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

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#2401

Mayuko Watanabe

#112659

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Mayuko Watanabe is a Japanese journalist and media scholar specialized in media literacy, gender and sexuality. She had been a Senior Researcher and lecturer at Keio University Research Institute. Her research interest through nearly 20 years of career including as a TV news reporter has been the way of regulatory policy of obscene expressions. She has published research and provided media commentary on the topics of media communication and literacy of Japanese obscene content.

#2402

Vladana Likar-Smiljanić

#101303

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Vladana Likar-Smiljanić is a Serbian engineer, educator and book illustrator and writer. In the former Yugoslavia, Likar-Smiljanić illustrated children's books, of which hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. Her books were sold also in Spain, Italy, the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union. She initially became well-known for her page "Cica's Corner" in popular Yugoslav magazine for entertainment, Politikin Zabavnik. Her first illustrations appeared in The Treasury of Children's Poems by Jova Jovanović Zmaj.

#2403

Sarah Vaughan

#72425

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Sarah Hall , best known under the pseudonym Sarah Vaughan, is a British writer and journalist. Until 2008, she worked for The Guardian as a senior reporter, health correspondent, and political correspondent.

#2404

Judy Jordan

#116065

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Judy Jordan is an American poet. Her honors include the Walt Whitman Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Life She grew up on a small farm near the Carolina border. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she was picking cotton by the time she was 5. She was the first member of her family to attend university, with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 1990, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1995. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree, in fiction from the University of Utah, in 2000. She lived in Salt Lake City.

#2405

Mari Saat

#90472

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Mari Saat is an Estonian writer. In 1970, Saat graduated from the Tallinn Polytechnical Institute's faculty of economics. Since 1976, she has been a member of the Estonian Writers' Union. During the period of 1983–1993, she was a professional writer.

#2406

Susan L. Mizruchi

#187410

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Susan Laura Mizruchi is professor of English literature and the William Arrowsmith Professor in the Humanities at Boston University. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, religion and culture, literary and social theory, literary history, history of the social sciences, and American and Global Film and TV. Since 2016, she has served as the director of the Boston University Center for the Humanities.

#2407

Isabel Torres

#185701

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Isabel Marie Bernadette Torres is Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. Biography Torres gained her Bachelor's degree and PhD from Queen's University. She was elected as member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2019, and as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.

#2408

Ruth Etchells

#89207

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Dorothea Ruth Etchells was an English poet and college principal who spent most of her working life in the University of Durham. Early life She was born on 17 April 1931. She attended Merchant Taylors’ School and the University of Liverpool. After graduation, she became an English teacher at Aigburth Vale High School in Liverpool and then a lecturer at the Chester College of Higher Education.

#2409

Jane E. Clarke

#65761

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jane Elizabeth Clarke is an English writer of children's books and poetry. Her best known books include Gilbert the Greatillustrated by Charles Fuge, and Neon Leon illustrated by Britta Teckentrup. Jane has published more than 80 books, including the Dr. Kittycat series for Oxford University Press, and children's reading scheme books used in schools. CBeebies Bedtime Stories have featured two of Jane's books, Stuck in the Mud and Knight Time . Stuck in the Mud is also featured with a US Scholastic Book Club edition which includes a CD audio edition. This audio edition is produced by Beatstre...

#2410

Cynthia Arrieu-King

#190975

Overall Influence

Cynthia Arrieu-King is an American poet with Chinese heritage. Early life Cynthia Arrieu-King was raised in Louisville, KY. Career Cynthia Arrieu-King is the author of three collections of poetry, People are Tiny in Paintings of China ; Manifest ; and Futureless Languages . She also co-wrote a chapbook with Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis By a Year Lousy with Meteors and a book-length collaborative volume of poetry with the late Hillary Gravendyk, Unlikely Conditions .

#2411

Barbara Cully

#189487

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Barbara Cully is an American poet. Life She has taught at the Prague Summer Writers' Program, and teaches at the University of Arizona. She is a contributing editor of Cue. Awards 1996 National Poetry Series Open Competition, for The New IntimacyArizona Commission on the Arts FellowshipWriter-in-Residence for the YMCA Writer's Voice.

#2412

Renée Poznanski

#93203

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Renée Poznanski is a French-born Israeli historian, specialist in the Holocaust, and the Jewish Resistance in France during the Second World War, who teaches at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba, in Israel.

