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.

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).

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#2001

Joanna Fuhrman

#111117

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Joanna Furhman is an American poet and professor. She is the author of six collections of poems and her poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals, as well as in anthologies. Fuhrman is a member of the Alice James Books Cooperative Board, and poetry editor for Boog City, a community newspaper for the Lower East Side in New York.

#2002

Doris Dungey

#121997

Overall Influence

1961 - 2008 (47 years)

Doris J. Dungey was an American blogger who wrote extensively about the United States housing bubble for the blog Calculated Risk under the pseudonym Tanta. Early life and work Born in Oxnard, California to Byron and Eileen Dungey in 1961, she was raised in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. She earned a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, where she taught until 1989. She then returned to Bloomington, where she wrote the training manual for a local rape crisis center. She worked in the mortgage industry for many years, starting at Champion Federal Savings and Loan Association where she was a trainer and technical writer.

#2003

Kim Seunghui

#173715

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Kim Seunghui is a South Korean poet, essayist, and novelist. Life Kim was born in Gwangju on March 1, 1952. She graduated from Chon-nam Girls' High School. She majored in English Literature at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea from which she later received a doctorate in Korean Literature. In 1973, she made her official literary debut with her poem "Geu-rim sog-ui mul" when it won an entry in the Annual Contest for new writers held by Kyung-hyang Shin-mun . Kim is currently a professor of Korean Literature at Sogang University.

#2004

Sable Elyse Smith

#124839

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (38 years)

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, write and educator based in New York. Smith works in photography, neon, text, appropriated imagery, sculpture, and video installation connecting language, violence, and pop culture with autobiographical subject matter. In 2018, Smith was an Artist-in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work was first featured at several areas such as MoMA ps1, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia, MIT list visual arts center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other places. The artist lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and New York City. She has ...

#2005

Maggie Kilgour

#134721

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Margaret "Maggie" Kilgour is a Molson professor of English Language and Literature at McGill University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Education Kilgour earned her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto and her PhD at Yale University. She wrote her dissertation under the title "Ingestion as Metaphor and Literary Technique in Rabelais, Milton, Burton, Ruskin, and Northorp Frye," although it was late republished in 1990 by Princeton University Press as "From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation."

#2006

Rachelle Cruz

#158112

Overall Influence

Rachelle Cruz is an American poet. She won a 2018 American Book Award. She teaches at University of California, Riverside. In 2019, she was Inlandia Literary Laureate. Works God’s Will for Monsters

#2007

Caroline Vout

#102443

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Caroline Vout is a British classicist and art historian. she is a Professor in classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Christ's College. In 2021 she became Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge.

#2008

Paola Pruneti

#177754

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Paola Pruneti , Italian papyrologist and palaeographer. Pruneti worked at the University of Florence. She is a member of the Editor Committee of Analecta Papyrologica, a journal edited by the Department of Philology and Linguistic of the University of Messina.

#2009

Kiki Petrosino

#165404

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Kiki Petrosino is an American poet and professor of poetry. She currently teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. Early life and education Petrosino was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. After spending two years in Switzerland teaching Italian and English in a private school, she earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia , a Master of Arts in humanities degree from the University of Chicago , and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop .

#2010

Mary Moore

#124147

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Georgina Mary Moore was a British author, diplomat and administrator, the principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1990. She published several novels, radio and television plays under the pen name Helena Osborne.

#2011

Tanaya Winder

#98510

Overall Influence

Tanaya Winder is a performance poet, writer, motivational speaker, and educator. She was raised on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colorado and is an enrolled member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe. Her background includes Southern Ute, Pyramid Lake Paiute, Dine, and Black heritages. With fellow Indigenous writer Casandra Lopez, she founded , an online literary magazine to "showcase the creative literary expressions and scholarly work of both emerging and established women writers from around the world." With Lakota rap artist Frank Waln and other collaborators, she runs Dream Warriors Management, an organization to promote Indigenous artists and support young Native students.

#2012

Huda al-Attas

#149157

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Huda al-Attas is a Southern Yemeni journalist and author. Biography She was born in 1971 in Dawʿan in the Hadhramaut. She is best known for her short stories, for which she has won a number of awards, including the Al-Afif prize in 1997. Her first collection of stories hājis rūḥ wa hājis jasad was published in Aden in 1995. Since then she has published two more collections.

