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,
#2601
Nicoletta Momigliano
1900 - Present (126 years)
Nicoletta Momigliano is an archaeologist specialising in Minoan Crete and its modern reception. Early life and education Momigliano was born in Milan, Italy, in 1960, where she attended primary and secondary school. She read Classics at the University of Pisa, where she graduated in 1982. She obtained her MA from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London , and her PhD from University College London , under the supervision of John Nicolas Coldstream. From 1990 to 1993 she was a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Research Assistant to Ann Br...
Go to Profile#2602
Eleanor Duckett
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Eleanor Shipley Duckett was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College . Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Ma...
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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#2604
Silva Tipple New Lake
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Silva Tipple New Lake was an American classics professor, archaeologist, and scholar of the New Testament. She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1929 and 1930, for work on Greek, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts.
Go to Profile#2605
Concha Meléndez
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Dr. Concha Meléndez was an educator, poet, and writer. She was the first woman to belong to the Puerto Rican Academy of Languages. Early years Meléndez was born and raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she received her primary and secondary education. After graduating from high school she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico where she earned her teacher's certificate.
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Pearl S. Buck
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
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Janis Mayes
Dr. Janis Alene Mayes is an American author, literary critic and translator and a professor in Africana literature. Early life Mayes gained her undergraduate degree in French literature at Fisk University. She was a Fulbright Scholar. She had additional study as a scholar at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. In the 1980s she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she began teaching at Syracuse University in the Department of African American Studies; she is currently a professor there. She teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
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Flora Belle Ludington
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964. Life Born in Huron County, Michigan, Ludington moved to Wenatchee, Washington, as a young girl. At fourteen, she began her library career as a volunteer in the Carnegie public library in Wanatchee. She worked as an assistant in the University of Washington library, where she received a bachelor's degree in librarianship in 1920. She left Washington to be a reference librarian at Mills College, where she went on to study and receive a master's degree in history fin 1925.
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Caroline Brady
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Caroline Agnes Brady was an American philologist who specialised in Old English and Old Norse works. Her works included the 1943 book The Legends of Ermanaric, based on her doctoral dissertation, and three influential papers on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University, among other places.
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Edith Finch Russell
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Edith Finch, Countess Russell was an American writer and biographer. She was the fourth and last wife of Bertrand Russell. Biography Finch was born to Edward Bronson Finch, a physician, and his wife, Delia. Raised in New York City, she graduated from Miss Chapin's School. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and St Hilda's College, Oxford where she was awarded degrees in 1925 and 1926.
Go to Profile#2611
Rosamund Bartlett
1900 - Present (126 years)
Rosamund Bartlett is a British writer, scholar, lecturer, and translator specializing in Russian literature. Bartlett graduated from Durham University with a first-class degree in Russian. She went on to complete a doctorate at Oxford.
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Florence Bonime
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Florence Bonime was an American novelist. She also published under the name Florence Cummings. Life Florence Bonime was born May 12, 1907 in the Bronx. When she was 16 she began working in advertising, eventually becoming a copywriter.
Go to Profile#2613
Julia Bastin
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Julia Bastin was a Belgian academic, educator and novelist. Biography She was born in Liège and grew up there. Bastin studied at The Hague, earning a diploma that allowed her to teach Dutch. From 1912 to 1914, she taught at a middle school in Braine-le-Comte. Bastin spent World War I in England and studied languages at Bedford College, particularly French literature from the Middle Ages. She was also a teaching assistant for French conversation and composition courses at the college. Afterwards, she taught in secondary schools in Derbyshire and then Yorkshire. From 1920 to 1931, she lived in ...
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Ella E. Clark
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Ella Elizabeth Clark was an American educator, writer, and Professor Emerita of English. Although Clark was not a trained anthropologist or folklorist, she collected large numbers of American Indian and First Nations oral traditions and made them available to a wide readership.
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Alice Henson Ernst
1880 - 1980 (100 years)
Alice Henson Ernst was an American playwright, professor and author. She conducted anthropological work among the Native Americans in Oregon. Ernst was also well-known for her history and research of pioneer theater in the northwest. Ernst taught English and drama at the University of Washington and the University of Oregon.
Go to Profile#2616
Anne Sexton
1928 - 1974 (46 years)
Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom it was later alleged she physically and sexually assaulted.
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Gladys Schmitt
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Gladys Leonore Schmitt was an American writer, editor, and professor. Described by the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in 1942 as one of the city's "literary lights, her second novel, David the King became a Literary Guild selection which rose to number one on national bestseller lists.
