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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#2701

Anwara Bahar Chowdhury

1919 - 1987 (68 years)

Anwara Bahar Chowdhury was a Bangladeshi social activist and writer. Background and education Chowdhury was admitted to Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School, established by women rights activist Begum Rokeya. She passed matriculation in 1934. She completed her higher secondary school examination and BA degree from Bethune College of Kolkata. She passed Bachelor in Teaching from Scottish Church College in 1941.

#2702

Elizabeth Williams Champney

Elizabeth Williams Champney

1850 - 1922 (72 years)

Elizabeth Williams Champney was an American author of novels and juvenile literature, as well as travel writing, most of which featured foreign locations. Champney's observations and experiences during her European travels were published in Harper's Magazine, and also in The Century Magazine. She published eighty or more articles in Harper's and Century, including a series on Portugal, and papers entitled "A Neglected Corner of Europe", and "In the Footsteps of Futuney and Regnault". After her return to the United States, Champney wrote fifteen books; novels, stories for juveniles, and historical works under cover of stories, mostly adapted to young people.

#2703

Mary Bigelow Ingham

Mary Bigelow Ingham

1832 - 1923 (91 years)

Mary Bigelow Ingham was an American author, educator, and religious worker. Dedicated to teaching, missionary work, and temperance reform, she served as professor of French and belles-lettres in the Ohio Wesleyan College; presided over and addressed the first public meeting ever held in Cleveland conducted exclusively by religious women; co-founded the Western Reserve School of Design ; and was a charter member of the order of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

#2704

Beatrice White

1902 - 1986 (84 years)

Beatrice Mary Irene White was a British literary scholar. She had a long association with Westfield College and the English Association. Life White was born in Ely in 1902. In 1919 she started her studies at King's College, London and four years later she graduated with a first class honours degree in English. Three years after that she obtained her master's degree at King's with a thesis about the life and works of the English poet Alexander Barclay. White went on for an extra two years to create an edition of Barclay's "Eclogues" in 1928. She dedicated this book to Professor A. W. Reed who ...

#2705

Helen Rose Hull

1888 - 1971 (83 years)

Helen Rose Hull was born in Albion, Michigan. She is remembered as a novelist, feminist, and English professor. Beginning her teaching career at Wellesley College and Barnard College, she went on to teach creative writing at the Ivy League institution, Columbia University for forty years with her lifelong partner, Mabel Louise Robinson.

#2706

Henrietta Gould Rowe

Henrietta Gould Rowe

1835 - 1910 (75 years)

Henrietta Gould Rowe was an American litterateur and author of the long nineteenth century. Biography Henrietta Gould was born in East Corinth, Maine, 1835. She was the daughter of Aaron and Sarah Gould. Rowe received an academic education.

#2707

Saralabala Sarkar

1875 - 1961 (86 years)

Saralabala Sarkar was an Indian Bengali writer. Early life Saralabala Sarkar was born on 10 December 1875 in Katalpora, Nadia District, Bengal Presidency, British Raj. Her ancestral house was in Bhar Ramdia, Faridpur District, Bengal Presidency. She was home schooled. She was married to Sarat Chandra Sarkar when she was twelve years old. Her husband died when she was twenty-three. Her grandmother was Shreemati Rasasundari, a writer herself, notable for her autobiography that provided a keen insight into the life of a 19th-century Bengali housewife.

#2708

Evelyn Eaton

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton was a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, poet and academic known for her early novels set in New France, and later writings which explored spirituality. Life account Born in Montreux, Switzerland, Eaton was the daughter of Canadians Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Isaac Vernon Eaton, an army officer from Nova Scotia, and Myra Fitzrandolph of New Brunswick. Eaton was the younger of two daughters. Lt.-Col. Eaton was killed in 1917, while directing the artillery assault at the battle of Vimy Ridge in France, when Evelyn Eaton was just 14. Evelyn's older sister, Helen Moira...

#2709

Abby Leach

1855 - 1918 (63 years)

Abby Leach was as an American educator and professor of Greek and Latin at Vassar College. She was appointed as the first female president of the American Philological Association in 1899. Formative years and family Born in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 28, 1855, Abby Leach was one of five children of Marcus and Eliza Paris Bourne Leach. Her father was an owner of a shoemaking business.

#2710

Antonina Riasanovsky

1895 - 1985 (90 years)

Antonina Riasanovsky was a Russian Empire-born writer who, under the pen name Nina Fedorova, wrote The Family, the tenth highest selling fiction book in the United States 1940. The book won the 1940 $10,000 fiction novel prize from the Atlantic Monthly. The Family tells the story of an exiled White Russian family in Tianjin, China.

#2711

Marion Cummings

1876 - 1926 (50 years)

Alice Marion Cummings was a California-born poet, philosopher, and academic. She taught philosophy, psychology, and the history of education for most of her career at University of Arizona. Cummings edited two poetry anthologies and her own poetry was published in popular periodicals such as Smart Set, Harper's, Commonwealth, Lippincott's, and The Forum. Cummings had a short-lived but intense friendship with poet Sara Teasdale, who wrote several poems about Cummings. The two continued their friendship through correspondence.