#2013

Ladette Randolph

#140774

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Ladette Randolph is an American author and editor. Ladette Randolph is the author of five books: three novels: Private Way, Haven’s Wake and A Sandhills Ballad, a short story collection, This is Not the Tropics, and a memoir, Leaving the Pink House. She is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Ploughshares at Emerson College and co-owner of the manuscript consulting firm Randolph Lundine. A long-time Nebraskan, she spent her childhood in the same part of west-central Nebraska where her family lived for five generations. She now lives in Boston with her husband Noel.

#2014

Miriam Gamble

#140744

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Miriam Gamble is a poet who won the Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. She lives in Scotland and works as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Life and career Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1980 and grew up in Belfast in Northern Ireland. She studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and Modern Literary Studies at Queen's University of Belfast where she also received her phD in Form, Genre and Lyric Subjectivity in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. She moved to Scotland in 2010 and began teaching creative wr...

#2015

Ann Darr

#159603

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Ann Darr was an American poet and educator who lived in Washington, D.C. Biography Born Lois Ann Russell in Bagley, Iowa she studied at the University of Iowa where she graduated in 1941 and also completed Civilian Pilot Training.

#2016

Synnøve des Bouvrie

#171460

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Synnøve des Bouvrie is a Norwegian philologist. She was born in Naarden, Netherlands as a twin. She took her classical languages education at Leiden University. In her academic career she served as managing director of the Norwegian Institute at Athens and professor of antique culture and literature at the University of Tromsø. She is a fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

#2017

Lola Haskins

#170807

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Lola Haskins is an American poet. Life She was born in New York, and raised in northern California. Haskins has lived in San Francisco, Greece, and Mexico. She now divides her time between Northern England and North-Central Florida.

#2018

Juana María Rodríguez

Juana María Rodríguez

#127693

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Juana María Rodríguez is a Cuban-American professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly writing in queer theory, critical race theory, and performance studies highlights the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and embodiment in constructing subjectivity.

#2019

Sarah Viren

#144112

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Sarah Viren is an American essayist best known for her 2018 essay collection Mine. Career In 2016, Viren won the Riverteeth Book Prize which offered publication of her essay collection Mine. Mine was published in 2018 and was longlisted at the 31st Annual Lammy Finalists in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography category and longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

#2020

Martha Serpas

#141548

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Martha Serpas is an American poet and educator. She has published a few poetry books and is a professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Biography Serpas was born on December 10, 1965, in Galliano, Louisiana. She received her BA degree from Louisiana State University. She subsequently did graduate study at New York University , Yale Divinity School , and the University of Houston .

#2021

Bettelou Los

#111279

Overall Influence

Bettelou Los is a linguist and philologist specializing in the history of the English language. Since 2013 she has held the Forbes Chair of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Academic career Los received her MA from the University of Amsterdam in 1986. After spending some time working as a translator, she obtained her PhD in 2000 from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; her dissertation focused on infinitives in Old and Middle English. From 2004 she held positions as lecturer first at the Vrije Universiteit and then at Radboud University Nijmegen, where she was promoted to senior l...

#2022

Amira Nur al-Din

#167154

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Amira Nur al-Din Daoud was an Iraqi poet. Born in Baghdad. After completing her secondary education, she joined Fuad I University in Cairo in 1943, and BA in Arabic Language and Literature in 1947, and a master's degree from the same university in 1957. She worked as a teacher of Arabic in secondary schools, then at the Faculty of Arts of Baghdad, then dean of the Institute of Applied Arts. Published her poetry in many Iraqi and Arab magazines and newspapers.

#2023

Kjersti Bale

#151852

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kjersti Bale is a Norwegian philologist. She is a professor at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo. She headed the aesthetics study programme from its inception in 2003 to 2005, and headed her Department from 2009 to 2012. She is a co-editor of the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture and editorial board member of Agora. Among her literary interests are Cora Sandel and Michel de Montaigne.

#2024

Pattie McCarthy

#176157

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Pattie McCarthy is an American poet and educator. Biography McCarthy completed undergraduate work at Towson University and received her MA in creative writing from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1998.

#2025

Wendy Mayer

#97742

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Wendy Mayer is an Australian scholar in late antiquity and religion who is a research professor and associate dean for research at Australian Lutheran College, dean of research strategy for the University of Divinity, and honorary research fellow at the University of South Africa. She is known for her work on John Chrysostom and on early Christian preaching.