Go to Profile#2618
Emily Hale
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher, who was the longtime muse and confidante of the poet T. S. Eliot. Exactly 1,131 letters from Eliot to Hale were deposited in Princeton University Library in 1956 and were described as one of the best-known sealed archives in the world for many years. Per Hale's instructions, the letters were opened on January 2, 2020. Hale had specified that the letters would be embargoed for fifty years after the latter of their deaths; the Princeton Library gave its staff a few more months to get them ready for the public to read. The day the Hale letter...
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Victoria Woodhull
1838 - 1927 (89 years)
Victoria Claflin Woodhull , later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35.
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Ruth Manning-Sanders
1886 - 1988 (102 years)
Ruth Manning-Sanders was an English poet and author born in Wales, known for a series of children's books for which she collected and related fairy tales worldwide. She published over 90 books in her lifetime
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Mary Russell Mitford
1787 - 1855 (68 years)
Mary Russell Mitford was an English author and dramatist. She was born at Alresford in Hampshire. She is best known for Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life in Three Mile Cross near Reading in Berkshire.
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Caroline Gordon
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was an American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and an O. Henry Award in 1934. Biography Gordon was born and raised in Todd County, Kentucky at her family's plantation home, "Woodstock". She was educated at her father's Clarksville Classical School for Boys in Montgomery County, Tennessee. In 1916, Gordon graduated from Bethany College and became a writer of society news for the Chattanooga Reporter newspaper in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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Nancy Mitford
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Nancy Freeman-Mitford , known as Nancy Mitford, was an English novelist, biographer, and journalist. The eldest of the Mitford sisters, she was regarded as one of the "bright young things" on the London social scene in the inter-war period. She wrote several novels about upper-class life in England and France, and is considered a sharp and often provocative wit. She also has a reputation as a writer of popular historical biographies.
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Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
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Ouida
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Maria Louise Ramé , going by the name Marie Louise de la Ramée and known by the pseudonym Ouida , was an English novelist. During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children's books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day.
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Táhirih
1817 - 1852 (35 years)
Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.
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Radclyffe Hall
1880 - 1943 (63 years)
Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.
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Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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Anna Pavlova
1881 - 1931 (50 years)
Anna Pavlovna Pavlova was a Russian prima ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognized for her creation of the role of The Dying Swan and, with her own company, became the first ballerina to tour around the world, including performances in South America, India, Mexico and Australia.
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Gabrielle Roy
1909 - 1983 (74 years)
Gabrielle Roy was a Canadian author from St. Boniface, Manitoba and one of the major figures in French Canadian literature. Early life Roy was born in 1909 in Saint-Boniface , Manitoba, and was educated at the Académie Saint-Joseph. She was born into a family of eleven children and reportedly began to write at an early age. She lived on rue Deschambault, a house and neighbourhood in Saint-Boniface that would later inspire one of her most famous works. The house is now a National Historic Site and museum in Winnipeg.
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Baroness Orczy
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Baroness Emma Orczy , usually known as Baroness Orczy or to her family and friends as Emmuska Orczy, was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright. She is best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save French aristocrats from "Madame Guillotine" during the French Revolution, establishing the "hero with a secret identity" in popular culture.
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Ling Shuhua
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Ling Shuhua , also known as Su-hua Ling Chen after her marriage, was a Chinese modernist writer and painter whose short stories became popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Her work is characterized by her use of symbolism and boudoir literature.
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Tamara Karsavina
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina was a Russian prima ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later of the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. After settling in Britain at Hampstead in London, she began teaching ballet professionally and became recognised as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance-teaching organisation.
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Marie Taglioni
1804 - 1884 (80 years)
Marie Taglioni, Comtesse de Voisins was a Swedish-born ballet dancer of the Romantic ballet era partially of Italian descent, a central figure in the history of European dance. She spent most of her life in the Austrian Empire and France. She was one of the most celebrated ballerinas of the romantic ballet, which was cultivated primarily at Her Majesty's Theatre in London and at the Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique of the Paris Opera Ballet. She is credited with being the first ballerina to truly dance en pointe.
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Hwang Jini
1506 - 1544 (38 years)
Hwang Jini or Hwang Jin-yi , also known by her gisaeng name Myeongwol , was one of the most famous gisaeng of the Joseon Dynasty. She lived during the reign of King Jungjong. She was noted for her exceptional beauty, charming quick wit, extraordinary intellect, and her assertive and independent nature. She has become an almost myth-like figure in modern Korea, inspiring novels, operas, films, and television series.
