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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#1951
Valentina Radinska
#176117
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Valentina Dimitrova Radinska is a Bulgarian poet. Life She studied at the Sofia University, and graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute with an MA. She was an editor at Bulgarian Cinematography. She teaches at Sofia University.
Go to Profile#1952
Rachel Bowlby
#171373
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Rachel Bowlby FBA is Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London. Biography Bowlby completed undergraduate studies in Latin and Greek Literature at the University of Oxford and a PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University in 1983. She held positions at the University of Sussex, University of Oxford, and the University of York before joining UCL in 2004 as Lord Northcliffe Professor of English Literature. Between 2014 and 2016 Bowlby was Professor of Comparative Literature. She rejoined UCL in 2017. Bowlby was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.
Go to Profile#1953
Ezzat Goushegir
#69841
Overall Influence
Ezzat Goushegir is a fiction writer and playwright born in Iran and living in the U.S. since 1986. She has published four books in Persian, including two collections of short stories. She began her playwriting career in 1976 when her first play "Beginning of Bloom" was produced for Iranian National Television followed by the “Middle East Odyssey” at Culture and Art Hall in Tehran. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa.
Go to Profile#1954
Barbara Hardy
#144492
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Barbara Gladys Hardy, was a British literary scholar, author, and poet. As an academic, she specialised in the literature of the 19th Century. From 1965 to 1970, she was Professor of English at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Then, from 1970 to 1989, she was Professor of English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Go to Profile#1955
Betty Comden
#130787
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Betty Comden was an American lyricist, playwright, and screenwriter who contributed to numerous Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century. Her writing partnership with Adolph Green spanned six decades: "the longest running creative partnership in theatre history." The musical-comedy duo of Comden and Green collaborated most notably with composers Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein, as well enjoyed success with Singin' in the Rain, as part of the famed "Freed unit" at MGM.
Go to Profile#1956
Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich
#171519
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich is a German philologist. She specializes in medieval and neo-Latin literature, and the medieval reception of Ovid. Education and career Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich studied Latin and French at the University of Mannheim, the University of Nantes and the University of Lausanne. After a year of study at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, she studied Latin philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1986 to 1989. In 1990, she received her doctorate in Mannheim with the thesis Das Motiv der "Witwe von Ephesus" in lateinischen Texten der Antike und des Mittelalters . ...
Go to Profile#1957
Mez Packer
#97027
Overall Influence
Mez Packer is an English novelist. She is the author of Among Thieves and The Game Is Altered and lectures at Coventry University. Biography Packer was born in Essex, England and spent her early years amongst the Plymouth Brethren, in Essex. She attended Warwick University from 1984 to 1988, gaining a degree in Philosophy and literature.
Go to Profile#1958
Lynette R. Muir
#132378
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Lynette Ross Muir was an English scholar of medieval literature. She was a Reader in the Department of French Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. Life Lynette Ross Muir was born on 30 December 1930 in Eastbourne, England. She received a BA with first-class honours from the University of Exeter in 1951 and a PhD from the University of London in 1956.
Go to Profile#1959
Madeleine Monette
#132013
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Madeleine Monette is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, and poet from Quebec. Biography Born in Montreal, she has lived in New York City since 1979. After her first novel, Le Double suspect, won the Prix Robert-Cliche in 1980, she devoted herself to writing novels and short stories that combine an intimate sense of reality with an acute social consciousness, revisiting the social novel and probing at close range the notion of "Americanity", creating works that are cultural multiplexers and whose geography tends to undo the very concept of "territory", physical or imaginary. In 2007, she ...
Go to Profile#1960
Rusty Morrison
#128075
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Rusty Morrison is an American poet and publisher. She received a BA in English from Mills College in Oakland, California, an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, California, and an MA in Education from California State University, San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and was Poet in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in 2009. She has also served as a visiting poet at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Redlands, the University of Arizona, Boise State University, Marylhurst University, and Millikin University.
Go to Profile#1961
Amanda Holden
#96772
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Amanda Juliet Holden was a British pianist, librettist, translator, editor and academic teacher. She is known for translating opera librettos to more contemporary English for the English National Opera, and for writing new librettos, especially in collaboration with Brett Dean. She contributed to encyclopedias such as the New Penguin Opera Guide.
Go to Profile#1962
Nike Sulway
#171685
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Nike Sulway is an Australian novelist. Career Nike Sulway is a novelist, short story writer, researcher, and teacher who works across speculative and literary fiction. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Griffith University and is a graduate of the Clarion South Writers Workshop. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in a range of journals, including Lightspeed, Shimmer, Interzone, Fantasy Magazine, Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin, Liminality, Southerly, Verity La, Cordite Poetry Review and ASIM . She has also had works included in a range of anthologies, including The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, vol.
