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,
#2101
Kerri Webster
#168212
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Kerri Webster is an American poet. She was a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award. She currently teaches at Boise State University. Biography Kerri Webster was born in 1971 and raised in Idaho. She is the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks. She received her MFA from Indiana University, and was Writer in Residence in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis . For ten years, Webster worked as a Writer in the Schools, conducting weekly creative writing workshops for students. She teaches in the MFA program at Boise State University. Webster’s poems have appeared in numero...
Go to Profile#2102
Danièle Sallenave
#69500
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Danièle Sallenave is a French novelist and journalist. In April 2011, she became a member of the Académie française. In 1980 Sallenave received the Prix Renaudot for her novel Les Portes de Gubbio.
Go to Profile#2103
Hope Sabanpan-Yu
#87963
Overall Influence
Hope Sabanpan-Yu is a short story writer/poet from Cebu City, Philippines. She earned her doctorate degree in Comparative Literature from the University of the Philippines Diliman and her Master of Arts in English from the University of Calgary .
Go to Profile#2104
Sharrona Pearl
#148038
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Sharrona Pearl is a Canadian-American historian and theorist of the face and writer who teaches at Drexel University. Background and education She was raised in Toronto, Canada, and graduated from the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto in 1995. She earned her bachelor’s of arts degree summa cum laude from York University in 1999, and was awarded her doctorate in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2006. She has studied abroad at both the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge. Pearl has taught at Harvard University, MIT, The University of Pennsylvania,...
Go to Profile#2105
Angèle Bassolé-Ouédraogo
#34309
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Angèle Bassolé-Ouédraogo is an Ivoirian-born Canadian poet and journalist. She has won the Trillium Book Award and been nominated for the Ottawa Book Award. Biography She was born in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and raised in Upper Volta. She was an avid reader as a child, and was encouraged by her local librarian who eventually taught her as his assistant, which allowed her access to more books than she would normally be allowed. She wrote her first poem around the age of 11 to 12, after being influenced by her brother Francis, who would go on to be a well known poet in Côte d'Ivoire. Her first p...
Go to Profile#2106
Amy Catanzano
#159587
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Amy Catanzano is an American poet from Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of Multiversal, which won the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry. Michael Palmer describes her work as "a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity, and an open space that is motile and multidimensional." Since 2009 she has published writing on a theory and practice called "quantum poetics," which explores the intersections of poetry and science, particularly physics. Her other interests include cross-genre texts and the literary avant-garde.
Go to Profile#2107
Deborah L. Nelson
#134167
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Deborah L. Nelson is an American academic. Nelson earned her doctorate from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1996. She was appointed the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English in 2018. Her 2017 book, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil won the 2018 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association, and the 2019 Gordon J. Laing Award.
Go to Profile#2108
Marilyn Brown
#140858
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Marilyn McMeen Miller Brown is an American novelist best known for her work within her native Mormon culture. She is the creator and namesake of the Marilyn Brown Novel Award. Brown has written 14 novels. In 2000, she served as president of the Association for Mormon Letters. Brown has also had works attributed to her not only as Marilyn Brown, but as Marilyn Miller, Marilyn McMeen Miller, Marilyn R. Brown and several other related variants.
Go to Profile#2109
Erika Meitner
#157053
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Erika Meitner is an American poet. Life She graduated from Dartmouth College with an A.B. in 1996, and from the University of Virginia with an MFA in creative writing, and an MA in religious studies.
Go to Profile#2110
Dawn Lundy Martin
#103450
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, essayist and activist. She has received a number of awards such as the Academy of American Arts and Science's May Sarton Prize for Poetry. Martin is currently faculty at University of Pittsburgh and director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Martin received the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her book Good Stock, Strange Blood published by Coffee House Press.
Go to Profile#2111
May Telmissany
#164194
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
May Telmissany is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist, translator, film critic and academic. She teaches Arabic studies and cinema at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Biography May Telmissany was born in Cairo, Egypt, on 1 July 1965. She is the daughter of Egyptian documentary filmmaker Abdel-Kader El-Telmissany . Telmissany first studied French literature at Ain Shams University. She worked for several years in the French Service of Radio Cairo[Which one?] and in the Arts Faculty at Menoufia University. She also lived for a time in Paris. In 1995, she obtained a master's degree in French literature from Cairo University.
Go to Profile#2112
Esther Morgan
#170206
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Esther E. Morgan is a British poet. She graduated with an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 1998. She has published four collections of poetry and won an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. Her first collection was Beyond Calling Distance . It won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second collection, The Silence Living in Houses, was published in 2005. Grace was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize. It includes the poem This Morning which won the 2010 Bridport Poetry Prize.