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Zona Gale
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Zona Gale , also known by her married name, Zona Gale Breese, was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. The close relationship she had with her parents set the tone for her writing and her personal life. Her books based upon her home town were found to be charming and had an intimate sense of realism, in which she captures the underlying feelings and motivations of her characters. All of her works were written under her maiden name, Zona Gale.
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Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Jean Stafford
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970. Biography She was born in Covina, California, to Mary Ethel and John Richard Stafford, a Western pulp writer. As a youth Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and, with friend James Robert Hightower, won a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936 to 1937.
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Julia de Burgos
1914 - 1953 (39 years)
Julia de Burgos García was a Puerto Rican poet. As an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, she served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was also a civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers.
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Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and his only child with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt. Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican Party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Borah.
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Sally Benson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sally Benson was an American writer of short stories and screenwriter. She is best known for her humorous tales of modern youth collected in Junior Miss and her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis.
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Su Xuelin
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Su Xuelin or Su Hsüeh-lin was a Chinese writer and scholar. Early life Su Xuelin was born to a family of officials native to Anhui province in 1897. Her grandfather, Su Jinxin, served as a magistrate in several counties in Zhejiang province, where Su Xuelin was born. Her mother was surnamed Tu, but had no formal first name, instead going by the nickname To-Ni. Su's father held a minor official position, first under the Qing dynasty and then the Republic of China. Su had three brothers and two sisters.
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May Hill Arbuthnot
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
May Hill Arbuthnot was an American educator, editor, writer, and critic who devoted her career to the awareness and importance of children's literature. Her efforts expanded and enriched the selection of books for children, libraries, and children's librarians alike. She was selected for American Libraries article “100 Most Important Leaders we had for the 20th Century”.
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Helen Adolf
1895 - 1998 (103 years)
Helen Adolf was an Austrian–American linguist and literature scholar. Early life and education Helen Adolf was born in 1895 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her family was Jewish. Her mother, Hedwig Adolf, was an artist, while her father, Jakob Adolf, was a lawyer. Adolf had one older sister, Anna Adolf Spiegel. She was a first cousin of writer Leonie Adele Spitzer.
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Dorothy M. Johnson
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Dorothy Marie Johnson was an American writer best known for her Western fiction. Biography Early life Dorothy Marie Johnson was born in McGregor, Iowa, the only daughter of Lester Eugene Johnson and Mary Louisa Barlow. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Montana.
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Jane Taylor
1783 - 1824 (41 years)
Jane Taylor was an English poet and novelist best known for the lyrics of the widely known "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". The sisters Jane and Ann Taylor and their authorship of various works have often been confused, partly because their early ones were published together. Ann Taylor's son, Josiah Gilbert, wrote in her biography, "Two little poems – 'My Mother,' and 'Twinkle, twinkle, little Star' – are perhaps more frequently quoted than any; the first, a lyric of life, was by Ann, the second, of nature, by Jane; and they illustrate this difference between the sisters."
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May Swenson
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Anna Thilda May "May" Swenson was an American poet and playwright. Harold Bloom considered her one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. The first child of Margaret and Dan Arthur Swenson, she grew up as the eldest of 10 children in a Mormon household where Swedish was spoken regularly and English was a second language. Although her conservative family struggled to accept the fact that she was a lesbian, they remained close throughout her life. Much of her later poetry works were devoted to children . She also translated the work of contemporary Swedish poets, includi...
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Léonie Adams
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Léonie Fuller Adams was an American poet. She was appointed the seventh Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1948. Biography Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in an unusually strict environment. She was not allowed on the subway until she was eighteen, and even then, her father accompanied her. Her sister was the teacher and archaeologist Louise Holland and her brother-in-law the archaeologist Leicester Bodine Holland. She studied at Barnard College, where she was a contemporary and friend of roommate Margaret Mead. While still an undergraduate, she showed remarkable skill as a poet, and at this time her poems began to be published.
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Elise Richter
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Elise Richter was an Austrian philologist, specialising in Romance studies, and university professor. She was the first woman to achieve the habilitation at the University of Vienna, the first female associate professor and the only woman at any Austrian university before World War I to hold an academic appointment. Persecuted by Nazi officials during World War II, she was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in October 1942, and died there in June 1943.
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Mary Sidney
1561 - 1621 (60 years)
Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham's verse miscellany Belvidere. Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel's closet drama Cleopatra and of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra . She was also known for translating Petrarch's "Triumph of Death", for the ...
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