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).
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#2451
Jane Unrue
#191833
Overall Influence
Jane Unrue is an American writer and educator. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Brown University . She has taught at Emerson College, Boston College, and Wellesley College, and currently teaches at Harvard University, where she directs the Harvard Scholars at Risk Program and chairs the Freedom to Write Committee board for PEN New England.
Go to Profile#2452
Zora Dirnbach
#119768
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Zora Dirnbach was a Croatian-Jewish journalist and writer, born in Osijek on 22 August 1929 to a Jewish father and Austrian-born Catholic mother who converted to Judaism in 1922. She was raised with her sister Gertruda.
Go to Profile#2453
Teresa de Dios Unanue
#190905
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dr. Teresa de Dios Unanue is an educator, civic leader, the author of several essays published in Puerto Rico and the United States, the co-author of the book Educación Personalizada , and the co-founder and Executive President of Atlantic University College, a university institution specializing in digital arts in Puerto Rico and Caribbean.
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Debra Spark
#192242
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Debra Spark is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and editor. She teaches at Colby College and at Warren Wilson College. Biography Debra Spark was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1962. She graduated from Yale University. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Esquire, Narrative, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Go to Profile#2455
Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller
#26532
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller is a Mexican writer, journalist, researcher, and the wife of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Personal life and education Gutiérrez Müller was born in Mexico City, the daughter of Juan Gutiérrez Canet and Nora Beatriz Müller Bentjerodt, a German Chilean. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications from the Ibero-American University Puebla in 1998, with her thesis Regulación del uso de los medios de comunicación en leyes electorales federales . She also graduated with a master's degree from the same university in 2002 with her thesis El arte de la memoria en la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España .
Go to Profile#2456
Rose Moss
#172563
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Rose Rappoport Moss is an American writer born in South Africa. She emigrated to America in 1961. She has published novels, short stories, words for music and nonfiction. In addition, she was a teacher at Wellesley College. Along with Barney Simon and Rose Zwi, she was one of the so-called Johannesburg group of writers. Her work has been analysed for its powerful use of language.
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Simonetta Agnello Hornby
#89026
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Simonetta Agnello Hornby is an Italian novelist and food writer. Her novels are international bestsellers, translated in more than twenty languages. Biography Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1945, Simonetta Agnello Hornby has spent most of her adult life in England where she worked as a solicitor for a community legal aid firm specialized in domestic violence that she co-founded in 1979. She has been lecturing for many years, and was a part-time judge at the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal for eight years.
Go to Profile#2458
Alicia Galaz Vivar
#187597
Overall Influence
1936 - 2003 (67 years)
Alicia Galaz Vivar was a Chilean poet and literary researcher. She was the founder and director of the poetry magazine Tebaida. Biography Galaz Vivar was born in Valparaiso and was a professor at the University of Chile of Arica . Along with her husband, fellow poet Oliver Welden, she became a key figure in Tebaida, a culture magazine founded in 1968. They were forced into exile in 1975 in the aftermath of the Chilean military coup of 1973.
Go to Profile#2459
Marie Lee
#192337
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Marie Lee may refer to:Marie Lee Marie Madeleine Lee , Mauritian politician and diplomatVanessa Marie Lee , Singaporean netball player See also Mary Lee
Go to Profile#2460
Judith McCormack
#188250
Overall Influence
Judith McCormack is a Canadian author of literary fiction. Biography McCormack's first short story was nominated for the Journey Prize, and her next three were selected for the Coming Attractions Anthology. Her collection of stories, The Rule of Last Clear Chance, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail. Her work has been published in the Harvard Review, Descant and The Fiddlehead, and one of her stories has been turned into a short film by her twin sister Naomi McCormack, an award-winning filmmaker.
Go to Profile#2461
Andrea Spofford
#189968
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Andrea Spofford is an American poet, essayist, and professor. Her most recent chapbook is Qikiqtagruk: Almost An Island . Her poems and essays have appeared in Vela Magazine, The Citron Review, Blood Orange Review, Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Composite Arts Review, The Coachella Review, The Oklahoma Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for Zone 3 Magazine.
