948 to 1950.

#1785

Rosemary Hennessy

#101822

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rosemary Hennessy is an American academic and socialist feminist. She is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She has been a part of the faculty at Rice since 2006.

#1786

Dorothy Auchterlonie Green

#104538

Overall Influence

1915 - 1991 (76 years)

Dorothy Auchterlonie was an English-born Australian academic, literary critic and poet. Life Auchterlonie was born in Sunderland, County Durham in England. In 1927 when she was 12 years old, her family moved to Australia.

#1787

Elaine Romero

#146112

Overall Influence

Elaine Romero is a Latina playwright, who grew up close to the border in San Juan Capistrano, California and has lived in Tucson, Arizona for many years. She is now an associate professor at the University of Arizona, teaching playwriting, script writing, and dramaturgy.

#1788

Siobhan Vivian

#160280

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Siobhan Vivian is a bestselling American novelist, editor, and screenwriter. Early life and education Siobhan Vivian was born in New York City on January 12, 1979. At a young age, Vivian moved to Rutherford, New Jersey where she went to school and often got in trouble for sneaking out and not doing her homework. A 1997 graduate of Rutherford High School, Vivian has used her childhood in Rutherford as a "deep well" of ideas for her work.

#1789

Nancy Reisman

#123556

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Nancy Reisman is an American author. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Biography Reisman received her M.F.A. from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her B.A. from Tufts University.

#1790

Liv Lundberg

#134722

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Liv Lundberg was a Norwegian poet, novelist, essayist and translator. She was also a professor at the University of Tromsø. Literary career Lundberg made her literary debut in 1979 with the poetry collection Den klare tonen. Further collections are Hjertespeil , Språkets hus har åpninger and Steindrømt . In 1986 she published Sylvia Plath: Lady Lazarus, a translation of works by Sylvia Plath into Norwegian language. Her poetry collection Tveegget engel from 1988 was also influenced by Plath. In the 1990s she wrote two novels,Vinterens hjerte and Nybegynnerens forutsetningsløshet . In 1997 she translated Inger Christensen's Alfabet into Norwegian language.

#1791

Nina Burton

#170525

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Eva Ulla Nina Burton is a Swedish poet and essayist. Career Burton's writings have, among other things, focused on the intersection between natural sciences and humanities. The essay book Den nya kvinnostaden was nominated for the August Prize in 2005. Her book Flodernas bok won Stora fackbokspriset in 2012. In 2016 Burton was awarded the August Prize for non-fiction for Gutenberggalaxens nova. She was nominated to the culture prize of Dagens Nyheter in 2021 for her book Livets tunna väggar.

#1792

Lucy Thurber

#78109

Overall Influence

Lucy Thurber is an American playwright based in New York City. She is the recipient of the first Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting, a Lilly Award and a 2014 OBIE Award for The Hill Town Plays.

#1793

Sharon Marcus

#136117

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sharon Marcus is an American academic. She is currently the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance. Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim Fellowship, and ACLS fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia.

#1794

Louise McNeill

#101971

Overall Influence

1911 - 1993 (82 years)

Louise McNeill , also known as Louse McNeil Pease, was an American poet, essayist, and historian of Appalachia. She began teaching in a one roomed schoolhouse in West Virginia and would eventually move on to teach at other universities. She would eventually become a professor of history and English at West Virginia University where her archives are held today.

#1795

Ann Jones

#48891

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Ann Jones is an American journalist and author of a number of non-fiction books about her research into women's and humanitarian issues: Women Who Kill, Kabul in Winter, Looking for Lovedu, Next Time She'll be Dead and When Love Goes Wrong. She has also written and taken photographs for a number of publications including National Geographic Traveler, Outside, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. The majority of her work and writings centers on women's issues, especially domestic violence. Jones has provided humanitarian aid around the world, including Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast.

#1796

Helen Bevington

#86500

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Helen Smith Bevington was an American poet, prose writer, and educator. Her most noted book, Charley Smith's Girl , was "banned by the library in the small town of Worcester, N.Y., where she grew up, because the book tells of her minister father's having been divorced by her mother for affairs that he was carrying on with younger female parishioners."

#1797

Epp Annus

#116165

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Epp Annus is an Estonian writer and literary scholar. In 2002, she graduated from the University of Tartu, studying Estonian literature. Her doctoral thesis topic was "Kuidas kirjutada aega". Works 2007: novel "Sina, Matilda"children books: "Jaak ja lumi", "Jaak läheb poodi", "Oravaraamat", "Oravalapsed vanas majas", "Oravalapsed talvises metsas", "Mari päev", "Oskar läheb õue", "Unelaul kahel häälel", "Väike lumehelbeke", "Täheraamat"

#1798

Jane Aaron

#126679

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jane Rhiannon Aaron FEA FLSW is a Welsh educator, literary researcher and writer. She was Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan in south Wales, until her retirement in September 2011. She then became an associate member of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of South Wales. Aaron is known for her research and publications on Welsh literature and the writings of Welsh women. She was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2011.

#1799

Antoaneta Sabău

#87038

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Antoaneta Sabău is a Romanian classicist, translator and editor. Her main contribution are mainly in the field of medieval and translation studies. Studies Antoaneta Sabău studied classical languages at Bucharest University, and medieval studies at Central European University. She had research stays at Centre Sèvres , University College Dublin, Warburg Institute , Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies . She received a certificate in medieval Latin from the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies .

#1800

Sonja Tomić

#107082

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sonja Tomić is a contemporary Croatian writer, translator, illustrator, croatist, Germanist and radio presenter. She has been noted for her works in children's literature and traveloguess. She won the 2011 Literary Kranjčić.

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