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,
#201
Michelle Cliff
#18662
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng , No Telephone to Heaven , and Free Enterprise . In addition to novels, Cliff also wrote short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various complex identity problems that stem from the experience of post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic individual identity in the face of race and gender constructs. A historical revisionist, many of Cliff's works seek to advance an alternative view of history against established mainstream narratives....
Go to Profile#202
Annie Dillard
#12388
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#203
Norma Alarcón
#14592
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Norma Alarcón is a Chicana author and publisher in the United States. She is the founder of Third Woman Press and a major figure in Chicana feminism. She is Professor Emerita of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#204
Hiromi Itō
#24738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Hiromi Itō is one of the most prominent women writers of contemporary Japan, with more than a dozen collections of poetry, several works of prose, numerous books of essays, and several major literary prizes to her name. She divides her time between the towns of Encinitas, California and Kumamoto in southern Japan. She is currently teaching at School of Culture, Media and Society in Waseda University, Tokyo.
Go to Profile#205
Hualing Nieh Engle
#22072
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Hualing Nieh Engle , née Nieh Hua-ling , is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa. Early life and education Nieh Hua-ling was born on 11 January 1925 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In 1936, Nieh's father, an official of the Kuomintang administration, was executed by the Communist Red Army during the Chinese Civil War.
Go to Profile#206
Sarah Ruhl
#7931
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice , The Clean House , and In the Next Room . She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Record...
Go to Profile#207
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#15678
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels , as well as a short story were adapted into films.
Go to Profile#208
Tracy K. Smith
#17086
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Go to Profile#209
Svetlana Boym
#20875
Overall Influence
1959 - 2015 (56 years)
Svetlana Boym was a Russian-American cultural theorist, visual and media artist, playwright and novelist. She was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University. She was an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her work focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern.
Go to Profile#210
Elizabeth Strout
#14638
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine, and her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her nine novels.
Go to Profile#211
Ruth Wisse
#12900
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ruth Wisse is a Canadian academic and is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita. She is a noted scholar of Yiddish literature and of Jewish history and culture.
Go to Profile#212
Ann Beattie
#14749
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ann Beattie is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form.
Go to Profile#213
Ntozake Shange
#10839
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf . She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo , Liliane , and Betsey Brown , about an African-American girl run away from home.
Go to Profile#214
Janet Frame
#8060
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Janet Paterson Frame was a New Zealand author. She is internationally renowned for her work, which includes novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and received numerous awards including being appointed to the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civil honour.
Go to Profile#215
Dimitra Fimi
#13252
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Dimitra Fimi is a Scottish academic and writer and since 2020 the Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research includes that of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and children's fantasy literature.
Go to Profile#216
Karen Tei Yamashita
#17790
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer. Early life Yamashita was born on January 8, 1951, in Oakland, California. Career Yamashita is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. Her works, several of which contain elements of magic realism, include novels I Hotel , Circle K Cycles , Tropic of Orange , Brazil-Maru , and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest . Yamashita's novels emphasize the necessity of polyglot, multicultural communities in an increasingly globalized age, even as they destabi...
Go to Profile#217
Maureen Corrigan
#13720
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Maureen Corrigan is an American author, scholar, and literary critic. She is the book critic on the NPR radio program Fresh Air and writes for the "Book World" section of The Washington Post. In 2014, she wrote So We Read On, a book on the origins and power of The Great Gatsby. In 2005, she published a literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. Corrigan was awarded the 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle for her reviews on Fresh Air on NPR and in The Washington Post, and the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism by the Mystery Writers of America for her book, Mystery & Suspense Writers, with Robin W.
Go to Profile#218
Susan Griffin
#7396
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Susan Griffin is a radical feminist philosopher, essayist and playwright particularly known for her innovative, hybrid-form ecofeminist works. Life Griffin was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943 and has resided in California since then. Following her father's death when she was 16, she bounced around the family but was eventually taken into the home and family of noted artist Morton Dimondstein. Her biological family were of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and German ancestry. Having spent a year in a post-War Jewish home, her German heritage wasn't openly spoken of and she initially demonized Germans, but later made several trips to Germany to reconcile her Jewish and German heritages.
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Joanne Kyger
#11548
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.
