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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#2151

Diane McKinney-Whetstone

#175219

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Diane McKinney-Whetstone is an American author and is a member of the University of Pennsylvania Creative Writing program faculty. Her works of fiction have won numerous awards, including the BCALA Literary Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. in 2005 and 2009

#2152

Diana Cage

#154724

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Diana Cage is an American feminist author, editor, cultural critic and radio personality. Her work examines sexuality, feminism, and LGBT culture. Career Cage began writing about sex and culture while interning under editor Lisa Palac at the San Francisco-based magazine Future Sex. In 2000, Cage's editorial work and extensive writing on sex and sexuality converged when she was hired as editor at the landmark lesbian magazine On Our Backs. During her tenure there, Cage operated the magazine according to her radical beliefs about sex and sexual identity, expanding the magazine's vision of what constituted lesbian sex.

#2153

Gillian Jerome

#175406

Overall Influence

Gillian Jerome is a Canadian poet, essayist, editor and instructor. She won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2009 and the ReLit Award for Poetry in 2010. Jerome is a co-founder of Canadian Women In Literary Arts , and also serves as the poetry editor for Geist. She is a lecturer in literature at the University of British Columbia and also runs writing workshops at the Post 750 in downtown Vancouver.

#2154

Rhiannon Ash

#166973

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Rhiannon Ash is a British classical scholar specialising in Latin literature and Tacitus. She is professor of Roman Historiography in the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. She was formerly a lecturer at the Department of Greek and Latin at University College, London.

#2155

Joanie Mackowski

#173464

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Joanie V. Mackowski is an American poet. Life Mackowski grew up in Connecticut. She graduated from Wesleyan University, the University of Washington, and was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She earned a Ph.D. at University of Missouri.

#2156

Betty Jane Belanus

#102122

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Betty Jane Belanus is an American writer and folklorist. Belanus completed her graduate work in folklore at Indiana University and has been with the Smithsonian Institution since 1987, ultimately working with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage as an education specialist. Part of her work with the Smithsonian has been the curating of programs for the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival, including the 2009 Wales program. She has worked on "Smithsonian Inside Out", on the occupational life of the Smithsonian.

#2157

Deanne Lundin

#67921

Overall Influence

Deanne Lundin is an American poet, and short story writer. Life She was born and raised in Florida and has lived in Oklahoma, Boston, California, England and Wales. She graduated from Harvard University, and University of Michigan in 1997 with an MFA. She graduated from the Eastman School of Music, with a master's in music.

#2158

Jennette McCurdy

Jennette McCurdy

#157368

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (32 years)

Jennette Michelle Faye McCurdy is an American producer, director, singer, writer and former actress. McCurdy's breakthrough role as Sam Puckett in the Nickelodeon sitcom iCarly earned her four Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards. She reprised the character in the iCarly spin-off series Sam & Cat before leaving Nickelodeon. McCurdy also appeared in the television series Malcolm in the Middle , Zoey 101 , Lincoln Heights , True Jackson, VP , and Victorious . She produced, wrote, and starred in her own webseries, What's Next for Sarah? , and led the science-fiction series Between .

#2159

Jana Harris

#178777

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jana Harris is an American poet, novelist, and essayist and the founder of one of the internet's first electronic poetry journals. Biography Harris was born in San Francisco, California. She attended the University of Oregon and San Francisco State University . She has taught creative writing at New York University and, since 1986, at the University of Washington.

#2160

Rosamond S. King

#152490

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rosamond S. King is an American poet and literary theorist. She is a literature professor at Brooklyn College, where her courses focus on Caribbean and African literature, sexuality, and performance. In 2017, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for her debut poetry collection, Rock | Salt | Stone.

#2161

Marina Vishmidt

#168351

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Marina Vishmidt is an American writer, editor and critic. She lectures at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London in the MA program Culture Industry, and teaches Art Theory in the MA Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her research mainly concerns the relationship between art, value and labour. She further explores this through works on debt, social reproduction and artistic entrepreneurialism. In 2013, she completed her PhD entitled 'Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital' at the Queen Mary University of London.

