The Most Influential People Across History
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 …
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#1801
Katharine Worth
#89823
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Katharine Worth was a British academic, Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. Biography Early life and education Katherine Joyce Worth was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 4 August 1922 to George and Elizabeth Lorimer. The family later moved to Newbiggin-by-the-Sea and Whitley Bay, Northumberland, where she grew up. She was successful in obtaining a scholarship to Bedlington High School but left to sit the Civil Service entry exam when she was sixteen years-old. She obtained a BA in English through a correspondence course with the University of London whilst employed as a junior civil servant.
Go to Profile#1802
Lydia Baumbach
#83702
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Lydia Baumbach was a South African classical scholar, known particularly for her work in the field of Mycenaean studies. Early life Lydia Baumbach was born in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 1924, to a German missionary family associated with the Rhenish Mission.
Go to Profile#1803
Žamila Kolonomos
#121599
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Žamila Andžela Kolonomos was a Sephardi Jewish freedom fighter, writer, academic, and political activist in what is now North Macedonia. During the Bulgarian occupation of her home city of Monastir , Kolonomos joined the anti-fascist Yugoslav Partisan resistance. After fighting to liberate Macedonia, she returned to Monastir to find her entire family had been killed in an extermination camp. She moved to the capital, where she became a professor at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje and worked to preserve the language and history of the country's Jewish community.
Go to Profile#1804
Jennifer Vanderbes
#138125
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Jennifer Vanderbes is an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Biography Early life Vanderbes was born in New York City. She attended the Dalton School and earned a B.A. in English magna cum laude from Yale University. While at Yale, she began writing for the Yale Daily News and was featured on CBS Evening News for her investigation into a suspicious egg donor agency that was then closed down due to her reporting. She graduated from Yale in seven semesters, and worked at CNN during her junior year. After Yale, Vanderbes worked as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette before mov...
Go to Profile#1805
Christine Hume
#135435
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Christine Hume is an American poet and essayist. Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry, Musca Domestica , Alaskaphrenia , and Shot and two works of nonfiction, Saturation Project and Everything I Never Wanted to Know. Her chapbooks include Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense , Ventifacts , Hum , Atalanta: an Anatomy , Question Like a Face , a collaboration with Jeff Clark and Red: A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story . She is faculty in the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.
Go to Profile#1806
Susan Treggiari
#114366
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Susan Treggiari is an English scholar of Ancient Rome, emeritus professor of Stanford University and retired member of the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. Her specialist areas of study are the family and marriage in ancient Rome, Cicero and the late Roman Republic.
Go to Profile#1807
Helene P. Foley
#154431
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Helene P. Foley is an American classical scholar. She is Professor of Classical Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and a member of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia. She specialises in ancient Greek literature , women and gender in antiquity, and the reception of classical drama.
Go to Profile#1808
Carolyne Wright
#120253
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Carolyne Wright is an American poet. Life She studied at Seattle University, New York University, and graduated from Syracuse University with master's and doctoral degrees. She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe College, Sweet Briar College, Emory University, University of Wyoming, University of Miami, Oklahoma State University, University of Central Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, The College of Wooster, and Cleveland State University.
Go to Profile#1809
Joy Katz
#161871
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Joy Katz is an American poet who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently All You Do Is Perceive, a National Poetry Series finalist , The Garden Room , and Fabulae . Her work appears in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast,Conduit, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Court Green, and Verse, Slope, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, and Prairie Schooner. Katz was raised in Buffalo; Philadelphia; Camden, Maine; and Cincinnati. She earned a B.S. at Ohio State University, an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, and she held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#1810
Lieve Van Hoof
#99283
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Lieve Van Hoof is a Belgian classical scholar and Research Professor at the University of Ghent. She specialises in work on the socio-political role of Greek and Latin literature in the Roman Empire. Van Hoof is currently engaged in examining Greek and Latin letters in order to understand lobbying in late antiquity. Van Hoof is known in particular for her work on Plutarch and Libanius.
Go to Profile#1811
Averill Curdy
#165638
Overall Influence
Averill Ann Curdy is an American poet and academic. Life She received her MFA from the University of Houston and her PhD from the University of Missouri. Curdy worked as an arts administrator and as a marketing manager and technical editor.
Go to Profile#1812
Leni Zumas
#152883
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Leni Zumas is an American writer from Washington, D.C., who lives in Oregon. She is the author of Red Clocks, The Listeners, and the story collection Farewell Navigator. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB, The Cut, Granta, Guernica, Portland Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times Style , Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Portland State University.