Go to Profile#2462
Terri Te Tau
#95223
Overall Influence
Terri Te Tau is a New Zealand contemporary artist and writer. She is a member of the Mata Aho Collective. In 2017, the collective represented New Zealand at documenta, a quinquennial contemporary-art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. This was the first time New Zealand artists had been invited to present their work at the event.
Go to Profile#2463
Barbara Sleigh
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh was an English children's writer and broadcaster. She is remembered most for her Carbonel series about a king of cats. Family and career Barbara Sleigh was born on 9 January 1906 in Birmingham, the daughter of an artist, Bernard Sleigh, and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both parents came from a Methodist background, but she was brought up an Anglican. The family moved to Chesham for a time, then back to Birmingham. Their marriage broke up in about 1914. Her older brother, Brocas Linwood Sleigh , would also become a writer.
Go to Profile#2464
Madeline Gleason
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She was the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild. In 1947, she became the director of the first poetry festival in the United States, laying the groundwork for what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 .
Go to Profile#2465
Barbara Leonard Reynolds
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Barbara Leonard Reynolds , was an American author who became a Quaker, peace activist and educator. In 1951, Reynolds moved with her husband to Hiroshima where he conducted a three-year study on the effects of radiation on children who had survived the first atomic bomb. She and her family then became peace activists, sailing around the world to protest nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, she traveled around the world with atomic bomb survivors to show world leaders, first-hand, the horrors of nuclear warfare. She then established the World Friendship Center, devoting 13 years to it, and don...
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Elisabeth Jastrow
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Elisabeth Jastrow was a German-born American classical archaeologist. Her research focus included arulae . Early life and education Elisabeth Anna Marie Jastrow was born October 7, 1890, in Berlin. She came from a family of assimilated German Jews. Her father was the historian and social scientist, Ignaz Jastrow. Through her father, she grew up in a world full of scholars and artists, the sister Lotte Beate Jastrow Hahn later combined education and horticulture.
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Elinor Glyn
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Elinor Glyn was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern standards. She popularized the concept of the it-girl, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and, possibly, on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and, especially, Clara Bow.
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Choe Jeong-hui
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Choe Jeong-hui was one of the most successful early women writers in South Korea. Life She was born in Dancheon, South Hamgyong Province and was educated in Seoul. She worked at a kindergarten in Tokyo and as a journalist in Seoul before starting her writing career in 1931; she worked for the magazine Samcheolli and the newspaper The Chosun Ilbo . She was associated with the Korean Artists' Proletarian Federation, and was jailed in 1934 as a result.
Go to Profile#2469
Emma Roberts
1794 - 1840 (46 years)
Emma Roberts , often referred to as "Miss Emma Roberts", was an English travel writer and poet known for her memoirs about India. In her own time, she was well regarded, and William Jerdan considered her "a very successful cultivator of the belles lettres".
Go to Profile#2470
Alice Werner
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Alice Werner CBE was a writer, poet and teacher of the Bantu languages. Life Alice Werner was one of seven children in the family of Reinhardt Joseph Werner of Mainz, teacher of languages, and his wife, Harriett. Her father travelled extensively during the first fifteen years of her life, and she lived in New Zealand, Mexico, United States and throughout Europe, until the family settled in Tonbridge, England, in 1874.
Go to Profile#2471
Gertrude Smith
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Gertrude Elizabeth Smith was the Edwin Olson Professor of Greek at the University of Chicago. She is known for her work on Greek law and her longstanding involvement in and support of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She was the first woman to be president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and is currently the only woman to have been president of CAMWS and the American Philological Association.
Go to Profile#2472
Rachel Hunter
1754 - 1813 (59 years)
Rachel Hunter was an English woman novelist of the early 19th century who lived and worked in Norwich. She was a contemporary of Jane Austen. Literary setting Rachel Hunter wrote for the same circulating library readership as Jane Austen, and like the latter she might belittle standard novel conventions in writings like Letitia. Her writings were well known in the Austen circle, one acquaintance describing a state of well-being as "quite Palmerstone", after Hunter's Letters from Mrs Palmerstone.