Go to Profile#2113
Ella Dzelzainis
#176095
Overall Influence
Ella Dzelzainis lectures in nineteenth-century literature and is the Postgraduate Research Director for the School of English at Newcastle University. Dzelzainis is an advisory editor for Oxford Bibliographies and is on the editorial boards of the Gaskell Journal on "Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century", and the journal Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature.
Go to Profile#2114
Alison Ruth Sharrock
#116255
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#2115
Roberta Hill Whiteman
#80225
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roberta Hill Whiteman is an Oneida poet from Wisconsin. She is known for the collections Star Quilt and Philadelphia Flowers . She received the 1991 Wisconsin Idea Foundation's Excellence Award. Early life and education She was born Roberta Hill in 1947 into the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She lived with her family on the reservation and also in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Her father was a musician. She attended local schools.
Go to Profile#2116
Eeva Tikka
#152919
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Eeva Tikka is a Finnish writer who wrote Hiljainen kesä, which received the 1980 Thanks for the Book Award.
Go to Profile#2117
Annemarie Jacir
#128994
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Annemarie Jacir is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and producer. Career Filmmaking Jacir has been working in independent cinema since 1998 and has written, directed and produced a number of award-winning films. Two of her films have premiered as Official Selections in Cannes, one in Berlin and in Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Telluride. All three of her feature films were selected as Palestine's Oscar Entry for Foreign Language Film. Her short film, like twenty impossibles was the first Arab short film to ever be an official selection of the Cannes International Film Festival and...
Go to Profile#2118
Teolinda Gersão
#88837
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Teolinda Gersão is a Portuguese writer. Born in Coimbra, she studied at the universities of Coimbra, Tübingen and Berlin. She also taught at the Technical University of Berlin, Lisbon University, and the Universidade de Lisboa, among others. A full-time writer since the mid-1990s, Gersao is the author of more than a dozen books. She has won several literary prizes for her work. Her novel The Word Tree set in colonial Mozambique, was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa.
Go to Profile#2119
Cusi Cram
#140079
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Cusi Cram is an American playwright, screenwriter, actress, model, director, educator, and advocate for women in the arts. Early life Cusi Cram was born in Manhattan, New York, on September 22, 1967, to Lady Jeanne Campbell, daughter of Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll and Janet Gladys Aitken, and granddaughter of Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook; Lady Jeanne was married at the time to John Cram III, a descendant of railroad developer Jay Gould. Her biological father, however, was Bolivian and worked at the United Nations. She identifies as Latina and has written extensively about her Latin...
Go to Profile#2120
Rosemary Harris
#105847
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Rosemary Jeanne Harris was a British author of children's fiction. She won the 1968 Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Harris was born in London in February 1923, the daughter of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and his wife, Barbara Daisy Kyrle Money. She attended school in Weymouth, and then studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Chelsea School of Art and the Courtauld Institute. She served in the British Red Cross Nursing Auxiliary Westminster Division during World War II and subsequently worked as a picture restorer and as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer....
Go to Profile#2121
Yoshiko Noguchi
#147654
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Yoshiko Noguchi is one of the leading researchers on Grimm's Fairy tales in Japan. She is a professor of German, comparative literature, cultural studies, children's literature, folklore, and gender studies. She is a professor emeritus at Mukogawa Women's University and a professor at division of children's literature, graduate school of Letters, Baika Women's University. She was born in Osaka and her maiden name is Hiiragi . She is different from other researchers in that she discusses how Grimm's fairy tales are accepted in Japan and the UK from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has recently unraveled a long-standing mystery in the history of German-Japanese cultural exchange.
Go to Profile#2122
Brenda DoHarris
#175076
Overall Influence
Brenda Chester DoHarris is a writer and academic from Guyana. Career Doharris was born in Georgetown, British Guiana and attended Bishops' High School on scholarship. Her education and experience growing up in rural Kitty were a major influence on her writing.
Go to Profile#2123
Rachel Feldhay Brenner
#171617
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Rachel Feldhay Brenner was a Polish-born college professor, writer, and scholar of Jewish literature. She was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2007 to 2009. Early life and education Rachel Feldhay was born in Zabrze, Poland, the daughter of Michael Feldhay and Helena Feldhay. She moved to Israel with her family in 1956. She earned a bachelor's degree at Hebrew University, a master's degree at Tel Aviv University, and a PhD at York University.
Go to Profile#2124
Debra Marquart
#177112
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University , she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone." She is the Poet Laureate of Iowa since 2019.
