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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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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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#1851

Josephine Gattuso Hendin

#99248

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Josephine Gattuso Hendin is an Italian American feminist novelist and critic. Life She grew up in Queens and now lives in Manhattan. She graduated from City College of New York, magna cum laude, and Columbia University with an M.A. in 1965, and Ph.D. in 1968. She taught at Yale University, and City College of New York. She teaches at New York University.

#1852

Mary Travis Arny

#92121

Overall Influence

1909 - 1997 (88 years)

Mary Wilson Travis Arny was a writer, naturalist, historian, and educator. Arny served as a professor of biology at Montclair State College in Montclair, New Jersey. She also authored several books on history, nature, and ecology, and she wrote articles for newspapers in New Jersey.

#1853

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

#131619

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is an American poet of Pakistani origins. Her poetry, written in English, has been translated into Spanish and Urdu. She has been the editor of the Magee Park Poets Anthology and MahMag and is a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. Many of Hashmi's poems explore feminism, history and perspectives on Islam.

#1854

Karin Coonrod

#78694

Overall Influence

Karin Coonrod is an American theater director and writer who teaches at Yale School of Drama. Coonrod is known for her modern adaptations of classic plays by William Shakespeare and other playwrights. She often chooses to direct plays produced from unusual sources such as lesser-known works by notable playwrights, adaptations from non-dramatic sources, and the writings of notable figures in history.

#1855

Ardis Butterfield

#127062

Overall Influence

Ardis Butterfield is a scholar of medieval music and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor of English, and Professor of Music and French at Yale University United States. Education Butterfield read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, followed by a Master's degree in medieval literature at the University of Bristol, both in England, after which she returned to Trinity College to complete a PhD. Her PhD was entitled 'Interpolated lyric in medieval narrative poetry' .

#1856

Julie Carr

#163971

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Julie Carr is an American poet who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in 1988, from New York University with an MFA in 1997, and from University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in 2006. She teaches at University of Colorado.

#1857

Sarah Einstein

#166522

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Sarah Einstein is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. She is a recipient of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Pushcart Prize.

#1858

Kathy Psomiades

#124664

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Kathy Alexis Psomiades is an American literary critic and an associate professor of English at Duke University. Education Psomiades graduated from Bryn Mawr College and received her M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale University before earning her Ph.D. at Yale.

#1859

Catherine Wagner

#168648

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Catherine Wagner is an American poet and academic. Life Wagner lived in Asia and the Middle East until 1977, when her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Iowa , and University of Utah .

#1860

Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry

#53380

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry is an American literary critic and writer of Hispanic descent. Personal life The daughter of Carlota and Canuto Gonzáles, she was born on the family farm near Roy, New Mexico and grew up in Roy and in Rosebud, New Mexico. She married Edward Berry; the couple had one daughter.

#1861

Alison Townsend

#118860

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alison Townsend is an American poet. Life She grew up in New York. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Clackamas Literary Review, Fourth Genre, New Letters, The North American Review, and The Southern Review.

#1862

Claudia Moscovici

Claudia Moscovici

#150168

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Claudia Moscovici is a Romanian-American novelist and art/literary critic. Life Moscovici was born in Bucharest, Romania. At the age of 12, she immigrated with her family to the United States where she has gone on to obtain a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Moscovici taught philosophy, literature and arts and ideas at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she writes from her experience of life in a totalitarian regime, which marked her deeply.

#1863

Sultana Wahnón

#168344

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sultana Wahnón Bensusan is a Spanish essayist and literary critic, a professor at the University of Granada specializing in literary theory and comparative literature. Academic activity Sultana Wahnón graduated in Spanish Philology in 1982, with a licentiate in the poetry of the National Literature Prize winner , a Melillan author to whom she has dedicated two books. Her doctoral thesis, defended in 1987 and published by Rodopi in 1998, consists of a description of the Spanish fascist aesthetic system and the analysis of its progressive dissolution in postwar literary criticism. Specializing ...

#1864

Persis Karim

#65541

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Persis Maryam Karim is an American poet, essayist, editor, and educator. She serves as the Neda Nobari Distinguished Chair and director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University since 2017. Her work focuses on Iranians living outside of Iran, specifically Iranian Americans, and their complicated histories and identities which is often presented through storytelling.

