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,

#2051

Doina Cornea

#16951

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Doina Cornea was a Romanian human rights activist and French language professor. She was a dissident during the communist rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She was co-founder of the Democratic Anti-totalitarian Forum of Romania , as the first attempt to unify the democratic opposition to the post-communist government. This organization later transformed into the Romanian Democratic Convention , which brought Emil Constantinescu to power.

#2052

Gail Kern Paster

#122084

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Gail Kern Paster is an American Shakespeare scholar, historian and writer. Life She was born on 8 November 1944. Paster graduated from North Shore High School in 1962. She received her bachelor's degree from Smith College and her PhD from Yale University.

#2053

Michal Arbell-Tor

#171144

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michal Arbel-Tor is a researcher of Israeli literature and a lecturer in Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University. Childhood Arbel was born in Jerusalem, the daughter of Hana Arbel, a physicist, and Yehuda Arbel, a police officer and pilot. She attended the historic Rehavia Hebrew Gymnasium High School, served in the IDF as a clerk, and studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and graduated with a bachelor's degree with honors.

#2054

Lori Jakiela

#74969

Overall Influence

Lori Jakiela is an American author of memoirs and poetry. She won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for non-fiction for her third memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe, in 2016.

#2055

Anna Aguilar-Amat

#167403

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Anna Aguilar-Amat is a Catalan poet, translator, researcher and university professor in Terminology and Computational Linguistics. She writes primarily in Catalan but also has some work in Spanish . She has a PHD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she now teaches Terminology applied to Translation at the Translation Faculty. She published five collections of poems and has received several awards for Catalan poetry. Her poetic work is present in several anthologies of Catalan poets and she has been translated into Spanish, English, French, Italian, Sardinian, Macedonian, Finnish, Arabian, Turkish, Greek, German and Slovenian.

#2056

Alison Donnell

#142199

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Alison Donnell is an academic, originally from the United Kingdom. She is Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was previously Head of School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading, where she also founded the research theme "Minority Identities: Rights and Representations". Her primary research field is anglophone postcolonial literature, and she has been published widely on Caribbean and Black British literature. Much of her academic work also focuses questions relating to gender...

#2057

Dorothy Bush Koch

Dorothy Bush Koch

#13724

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Dorothy Walker Bush LeBlond Koch is an American author and philanthropist. She is the sixth and youngest child of the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, and First Lady Barbara Bush. Her older brother, George W. Bush was the 43rd President.

#2058

Kate Moira Ryan

#171225

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Kate Moira Ryan is an American playwright. Among the plays Ryan has worked on are Leaving Queens; The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, an adaptation of three books by Ann Bannon; Caveweller; and Bass for Picasso.

#2059

Ye Wenling

#107773

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ye Wenling is a Chinese novelist. She was a member of the 6th, 7th and 8th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Biography Ye was born in Chumen Town, Yuhuan, Zhejiang, China in 1942. She has a brother, Ye Peng .

#2060

Ronna C. Johnson

#168100

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Ronna C. Johnson is a Professor of English at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Johnson is an established authority on the Beat Generation. She has worked as a fiction editor for ASPECT magazine, Zephyr Press, and Dark Horse magazine. She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Beat Studies published by Pace University Press, a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association, and the co-editor of the Beat Studies book series published by Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press.

#2061

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

#170741

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an American writer and educator who is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Education. Her research considers children's literature and fan culture. Her book, The Dark Fantastic, was awarded the 2020 Children's Literature Association Book Award.

#2062

Laura Moriarty

#106185

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Laura Moriarty is an American poet and novelist. Life and work Moriarty was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and has lived in Northern California since 1966. She attended Sacramento State University and the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s. She was married to the poet Jerry Estrin until his death in 1993, and is currently married to the poet/librarian Nick Robinson.

#2063

Diana Gittins

#72574

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Diana Gittins , is a former associate lecturer in creative writing for the Open University and a published writer of fiction and non-fiction books. Gittins is the author of Madness in Its Place: Narratives of Severalls Hospital 1913-1997, which was adapted for broadcast for BBC Radio 4.

#2064

Glori Simmons

#159364

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Glori Simmons is an American poet, and short story writer. Simmons graduated from the University of Washington and from the University of Michigan with an MFA. She was a 2003 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

#2065

Ruth L. Schwartz

#125307

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Ruth L. Schwartz is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Dear Good Naked Morning . She graduated with a B.A. from Wesleyan University; an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan; and, a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology from the University of Integrative Learning. The San Francisco Bay Area has been Ruth's chosen home since 1985; she has also traveled extensively in Latin America, and speaks fluent Spanish.

#2066

Mary Cappello

#171545

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Acade...

#2067

Anne Winters

#121066

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Anne Winters is an American poet, leftist, and professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Having received an early university education at both New York University and Columbia University in New York City, where she was born and raised, she went on to complete her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She has studied, in various schools, under the well-known American poets Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell. She currently teaches British literature, the Bible , and graduate courses in translation and poetry.