Go to Profile#1963
Mary Koncel
#148261
Overall Influence
Mary Koncel is an American poet who has published three books of poetry. She is known for writing prose poetry. Biography Koncel was born and raised in Chicago and holds a BFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and MFA in English from MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She lives in Worthington, Massachusetts. Koncel teaches writing at Smith College, and is a writing consultant to Boston's Department of Public Health in the AIDS Bureau. Koncel is known for prose poetry that is a combination of humor and visual images.
Go to Profile#1964
Emma Lou Thayne
#60473
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Emma Lou Warner Thayne was a poet and novelist. She was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and counted as one of the 75 most significant Mormon poets. Thayne graduated from the University of Utah in 1945. She would later return there to coach tennis and teach English. In the late 1960s, she completed a master's degree at the University of Utah. She was on the faculty over 30 years. In 1949, she married Mel Thayne; they became the parents of five daughters.
Go to Profile#1965
Mary Jacobus
#107983
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Mary Longstaff Jacobus, is a British literary scholar. Career Born on 4 May 1944 to Marcus and Diana Jacobus, Jacobus attended Oxford High School before going up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford , to read English; she graduated in 1965 and then completed her doctorate in 1970.
Go to Profile#1966
Debora Shuger
#95443
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Debora Kuller Shuger is a literary historian and scholar. She studies early modern, Renaissance, late 16th- and 17th century England. She writes about Tudor-Stuart literature; religious, political, and legal thought; Neo-Latin; and censorship of that period.
Go to Profile#1967
Judith A. Boss
#93104
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Judith A. Boss is an ethicist and author of several college textbooks with McGraw-Hill Education, including THiNK, Ethics for Life, and Analyzing Moral Issues. She is also author of a romantic/suspense novel set in Antarctica titled Deception Island as well as a YA suspense novel titled Fall from Grace .
Go to Profile#1968
Larissa Szporluk
#107557
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Larissa Szporluk is an American poet and professor. Her most recent book is Embryos & Idiots . Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Daedalus, Faultline, Meridian, American Poetry Review, and Black Warrior Review. Her honors include two The Best American Poetry awards, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council.
Go to Profile#1969
Sandra Alcosser
#175729
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sandra B. Alcosser is an American poet. She was appointed the first state poet laureate of Montana from July 13, 2005 - August 13, 2007 and was superseded by Greg Pape. Life She started the MFA in writing program at San Diego State University and is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in writing program at Pacific University.
Go to Profile#1970
Ham Jeung-im
#133207
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ham Jeung Im is a South Korean writer, professor, and former literary editor. She began writing articles on Korean literature for the journal Monthly Literature & Thought when she graduated from university, and went onto become the editor-in-chief of the journal Writer’s World and the publisher Solbook. She made her literary debut in 1990 when her short story “Gwangjangeuro ganeun gil” won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer's Contest and has written prolifically since. In 1993, she married Kim So-jin, a leading realist writer in South Korea. She stayed with him until his death in 1997. Her experienc...
Go to Profile#1971
Liz Gloyn
#154663
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Gloyn is a Reader in Latin Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, the University of London and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research focuses on the intersection between Latin literature, ancient philosophy and gender studies; as well as topics of classical reception, and the history of women in the field of Classics.
Go to Profile#1972
Mary Bucci Bush
#108022
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Mary Bucci Bush is an American author and a professor of English and creative writing at California State University, Los Angeles. Bush won a PEN/Nelson Algren award for her collection of short stories, A Place of Light, in 1987; a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in 1995; and the Tillie Olsen Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association for her novel, Sweet Hope, in 2012.
Go to Profile#1973
Yoo An-jin
#164135
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Yoo An-Jin is a South Korean poet, essayist, and professor. Life Yoo An-Jin was born April 21, 1941, in Andong, Gyeongsangbuk-do. Yu graduated from Seoul National University Teacher's College's Department of Education and then received her graduate degree and Ph.D. in Education from the University of Florida. She has taught at Dankook University and Seoul National University. Her literary debut was in 1965.
Go to Profile#1974
Lee Hall
#86865
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Lee Hall was an American painter, writer, educator, and a university president. She was an abstract landscape painter. She served as the 13th president of Rhode Island School of Design . In 1993, Hall wrote a controversial book on the artists Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning.
Go to Profile#1975
Helen Carr
#150695
Overall Influence
Helen Carr is a journalist and emeritus professor of English and comparative literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her book on the imagist movement was described by Ian Sansom in The Guardian as "the most comprehensive book on the subject ever written."