#1865

Bettina Judd

#101057

Overall Influence

Bettina Judd is an African-American interdisciplinary writer, scholar, artist, and performer. Early life and education Judd was born in Baltimore and raised in Southern California. She received her bachelor's degree in Comparative Women’s Studies and English from Spelman College in 2005, her master's degree in Women's Studies from University of Maryland in 2007, and her PhD in Women's Studies in 2014, also from the University of Maryland. Her dissertation, Feelin Feminism: Black Women's Art as Feminist Thought , is an analysis of how various oppressions that affect black women are felt, and ma...

#1866

Celia Deutsch

#95455

Overall Influence

Celia M. Deutsch is an American religious sister, academic, educator, writer, and Old Testament scholar. She is a professor at Barnard College and serves on the Christian Scholars Group on Christian-Jewish Relations.

#1867

Laura Kipnis

#79107

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic and essayist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment and free speech policies in higher education.

#1868

Natasha Sajé

#88922

Overall Influence

Natasha Sajé is an American poet. Life She grew up in New York City, and New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland, College Park. She teaches at Westminster College. and Vermont College.

#1869

Mary Schendlinger

#147749

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mary Schendlinger is a writer and editor. She is the senior editor at Geist, a magazine she co-founded with Stephen Osborne. Personal life Schendlinger grew up in Waukesha, Wisconsin. As a child, she was greatly inspired by Mad Magazine, and submitted her writing and comics to it several times without success.

#1870

Bernice McFadden

Bernice McFadden

#144660

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.

#1871

Eleanor Winsor Leach

#149069

Overall Influence

1937 - 2018 (81 years)

Eleanor Winsor Leach was the Ruth N. Halls Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. She was a trustee of the Vergilian Society in 1978–83 and was second and then first vice-president in 1989–92. Leach was the president of the Society of Classical Studies in 2005/6, and the chair of her department . She was very involved with academics and younger scholars – directing 26 dissertations, wrote letters for 200 tenure and promotion cases, and refereed more than 100 books and 200 articles. Leach's research interests included Roman painting, Roman sculpture, and Cicero and Pliny's Letters.

#1872

Adela de la Torre

#46590

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Adela de la Torre is an American professor and university administrator. She has served as the ninth president of San Diego State University in San Diego, California, since 2018. She is the first woman to serve in the role.

#1873

Nalini Das

#103493

Overall Influence

1916 - 1993 (77 years)

Nalini Das was a Bengali educationist, writer and editor. She was one of the editors of the Bengali children's magazine Sandesh. Early life Nalini Das was born to Arunnath Chakraborty and Punyalata . Her father was a deputy magistrate posted in Bihar, and her mother was the daughter of Bengali writer, technologist and entrepreneur Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury. Bengali writer Sukumar Ray was her maternal uncle, and Oscar-winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray her cousin. She completed her matriculation from the Brahmo Balika Shikshalaya and IA from St. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School in...

#1874

Sue Owen

#119952

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sue Owen is a dark humor poet influenced by the work of W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, and Mark Strand. As the Poet-in-Residence, she taught poetry writing until 2005 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#1875

Margaret Diesendorf

Margaret Diesendorf

#121661

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

Margaret Diesendorf née Máté , , was an Australian linguist, poet, editor, translator and educationist. Born in Vienna, Austria, Diesendorf migrated to Australia in 1939. She published two books of poetry, made numerous translations of other people's works, and with Grace Perry, edited Poetry Australia.

#1876

Edith Covensky

#169808

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Edith Covensky is a Hebrew poet living in the United States and senior lecturer in Hebrew and Israeli Studies at Wayne State University. She has authored 34 books of poetry, in Hebrew, bilingually in Hebrew and English, trilingually in Hebrew, Arabic and English, and in Romanian and Spanish.

#1877

Nadine Meyer

#110952

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Nadine Sabra Meyer is an American poet. Life Nadine Meyer grew up in Baltimore, MD, where she earned a B.A. in Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins University. She earned her M.F.A. from George Mason University and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her forthcoming book of poems, entitled Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum, won the Green Rose Prize and will be published by New Issues Poetry and Prose in spring 2017. Her first book of poems, The Anatomy Theater, won the National Poetry Series, and was published by HarperCollins. Her poems have won the New Letters Prize for Poetry, the Meridian Editor's Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.