#2162

Cornelia Hoogland

#176940

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Cornelia Hoogland is a Canadian poet, playwright and retired professor. She lived on Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada, but until 2011 divided her time between London, Ontario as well, where she was a professor at the University of Western Ontario. Hoogland has performed and worked internationally in the areas of poetry and theatre. In 2004, she founded and was the director until 2011 of Antler River Poetry , a poetry reading and workshop series.

#2163

Pippa Little

#179909

Overall Influence

Pippa Little is a Scottish poet, reviewer, translator, and editor. She has published five poetry collections and her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Oxford Poets 2010 and Best British Poetry 2011.

#2164

Katherine Firth

#175395

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Katherine Elizabeth Firth is a British-Australian poet and librettist. She is the inaugural Head of Lisa Bellear House in the University of Melbourne. She previously was Academic Coordinator at International House, University of Melbourne, a university lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and a research associate at Trinity College Theological School, Melbourne, the theological college of the Anglican Province of Victoria.

#2165

Amanda Coplin

#142461

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Amanda Coplin is an American novelist. She was born in Wenatchee, Washington, and graduated from the University of Oregon and University of Minnesota. In 2013 Coplin won a Whiting Writer's Award and was named to the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35".

#2166

Nadine Akkerman

#160237

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Nadine Akkerman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her published work has been concerned with the life and letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, and early modern espionage, and she has made a major contribution to studies of that Queen, the Thirty Years War, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, by revisiting and editing original manuscript sources and letters.

#2167

Judy Radul

#173801

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Judy Radul is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, writer and educator. She is known for her performance art and media installations, as well as her critical writing. Biography She has exhibited her work around the world, and recently participated in the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst program in Berlin. She is currently a professor at Simon Fraser University, in the School for Contemporary Arts and is represented by the Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

#2168

Marie-Pascale Huglo

#175267

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Marie-Pascale Huglo is a French-born writer and educator living in Quebec. Biography She was born in Amiens. She studied modern literature and English studies at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. She moved to Montreal in 1983. She pursued studies in comparative literature at the Université de Montréal, receiving a doctorate in 1983. She teaches at the Université de Montréal, where she is a professor in the department of French language literature, and at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

#2169

Verónica Reyes

#177876

Overall Influence

Verónica Reyes is a Chicana, Latina, LGBT poet from East Los Angeles, California. She is known for her book of poetry Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives, which won her several awards. In 2014, she was honored with the International Latino Book Award and the Golden Crown Literary Society Award, and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. In 1999, she won the AWP Intro Journals Project award and was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

#2170

Virginia MacKenny

#138656

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Virginia MacKenny is a South African artist and writer. She is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa.

#2171

Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira

#38833

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira is a Brazilian journalist and feminist writer. Biography She was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944, she graduated in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In the 1960s, she began her professional career as a journalist at Revista Senhor, Jornal do Brasil, Revista Visão and O Globo.

#2172

Helen Morales

#182100

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Dr Helen Morales is a classicist and the second Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is best known for her scholarship on the ancient novel, gender and sexuality, and Greek mythology, as well for her public writing and lectures.

#2173

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

#168666

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is an Indian feminist scholar, a professor in English, and author of several books on issues related to feminism and gender. Her research interest has covered many subjects such as of the pre and post colonial period, Indian English writing, gender and cultural issues related to South Asia, and the English literature of the Victorian era. She has also edited a series called the "Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism", and "Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India". She has authored many books of which the notable ones are the Scandal of the State: Women, Law...

#2174

Samiya Bashir

#143783

Overall Influence

Samiya A. Bashir is an American lesbian poet and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

#2175

Danièle Chatelain

#116157

Overall Influence

Danièle Chatelain is a professor of French and a writer. She holds master's degrees from the University of Strasbourg and the University of California, Riverside, where she also got a Ph.D. in 1982. She is a professor of French at the University of Redlands.