#2026

Elizabeth Abel

#146837

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Elizabeth Abel is an American literary scholar, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Abel was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. In 1981 she was guest editor for a special issue of Critical Inquiry, 'Writing and Sexual Difference'. The essays marked a shift in feminist literary theory from "recovering a lost tradition to discovering the terms of confrontation with the dominant tradition", by means of "specific historical studies of the ways women revise prevailing themes and styles". Abel's Virginia Woolf and the fictions of psychoanalysis related ...

#2027

Maria de la Pau Janer

Maria de la Pau Janer

#100488

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Maria de la Pau Janer is a writer from Spain who works in Spanish and Catalan. She is a recipient of the Premio Planeta de Novela and the Ramon Llull Novel Award. She got her PhD degree at the University of the Balearic Islands. She is a member of the Associació d'Escriptors en Llengua Catalana. She was married to Joan Oliver Araujo. They divorced and then she married Joan Corbella. Her father, Gabriel Janer Manila, is also a well-known writer.

#2028

Louise Plummer

#115814

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Louise Plummer is an American author of young adult fiction and a retired associate professor of English at Brigham Young University. She lives in New York, New York with her writer/professor husband Tom. Together they have four sons.

#2029

Melba Boyd

#99104

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Melba Joyce Boyd is a significant figure in African-American poetry. She has authored 13 books and is a Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University.

#2030

Ruth Dean

#125065

Overall Influence

1902 - 2003 (101 years)

Ruth Josephine Dean was an American scholar of Anglo-Norman literature. Throughout her career, she worked hard to establish the legitimacy of Anglo-Norman literature as a subject of study, and her definitive work, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts has won widespread praise for its substantial contribution to the study of literature.

#2031

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood

#172869

Overall Influence

1945 - 2007 (62 years)

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood was a scholar in the field of Ancient Greek religion and a highly influential Hellenist. Biography Sourvinou-Inwood was born in Volos, Greece, in 1945, but grew up in Corfu. Sourvinou-Inwood studied at the University of Athens from 1962–66, where she specialised in history and archaeology, and was a pupil of the Greek prehistoric archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos; after graduating with a starred first in Classics, she began research in the field of Mycenology in Rome, publishing her first article on the reading of a Linear B tablet from Knossos in 1968.

#2032

Karen Simpson Nikakis

#170806

Overall Influence

Karen Simpson Nikakis, known commonly as K. S. Nikakis, is an Australian fantasy author, writer and poet who lives at Melton, who has written the fantasy novel The Whisper of Leaves . She was nominated for an Aurealis Awards twice in 2020.

#2033

Marianne Boruch

#109904

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971. Life Born and raised Catholic in Chicago, Boruch was educated in parish schools and spent many summers in Tuscola, Illinois with her grandparents. She graduated from the University of Illinois, then earned her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where her MFA thesis advisor was James Tate. She has taught at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and at the University of Maine at Farmington, going on, in 1987, t...

#2034

Anna Leahy

#161713

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Anna Leahy is an American poet and nonfiction writer. The author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and creative writing pedagogy, Leahy directs the Tabula Poetica Center for Poetry and MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California. In 2013, she was named editor of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics.

#2035

Vera Mireeva

#108642

Overall Influence

1931 - 2004 (73 years)

Vera Arsenivna Mireeva was a philologist, turkologist, and Russian scholar, teacher, and methodologist of the Russian language, poet and prose writer, journalist. She gave 45 years for enlightenment and russification of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, Honorary student of education of the USSR and an excellent student of national education of the Uzbek SSR.

#2036

Aya de Leon

#162925

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Aya de Leon is an American novelist and activist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley. She first came to national attention as a spoken-word artist in the underground poetry scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a hip-hop theater artist. de Leon is of Puerto Rican, African-American, and West Indian heritage, and much of her work explores issues of race, gender, socio-economic class, body, nation and the climate crisis.

#2037

Robin Beth Schaer

Robin Beth Schaer

#174536

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Robin Beth Schaer is an American poet. Biography Born in 1971, she graduated from Colgate University and Columbia University, and has taught at Columbia University, The New School, Cooper Union, Oberlin College and worked at the Academy of American Poets.

#2038

Rosemary Winslow

#95110

Overall Influence

Rosemary Winslow is an American poet and academic. Life Rosemary Winslow lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband John, a visual artist. She teaches at The Catholic University of America. Her work has appeared in 32 poems, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Crux. She published a collection of poems in 2007 entitled Greenbodies.