#1878

Susan Kinsolving

#81905

Overall Influence

Susan Kinsolving is an American poet whose books include The White Eyelash, Dailies & Rushes Peripheral Vision and Among Flowers. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, Yale Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Washington Post. A finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and the Yale Younger Series award, she has taught at Bennington College, California Institute of the Arts, University of Connecticut, Southampton College, and Chautauqua Institution. She has received international fellowships from ...

#1879

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb

#34312

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Amal Abdo Saad-Ghorayeb is a Lebanese writer and political analyst known for her writings on the Israeli–Lebanese conflict and Hezbollah. Life Saad-Ghorayeb was an assistant professor of political science at the Lebanese American University until 2008. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, England. She was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center .

#1880

Zandra Ahl

#151585

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Zandra Ahl, born 1975 in Växjö, is a Swedish designer, artist, and author. Biography Ahl graduated from Konstfack university in 1999. She subsequently became a Professor of glass and ceramics at Konstfack, before becoming the rector of Beckmans College of Design in September 2016. She is the author of the books Fult och snyggt in 1998 and, Svensk smak: myter om den moderna formen in 2001, which was co-authored with Emma Ohlson. Her writing caused controversy through their criticism of Swedish design as "banal", "white", and "austere" and its description of Sweden's late-20th century "less is...

#1881

Mayra Santos-Febres

#145676

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican author, poet, novelist, professor of literature, essayist, and literary critic and author of children's books. Her work focuses on themes of race, diaspora identity, female sexuality, gender fluidity, desire, and power. She is a cultural activist who helps to bring books to young readers and the less fortunate. Her writings have been translated into French, English, German, and Italian.

#1882

Susan Steinberg

#132156

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Susan Steinberg is an American writer. She is the author of the short story collections The End of Free Love , Hydroplane and Spectacle . Her first novel Machine: A Novel , revolving around a group of teenagers during a single summer at the shore, employs experimental language and structure to interrogate gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma.

#1883

Patricia Smith Yaeger

#123461

Overall Influence

1949 - 2014 (65 years)

Patricia Smith Yaeger was an American academic and literary critic. Biography Yaeger studied at Bryn Mawr College, receiving her BA in 1972. She took a Ph. D. at Yale University in 1980. She began her teaching career with posts at Williams College, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University before becoming an associate professor at the University of Michigan in 1990. She was promoted to professor in 1999 and named the Henry Simmons Frieze Collegiate Professor of English and Women's Studies in 2005. At the time of her death from ovarian cancer, she was researching the concept of the "female sublime".

#1884

Harriet Brown

#50733

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Harriet Brown is an American writer, magazine editor, and professor of magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Career She began her magazine career in 1979, with a stint at Popular Science magazine. She was part of the start-up staff for both Wigwag magazine, 1989–1991, and American Girl magazine American Girl, 1992–2000. Her 2006 New York Times article "One Spoonful at a Time" chronicled her daughter's descent into anorexia and recovery via family-based treatment, also known as the Maudsley approach. That article became the basis of her 2010 book, Brave Girl Eating.

#1885

Catherine Imbriglio

#172840

Overall Influence

Catherine Imbriglio is an American poet. Life Catherine was born and lives in Rhode Island. She graduated from Regis College, Boston College, Brown University, M.A. , and Ph.D. 1995. She teaches at Brown University.

#1886

Carol Houlihan Flynn

#144437

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Carol Houlihan Flynn was an American academic, literary critic, and writer of fiction. A professor emerita at Tufts University, Flynn was previously on the faculty of New York University and Princeton University. She is the author of Samuel Richardson, a Man of Letters; The Body in Swift and Defoe; a noir mystery, Washed in the Blood; and a memoir, The Animals, among other works. She was co-creator of the Somerville Conversations, a project designed to encourage dialogue between diverse members of the community.

#1887

Enid Shomer

#108067

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Enid Shomer is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five poetry collections, two short story collections and a novel. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology.