#2176

Carolina López-Ruiz

#172316

Overall Influence

Carolina López-Ruiz is a Spanish classicist specializing in comparative mythology, Ancient Mediterranean religions, Greek language and literature, North-West Semitic languages and literatures, and cultural exchange. She has authored several works on the Phoenician civilization, and contacts between Greek and Near Eastern cultures.

#2177

Murasaki Yamada

#144887

Overall Influence

1948 - 2009 (61 years)

Murasaki Yamada, born as Mitsuko Shiratori, was a Japanese manga artist, feminist essayist and poet. She was associated with the alternative manga magazine Garo. Life She made her debut as a professional manga artist in 1969 in Osamu Tezuka's avantgarde magazine COM and had formal art training before becoming a manga artist. When COM stopped being published, she started working for Garo magazine instead. Her first short story in Garo was "Aa Seken-sama" in 1971. For another short story, "Kaze no Fuku Koro", she won a Honorable Mention at the Big Comic Award associated with the Big Comic magazi...

#2178

Sarah Maddison

#38510

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sarah Maddison CF is an Australian author and political scientist. Education Maddison has a PhD in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Career She is a former Director of GetUp! and the 2018–19 president of the Australian Political Studies Association. She was awarded a very large grant from the SEROS Foundation which was withdrawn under unclear circumstances.

#2179

Maura Stanton

#138084

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Maura Stanton , is an American poet, and writer. Biography Maura Stanton was born to Joseph Stanton, a salesman, and Wanda Haggard Stanton, a nurse, in Evanston, Illinois. She received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1969, and her M.F.A. in 1971 from the University of Iowa.

#2180

Lisa Gorton

#155054

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion , and Empirical. Her novel The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, and the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction . Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.

#2181

Siomara España

#178656

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Siomara España Muñoz is an Ecuadorian poet, essayist, professor and literary critic. She is director of the area of Literature of the House of Culture Núcleo del Guayas. Trajectory She is the author of six books and other works, with a critical and essay style within Ecuadorian literature. She has also collected poems from her previous publications in an anthology in which she has added some unpublished verses.

#2182

Doris Runge

#129998

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Doris Runge is a German writer. She was the daughter of a manufacturer whose business was expropriated after World War II. Her family moved to Neukirchen in Schleswig-Holstein in 1953, and he attended schools in Oldenburg and Lübeck before following high education in Kiel where she became a teacher. She married the painter Jürgen Runge and they divorced in 1981. They couple used to live partially in Ibiza during the 1970s. Runge moved back to Germany where she lives in the so-called Weiße Haus in , Holstein. She organizes there readings with important contemporary authors. Runge has been continuously publishing poetry books since 1981.

#2183

Janine Joseph

#123682

Overall Influence

Janine Joseph is a Filipino-American poet and author. Early life and influences Janine Joseph was born in the Philippines. Her father, at the time, worked for President Corazon Aquino. He held a strong belief that if they stayed then their children would never learn the values of hard work and would inherit the social and economic status that their family had in the Philippines. In 1991, Joseph and her family immigrated to California on tourist visas, where the family had previously visited multiple times before. First settling in Riverside, California, then in Arizona.

#2184

Andrea Brady

#163158

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary. She studied at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge Her academic work focuses on contemporary poetry and the early modern period. She is the curator of the Archive of the Now and the co-editor of Barque Press.

#2185

Ellen Sue Miller

#183653

Overall Influence

1967 - 2008 (41 years)

Ellen Miller was an American fiction writer. She was born and raised in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, New York, though lived in New York's East Village for the last 20 years of her life. Miller's novel Like Being Killed was published in 1998 and appeared briefly on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list. Her fiction also appeared in the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Brooklyn Noir, and Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. She was at work on a second, untitled novel at the time of her death.

#2186

Audacia Ray

#169339

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Audacia Ray is an American human sexuality and culture author, who focuses on the influences of modern technology. She is a sex worker rights advocate and leads media skills workshops intended to train sex workers to deal with interviews.