Go to Profile#220
Carolyn Forché
#7149
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work. Biography Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing at Michigan State University in 1972, and Master of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in 1975.
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Amy Hempel
#17895
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Amy Hempel is an American short story writer and journalist. She teaches creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers. Life Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois. She moved to California at age 16, which is where much of her early fiction takes place. She moved to New York City in the mid-seventies. There, she connected with writer and editor Gordon Lish, with whom she maintained a long professional relationship. She formerly was professor of creative writing at the University of Florida. She was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer of English at Harvard University from 2009 to 2014. Additionally, she taught fiction in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Writing at Bennington College.
Go to Profile#222
Nancy Armstrong
#15092
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Nancy Armstrong is a scholar, critic and professor of English at Duke University. Overview Before moving to Duke, Armstrong was the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture & Media, and Gender Studies at Brown University. She is currently the Gilbert, Louis & Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke. She is interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American fiction, empire and sexuality, narrative and critical theory, visual culture, and scientific discourses at work in literary forms. She is best known for her groundbreaking book o...
Go to Profile#223
Aimee Bender
#14691
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal stories and characters. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Biography Born to a Jewish family, Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the creative writing MFA program at University of California at Irvine. While at UCI she studied with Judith Grossman and Geoffrey Wolff. She received ArtsBridge scholarships and worked with mentor Keith Fowler to create writing programs for K-12 students in Orange County, California. She cu...
Go to Profile#224
Jacqueline Woodson
#19255
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Go to Profile#225
Lisa Zunshine
#19631
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Lisa Zunshine is an American scholar of literature and cognitive science, who publishes in eighteenth-century British literature, comparative literature, film/media studies, and cognitive psychology. She came to the United States as a refugee, from Latvia, when she was twenty-one, and became a U.S. citizen in 1998. She is professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington; a Guggenheim fellow ; and author or editor of twelve books, including Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture ,The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies , and The...
Go to Profile#226
Carla Harryman
#22142
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. She is married to the poet Barrett Watten.
Go to Profile#227
Elif Batuman
#17847
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Go to Profile#228
Etel Adnan
#8192
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Go to Profile#229
Miranda Seymour
#13557
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Miranda Jane Seymour is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer. The lives she has described have included those of Robert Graves and Mary Shelley. Seymour, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has in recent years been a visiting Professor of English Studies at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Go to Profile#230
Rey Chow
#12328
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Rey Chow is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Go to Profile#231
Anita Silvey
#22472
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Anita Silvey is an American author, editor, and literary critic in the genre of children’s literature. Born in 1947 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Silvey has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book Magazine and as vice-president at Houghton Mifflin where she oversaw children’s and young adult book publishing. She has also authored a number of critical books about children's literature, including 500 Great Books for Teens and The Essential Guide to Children's Books and Their Creators. In October 2010, she began publishing the Children's Book-A-Day Almanac online, a daily essay on classic and co...
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Marge Piercy
#8881
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Marge Piercy is an American progressive activist, feminist, and writer. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller and a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, Communist social and political activism, and feminist ideals.
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Walidah Imarisha
#18999
Overall Influence
Walidah Imarisha is an American writer, activist, educator and spoken word artist. Career Writing Imarisha is co-editor, with adrienne maree brown, of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, named after the legendary science fiction writer Octavia Butler. She also co-edited Another World Is Possible, the first anthology out in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Go to Profile#234
Ama Ata Aidoo
#12546
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
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Nargiz Pashayeva
#30215
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nargiz Arif gizi Pashayeva is an Honored Scientist of Azerbaijan, Honorary member of ANAS , vice-president of ANAS , Doctor of Philology, rector of the Lomonosov Moscow State University's Baku branch, head of the Nizami Ganjavi Scientific Center of the University of Oxford, from the Azerbaijani side, chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the British Foundation for the Study of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, permanent member of Chancellor's Court of Benefactors of University of Oxford., co-chairman of the Anglo-Azerbaijani Society.
Go to Profile#236
Edith Hall
#13390
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department.