#2413

Elizabeth Azcona Cranwell

Elizabeth Azcona Cranwell

#118142

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Elizabeth Azcona Cranwell was an Argentine poet, storyteller, writer, translator, and literary critic. She was born and died in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was on the faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. She was a teacher, teaching workshops and seminars. She was also a literary critic for the newspaper La Nación and a translator. She translated the poems of William Shand, the collected poems of Dylan Thomas, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

#2414

Shaista Wahab

#57493

Overall Influence

Shaista Wahab has written Dari language books. Her book A Brief History of Afghanistan was published in 2007. Wahab was a librarian and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she coordinated the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection in the Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library Archives & Special Collections. An oral history specialist, she served as a consultant to the Afghanistan Unveiled film project by Independent Lens, which was later picked up by PBS.

#2415

Amy Jephta

#189621

Overall Influence

Amy Jephta is a South African playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. Works include Kristalvlakte, Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story, Other People's Lives, Sonskyn Beperk, and While You Weren't Looking. She is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town and the first recipient of the Emerging Theatre Director's Bursary in South Africa. Her work has been staged at The Fugard Theatre, The Bush Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, Jermyn Street Theatre, Theatre503 and the Edinburgh International Festival. Jephta is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab and was one of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans in 2013.

#2416

Aldona Jonaitis

#125657

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Aldona Jonaitis is the director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an author who has published widely on Native American art.

#2417

Julie Cassiday

#191194

Overall Influence

Julie A. Cassiday is an American literary scholar and Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College. She is known for her expertise in comparative literature. Cassiday is a former president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

#2418

Anna Livia

#175085

Overall Influence

1955 - 2007 (52 years)

Anna Livia was a lesbian feminist author and linguist, well known for her fiction and non-fiction regarding sexuality. From 1999 until shortly before the time of her death she was a member of staff at University of California, Berkeley.

#2419

Mary Claire Engstrom

#184108

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Mary Claire Engstrom was an American writer and historian. She is best known for her active role in preserving the historic town of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Biography Mary was born in Kansas City, and was the daughter of Lester L. Randolph and Florence Alberta Toynbee Randolph. She earned a PhD at University of North Carolina in English literature in 1939, and did postdoctoral research at Harvard and Yale, specializing in 18-century satire.

#2420

Sonya Voumard

#187725

Overall Influence

Sonya Voumard is an Australian writer and lecturer who has taught non-fiction for many years at the University of Technology Sydney and most recently at Southern Cross University. Voumard has published one work of fiction , two book length works of non-fiction and several articles for Australian newspapers, magazines and literary journals. Prior to academia, Voumard spent over 20 years as a journalist working for major newspapers and magazines in Australia such as The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Voumard's academic articles have also been published in Meanjin, Griffith Review and Island...

#2421

Marisa Cleveland

#111997

Overall Influence

Marisa Cleveland is an American author and educator, an executive director for The Seymour Agency, and a managing partner for Simeris Alliance. Her debut teen novel, Accidental Butterfly, hit the New York Times and USA Today bestsellers list as part of an anthology in June 2015.

#2422

Marcela Iacub

#52520

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Marcela Iacub is an Argentine writer and jurist specializing in bioethics research, living in France. In 2013, Iacub was successfully sued for invasion of privacy by Dominique Strauss-Kahn: her novel Belle et Bête included a character based on him.

#2423

Caitríona Ní Chléirchín

#190420

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Caitríona Ní Chléirchín is an Irish writer. Biography Ní Chléirchín was born in Emyvale, County Monaghan. Her first collection, Crithloinnir, was published in 2010. It won first prize in the Oireachtas competition for new writers 2010. An Bhrídeach Sí, her second collection of poetry, received the Michael Hartnett Prize in 2015. She is an Irish-language lecturer at Dublin City University.

#2424

Miyako Yoshida

#45379

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Miyako Yoshida is a Japanese ballet dancer. She was a Principal Guest Artist of The Royal Ballet as well as a principal dancer with K-ballet, Japan. Life and career Born and trained in Tokyo, Yoshida won the Prix de Lausanne in 1983 and joined Royal Ballet School in England. In 1984, she joined then Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, the present Birmingham Royal Ballet and was promoted to principal in 1988. In following year, she was awarded the Global Award and the Arts Encouragement Prize for Artists of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, Japan.

#2425

Jean E. Howard

#133668

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jean Elizabeth Howard is an American professor in English studies and a Shakespeare scholar. She is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and a former trustee of Brown University.

#2426

Virgia Brocks-Shedd

#185128

Overall Influence

1943 - 1992 (49 years)

Virgia Brocks-Shedd was an American librarian and poet. She was the head librarian at the Tougaloo College library and was a founding member of multiple library associations, working to ensure African-Americans were represented in libraries. Brocks-Shedd published poetry in multiple venues and inspired an appreciation for literature in generations of students.