#2187

Carrie Oeding

#174332

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Carrie Oeding is an American poet. Life She was born and raised in Luverne, in southwestern Minnesota. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and a PhD in Creative Writing from Ohio University. She has taught at Ohio University, University of Houston, and is currently teaching at Bridgewater State University in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

#2188

Karen Mulhallen

#173991

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Karen Mulhallen is a Canadian educator, poet, essayist, critic and editor. She taught English at Ryerson University from 1967 to 2014. She served as the poetry review editor of The Canadian Forum from 1974 to 1979, and their features editor from 1975 to 1988. In 1973, Mulhallen became editor-in-chief of Descant until its closure in 2015.

#2189

KJ Sanchez

#142253

Overall Influence

KJ Sanchez is an American theatre actor, director, and playwright. She is currently an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as head of the MFA Directing program.

#2190

Caroline T. Schroeder

#146273

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Caroline Theresa Schroeder is professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is an expert on early Christianity. Early life Schroeder is the daughter of Mary M. Schroeder.

#2191

Emilie Pine

#173403

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Emilie Pine is a writer and lecturer in modern drama at University College Dublin . Her story, Notes to self, shows events in her private life. Biography Pine was born in 1978. She lived in Dublin before her family moved to London.

#2192

Lisa Downing

#127598

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Lisa Downing is an author and academic. She is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. Downing's work is innovative in its dialogue between the critical humanities and the sciences, especially psychiatry. Her published work focuses principally on theories of sexual perversion and queer theory; the work of Michel Foucault; ethical philosophy and film; and, most recently, the cultural meanings of criminality.

#2193

Kristin Linklater

#134467

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Kristin Linklater was a Scottish vocal coach, acting teacher, actor, theatre director, and author. She retired from the Theatre Arts Division of Columbia University where she was professor emerita. She taught residential courses in Orkney.

#2194

Karin Lin-Greenberg

#173189

Overall Influence

Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions , won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award . Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University.

#2195

Ashlee Adams Crews

#181518

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Ashlee Adams Crews is an American fiction writer who typically incorporates her rural Middle Georgia roots in her works of literature. Biography Crews was born and raised just outside Sandersville, Georgia. Crews earned an English degree from the University of Georgia and later earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College and State University. She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two daughters and has taught composition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#2196

Kari edwards

#184003

Overall Influence

1954 - 2006 (52 years)

kari edwards was a poet, artist and gender activist. Her name is written all lowercase. She won the New Langton Arts Bay Area Award in literature and posthumously won a Lambda Literary Award. She authored have been blue for charity ; obedience ; iduna ; a day in the life of p ; a diary of lies, Belladonna #27 ; obLiqUE paRt: colLABorationS ; and post/ .

#2197

Mireya Cueto

#145047

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Mireya Cueto was a Mexican puppeteer, writer and dramaturg. She was also co-founder of the national marionette museum Museo Nacional de Títeres in Huamantla, Tlaxcala. Biography Cueto, born on February 3, 1922, in Mexico City, is one of two daughters of artists Lola and Gérman, who were also well-known puppeteers.

#2198

Wendy James

#127179

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Wendy James is an Australian author of crime and literary fiction. James received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney an MA from University of Technology, Sydney and a PhD from the University of New England, Armidale.

#2199

Wendy Battin

#179261

Overall Influence

1953 - 2015 (62 years)

Wendy Battin was an American poet. Life Wendy Battin was born in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from Cornell University and the University of Washington. She taught at MIT, Smith College, Syracuse University, Boston University, Connecticut College.

#2200

Christine Fell

#129235

Overall Influence

1938 - 1998 (60 years)

Professor Christine Elizabeth Fell OBE taught English at the University of Nottingham from 1971 until 1993. She was awarded a first-class Honors in English from Royal Holloway, University of London and later completed an MA in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at University College London. Professor Fell was Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Nottingham from 1986 to 1989, and Head of the English department from 1990 to 1993. She moved onto become the first Director of Humanities Research Centre in 1994, continuing until her retirement in 1997 due to ill health.

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