#2039

Jane Wong

#163295

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Jane Wong is an American poet and professor at Western Washington University. She is the author of Overpour and has been published in Best American Poetry 2015 and Best New Poets 2012. Wong grew up in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, where her parents owned a Chinese restaurant, and where Jane remembers much of her childhood. She currently resides in Seattle, Washington.

#2040

Margaret Belcher

#141313

Overall Influence

1936 - 2016 (80 years)

Margaret Belcher was a New Zealand literary scholar who was a specialist in the literary output of Augustus Pugin, whose letters she edited in five volumes. Early life Margaret Belcher was born on 18 September 1936 in Christchurch, New Zealand, the second daughter of Nelson and Lesley Belcher. She had a brother John and a sister Pam. She was educated at Rangi Ruru Girls' School, a private academy in Christchurch, and then at Canterbury University College, a constituent college of the University of New Zealand, where she obtained an MA in English. She won a scholarship to study at St Hugh's Co...

#2041

Ruby Blondell

#162424

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ruby Blondell is Professor Emerita of Classics and Adjunct Professor Emerita of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington; prior to retirement, they were the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities also at the University of Washington. Their research centres on Greek intellectual history, gender studies, and the reception of ancient myth in contemporary culture.

#2042

Karen Volkman

#135479

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Karen Volkman is an American poet. Life She was educated at New College of Florida, Syracuse University, and the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize XXVII.

#2043

Ruth Whitman

#144549

Overall Influence

1922 - 1999 (77 years)

Ruth Whitman was an American poet, translator, and professor. Career Whitman received a B.A. and an M.A. from Radcliffe College, and also taught at Radcliffe, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#2044

Jane Howard

#56191

Overall Influence

1954 - 1996 (42 years)

Jane Temple Howard was an American journalist, author, and educator. She worked at Life magazine from 1956 to 1972. She contributed articles to many publications and wrote several books; most well-known was her biography of Margaret Mead.

#2045

Sieglinde Gstöhl

#129886

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Sieglinde Gstöhl is an academic from Liechtenstein. Biography She currently serves as Director of Studies of the department of EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, as well as a professor of international relations. Before joining the College she was assistant professor of international relations from 1999 to 2005 at the Institute of Social Sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin.

#2046

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

#171977

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is an Indian literary scholar. She studied literature at the University of Calcutta, University of Oxford, and Cambridge University, and has taught at the University of Leeds and King's College London. She is the author of numerous research papers and she has published several books. Her prizes include the Infosys Prize for humanities in 2017, and the Humboldt Prize in 2018. Kabir was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

#2047

Tamara Bower

#143633

Overall Influence

Tamara Bower is an American archaeological illustrator and children's author. She has worked as a staff illustrator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a technical illustrator for archaeological digs in Egypt, Turkey, Spain, Belize, and California, and is also the author/illustrator of three children's books set in ancient Egypt. She lives in New York, NY.

#2048

Danielle Cadena Deulen

#104417

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Danielle Cadena Deulen is an American poet, essayist, and academic. She is also the host of the Literary radio program and podcast Lit from the Basement. Biography Danielle Cadena Deulen was born and raised in Portland, Oregon to Daniel Deulen and Cecilia Cadena. She is half-Latinx on her mother's side. Much of her early life is explored in her personal essay collection, The Riots.

#2049

Jin Eun-young

#171176

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jin Eun-young is a South Korean poet and philosopher. She has been praised by the poet Choi Seung-ja, who said “I’ve finally found a poet whom I can call my true successor." Life Jin Eun-young was born in Daejeon, South Korea in 1970. She received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in philosophy at Ewha Womans' University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Nichewa chaiui cheorak . She made her literary debut when "Keodaran changoga itneun jip" and three of her other poems were published in the 2000 Spring issue of Literature and Society. She has three poetry collections published to date: Ilgop gaeui daneoro dwen sajeon , Urineun maeilmaeil , and Humcheoganeun norae .

#2050

Margaret Gibson

#171398

Overall Influence

1944 - 2006 (62 years)

Margaret Gibson is an American poet. Life Margaret Gibson grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was educated at Hollins College, and the University of Virginia. She went to Yaddo in 1975. Gibson is Professor Emerita at The University of Connecticut.

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