#2712

Mary Nourse

1880 - 1971 (91 years)

Mary Augusta Nourse was an American educator and writer on China and the Far East, and a co-founder of Jinling College in Nanjing. The best-known of her several books was her first, a popular history of China titled The Four Hundred Million.

#2713

Gertrud Herzog-Hauser

1894 - 1953 (59 years)

Gertrud Herzog-Hauser was an Austrian classical philologist. She was specialised in ancient mythology and religion as well as Latin literature and published Latin school textbooks. She campaigned for equal rights for women in education.

#2714

Clara Beranger

1886 - 1956 (70 years)

Clara Beranger was an American screenwriter of the silent film era and a member of the original faculty of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Biography Beranger was born Clara Strouse in Baltimore, Maryland, to Benjamin and Fannie Strouse. Her family was of German Jewish descent. Benjamin and his brothers had emigrated and opened a dry-goods store in Indiana.

#2715

Jennifer Clarvoe

1900 - Present (126 years)

Jennifer S. Clarvoe is an American poet and English professor at Kenyon College. She has published two books of poetry, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2001.

#2716

Ruth Bellamy

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Ruth Bellamy , also known as Ruth Bellamy Brownwood, was an American writer, a journalist, dramatist, songwriter, actress, and poet, based in North Carolina and Japan. Early life and education Ruth Elizabeth Bellamy was born in Enfield, North Carolina, the daughter of Phesington Sugg Bellamy and Lula Spruill Bellamy. Her father was a businessman. Her mother, known as "Mamee", was a well-known social figure in Rocky Mount in her later years.

#2717

Fanny Brice

1891 - 1951 (60 years)

Fania Borach , known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedian, illustrated song model, singer, and actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.

#2718

Viola Brothers Shore

1890 - 1970 (80 years)

Viola Brothers Shore was an American author who worked in a variety of mediums from the 1910s through the 1930s. Married three times, she began her writing career as a poet and a writer of short stories and articles or magazines. Toward the end of the silent film era, she began writing screenplays, and eventually expanded into theatrical plays and novels. Her daughter, Wilma Shore, was also a successful writer.

#2719

H. B. Goodwin

1827 - 1893 (66 years)

Hannah Elizabeth Bradbury Goodwin Talcott was an American novelist, poet and educator from Maine who resided in Boston for many years. She wrote under various pen names, including H. B., H. E. B., H. B. G., Mrs. H. B. Goodwin, and Mrs. Goodwin-Talcott.

#2720

Mabel Normand

1892 - 1930 (38 years)

Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...

#2721

Barbara P. McCarthy

Barbara P. McCarthy

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire. Education McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A.

#2722

Gracie Fields

1898 - 1979 (81 years)

Dame Gracie Fields was an English actress, singer, comedian and star of cinema and music hall who was one of the top ten film stars in Britain during the 1930s and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She was known affectionately as Our Gracie and the Lancashire Lass and for never losing her strong, native Lancashire accent. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer of the Venerable Order of St John in 1938, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.

#2723

A. M. Dale

1901 - 1967 (66 years)

Amy Marjorie Dale, , published as A. M. Dale, was a British classicist and academic. Life Dale was born in 1901. She studied Classics as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. She subsequently studied under Ludwig Radermacher at the University of Vienna, and at the University of Lund under Albert Wifstrand. Her first academic post, from 1927 to 1929, was at Westfield College in the University of London, followed by a further post at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

#2724

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 .

#2725

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

#2726

Elizabeth Bentley

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.

#2727

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.

#2728

Carolina Marcial Dorado

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.

#2729

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.

#2730

Branca Edmée Marques

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.

#2731

Inna Meiman-Kitrossky

Inna Meiman-Kitrossky

1932 - 1987 (55 years)

Inna Ilyinichna Meiman-Kitrossky was a refusenik, a member of a group of refuseniks-cancer patients, and an author of textbooks for the English language. Life Inna Meiman was born as Ina Fuxson in a Jewish family in Moscow, and graduated from Moscow State Linguistic University, where she worked for many years teaching English. This experience resulted in being awarded a Ph.D. and also in two textbooks: , , which was in usage in several Russian Universities. Meiman also translated from English to Russian and vice versa. She was married for several years and had a son.

#2732

Judy Holliday

1921 - 1965 (44 years)

Judy Holliday was an American actress, comedian and singer. She began her career as part of a nightclub act before working in Broadway plays and musicals. Her success as Billie Dawn in the 1946 stage production of Born Yesterday led to her being cast in the 1950 film version for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She was known for her performance on Broadway in the musical Bells Are Ringing, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and reprising her role in the 1960 fi...