Go to Profile#2125
Jennifer Cornell
#181286
Overall Influence
Jennifer C. Cornell is a Northern Ireland – American short story writer. Life She graduated from University of Ulster with an MA, and Cornell University with an MFA in 1994. She teaches at Oregon State University.
Go to Profile#2126
Mary Ashun
#129207
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Mary A. Ashun is a Ghanaian-Canadian educator, author and researcher; she is principal of Ghana International School in Accra, Ghana. Education Mary Ashun was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1968 as Mary Asabea Apea to Emmanuel Apea, former diplomat with the Commonwealth Secretariat in London and UN Ambassador and Coordinator to Nigeria and ECOWAS, and Emma Elizabeth Apea a teacher.
Go to Profile#2127
Héloïse Côté
#140429
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Héloïse Côté is a Québécoise author of fantasy novels and a researcher in the sciences of education. Biography Héloïse Côté began studying in 1998 for a Bachelor of Science in Education at Laval University in Quebec. Rather than teaching high school at the end of her undergraduate studies, as she had originally planned, she continued at Laval for her master's degree. She accumulated four annual citations on the honour roll of the Faculty of Education, and another on the honour roll of the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Côté also won the prize for the best Master's dissertation and the Raymond-...
Go to Profile#2128
Diana Spencer
#151177
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Diana Jane Spencer is an Irish classical scholar. She is Professor of Classics and dean of liberal arts and natural sciences at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on how ancient Romans articulate and explore their own identity.
Go to Profile#2129
Nora Decter
#33892
Overall Influence
Nora Decter is an instructor at the University of Winnipeg and an award-winning author. She won the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for fiction for her novel How Far We Go and How Fast. The Kobo Prize comes with a $10,000 cash award.
Go to Profile#2130
Susan Johnson
#155441
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Susan Johnson is an American author of numerous New York Times bestselling sexually explicit romance novels. She is unusual among romance writers for providing footnotes in some of her novels. Bibliography
Go to Profile#2131
Carol Guess
#111658
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Carol Guess is an American poet and fiction writer. Her work emphasizes compression, musicality, and experimental structure. Biography Guess attended Columbia University, majoring in English while studying ballet. She later earned graduate degrees in Creative Writing and English from Indiana University. Currently Professor of English at Western Washington University, she lives in Bellingham, WA. Guess identifies as queer and was a member of the Lesbian Avengers in the 1990s. Her books Homeschooling, Femme's Dictionary, and Gaslight were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Switch was a finalist for the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award in 1999.
Go to Profile#2132
Judith Baumel
#99314
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Judith Baumel is an American poet. Life She grew up in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science. She graduated from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, studying with Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert B. Shaw, James Richardson, and Jane Shore. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Richard Howard, Cynthia Macdonald, and David St. John. She taught at Boston University, and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2133
Judith Merkle Riley
#39174
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Judith Merkle Riley was an American writer, teacher and academic who wrote six historical romance novels. Biography Judith Astria Merkle was born in 1942 and grew up in Livermore, California. Her great-uncle was baseball player Fred Merkle. Her father, Theodore Charles Merkle, ran Project Pluto, and her brothers, Ted Merkle DVM is a well respected veterinarian serving Shasta County, Ralph is a pioneer in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. She earned a MA from Harvard University and held a Ph.D. from the University of C...
Go to Profile#2134
Elizabeth Minchin
#108968
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Elizabeth Hume Minchin is an Australian classicist and former professor of classics at the Australian National University . Until 2014 she was one of the two editors of Antichthon, the journal of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies.
Go to Profile#2135
Hanni Ossott
#169960
Overall Influence
1946 - 2002 (56 years)
Hanni Ossott was a Venezuelan poet, translator and critic. Life She was born in Caracas and she received her bachelor's degree in the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where she was also a professor. She was awarded the José Antonio Ramos Sucre Prize and the Lazo Martí Prize and she worked as a translator and a critic.
Go to Profile#2136
Pumla Dineo Gqola
#102302
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Pumla Dineo Gqola is a South African academic, writer, and gender activist, best known for her 2015 book Rape: A South African Nightmare, which won the 2016 Alan Paton Award. She is a professor of literature at Nelson Mandela University, where she holds the South African Research Chair in African Feminist Imaginations.
Go to Profile#2137
Rosabetty Muñoz
#179427
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Rosabetty Muñoz Serón is a Chilean poet and professor who is linked to the cultural movements from Ancud, from Castro, and Índice and Matra from Valdivia. She is a recipient of the Pablo Neruda Award and the Poetry Altazor Award of the National Arts.