#2068

Inés Marful

#177402

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Inés Marful , also known as Inés Marful Amor, is a Spanish scholar, writer, and visual artist from Asturias, known for her scholarly work about Federico García Lorca. Her novel Cuatro Cuentos de Amor y El Intocable Absurdo won the 2008 Casino Mieres Novel Award.

#2069

Suzanne Conklin Akbari

#167718

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is a medievalist, recognised for her global and comparative approach to medieval literary history. She was a Professor in English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto from 1995 until 2019, when she joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

#2070

Nancy Worman

#148588

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard and Columbia University. She is an expert on ancient Greek drama and oratory, on ancient literary criticism and literary theory, and on the reception of ancient Greece in the post-classical world.

#2071

Myra Jehlen

#113891

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Myra Jehlen is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley for her dissertation on William Faulkner, directed by Henry Nash Smith, a founding scholar of the field of American Studies. She holds a BA from City College of the City University of New York. She has taught at New York University, Columbia University, The State University of New York, College at Purchase, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Fellow of ...

#2072

Masako Watanabe

#131174

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Masako Watanabe is a Japanese manga artist. She began her professional career as an illustrator of books in 1949. She switched to creating manga after reading Osamu Tezuka's works, debuting in 1952 with Namida no Sanbika. She quickly became the most popular female manga artist of her time.

#2073

Virginia Jackson

Virginia Jackson

#167889

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. She is more recently credited with revising the racialized history of American poetics, as the poet Terrance Hayes writes, “If there is a kind of ‘poet’s poet,’ might there also be a kind of ‘poet’s scholar,’ someone a poet reads for lucid, explosive doses of insight and history? Yes: Virginia Jackson. Actually, she’s more than a poet’s favorite scholar, she is a poet’s favorite pathfinding detective.

#2074

Emily Stipes Watts

#124600

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Emily Stipes Watts was an American educator, writer, and literary historian. In parallel with her academic career, she wrote Ernest Hemingway and the Arts , The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 and The Businessman in American Literature . A laureate of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she also served as chair of the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

#2075

Lauren Wilkinson

#175165

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Lauren Wilkinson is an American fiction writer. Her debut novel American Spy was published by Random House in February 2019 in the US and in July 2019 in the UK via Dialogue Books . Early life Wilkson grew up in New York City. She earned an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University.

#2076

Jacqueline Assaël

#103625

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jacqueline Assaël is a French Hellenist and a professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis since 2004. She is also an essayist and poet. Assaël is a specialist in the works of the tragic Greek poet Euripides, and she has also published works on the phenomenon of poetic inspiration in Antiquity. Also a philologist, she has also created some works of New Testament exegesis.

#2077

Helen Farish

#169886

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Helen Farish is a British poet. Life She received her B.A. from University of Durham, M.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford Brookes University. She lectured in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust . She has also been a visiting lecturer at Sewanee University, and a visiting scholar at the University of New Hampshire.

#2078

Priscilla Gilman

#158490

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Priscilla Gilman is an American writer and former college professor. She has written about literature, parenting, education, and autism for numerous publications, and is an advocate for autistic people and children. She is the author of The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy, which was inspired by her autistic son Benjamin.

#2079

Beryl Rawson

#131973

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Beryl Rawson was an Australian academic. She was Professor and Visiting Fellow in Classics at the Faculty of Arts of the Australian National University . Her work "made ANU a significant centre for classical studies".

#2080

Susan Sherman

#163975

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Susan Sherman is an American author, poet, playwright, and a founder of IKON Magazine. Sherman's poems "convey the different voices of those who have felt the pang of suffering and burning of injustice."

#2081

Divya Victor

#72053

Overall Influence

Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet and professor, known for her poetry book Curb which won the PEN Open Book Award. Early life and education Divya Victor was born in Nagercoil, India. Victor earned her B.S. in English from Towson University, her M.A. in Creative Writing from Temple University, and her Ph.D. in English at University at Buffalo .

#2082

Leila Philip

#173131

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Leila Philip is an American writer, poet and educator. She is the author of award-winning books of nonfiction which have received glowing national reviews. Her books include: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, Hidden Dialogue: A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States, The Road Through MiyamaWater Rising

#2083

Julie Iromuanya

#168441

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Julie Iromuanya is an American author and academic. Her 2015 novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, was the runner-up for the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Literature and was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction.

#2084

Rhonda Garelick

#141729

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rhonda K. Garelick is an American professor and author. She is currently a professor of English with a special joint appointment in the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts. She is the founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Symposium based in the Hixson-Lied College. She is a scholar of performance, fashion, literature, visual arts, and cultural politics.

#2085

Karen Kovacik

#172382

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Karen Kovacik is a former poet laureate of the American state of Indiana from 2011 until 2013. George Kalamaras succeeded her.

