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,

#2201

Eve MacDonald

#102833

Overall Influence

Eve MacDonald is a Canadian classicist and archaeologist who specialises in social history. She is a Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University. MacDonald previously worked at the Universities of Edinburgh and Reading. In 2015 she published Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life with Yale University Press.

#2202

Marjorie Kowalski Cole

#107268

Overall Influence

1953 - 2009 (56 years)

Marjorie Kowalski Cole was an American writer of poetry, short stories and novels. She won the 2004 Bellwether Prize with her first novel Correcting the Landscape. History Born in Boston, Cole lived in Alaska from 1966 until her death. She earned a BA and an MA in English from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MLS in Library Science from the University of Washington. She worked as a librarian and for a time as an instructor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, retiring in 1999 to focus on writing.

#2203

Irene Lemos

#156194

Overall Influence

Irene S. Lemos is a British classical archaeologist and academic, specialising in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Greece. She is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

#2204

Maja Solar

#162892

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Maja Solar is a Serbian poetress and Marxist-feminist philosopher. Biography Maja Solar studied philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad, graduated with Magister thesis on Darwin and Essentialism in 2008 and obtained her doctorate as PhD with thesis on The problem of ownership in Rousseau’s and Marx's philosophy in 2014. She was assistant at the department of philosophy of the university, specialized in philosophy of economics with focus on Marxism, political philosophy, philosophy of science and feminist theory from 2009–14.

#2205

Linda Leavell

#177928

Overall Influence

Linda Leavell is an American writer, scholar, and professor. Her biography of Marianne Moore won the PEN Weld Award for Biography and the Plutarch Award. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

#2206

Sarah Glaz

#101202

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sarah Glaz is a mathematician and mathematical poet. Her research specialty is commutative algebra; she is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. Education and career Glaz was born in Bucharest, Romania, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1972 at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She came to the US for her graduate education in mathematics, completing a Ph.D. in 1977 at Rutgers University. Her dissertation, Finiteness and Differential Properties of Ideals, was supervised by Wolmer Vasconcelos.

#2207

Juanita León

#63295

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Juanita León García is a Colombian journalist, writer, and public speaker. She is best known as the founder and director of the news website La Silla Vacía. Biography León obtained a law degree at the University of the Andes in Bogotá and an M.S. in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. She worked as a reporter on the Wall Street Journal Americas before returning to Colombia in 1998.

#2208

Lynne McMahon

#171209

Overall Influence

Lynne McMahon is an American poet. She graduated from University of Utah with a PhD in 1982. She teaches at University of Missouri, Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, New Virginia Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Yale Review, The New England Review and The Paris Review.

#2209

Ruth Perry

#168064

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ruth Perry is an American literary scholar who works on the literary and cultural history of eighteenth-century England and Scotland. She is known especially for her work on women’s writing. She is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

#2210

Jacqueline Fabre-Serris

#179432

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jacqueline Fabre-Serris is a French classical scholar, who is known for her work on Ovid, mythography, classical reception, and gender studies. She is Professeure des Universités of Latin Literature at the Charles de Gaulle University – Lille III.

#2211

Tenaya Darlington

#176312

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Tenaya Darlington is an American writer as well as associate professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her general fields of professional interest include food writing, fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and journalism. She is the author of six books.

#2212

Julia Kindt

#119363

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Julia Kindt is a German academic and writer who specialises in ancient Greek history and religion. She is a professor at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, Australia.

#2213

Sabra Loomis

#100601

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Sabra Loomis is an Irish-American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is House Held Together by Winds , winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series. Her honors include Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellowships. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, American Voice, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Cyphers, Florida Review, Heliotrope, Lumina, Negative Capability, Poetry Ireland Review, Salamander, Salt Hill Journal, and St. Ann's Review. She is the daughter of Alfred Loomis of Tuxedo Park, New York. She graduated from New York University. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and was on the faculty of the Poets' House, Donegal.

#2214

Marilyn Horowitz

Marilyn Horowitz

#178578

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Marilyn Horowitz is an American writer, TV creator, script doctor, writing coach, and producer. She is also the creator of the Horowitz System, a system for screenwriting, and author of several books.