Go to Profile#1976
Magda Cârneci
#98483
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Magda Cârneci is a poet, essayist, and art historian born in Romania. She took a Ph.D. in art history at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and received several international grants in literature and art history . Member of the well-known “generation of the ‘80s” in Romanian literature, of which she was one of the theoreticians, after the Revolution of December 1989 she became actively involved in the political and cultural Romanian scene of the 1990s. In the 2000s, after working as a visiting lecturer at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris, she was the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris .
Go to Profile#1977
Barrie Jean Borich
#176472
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Barrie Jean Borich is an American writer. She is best known for her memoirs My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage, which won a Stonewall Book Award in 2000 and was a shortlisted Lambda Literary Award nominee for Lesbian Biography at the 12th Lambda Literary Awards, and Body Geographic, which won the Lambda for Lesbian Biography/Memoir at the 26th Lambda Literary Awards.
Go to Profile#1978
Sarah Kay
#117365
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Sarah Kay is an American poet. Known for her spoken word poetry, Kay is the founder and co-director of Project V.O.I.C.E. , a group dedicated to using spoken word as an educational and inspirational tool.
Go to Profile#1979
Maurya Simon
#165346
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Maurya Simon is an American poet, essayist, and visual artist. She is the author of ten collections of poetry. Her most recent volume of poetry is The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems . Early life and education Born in New York City, Simon is the daughter of the Los Angeles visual artist, Baila Goldenthal, and the ethnomusicologist and composer, Robert Leopold Simon. She spent her early years living in Europe with her family, and later moved to Hermosa Beach in southern California, where she lived from 1959–1968. Simon attended the University of California, Berkeley , where she was a student of Robert Grenier, Angela Davis, and Richard Tillinghast.
Go to Profile#1980
Liliane Kerjan
#149480
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Liliane Kerjan was a French historian. She specialized in American literature. Biography Kerjan earned a degree in English from Rennes 2 University and a doctoral degree from Blaise Pascal University in 1977. She would go on to serve as Vice-President of Rennes 2 and subsequently was Rector of the Académie de Limoges from 2000 to 2005. As part of the Fulbright Program, she was a visiting professor at the University of San Diego and Yale University.
Go to Profile#1981
Antonella Anedda
#66435
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Antonella Anedda is an Italian poet and essayist. Of Sardinian and Corsican descent, she was born in Rome and was educated there and in Venice, receiving a degree in the history of modern art from Sapienza University of Rome. Anedda received a scholarship from the Cini Foundation. She worked for the in Rome and taught at the University of Siena and the University of Lugano. Anedda has also participated in radio programs for Rai 3. Her work has appeared in various magazines such as alfabeta2, Rinascita, Ipso facto and Doppiozero and she has contributed articles on art criticism to various mag...
Go to Profile#1982
Max D. Adams
#172485
Overall Influence
Max D. Adams is an American screenwriter and author. The winner of a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting and an Austin Film Festival screenwriting award, Adams went on to be dubbed “Red Hot Adams” by Daily Variety.
Go to Profile#1983
Rebecca Tamás
#116634
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Rebecca Tamás is a British poet, writer, critic and editor, the daughter of Hungarian philosopher and public intellectual Gáspár Miklós Tamás. She was born in London in 1988. She studied creative writing at the University of Warwick and at the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Grierson Verse Prize, before completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia. She is a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University where she co-convenes The York Centre for Writing Poetry Series. She is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of the anthology Spells: 21st-century Occult Poetry . She has publi...
Go to Profile#1984
Yohanca Delgado
#171153
Overall Influence
Yohanca Delgado is an American writer. She won a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts grant. She graduated from Kenyon College, and American University. She was an editor at Folio, and Barrelhouse. She is a Stegner Fellow.
Go to Profile#1985
Debra Monroe
#111610
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Debra Monroe is an American novelist, short story writer, memoirist, and essayist. She has written seven books, including two story collections, a collection of essays, two novels, and two memoirs, and is also editor of an anthology of nonfiction. Monroe has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, is a winner of the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and was cited on several "10 Best Books" lists for her nationally-acclaimed memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain.
Go to Profile#1986
Martha Vicinus
#157623
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Martha Vicinus is an American scholar of English literature and Women's studies. She serves as the Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor of English, Women's Studies, and History at the University of Michigan. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, Vicinus was a faculty member in the English Department at Indiana University from 1968 to 1982. She has written several books about Victorian women as well as gender and sexuality. She earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1968.