#2427

Clara Royer

#184472

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Clara Royer is a French writer and screenwriter. Her first novel, entitled Csillag, was published in 2011. She is the co-writer of the 2015 Hungarian film Son of Saul, which won the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards.

#2428

Flore Zéphir

#171240

Overall Influence

1958 - 2017 (59 years)

Flore Zéphir was a Haitian American academic and author. Biography The daughter of Sylla Zéphir and France Garoute, she was born in Jérémie, Haiti. Zéphir came to the United States in 1975. She received a BA in French and Education from Hunter College in New York City and received two MAss and a PhD in French linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington. She has been teaching in the Romance Languages and Literatures department of the University of Missouri since 1988; she was department chair from fall 2008 to summer 2014. From August 2008 to December 2016, she was director of the Afro-Romance Institute at the University of Missouri.

#2429

Imke David

#189561

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Imke David is a German viol player, author, Professor and Ensemble-Member. Early life David grew up in Erlangen in a musical family. As a six-year-old she was a member of the seven-member viol ensemble made up of her family members.

#2430

Sheila May Edmonds

#57194

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Sheila May Edmonds was a British mathematician, a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and Vice-Principal of Newnham College from 1960 to 1981. Early life and education Born in Kingston, Kent, Edmonds studied at Wimbledon High School and entered Newnham College, Cambridge in 1935 to study for the Mathematical Tripos. At this time women could attend lectures and sit examinations but were not permitted to graduate with a degree. She had an excellent undergraduate career and finished Part II as a "Wrangler", Cambridge nomenclature for a student achieving a First Class award. Edmonds followed this with a Distinction in Part III, and then studied for a PhD with G.

#2431

Veronica Gonzalez Peña

#191671

Overall Influence

Veronica Gonzalez Peña is an American writer and filmmaker, and is a faculty member at Stetson University, Florida. Biography In 2006 she founded rockypoint Press, a series of artist/writer collaborative prints, books, and films.

#2432

Catherine Nakalembe

#128341

Overall Influence

Catherine Nakalembe is an Ugandan remote sensing scientist and an associate research professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Geographical Sciences and the NASA Harvest Africa program Director. Her research includes drought, agriculture and food security.

#2433

Cara Cilano

#184360

Overall Influence

Cara Cilano is currently the chair professor of English at Michigan State University and also a published author of articles and books, being largely collected by libraries worldwide. She previously held the Fulbright Visiting Professor at University of Graz.

#2434

Virginia Walcott Beauchamp

#160290

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Virginia Walcott Beauchamp was an American educator and writer who was the founding coordinator of the Women's studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Walcott was born in Sparta, Michigan, the daughter of two teachers. She earned a B.A. in English at the University of Michigan in 1942, and after serving with the Red Cross during World War II, she returned to Michigan to complete an M.A. in 1948. She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 1955.

#2435

Janine Tavernier

#174584

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Janine Tavernier was a Haitian poet, novelist and academic.

#2436

Margaret C. McCulloch

#159979

Overall Influence

1901 - 1996 (95 years)

Margaret Callender McCulloch was a writer, teacher, and activist during the civil rights movement. McCulloch authored several books and articles on race relations and the segregation of African Americans, as well as two biographies. Her most influential books included Segregation, a Challenge to Democracy and Integration: Promise, Process, Problems. The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana houses McCulloch's articles, speeches, and correspondences.

#2437

Ragnhild Nilstun

Ragnhild Nilstun

#182974

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ragnhild Nilstun is a Norwegian novelist, children's writer and literary critic. She was born in Lofoten, is a philologist by education, and has worked at the University of Tromsø. She made her literary debut in 1979 with the novel Etterbyrden, with descriptions of postnatal depression. The novel was also adapted for theatre and staged at Fjernsynsteatret. In 1988 she published the short story collection Begjærets pris. The novel For mitt blikk depicts life in Finnmark and Troms in the late nineteenth century, and is the first in a trilogy which also includes For kjærlighets skyld , and Min lange reise ender her .

#2438

Jeannine Savard

#121425

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jeannine Savard is an American poet, born in the Adirondack Mountain Region of New York State. Her poems are lyrical and involve and reflect the lush region of the country, as well as the Sonoran Desert where she has lived since the 1980s as an Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University.