#2215

Kaye Ballard

#141529

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Kaye Ballard was an American actress, comedian, and singer. Early life Ballard was born Catherine Gloria Balotta in Cleveland, Ohio, one of four children born to Italian immigrant parents, Lena and Vincenzo Balotta. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Calabria, a region of southern Italy.

#2216

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

#170359

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is an American poet and served as Oklahoma's twenty-first poet laureate. Biography Born in Hobart, Oklahoma in 1961, Mish was educated at the University of Houston, the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, and the University of Oklahoma, where she earned her doctorate in 2009. She is a faculty member in the Red Earth MFA in creative writing at Oklahoma City University, which she also serves as program director. Mish is the founder and editor of Mongrel Empire Press, based in Norman, Oklahoma. She edited the 2011 anthology Ain't Nobody Can Sing like Me: New Oklahoma Writing which also features a poem by fellow Oklahoma Poet Laureate Nathan Brown.

#2217

Catherine Brady

#134188

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Catherine Brady is an American short story writer. Life She graduated from Hollins College with an MA, and from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with an MFA. She was on the board, served as Vice-President and President of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.

#2218

Rebecca Reynolds

#146646

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rebecca Reynolds is an American poet. Life Reynolds was born in Washington D.C., United States, in which city she also grew up. She graduated from Vassar College, Rutgers University , and the University of Michigan . Since 1991, she has worked as an administrator at Douglass College, and has also taught Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

#2219

Agnes Latham

#89510

Overall Influence

1905 - 1996 (91 years)

Agnes Mary Christabel Latham was a British academic, Professor of English at Bedford College. She is remembered for her lifelong project of editing the letters of Sir Walter Raleigh and for her edition of As You Like It for the Arden Shakespeare.

#2220

Catherine Heath

#111378

Overall Influence

1924 - 1991 (67 years)

Catherine Heath was a British novelist. An obituary in The Daily Telegraph called her work "gentle and witty, full of cool observations about human behaviour." Biography Heath was born Catherine Hirsch in Hendon, Middlesex, the daughter of Dutch immigrants Samuel and Anna de Boer Hirsch. She was educated at Henda County School then St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she studied English under Helen Gardner. In 1948, she married Denis Heath; they were divorced in 1980. Also in 1948, she became an assistant lecturer in the University of Wales.

#2221

Gayatri Gopinath

#169134

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Gayatri Gopinath is an associate professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Gopinath is perhaps best known for her book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, which received article-length reviews in a number of journals.

#2222

Carin Franzén

#174866

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Carin Franzén is a Swedish literary scholar. She graduated as dr.philos. in literary science in 1995, and is professor of language and literature at the Linköping University. Her works include the essay collection Till det omöjligas konst from 2010, Jag gav honom inte min kärlek. Om hövisk kärlek som kvinnlig strategi from 2012, and När vi talar om oss själva from 2018. She has also translated works from French into Swedish language, including psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Michel Foucault.

#2223

Deanne Williams

Deanne Williams

#170127

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Deanne Williams is a Canadian author and literary scholar. She is a Professor in York University's Department of English. A pioneer in early modern Girls' studies, she has published research on Shakespeare's girl characters and girl performers in medieval and early modern England, as well as on the influence of French culture on English literature.

#2224

Barbara Nicolosi

#181479

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Barbara Nicolosi is an American screenwriter, script consultant and university professor of cinema and Great Books. Early life and education Nicolosi was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Anthony and Hilda Nicolosi. She is the second of four daughters. Her youngest sister is the professional opera singer Valerie Nicolosi. When Barbara was five years old, the family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where her father took a job as the archivist for the Naval War College. Anthony Nicolosi would go on to found the Naval War College Museum. She has a B.A. from the Great Books program at The Col...

#2225

Shirley Hill Witt

#165812

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Shirley Hill Witt is an anthropologist, educator, author, civil rights activist, and former foreign service officer. A member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, Wolf Clan, Witt was one of the first Native American women to earn a Ph.D. She obtained her Ph.D. in evolutionary anthropology from the University of New Mexico in 1969. Witt has published extensively on Native Americans in addition to being a poet and fiction writer. She was a founding member of the National Indian Youth Council and worked with them from 1961 to 1964. She also served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

#2226

Brikena Smajli

#185038

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Brikena Smajli is an Albanian writer, and a lecturer at the European University of Tirana. Smajli was born in Shkodra, where she still lives. She has been described as "a fine representative of a new generation of female writers in Albania".