Go to Profile#2138
Gloria Dünkler
#130955
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Gloria Dünkler is a Chilean writer, and winner of the 2016 Pablo Neruda Award. She is best known for her poetry, although she also collects folktales. Biography Gloria Dünkler was born into a large family of artisans, musicians, and fishermen. She studied Pedagogy in Language and Communication at the University of La Frontera in Temuco, and graduated as a Spanish teacher and a licentiate in education in 2003. Later, in 2009, she qualified as a librarian at the Metropolitan University of Technology in Santiago.
Go to Profile#2139
Myriam J. A. Chancy
#172022
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. , she is the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of Humanities at Scripps College of the Claremont Consortium. As a writer, she focuses on Haitian culture, gender, class, sexuality, and Caribbean women's studies. Her novels have won several awards, including the Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award.
Go to Profile#2140
Toril Swan
#141168
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Toril Swan was a Norwegian linguist. She was born in Sandnessjøen. After taking a bachelor's degree in philosophy at Bates College in 1970, she graduated with the cand.philol. degree from the University of Oslo in 1978. Swan was hired as an associate professor at the University of Tromsø in 1980, and received the dr.philos. degree from the same institution in 1987. Promoted to professor in 1990, she also served as dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1997 to 2002.
Go to Profile#2141
V. V. Ganeshananthan
#102588
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
V. V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan is an American fiction writer, essayist, and journalist of Ilankai Tamil descent. Her work has appeared in many leading newspapers and journals, including Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post.
Go to Profile#2142
Diana Brydon
#176639
Overall Influence
Diana Brydon is a Canadian literary scholar, currently a Canada Research Chair at University of Manitoba.
Go to Profile#2143
Kekla Magoon
#174311
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Kekla Magoon is an American author, best known for her NAACP Image Award-nominated young adult novel The Rock and the River, How It Went Down, The Season of Styx Malone, and X. In 2021, she received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her body of work. Her works also include middle grade novels, short stories, and historical, socio-political, and economy-related non-fiction.
Go to Profile#2144
Sally Ball
#115108
Overall Influence
Sara Louise "Sally" Ball is an American poet, editor, and professor. She is the author of Annus Mirabilis . Her poems and essays have appeared in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Rivendell, Slate, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Go to Profile#2145
Elizabeth Stuckey-French
#124340
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Elizabeth Stuckey-French is an American short story writer, novelist and professor. Life Stuckey-French was born on September 2, 1958, in Little Rock. She grew up in the town of Lafayette, IN. She graduated from Purdue University and was founding editor of the Sycamore Review. She was a James A. Michener Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop; she graduated with an MFA in 1992. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Five Points, Narr ative. She teaches creative writing at Florida State University. Richard Russo in his commentary about the selections in the 2005 O.
Go to Profile#2146
Alice Mary Stoll
#105829
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Alice Mary Stoll was an American biophysicist who developed fire-resistant fabric. She was a pioneer in aerospace medicine. She received the Achievement Award from the Society of Women Engineers in 1969.
Go to Profile#2147
Ingrid Horrocks
#92585
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ingrid Horrocks is a creative writing teacher, poet, travel writer, editor and essayist. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Biography Ingrid Horrocks was born in Hamilton in 1975 and grew up on farms north of Auckland and in the Wairarapa.
Go to Profile#2148
Åse-Marie Nesse
#110299
Overall Influence
1934 - 2001 (67 years)
Åse-Marie Nesse was a Norwegian philologist, translator and poet. Biography Åse-Marie Nesse was born in Klepp, in Rogaland county, Norway. She finished her secondary education in 1952 at Rogaland offentlege landsgymnas. She attended Oslo Teachers' College from 1953 to 1955, then worked as a school teacher before enrolling at the University of Oslo. She graduated with the cand.philol. degree in 1963, and was hired as a lecturer in Germanic studies. She was later promoted to associate professor, and retired in 2000.
Go to Profile#2149
Sarah Leggott
#177727
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Sarah Janet Leggott is a New Zealand literature academic. She is currently a full professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. Academic career After a 1999 PhD titled 'Reinscribing the female historical subject: auto/biographical voices of contemporary Spanish women writers' at the University of Auckland, she moved to the Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor. In December 2021, Leggott was appointed Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor for both the Wellington Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Wellington Faculty of Education. She will hold this role until a...
Go to Profile#2150
Jinyu Liu
#177265
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Jinyu Liu is the acting Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History at the Department of History of Emory University. She was a professor of classics at DePauw University, and was a distinguished guest professor at Shanghai Normal University. She is an expert in Roman history, social history, translation, the reception of Graeco-Roman classics in China, and Latin epigraphy.
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