Go to Profile#2473
Dorothea Krook-Gilead
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Dorothea Krook-Gilead was an Israeli literary scholar, translator, and professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. Biography Krook was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. She earned a degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 1946 she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her Ph.D. and spent 14 years as a research fellow and assistant lecturer. Among her students there was the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote that Krook was her ideal of a successful career woman and wonderful human being.
Go to Profile#2474
Rosemary Woolf
1925 - 1978 (53 years)
Rosemary Estelle Woolf was an English scholar of medieval literature, known especially for her work on medieval English religious lyrics, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Biography Woolf was the daughter of British film executive C. M. Woolf. She was the first woman in her family to attend university, receiving a B.Litt. from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1949. She became a lecturer at the University College of Hull in 1948. She became a lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford University in 1961, teaching Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English...
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Cornelia C. Coulter
1885 - 1960 (75 years)
Cornelia Catlin Coulter was an American classicist and academic who was Professor of Latin at Mount Holyoke College from 1926 to 1951. She is known in particular for her work on the Medieval and Renaissance use of Classical sources and for her presidency of and advocacy for the Classical Association of New England.
Go to Profile#2476
Cornelia Meigs
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Cornelia Lynde Meigs was an American writer of fiction and biography for children, teacher of English and writing, historian and critic of children's literature. She won the Newbery Medal for her 1933 biography of Louisa May Alcott, entitled Invincible Louisa. She also wrote three Newbery Honor Books.
Go to Profile#2477
Dorothy Tarrant
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Dorothy Tarrant was a British classical scholar, specialising in Plato. She was the first female Professor of Greek in the United Kingdom, teaching at Bedford College, London from 1909 to 1950. She researched the work of Plato, pioneering the use of stylistic analysis to conclude that he had not written all the work previously attributed to him. She was active in the Classical Association and became its first woman president in 1958. She was also an active Unitarian and campaigned especially against alcohol, becoming the president of the Unitarian Temperance Association, the Unitarian Assembl...
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Marion Clinch Calkins
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
Marion Clinch Calkins was an American poet, writer, and teacher who taught English and Art History at the University of Wisconsin and wrote about the labor movement, industrial espionage, and fascism in America.
Go to Profile#2479
Margaret Deland
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Margaret Deland was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She also wrote an autobiography in two volumes. She generally is considered part of the literary realism movement. Biography Margaretta Wade Campbell was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania on February 23, 1857. Her mother died due to complications from the birth, and she was left in the care of an aunt named Lois Wade and her husband Benjamin Campbell Blake.
Go to Profile#2480
Sappho
650 BC - 550 BC (100 years)
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sapph...
Go to Profile#2481
Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into a very affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied cla...
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Jane Austen
1775 - 1817 (42 years)
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
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Emily Dickinson
1830 - 1886 (56 years)
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's home in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even to leave her bedroom.
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Eleanor Farjeon
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Eleanor Farjeon was an English author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire. Several of her works had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Some of her correspondence has also been published. She won many literary awards and the Eleanor Farjeon Award for children's literature is presented annually in her memory by the Children's Book Circle, a society of publishers. She was the sister of thriller writer Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.
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Johanna Spyri
1827 - 1901 (74 years)
Johanna Louise Spyri was a Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories. She wrote the popular book Heidi. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, as a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels.
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Zenta Mauriņa
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Zenta Mauriņa was a Latvian writer, essayist, translator, and researcher in philology. She was married to the Electronic Voice Phenomena researcher Konstantin Raudive. Biography Born to doctor Roberts Mauriņš, Zenta spent her childhood in Grobiņa, where, at the age of six, she contracted polio, leaving her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. After studying at the Russian girl's high school in Liepaja , she studied philosophy at the Latvian University in Riga . After this, she studied philology of Baltic languages . She taught at the Latvian Teachers Institute and at the Latvian...