#2227

Tracy Sorensen

#128349

Overall Influence

Tracy Sorensen is an Australian novelist, filmmaker and academic. Career Sorensen is a tutor and lecturer at Charles Sturt University and has published five academic papers. In February 2018 her debut novel The Lucky Galah was published through Pan MacMillan. It has been shortlisted and longlisted in multiple awards . It is narrated by a flightless pet galah observing characters from a family's back verandah in a small Western Australian town.

#2228

Kellie Wells

#105543

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kellie Wells is an American professor of English, novelist, and short story writer. Life Kellie Wells graduated from the University of Kansas with a BS in journalism and a BA in English. She received MFAs from the University of Montana and the University of Pittsburgh, and a PhD from Western Michigan University. Previously the director of the graduate writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, Wells now teaches at the University of Alabama, where she is also a member of the advisory board for The Tusculum Review. She also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.

#2229

Marta Segarra

#162798

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Marta Segarra Montaner is a Spanish philologist, university professor, and CNRS researcher who develops her work mainly in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, biopolitics and posthumanism, and cultural studies . In 2009, Segarra was awarded the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats Acadèmia award for research excellence in the Catalan field.

#2230

Kathleen McCracken

#174705

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kathleen McCracken is a Canadian poet, who was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry at the 1992 Governor General's Awards for her collection Blue Light, Bay and College.

#2231

Elizabeth Bartlett

#152770

Overall Influence

1911 - 1994 (83 years)

Elizabeth Bartlett was an American poet and writer noted for her lyrical and symbolic poetry, creation of the new twelve-tone form of poetry, founder of the international non-profit organization Literary Olympics, Inc., and known as an author of fiction, essays, reviews, translations, and as an editor.

#2232

Catherine Chandler

Catherine Chandler

#80798

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Catherine M. Chandler is a Canadian poet and translator, born in Queens, New York City and raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, emigrating to Canada in 1971. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Spanish from Wilkes University and a Master of Arts in Education from McGill University. She and her husband currently divide their time between their homes in Saint-Lazare-de-Vaudreuil, Québec, and Punta del Este, Uruguay.

#2233

Elizabeth Socolow

#172862

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Elizabeth Socolow is an American poet. Life She is a native of New York City, has taught at Rutgers University, Vassar College, Yale University, Barnard College, Wayne State University, University of Michigan Dearborn.

#2234

Pamela Alexander

#121669

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Pamela Alexander is an American poet. Life She graduated from Bates College in 1970 and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with a Master of Fine Arts in 1973. She teaches at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Book Review, Orion, TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Journal, New Republic, American Scholar.

#2235

Mojca Kumerdej

#109324

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Mojca Kumerdej is a Slovene writer, philosopher and critic. She works as the cultural chronicler for the daily newspaper Delo. Biography Kumerdej graduated in philosophy and sociology of culture from the University of Ljubljana. Her debut novel Krst nad Triglavom is a parody and a witty and ironical revision of one of Slovene literary history's most important works, the epic poem Krst pri Savici by France Prešeren. Her next two published books, Fragma and Temna snov, are collections of short stories. Her stories have been translated into many languages and have been published in various Slo...

#2236

Heather McDonald

Heather McDonald

#170576

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Heather McDonald is an American playwright, director, librettist, and professor. Early life Mcdonald is originally a Canadian citizen. She graduated from the University of Florida with a BFA in English. She is an MFA graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

#2237

Kim Todd

#175020

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Kim Todd is an American author. She is also a professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota. She has written essays and several books of nonfiction, primarily about environmental history and the natural sciences.