#1888

Bunny McBride

#85662

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Carol Ann McBride is an American author of a wide range of nonfiction books on subjects ranging from cultural survival and wildlife conservation to Native Americans. Her most recent ethnohistory book is Indians in Eden: Wabanakis and Rusticators on Maine's Mt.Desert Island . Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she regularly published her poetry and essays in the Christian Science Monitor, and reported on her travels in China, West Africa, East Africa, and northern Europe. Her articles appeared in various US newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, International Wildlife, Travel & Leisure, Sierra, Yankee Magazine, Downeast, and Reader's Digest.

#1889

Teresa Dovalpage

#172215

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Teresa Dovalpage is a Cuban writer. She was born in Havana but left in 1996 for the United States where she has been living ever since. She obtained her doctorate in Latin American literature from the University of New Mexico. She has published eight novels till date. Her third novel Muerte de un murciano en La Habana was runner-up for the Premio Herralde. Her next novel El difunto Fidel won the Rincon de la Victoria Award in Spain in 2009. She has also published several plays and short story collections.

#1890

Haruko Momma

#84314

Overall Influence

Haruko Momma is a philologist and a scholar of Old English literature and language. She has published on Old English poetic composition, Beowulf, philology in the nineteenth century, and teaching Old English. She is currently Professor of English at New York University.

#1891

Sue Henry

#110905

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Sue Henry was an American writer of mystery thriller fiction. She was also a librarian, college administrator, instructor at the University of Alaska. Biography According to her obituary in the Anchorage Daily News, she was born Mathilda Sue Hall in Salmon, Idaho, married Paul K. Henry in 1965; they had two boys, Bruce and Eric. After they divorced, she moved the boys to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1975.

#1892

Sandra McPherson

#79296

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Sandra Jean McPherson is an American poet. Born in San Jose, California, McPherson received her B.A. at San José State University, and studied at the University of Washington, with Elizabeth Bishop and David Wagoner. She considers her "literary mothers" to be Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer, and Adrienne Rich.

#1893

Mai Der Vang

#136421

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Mai Der Vang is a Hmong American poet. Life and education Vang was born in Fresno, California. Vang's parents resettled in the United States in 1981 as Hmong refugees fleeing Laos. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a degree in English, and from Columbia University with an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry.

#1894

Alegría Bendayán de Bendelac

#77485

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Alegría Bendayán de Bendelac was a Venezuelan philologist, professor, writer and Jewish poet. During her career she was dedicated to studying sephardic culture, especially the Judeo-Spanish language of northern Morocco. She was professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and published several works about sephardic traditions.

#1895

Sue Thomas

#44804

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sue Thomas is an English author. Writing since the late 1980s, she has used both fiction and nonfiction to explore the impact of computers and the internet on everyday life. In recent years her work has focused on the connections between life, nature and technology.

#1896

Danielle Fournier

#154779

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Danielle Fournier is a Quebec educator and writer. She was born in Montreal and received a PhD in literature from the Université de Sherbrooke. She also studied German at the University of New Brunswick. She has taught at the college and university level at various institutions including the Université de Sherbrooke, the University of New Brunswick, at McGill University, the Université du Québec à Montréal, at Concordia University and at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, where she held a permanent position.

#1897

Michelle Boisseau

#98547

Overall Influence

1955 - 2017 (62 years)

Michelle Boisseau was an American poet. Life and career Boisseau was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 26, 1955. She attended Ohio University, where she received a BA in 1977 and an MA in 1980, and the University of Houston where she received her PhD in 1985. She began teaching at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1995.

#1898

Marcella Polain

Marcella Polain

#134258

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Marcella Polain is an Australian-resident poet, novelist and short fiction writer. Early life and education Marcella Polain was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia at the age of two with her Irish father and Armenian mother.

#1899

Irene de Jong

#168913

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Irene J. F. de Jong is a classicist and professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam. She is known for her pioneering work on narratology and Ancient Greek literature. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

#1900

Catherine Merriman

#141595

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Catherine A. Merriman is a British novelist, short-story writer and editor who has published five novels and three short-story collections. Her work often addresses the experiences of women. Her first novel, Leaving the Light On , won the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award; her other works include the novels Fatal Observations and State of Desire ; the short-story collections Silly Mothers , shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year, and Getting a Life ; and the edited collection Laughing, Not Laughing: Women Writing on 'My Experience of Sex , which won an Erotic Award. Born in London, she has live...

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