Go to Profile#1813
Jane Springer
#109033
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jane Springer is an American poet. Her honors include a 2010 Whiting Award, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, and the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Life She graduated from Florida State University with a PhD in creative writing. She is associate professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Hamilton College.
Go to Profile#1814
Anna Goldsworthy
#113852
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons. She has held several academic positions, and is director of the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide. She is a founder member of the Seraphim Trio, which has toured Australia and the world since 1995.
Go to Profile#1815
Marusya Bociurkiw
#133579
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Marusya Bociurkiw is a Canadian born, Ukrainian film-maker, writer, scholar, and activist. She has published six books, including a novel, poetry collection, short story collection, and a memoir. Her narrative and critical writing have been published in a variety of journals and collections. Bociurkiw has also directed and co-directed ten films and videos which have been screened at film festivals on several continents. Her work appears in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the National Archives of Canada, and many university libraries. She founded or co-founded the media org...
Go to Profile#1816
Naoíse Mac Sweeney
#87701
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Naoíse Mac Sweeney is a classical archaeologist and ancient historian. Since 2020 she has been Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#1817
Jane Mead
#108662
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Jane Mead was an American poet and the author of five poetry collections. Her last volume was To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019 . Her honors included fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations and a Whiting Award. Her poems appeared in literary journals and magazines including Ploughshares, Electronic Poetry Review, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Antioch Review and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1990.
Go to Profile#1818
Cassandra Atherton
#130969
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Cassandra Atherton is an Australian prose-poet, critic, and scholar. She is an expert on prose poetry, contemporary public intellectuals in academia, and poets as public intellectuals, especially hibakusha poets. She is married to historian Glenn Moore.
Go to Profile#1819
Eleanor Dickey
#86357
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Eleanor Dickey, FBA is an American classicist, linguist, and academic, who specialises in the history of the Latin and Greek languages. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Classics at the University of Reading in England.
Go to Profile#1820
Camille Bordas
#140496
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Camille Bordas is a French writer and academic. She is an assistant professor at the University of Florida and her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, Chicago Magazine, and LitHub.
Go to Profile#1821
Emily Mitchell
#137367
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Emily Mitchell is an Anglo-American writer. Her debut novel, The Last Summer of the World, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2007. It concerns the photographer Edward Steichen in the context of World War I and was a finalist for the 2008 Young Lions Award for fiction.
Go to Profile#1822
Juliet Kono
#152045
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Juliet Kono is a Hawaiian poet and novelist. Early life and education Kono was born in 1943 in Hilo, Hawaii to Yoshinori and Atsuko Asayama; her grandparents were immigrants from Japan. One of her earliest memories is from the April 1 tsunami resulting from the 1946 Aleutian Islands earthquake; her family lost their home, which was near the water's edge where Liliuokalani Gardens is today, and were forced to live near her grandparents, who operated a small sugar cane plantation in Kaiwiki. She was raised as a Shin Buddhist, and her mother and grandmother were active members of Honpa Hongwanji ...
Go to Profile#1823
Béatrix Beck
#83233
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
Béatrix Beck was a French writer of Belgian origin. She was born at Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, the daughter of the poet Christian Beck. After several jobs, she became the secretary of André Gide who encouraged her to write about her experiences: her mother's suicide, the war, her poverty, etc. Beck died in Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 2008.
Go to Profile#1824
Miriam Hoffman
#125487
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Miriam Hoffman is a Yiddish language playwright and lecturer. Hoffman was born in Łódź, Poland to a Yiddish-speaking family. While she was a child, her father was sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accompanied by Hoffman and her mother. After a difficult passage through several other countries, the family arrived in the United States in 1949. In 1957 Hoffman finished the Jewish Teacher's Seminary with a B.A. in pedagogy. In the 1970s she taught Yiddish at the University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. She received a B.A. from the University of Miami, cum laude, in 1981, and an M.A. from Columbia University, in 1983.
Go to Profile#1825
Shelia P. Moses
#68751
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Shelia P. Moses is an American writer whose subjects include comedian Dick Gregory and The Legend of Buddy Bush. In 2004, she was nominated for the National Book Award and named the Coretta Scott King Honoree for "The Legend of Buddy Bush" In 2009, her novel "Joseph" was nominated for the NAACP Image Award.