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Frances Burney
1752 - 1840 (88 years)
Frances Burney , also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina , was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded. Most of her plays were not performed in her lifetime.
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Lady Caroline Lamb
1785 - 1828 (43 years)
Lady Caroline Lamb was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, best known for Glenarvon, a Gothic novel. In 1812, she had an affair with Lord Byron, whom she described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Her husband was the Honourable William Lamb, who after her death became 2nd Viscount Melbourne and British prime minister.
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Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, born Karoline Michaelis was a German-Portuguese romanist. Early life, education and private life Michaelis was born in Berlin as the last of five children of Gustav Michaelis, a mathematics teacher.
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Louise Holland
1893 - 1990 (97 years)
Louise Adams Holland was a philologist, university teacher, academic and archaeologist. Early life and education Born in Brooklyn in New York State in 1893 as Louise Elizabeth Whetenhall Adams, she was the third child but first daughter of six children of Henrietta and Charles Frederick Adams, a lawyer. Her younger sister was the United States Poet Laureate Léonie Adams. Louise Holland graduated from Barnard College in 1914 having specialised in Greek, and was awarded her M. A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1920, where she studied Latin. She studied at the...
Go to Profile#2491
María Rosa Lida de Malkiel
1910 - 1962 (52 years)
María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, born Maria Rosa Lida , was an Argentine philologist. Notable as an Hispanist medievalist, she came to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation program of study. Beginning in 1947, Lida de Malkiel lectured for many years in the US, including at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford. An advisor to the editorial boards of two professional journals, in the 1950s she was admitted to the Real Academia Española and the Academia Argentina de Letras.
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Mary Pix
1666 - 1709 (43 years)
Mary Pix was an English novelist and playwright. As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called "a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods".
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Dorothy Scarborough
1878 - 1935 (57 years)
Emily Dorothy Scarborough was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and women's life in the Southwest. Early life Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Renata von Scheliha
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Renata Johanna von Scheliha was a German classical philologist. She authored a number of books, treatises and monographs and carried out several translations. Life Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia , as the daughter of Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. Her mother was a daughter of the Prussian Minister of Finance Johann von Miquel. Her older brother by four years was the diplomat and resistance fighter Rudolf von Scheliha who was executed in December 1942 by the Nazis on a charge of being a member of the Red Orchestra
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Elizabeth Bentley
1767 - 1839 (72 years)
Elizabeth Bentley was an English poet, one of a small wave of British and Irish writers from the labouring classes in the eighteenth century. She was a local poet who was nonetheless engaged with larger political and social issues.
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Margarita de Mayo Izarra
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Margarita de Mayo Izarra was a Spanish writer, teacher, and journalist. Professional career Margarita de Mayo, after obtaining the title of teacher of Primary Higher Education, taught at a graduate school for girls in Valdepeñas from 1914 to 1918.
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Carolina Marcial Dorado
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Carolina Marcial Dorado was a Spanish educator, writer, and lecturer based in the United States. She was head of the Spanish department at Barnard College from 1920 until her death in 1941. Early life Carolina Marcial Dorado was born in Camuñas, Toledo, the daughter of José Marcial Palacios, a Protestant clergyman, and María de la Luz Marcial-Dorado; her parents were originally from Andalusia. Her older brother, José Marcial Dorado, was a journalist and briefly a member of the Spanish parliament; he was also secretary of the American Bible Society for the Caribbean, based in Cuba.
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Katharine Lambert Richards Rockwell
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Katharine Lambert Richards Rockwell was an American theologian, writer, and professor. Rockwell served as national secretary for the YWCA and as a member of their Board of Trustees for two terms. She also chaired the YWCA's Department of Religious Education.
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Branca Edmée Marques
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Branca Edmée Marques de Sousa Torres was a leading Portuguese specialist in the peaceful applications of nuclear technology who obtained a doctorate in Paris under the guidance of Marie Curie. Returning to Lisbon she founded the Radiochemistry Laboratory, where she continued her research for three decades.
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