#2238

Maurade Glennon

#185423

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Deirdre Maura Darrouzet , better known as Maurade Glennon, was an Irish-born American writer and teacher who lived in Texas. Glennon was born in Birr, Ireland, and received her early schooling at the Convent of Mercy in her hometown. She attended the Dominican College in Dublin from 1941 to 1943, St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas from 1959 to 1960, and University of Texas from 1961 to 1964. She has worked as a teacher and served on the board of directors of Austin Community Nursery Schools from 1963 to 1969.

#2239

Lynn Morris

#100420

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Lynn Morris was a Christian fiction author. She was the daughter of Gilbert Morris and co-wrote with him on most of her books. Books by Lynn Morris Cheney Duvall, M.D. Series This series was co-written with her father, Gilbert Morris.

#2240

Leslie Cockburn

#95222

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Leslie Cockburn is an American investigative journalist, and filmmaker. Her investigative television segments have aired on CBS, NBC, PBS Frontline, and 60 Minutes. She has won an Emmy Award, The Hillman Prize, Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award.

#2241

Lorraine Warren

#76333

Overall Influence

Lorraine Warren is a New Zealand academic. She is a full professor at the Massey University. Academic career After receiving a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Wales in 1983, Warren moved into the field of innovation and entrepreneurship, working at Loughborough University and University of Southampton in the UK, before moving to Massey University as a full professor.

#2242

Sarah Jones

#128108

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Sarah Jones is an American playwright, actress, and poet. Called "a master of the genre" by The New York Times, Jones has written and performed four multi-character solo shows, including Bridge & Tunnel, which was produced Off-Broadway in 2004 by Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, and then on to Broadway in 2006 where it received a Special Tony Award.

#2243

Erica Funkhouser

#123208

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Erica Funkhouser is an American poet. She graduated from Vassar College with a BA and from Stanford University with a MA. She teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She lives in Essex, Massachusetts.

#2244

Antonette diPaolo Healey

#81762

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Antonette diPaolo Healey is a philologist and a scholar of Old English literature and language. She has published on lexicography, glossography, and history of the English language. diPaolo Healey edited seven releases of The Dictionary of Old English , overseeing the development of the dictionary from physical material, microfiche, CD-ROM, through to the creation of the website. She is currently Professor Emerita of English at University of Toronto.

#2245

Margaret Waller

#179735

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Margaret "Peggy" Waller is an American scholar of 19th-century French literature. She is the Mary Ann Vanderzyl Reynolds Professor of Humanities and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

#2246

Laurie Stone

#184237

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Laurie Stone is an American writer and critic. Biography Stone is a graduate of Barnard College and holds an MA from Columbia University . She taught at Hunter College and Queens College from 1969 to 1975. After many years as a journalist at The Village Voice , she was appointed theater critic for The Nation and critic-at-large on NPR's Fresh Air. Her books include a story collection, My Life as an Animal , an essay collection, Laughing in the Dark , a novel, Starting with Serge , and an essay collection, Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening .

#2247

Aimee Bahng

#150743

Overall Influence

Aimee Bahng is an American academic. She is a professor of gender and women's studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her previous denial of tenure at Dartmouth College sparked widespread protests about discrimination against racial minorities in academia.

#2248

Leta Hong Fincher

#74197

Overall Influence

Leta Hong Fincher is an American journalist, feminist and writer. Biography Fincher was born in British Hong Kong, to a Chinese-American mother with roots in Xiamen, Fujian, and a European-American father. She grew up in Canberra after her parents received tenures at Australian National University. Her mother, a linguist, and her father, a historian, were both Chinese scholars, and she spent a significant portion of her childhood travelling to and from China. As a child, she spoke Mandarin at home with her mother.

#2249

Linda Macaulay

#154256

Overall Influence

Linda Ann Macaulay is the Emeritus Professor of System Design at the University of Manchester, specialising in Human–computer interaction, Requirements engineering and Service science, management and engineering.

#2250

Karla Pollmann

#135904

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Karla Pollmann is the President at the University of Tübingen in Germany, an office she has held since October 1, 2022. Previously she was the Dean of Arts at the University of Bristol, where she worked in both the department of Classics and Ancient History and the department of Religion and Theology. Her research covers Classical to Late Antiquity, patristics, the history of exegesis and hermeneutics, and the thought of Augustine of Hippo and its reception.

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