Go to Profile#1826
Chisa Hutchinson
#107271
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Chisa Hutchinson is an American playwright. Her plays have won multiple awards including the 2010 GLAAD Award, a Lilly Award in 2010, as well as a Lanford Wilson Award in 2015. She was a Lark Fellow as well as a Dramatist Guild Fellow in 2010–11. She was also a cast member of the Neo-Futurists in New York. Hutchinson was a staff writer for the Blue Man Group. She has been a member of New Dramatists for four years. Currently she is a Humanitas Fellow and the Tow Foundation Fellow at Second Stage. Hutchinson teaches creative writing at the University of Delaware. Most recently her play Somebody'...
Go to Profile#1827
Jill McDonough
#82566
Overall Influence
Jill Susann McDonough is an American poet. Life She grew up in North Carolina. She graduated from Stanford University and has an MA from Boston University. She taught in the Prison Education Program of Boston University.
Go to Profile#1828
Kristin Dimitrova
#97839
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Kristin Dimitrova, a Bulgarian writer and poet, was born in Sofia on May 19, 1963. Graduated in English and American Studies from the Sofia University, she now works there at the Department of Foreign Languages. From 2004 to 2006, she was editor of Art Trud, the weekly supplement for arts and culture of the Trud Daily, and in 2007-2008 was a columnist for Klasa Daily Since 2008 she has been a regular participant on the Darik Radio Friday talk show The Big Jury.
Go to Profile#1829
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting
#96985
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting is a feminist scholar and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Vice Provost of Arts and Libraries as well as Director of the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics. She served as Associate Provost for Academic Advancement from October 2021-June 2022. She was also the Chair of African American and Diaspora Studies until August 2022. She is editor of The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union", and editor of the academic journal Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.
Go to Profile#1830
Aimee Parkison
#123295
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Aimee Parkison is an American writer known for experimental, lyrical, feminist fiction. She has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize as well as the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Oklahoma State University.
Go to Profile#1831
Julienne van Loon
#108586
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Julienne van Loon is an Australian author and academic. In 2004 van Loon won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her first book, Road Story. Van Loon lived in Perth, where she was a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University from 1997 to 2015. In September 2015 she was appointed Vice Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University. She was director of the Australian Society of Authors from 2015 to 2017.
Go to Profile#1832
Hanan Qassab Hassan
#109830
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Hanan Qassab Hassan is a prominent Syrian writer, theatre director and academic. Biography Hanan's father was the prominent lawyer and writer Najat Qassab Hassan. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Paris III. She is currently the dean of the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus and a professor of Art history at the University of Damascus. She also served as the general secretary of the 2008 Arab Capital of Culture festivity.
Go to Profile#1833
Raffaella Cribiore
#87160
Overall Influence
1948 - 2023 (75 years)
Rafaella Cribiore was professor of Classics at New York University. She specialised in papyrology, ancient education, ancient Greek rhetoric and the Second Sophistic. Education Cribiore received her PhD from the Department of Classics at Columbia University in 1993. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Writing, Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt. She received her BA from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 1972.
Go to Profile#1834
Diana Cavallo
#92449
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Diana Cavallo was an American novelist, educator, playwright, and performer. Biography Early life and education Cavallo was born in Philadelphia in 1931, the daughter of Genuino and Josephine Cavallo. She grew up in an Italian neighborhood of South Philadelphia, where she attended public schools. Her grandparents, who lived with the family, spoke the Abruzzese dialect; Cavallo learned Italian from them, and later based two characters in her first novel on them. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and spent time in Florence, Italy, as a Fulbright scholar.
Go to Profile#1835
Julie Ann Ward
#73793
Overall Influence
Julie Ann Ward is the first poet laureate of Norman, Oklahoma. Norman was the first city in Oklahoma to appoint a poet laureate. She was born in Antlers, Oklahoma, and grew up in Elko, Nevada and Stillwater, Oklahoma. She is a graduate of University of Tulsa, University of Kansas and University of California, Berkeley. She taught at the University of Oklahoma as an Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American literature from 2014 to 2022.
Go to Profile#1836
Anelise Chen
#155665
Overall Influence
Anelise Chen is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. She was named "5 under 35" by the National Book Foundation in 2019. Her first novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was published in 2017 by Kaya Press and was named one of the best books of the year by Brooklyn Rail. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and New York University . Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, National Public Radio, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, Vice, and The Village Voice. She writes a column on mollusks for Paris Review.
