The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#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.
Go to Profile#2454
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
Sheila Coronel
Sheila S. Coronel is a Philippines-born investigative journalist and journalism professor. She is one of the founders of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism . In 2006, she was named the inaugural director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 2014, she was appointed the School's Academic Dean, a position she held until the end of 2020.
Go to Profile#2464
Dorothy Burr Thompson
1900 - 2001 (101 years)
Dorothy Burr Thompson was an American classical archaeologist and art historian at Bryn Mawr College and a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Early life Thompson was the elder of two daughters of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father was attorney Charles Henry Burr Jr. and her mother was novelist and biographer Anna Robeson Brown. Her grandfather was noted orator and lawyer Henry Armitt Brown. Early in life Thompson studied the Classics, attending Miss Hill's School in Center City, Pa., and The Latin School in Philadelphia. She began her study of Latin at age 9 and a...
Go to Profile#2465
Enrica Malcovati
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Enrica Malcovati was an Italian Classical philologist. Career In 1927, she was the general editor of Athenaeum, following the death of her mentor Carlo Pascal. She became a private teacher at the University of Pavia in 1930, the same year as her magnum opus - the three volumes of Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta - was published.
Go to Profile#2466
G. M. Hirst
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
Gertrude Mary Hirst , better known as G. M. Hirst, was an English-American classicist. Her most influential publication was her 1926 proposal that Livy was born in 64 BC, rather than the traditional date of 59 BC; this claim would later also be advocated by academics including Ronald Syme.
Go to Profile#2467
Bertha Harmer
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.
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Amy Clarke
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Amy Key Clarke was an English mystical poet and writer, and a teacher at The Cheltenham Ladies' College. Early life and education Clarke was born at 121 Elgin Crescent, Kensington, London, England to Henry Clarke, a lecturer and tutor, and his wife Amy , a writer and first headmistress of Truro High School.
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Marion Vera Cuthbert
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Marion Vera Cuthbert was an American writer and intellectual associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Cuthbert was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1920. She subsequently became principal of Burrel Normal School, then Dean of Women at Talladega College. In 1933, she delivered an address at the NAACP national convention entitled "Honesty in Race Relations." Cuthbert later received her master's degree and Doctorate from Columbia University. Her dissertation, titled "Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro College Graduate," was a sociological study of the effects of education on the lives of African-American women.
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Hedwig Voegt
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Hedwig Therese Dorothea Henriette Voegt was a German literary scholar who obtained a doctorate in German-Jacobin literature when she was 49 and became a university professor at Leipzig University. While she was a younger woman, modest family circumstances ruled out an academic career. During the 1920s she worked for the post office in Hamburg as a telegrapher and became a political activist , serving at least three prison terms during the twelve Nazi years because of her resistance to the régime.
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Anne Carroll Moore
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Anne Carroll Moore was an American educator, writer and advocate for children's libraries. She was named Annie after an aunt, and officially changed her name to Anne in her fifties, to avoid confusion with Annie E. Moore, another woman who was also publishing material about juvenile libraries at that time. From 1906 to 1941 she headed children's library services for the New York Public Library system. Moore wrote Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, one of two runners-up for the 1925 Newbery Medal.
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Phoebe Sheavyn
1865 - 1968 (103 years)
Phoebe Ann Beale Sheavyn was a British literary scholar and feminist. She was a professor at Victoria University of Manchester. She was a founding member of the British Federation of University Women.
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Edith R. Mirrielees
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Professor Edith Ronald Mirrielees was a pioneering teacher of creative writing; she inspired many talented, distinguished students, including novelist John Steinbeck at Stanford University. Biography Edith Ronald Mirrielees was born on September 10, 1878, in Pittsfield, Illinois, and grew up in Big Timber, Montana.
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Milada Součková
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Milada Součková was a Czech writer, literary historian, and diplomat. She is known mainly for introducing to Czech literature Modernist techniques employed by English-language writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
Go to Profile#2475
Alaíde Foppa
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Alaíde Foppa was a Guatemalan poet, writer, feminist, art critic, teacher and translator. Born in Barcelona, Spain she held Guatemalan citizenship and lived in exile in Mexico. She worked as a professor in both Guatemala and Mexico. Much of her poetry was published in Mexico and she co-founded one of the first feminist publications, Fem, in the country. After her husband's death, she made a trip to Guatemala to see her mother and renew her passport. She was detained and disappeared in Guatemala City on 19 December 1980, presumed to be murdered. Some sources note the date of her disappearance ...
Go to Profile#2476
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#2477
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#2478
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#2479
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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Charlotte Brontë
1816 - 1855 (39 years)
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the gender neutral pen name Currer Bell. Jane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.
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Rebecca West
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield , known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon , on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder , her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason , later The New Meaning of Treason , a study of th...
Go to Profile#2484
George Sand
1804 - 1876 (72 years)
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil , best known by her pen name George Sand , was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era, with more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
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Beatrix Potter
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
Helen Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. She is best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which was her first commercially published work in 1902. Her books, including 23 Tales, have sold more than 250 million copies. An entrepreneur, Potter was a pioneer of character merchandising. In 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy, making him the oldest licensed character.
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Dorothy L. Sayers
1893 - 1957 (64 years)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic. Born in Oxford, Sayers was brought up in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel Whose Body? was published in 1923. Between then and 1939 she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love.
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Sylvia Plath
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel , and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
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Murasaki Shikibu
973 - 1014 (41 years)
was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, widely considered to be one of the world's first novels, written in Japanese between about 1000 and 1012. Murasaki Shikibu is a descriptive name; her personal name is unknown, but she may have been , who was mentioned in a 1007 court diary as an imperial lady-in-waiting.
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Anaïs Nin
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris , and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.
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Katherine Mansfield
1888 - 1923 (35 years)
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a New Zealand writer and critic who is considered to be an important author of the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages.
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Alice B. Toklas
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Alice Babette Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner of American writer Gertrude Stein. Early life Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco into a middle-class Polish Jewish family. Her paternal grandfather was a rabbi, whose son Feivel Toklas moved to San Francisco in 1863. In 1876, Ferdinand Toklas married Emma Levinsky and they had two children: Alice and her brother Clarence Ferdinand .
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Bing Xin
1900 - 1999 (99 years)
Xie Wanying , better known by her pen name Bing Xin or Xie Bingxin, was one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. Many of her works were written for young readers. She was the chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Her pen name Bing Xin carries the meaning of a morally pure heart, and is taken from a line in a Tang dynasty poem by Wang Changling.
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon
1802 - 1838 (36 years)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. The writings of Landon are transitional between Romanticism and the Victorian Age. Her first major breakthrough came with The Improvisatrice and thence she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, casting her influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in Alfred Tennyson and in America, where she was very popular. Poe regarded her genius as self-evident.
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Marina Tsvetaeva
1892 - 1941 (49 years)
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed.
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Lady Gregory
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.
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Mary McCarthy
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Colette
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette , known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
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E. Nesbit
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Edith Nesbit was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.
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Elizabeth Gaskell
1810 - 1865 (55 years)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell , often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novel...
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Selma Lagerlöf
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.
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