#2439

Mélissa Verreault

Mélissa Verreault

#170747

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Mélissa Verreault is a Canadian writer and translator from Montreal, Quebec. She is most noted as the winner of the Governor General's Award for English to French translation at the 2022 Governor General's Awards for Partie de chasse au petit gibier entre lâches au club de tir du coin, her translation of Megan Gail Coles's novel Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.

#2440

Anna Monardo

#84530

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Anna Monardo is an American novelist of the Italian-American experience. Originally from Pittsburgh, she graduated from Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1983. She is a professor of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

#2441

Kate Fagan

#183155

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Kate Fagan is an Australian poet, musician and academic. Education Fagan attended James Ruse Agricultural High School. She came second in the state in the 1990 New South Wales Higher School Certificate, distinguishing herself in mathematics, modern history, agriculture and English. Initially studying arts/law at university, her academic interests began to focus on literary culture.

#2442

Morgan Jenness

#155307

Overall Influence

Morgan Jenness is an American freelance dramaturg based in New York City. Biography For over ten years, Jenness worked at The Public Theater, under both George C. Wolfe and Joseph Papp in roles ranging from literary manager to Director of Play Development to Associate Producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival. They were also Associate Artistic Director at the New York Theatre Workshop, and an Associate Director at the Los Angeles Theater Center in charge of new projects. They have worked with the Young Playwrights Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, the Playwrights Center/Playlabs, the Bay Are...

#2443

Heloísa Teixeira

#191997

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Heloísa Teixeira, formerly known as Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda is a Brazilian writer, essayist, editor and literary critic. Her research activity focuses on the relationship between culture and development, particularly with regard to poetry, feminism, gender and ethnic relations, marginalized cultures, and digital culture.

#2444

Suzanne Prou

#102178

Overall Influence

1920 - 1995 (75 years)

Suzanne Prou was a French novelist. She won the 1973 Prix Renaudot, for The Bernardini Terrace. She is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. Works Les Patapharis 1966The Patapharis affair: a novel, H. Regnery Co., 1970Les Demoiselles sous les ébéniers 1967Mlle. Savelli?, Harper & Row, 1971L'Été jaune 1968The yellow summer, Harper & Row, 1972La Ville sur la mer 1970Méchamment les oiseaux 1972 Prix CazesLa Terrasse des Bernardini 1973 Prix RenaudotThe Bernardinis' terrace, A. Ellis, 1975La petite boutique 1973The paperhanger , Harper & Row, 1974, Miroirs d'Edmée 1976La belle Edmée, Harper &...

#2445

Lise Hannestad

#171756

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Lise Hannestad née Budolfsen is a Danish classicist, archaeologist and writer. She joined the staff of Aarhus University in 1971, heading the classical archaeology department from 1989 until her retirement in 2004. She has published many articles and books in English on Greece and Rome in antiquity. Her most recent work is Nicator - Seleucus I and His Empire .

#2446

Beata Szymańska

#82061

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Beata Szymańska is a Polish poet, writer and philosopher. Biography Beata Szymańska left the philosophy department of the Jagiellonian University and received her doctorate in philosophy in 1977. Several years she worked as research associate at the Jagiellonian University. In 1987, she published her book ‘’Berkeley znany i nieznany’’ that was focused

#2447

Marian Robertson Wilson

#186683

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Alice Marian Robertson Wilson was an American cellist, linguist and teacher most notable role as music editor of the eight-volume Coptic Encyclopedia. She was a daughter of Leroy Robertson and has written scholarly analyses of his works.

#2448

Mary Elizabeth Carnegie

#57996

Overall Influence

1916 - 2008 (92 years)

Mary Elizabeth Carnegie was an educator and author in the field of nursing. Known for breaking down racial barriers, she was the first black nurse to serve as a voting member on the board of a state nursing association. She was later president of the American Academy of Nursing and edited the journal Nursing Research.

#2449

Ulla-Britta Lagerroth

#186987

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

Ulla-Britta Lagerroth was a Swedish literary critic. Biography Lagerroth was born in Malmö to Carl Holmström and Ingeborg Asp, and was married to . Her academic career includes professorship at the University of Lund.

#2450

Marcela Nari

#153597

Overall Influence

1965 - 2000 (35 years)

Marcela Nari was an Argentine historian and writer who is remembered for her work at the University of Buenos Aires on the history of women and feminism in Argentina. Biography Nari was a writer on the history of feminism in Argentina. The author of Políticas de Maternidad y Maternalismo Político. Buenos Aires, 1890–1940 on political motherhood in Argentina, she had a PhD in History and was a specialist in women's studies at the National University in Buenos Aires. In addition to founding the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género , she promoted research and coordination at other academic centres.

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