Go to Profile#1837
Jane McCafferty
#128371
Overall Influence
Jane McCafferty is an American novelist, and short story writer. Life Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, Glimmer Train, Story, Witness. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has two daughters.
Go to Profile#1838
Sonya Sones
#100778
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sonya Sones is an American poet and author. She has written seven young adult novels in verse and one novel in verse for adults. The American Library Association has named her one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century.
Go to Profile#1839
Alleen Pace Nilsen
#148457
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Alleen Pace Nilsen is an American literary scholar, linguist, and one of the pioneers of both humor studies and children's literature studies. She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where she was previously the director of the English Education Program. Together with her husband Don Nilsen, she co-founded the International Society for Humor Studies.
Go to Profile#1840
Maud Casey
#133533
Overall Influence
Maud Casey is an American novelist, and professor of creative writing at University of Maryland, College Park. Life She is the daughter of novelist John Casey. She graduated from University of Arizona with an M.F.A.
Go to Profile#1841
Abigail Child
#145483
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Abigail Child is a filmmaker, poet, and writer who has been active in experimental writing and media since the 1970s. She has completed more than thirty film and video works and installations, and six books. Child's early film work addressed the interplay between sound and image through reshaping narrative tropes, prefiguring many concerns of contemporary film and media.
Go to Profile#1842
Esther Cohen
#120890
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Esther Cohen Dabah is a Mexican writer and academic. Early life Esther Cohen Dabah was born in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1949. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants to Mexico: Her father was Moisés Cohen, who immigrated from Turkey, and her mother was Sarah Dabah de Cohen, who came from Syria.
Go to Profile#1843
Irina Reyn
#117730
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Irina Reyn is a Russian-born American novelist. Her novel, What Happened to Anna K., was selected as the tenth best fiction book of 2008 by Jennifer Reese of Entertainment Weekly, and won the 2009 Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by emerging writers.
Go to Profile#1844
Rocío Orsi
#28369
Overall Influence
1976 - 2014 (38 years)
Rocío Orsi Portalo was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and translator, as well as a professor of philosophy at Charles III University of Madrid . She is considered to be one of the most important Spanish-language thinkers of her generation.
Go to Profile#1845
Kaltham Jaber
#108147
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kaltham Jaber is a Qatari writer and poet. Considered a pioneer among women writers in the country, she was the first Qatari woman to author a collection of short stories, doing so in 1978. This feat also made her the first Qatari woman to publish a major work. She teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at Qatar University.
Go to Profile#1846
Evelyn Shakir
#122464
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Evelyn Shakir was a literary scholar. She was a pioneer in the study of Arab American literature, publishing some of the first academic papers to name Arab American literature as a field. She published several books, including Remember Me to Lebanon: Stories of Lebanese Women in America, a 2007 short story collection that won the Arab American National Book Award. Her memoirs were published posthumously as Teaching Arabs, Writing Self: Memoirs of an Arab-American Woman . She is remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, and the Arab American Book Award nonfiction prize was renamed in he...
Go to Profile#1847
Tiziana Andina
#80675
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Tiziana Andina is full professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin. Biography Tiziana Andina was born in Asti in 1970. Andina attended the University of Turin where she studied philosophy graduating in 1994. She got her PhD in aesthetics and theory of art in 2003 from the University of Palermo. She went on to become researcher and professor at the University of Turin, where she teaches theoretical philosophy. Her recent research interests concern aesthetics and philosophy of art, social ontology, transgenerational action, the relationship between generations and problems of intergenerational justice.
Go to Profile#1848
Rebecca Dunham
#121386
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Rebecca Dunham is a contemporary American poet. Her work has been described as post-Confessional and concerns itself with feminist and ecological issues. Dunham's lyric poetry is distinguished by its use of extended poetic sequences, its interrogation of the persona as artifice, as well as grounding itself frequently in accounts of women's lives.
Go to Profile#1849
Ruth Gilbert
#114702
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Florence Ruth Gilbert was a New Zealand poet whose work has been widely published in New Zealand and Commonwealth countries. She was born in Greytown and educated at Hamilton High School and the Otago School of Physiotherapy.
Go to Profile#1850
Cathy Day
#122256
Overall Influence
Cathy Day is an American novelist, short story writer, and English professor. She is the author of the linked story collection, The Circus in Winter , and a memoir, Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love .
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