#2086

Maria Rybakova

#78450

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Maria Aleksandrovna Rybakova is a Russian writer whose works have been published in multiple languages. Life Rybakova is the only daughter of literary critic Natalia Ivanova, deputy editor of the magazine Znamya, and a granddaughter of the writer Anatoly Rybakov.

#2087

Ailbhe Darcy

#173640

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Ailbhe Darcy is an Irish poet and Wales Book of the Year award laureate. Career Ailbhe Darcy was born in 1981 and grew up in Dublin. In 2015, she was awarded an MFA and a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Darcy now lives in Cardiff. She won the Wales Book of the Year award and the Pigott Poetry Prize at the 2019 Listowel Writers' Week with her collection Insistence, which was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

#2088

Ingrid Wendt

#168087

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ingrid Wendt , is an American writer and poet. Personal life Married to Ralph Salisbury, she lives in Eugene, Oregon. Education Wendt graduated from Cornell College in Iowa in 1966, and that year she moved to Oregon.

#2089

Patricia Brieschke

#143380

Overall Influence

Patricia A. Brieschke is an American short story writer. Life She graduated from Northeastern Illinois University, Alfred Adler Institute with an MA, in 1979, and from University of Illinois at Chicago with a Ph.D., in 1983. She teaches at Hofstra University. Her work has been published in Appalachee Review, Karamu, The Rambler Magazine, The MacGuffin, PMS, Rainbow Curve, Sou'wester, and StoryQuarterly.

#2090

Louise L. Lambrichs

#80183

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Louise L. Lambrichs is a French novelist and essayist. Lambrichs was born into a family of writers in Boulogne-Billancourt. Her father Georges Lambrichs was considered one of the greatest French-speaking editors of the second half of the 20th century. Her mother Gilberte Lambrichs who translated the works of Fritz Zorn and Thomas Bernhard wrote under the pseudonym Constance Delaunay.

#2091

Amy MacDonald

#105385

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Amy MacDonald is an American author of children's books. Her works include Little Beaver and the Echo, which has been translated into 28 languages around the world, and Rachel Fister's Blister. Her first book, a satire of Jill Krementz's children's books, was A Very Young Housewife.

#2092

K.E. Allen

#178503

Overall Influence

K. E. Allen is an American poet. Life K.E. Allen received her B.A. in English from Seattle University and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Center, Kenyon Review, LIT, Lynx, Poetry Daily, Rivendell, Spinning Jenny, Sycamore Review, Verse.

#2093

Sarah Colvin

#174695

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sarah Jean Colvin is a British scholar of German, literary theory, and gender studies. Since 2014, she has been Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. She previously held the Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh , and was Professor in Study of Contemporary Germany at the University of Birmingham , then Professor of German at the University of Warwick .

#2094

Diana Knight

#174868

Overall Influence

Diana Marilyn Knight is a British scholar of French literature, who specialises in 19th-century French literature, Honoré de Balzac, and Roland Barthes. is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Nottingham.

#2095

Barbara Borg

#97974

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Barbara Elisabeth Borg is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known in particular for her work on Roman tombs, the language of classical art, and geoarchaeology.

#2096

Cassandra Laity

#174115

Overall Influence

Cassandra Laity is an author and researcher in the field of modernism. In 2015 she is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Early life and education Laity completed her PhD at the University of Michigan.

#2097

Arjumand Ara

#167964

Overall Influence

Arjumand Ara is an Indian professor of Urdu literature at University of Delhi. She is a translator, critic and a scholar of humanities. She has translated Findings, Keepings: Life, Communism and Everything, biography of eminent Urdu Scholar Ralph Russell into Urdu. In 2021, She has received Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize for translating Arundhati Roy's English novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness into Urdu.

#2098

Katie Fallon

#172817

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Kathleen "Katie" Fallon is an American non-fiction author and essayist. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, both electronic and print, and received several accolades. In 2011, she published her first book, Cerulean Blues: A Personal Search for a Vanishing Songbird. She currently resides in Cheat Neck, WV with her husband Jesse, where she teaches creative writing at nearby West Virginia University. Much of Fallon's writing is grounded in naturalism and conservation efforts, especially concerning raptors and other birds.

#2099

Jo Labanyi

#177134

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Jo Labanyi is Professor of Spanish at New York University. She specialises in the study of Spanish literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Biography Labanyi studied for her undergraduate degree at Oxford University, graduating with a BA in Spanish in 1967. She was director of the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of London from 1997 to 2002. She was Professor of Spanish and Cultural Studies at the University of Southampton from 2001 to 2006 before moving to New York University in 2006.

#2100

Susan Wicks

#98659

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Susan Wicks is a British poet and novelist. She studied at the University of Hull, University of Sussex. She taught at University College, Dublin, University of Dijon, and the University of Kent. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. She lives in Tunbridge Wells.

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