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Jorie Graham
#14066
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She won the 2013 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Go to Profile#238
Ellen Gilchrist
#19643
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ellen Gilchrist is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan. Life Gilchrist was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and spent part of her childhood on a plantation owned by her maternal grandparents. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and studied creative writing under renowned writer Eudora Welty at Millsaps College. Later in life, Gilchrist enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, but she never completed her MFA. Gilchrist has been married and divorced four times and has three children, fourteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Go to Profile#239
Claudia Durst Johnson
#17100
Overall Influence
Claudia Durst Johnson is a literary scholar best known for her work on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, introducing the idea of the novel's gothicism and gothic satire. In the process of her research she befriended the author, Harper Lee. When the city of Chicago organized a One City One Book program in 2001 based on To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee was unavailable to speak, so Johnson was invited to Chicago to present the book to the city.
Go to Profile#240
Meena Alexander
#12303
Overall Influence
1951 - 2018 (67 years)
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Go to Profile#241
Janice Radway
#19940
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Janice Radway is an American literary and cultural studies scholar. Education Radway holds a BA from Michigan State University, 1971, and an MA from State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1972. She earned her PhD from Michigan State University 1977 with the dissertation A Phenomenological Theory of Popular and Elite Literature. She taught in the American Civilization Department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Literature Program at Duke University. She served as an editor of American Quarterly, and, in 1998–99, as president of the American Studies Association. In 2008, she became Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#242
Margo Jefferson
#20497
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Margo Lillian Jefferson is an American writer and academic. Biography Jefferson received her B.A. from Brandeis University, where she graduated cum laude, and her M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She became an associate editor at Newsweek in 1973 and stayed at the magazine until 1978. She then served as an assistant professor at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University from 1979 to 1983 and from 1989 to 1991. Since then she has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she is now professor of professional practice in writing.
Go to Profile#243
Cheryl Wall
#33144
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Cheryl A. Wall was a literary critic and professor of English at Rutgers University. One of the first black women to head an English department at a major research university, she worked for diversity in the literary canon as well as in the classroom. She specialized in black women's writing, particularly the Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston. She edited several volumes of Hurston's writings for the Library of America. She was also a section editor for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and was on the editorial boards of American Literature, African American Review and Signs.
Go to Profile#244
Kei Nakazawa
#30662
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kei Nakazawa is the professional name of Emiko Honda, a Japanese writer and professor. Nakazawa has won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers and the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and two of her novels have been adapted for film. Since 2005 she has been a professor of literature at Hosei University.
Go to Profile#245
Lynn Nottage
#5305
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
Go to Profile#246
Jewelle Gomez
#19064
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jewelle Lydia Gomez is an American author, poet, critic and playwright. She lived in New York City for 22 years, working in public television, theater, as well as philanthropy, before relocating to the West Coast. Her writing—fiction, poetry, essays and cultural criticism—has appeared in a wide variety of outlets, both feminist and mainstream. Her work centers on women's experiences, particularly those of LGBTQ women of color. She has been interviewed for several documentaries focused on LGBT rights and culture.
Go to Profile#247
Lynn Ahrens
#7707
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lynn Ahrens is an American songwriter, and librettist for the musical theatre, television and film. She has collaborated with Stephen Flaherty for many years. She won the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for the Broadway musical Ragtime. Together with Flaherty, she has written many musicals, including Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Ragtime, Seussical, A Man of No Importance, Dessa Rose, The Glorious Ones, Rocky, Little Dancer and, recently on Broadway, Anastasia and Once on This Island.
Go to Profile#248
Theresa Rebeck
#9023
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, television writer, and novelist. Her work has appeared on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, in film, and on television. Among her awards are the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award. In 2012, she received the Athena Film Festival Award for Excellence as a Playwright and Author of Films, Books, and Television. She is a 2009 recipient of the Alex Awards. Her works have influenced American playwrights by bringing a feminist edge in her old works.
Go to Profile#249
Lisa Appignanesi
#15569
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lisa Appignanesi is a British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She chaired the 2017 Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk.
Go to Profile#250
Eleanor Coerr
#29784
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Eleanor Coerr was a Canadian-born American writer of children's books, including Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and many picture books. Biography She was born in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in Saskatoon. As a child, she liked to think up and read new stories. Through her best friend in high school, who was born to Japanese immigrants, Coerr developed an interest in calligraphy, Japanese food, and origami. She was exposed to Japanese scenery and told her friend that she wished to visit Japan one day, a request which Coerr fulfilled during the writing of Sadako and the Thou...
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