Go to Profile#1987
Rebecca W. Keller
#97096
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Rebecca W. Keller, Ph.D., incorporated Gravitas Publications Inc in 2003 to develop and publish core sciences curriculum under the Real Science-4-Kids imprint. She has authored and published Real Science-4-Kids student texts, teacher manuals, and student laboratory workbooks in chemistry, biology and physics to serve kindergarten through ninth grade, available through mainstream and home school book distributors.
Go to Profile#1988
Kim Soo-hyun
#100679
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Kim Soo-hyun is a South Korean screenwriter and novelist. Career Kim Soon-ok graduated from Korea University in 1965 with a degree in Korean Language and Literature. She was hired at MBC after winning in their radio drama competition in 1968 with her radio play 그 해 겨울의 우화 . Using the pen name Kim Soo-hyun, the first television drama she wrote, Rainbow, went on air in 1972.
Go to Profile#1989
Debra Allbery
#110156
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Debra Allbery is an American poet. Life Allbery is an Ohio native, though she currently lives in Fairview, North Carolina. She has graduated from College of Wooster, University of Virginia, and University of Iowa, has taught at Dickinson College, Randolph College, the University of Michigan, and is the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she's been on the poetry faculty since 1983.
Go to Profile#1990
Patricia Klindienst
#142404
Overall Influence
Patricia Klindienst is an American writer, and independent scholar. She graduated from Stanford University, with a Ph.D. She taught at Yale University. Awards 2007 American Book Award2008 Phillip and Eric Heiner Endowed Fellowship, Virginia Center for Creative Arts
Go to Profile#1991
Maya Sonenberg
#171389
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Maya Sonenberg is an American short story writer. Life She graduated from Wesleyan University, in 1982 and from Brown University, in 1984. She teaches at University of Washington. Her work appeared in Gargoyle, Santa Monica Review,
Go to Profile#1992
Sabine Wichert
#125134
Overall Influence
1942 - 2014 (72 years)
Sabine Wichert , was a German born poet and historian who lived in Northern Ireland Biography Born Sabine Wichert on 8 June 1942 in Graudenz, West Prussia which is now Grudziadz, Poland, Wichert was educated in West Germany. She studied in Frankfurt, Marburg, FU Berlin and Mannheim. She also studied at the London school of Economics and Oxford University in Britain. She first came to Belfast as a tourist.
Go to Profile#1993
Cynthia Farah
#133245
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Cynthia Weber Farah Haines is an American photographer and writer. She is best known for her work on documenting Southwest writers and art and life in El Paso, Texas. Farah has also taught at the University of Texas at El Paso where she was involved with the university's first film studies program.
Go to Profile#1994
Nandini Das
#105241
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. She is a specialist in Shakespeare studies, Renaissance romance writing, early travel literature, and encounters between different cultures.
Go to Profile#1995
Brigitte Peucker
#171195
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German Languages and Literatures and Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. A disciple of Yale University's Geoffrey Hartman, she has written on and teaches in film studies, particularly German cinema, as well as in German lyric poetry and literature. She is an expert on Alfred Hitchcock, horror film, and painting and cinema. She has been Chair of the Film Studies Program at Yale University 1986-2000, and of the German Department 1997-2002, 2003-4.
Go to Profile#1996
Susan Sandler
#115130
Overall Influence
Susan Sandler is an American writer and currently a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She has numerous writing credits but is probably best known for her play Crossing Delancey, which she also adapted into a film with the same name starring Amy Irving and directed by Joan Micklin Silver.
Go to Profile#1997
Madeleine Doran
#88945
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Madeleine Kathryn Doran was an American literary critic and poet who taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1935 until her retirement in 1975. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Doran graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in 1927. She received her M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1928, and her Ph.D. in 1930 from Stanford. She joined the English department at the University of Wisconsin in 1935, and was made a full professor in 1952.
Go to Profile#1998
Yaba Badoe
#121952
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker, journalist and author. Career Yaba Badoe was born in Tamale, northern Ghana. She left Ghana to be educated in Britain at a very young age. A graduate of King's College, Cambridge, Badoe worked as a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ghana, before beginning her career in journalism as a trainee at the BBC. She also was a researcher at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and has worked as a producer and director making documentaries for the main television channels in Britain.
Go to Profile#1999
Cary Holladay
#176399
Overall Influence
Cary Holladay is an American writer and professor, best known for her historical short fiction. In 1999, her story "Merry-Go-Sorry" about the West Memphis Three murder case was selected by Stephen King for an O. Henry Award.
Go to Profile#2000
Penelope Schott
#65454
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Penelope Scambly Schott is a feminist poet and former professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College and Rutgers University. She has published several books of poetry and has taught poetry writing for Thomas Edison State College.
Go to Profile