#2733

Raïssa Maritain

1883 - 1960 (77 years)

Raïssa Maritain was a French poet and philosopher. She was the wife of Jacques Maritain, with whom she worked and whose companion she was for more than half a century, at the center of a circle of French Catholic intellectuals. Her memoir, Les Grandes Amitiés, which won the prix du Renouveau français, chronicles this. Jacques Maritain, Raïssa and her sister Vera formed what would be called "the three Maritains".

#2734

Emily Huntington Miller

1833 - 1913 (80 years)

Emily Clark Huntington Miller was an American author, editor, poet, and educator who co-founded St. Nicholas Magazine, a publication for children. Earlier in her career, she served as the Assistant Editor of The Little Corporal, a children's magazine and Associate Editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Miller and Jennie Fowler Willing were involved with organizing a convention in Cleveland in 1874, at which the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was formed. In September 1891, Miller was appointed Dean of Women at Northwestern University in Illinois.

#2735

Susan Wood

1948 - 1980 (32 years)

Susan Joan Wood was a Canadian literary critic, professor, author and science fiction fan and editor. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario. Biography Wood discovered science fiction fandom while she was studying at Carleton University in the 1960s. Wood met fellow fan Mike Glicksohn of Toronto at Boskone VI in 1969. Wood and Glicksohn married in 1970 , and they published the fanzine Energumen together until 1973. Energumen won the 1973 Hugo for Best Fanzine. Wood and Glicksohn were co-guests of honor at the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention. Wood published a great deal of trenchant criticism of the field, both in fanzines and in more formal venues.

#2736

Julia Harwood Caverno

Julia Harwood Caverno

1862 - 1949 (87 years)

Julia Harwood Caverno was an American classical philologist. Biography Julia Harwood Caverno was born on 19 December 1862 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to the Reverend Charles and Abbie H. S. Caverno. While at school she wrote to the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poem Snow-Bound she and a friend had memorized . She was educated at Smith College for both her BA and MA degrees, graduating in 1887 and 1890 respectively. Her MA thesis examined the similes of Homer in relation to those found in Virgil, Dante, Milton and Tennyson's works.

#2737

Frances Burney

1776 - 1828 (52 years)

Frances Burney was an English playwright and governess, named for her famous aunt. Life and work Frances Burney was a niece of the novelists Frances Burney and Sarah Burney, and granddaughter of the musicologist Charles Burney. One of eight children of musicians Esther "Hetty" Burney and Charles Rousseau Burney , Burney became a governess at the age of 18, and worked in various such posts for the rest of her life. She spent periods in the households of Sir Thomas Plumer and Sir Henry Russell.

#2738

Barbara Ramsden

1903 - 1971 (68 years)

Barbara Mary Ramsden was an Australian book editor who worked for Melbourne University Press from 1941 to 1967. Ramsden was born in the Sydney suburb of Annandale to English migrants Edward and Edith Ramsden. She boarded at Ascham School, and intended to study medicine but instead enrolled in arts at the University of Sydney in 1924. The next year, she moved with her mother and brother to Melbourne, where she enrolled in the University of Melbourne and completed her Bachelor of Arts degree.

#2739

Margaret Heavey

Margaret Heavey

1908 - 1980 (72 years)

Margaret Mary Heavey was a polyglot and classics scholar. She taught in the Classics department at University College Galway from 1931 to 1980, and worked primarily in Irish, translating from Greek and Latin along with writing original works.

#2740

Michelle Reale

1900 - Present (126 years)

Michelle Reale is an Italian-American poet, academic and ethnographer. Reale is an associate professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. She uses poetic inquiry to present her research among African refugees in Sicily and her poetry is mainly concerned with Italian-American life, ethnic identity, histories, family dynamics and remembrance and forgetting. Among master's degrees in English and library and information science, she has an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in poetry. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

#2741

V. Penelope Pelizzon

1900 - Present (126 years)

V. Penelope Pelizzon is an American poet and essayist. Her first poetry collection, Nostos , won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Whose Flesh Is Flame, Whose Bone Is Time , was a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc. , a critical study of film, photography, and crime narratives. She is a professor at the University of Connecticut.

#2742

Nancy Barr Mavity

Nancy Barr Mavity

1890 - 1959 (69 years)

Nann "Nancy" Barr Mavity was an American crime mystery author. Early life Nann "Nancy" Clark Barr was born on October 22, 1890, in Lawrenceville, Illinois, the daughter of Dr. Granville Walter Barr and Annabelle Applegate.

#2743

Bettina Linn

1905 - 1962 (57 years)

Mary Bettina Linn was an American writer and college professor. She wrote three published novels, and was on the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. She worked with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

#2744

C. Violet Butler

1884 - 1982 (98 years)

Christina Violet Butler was a social researcher and educator active in Oxford. She was known for her 1912 study Social Conditions in Oxford which recorded the lives of working class citizens in the Edwardian city. She also taught economics, women's studies, and trained social workers in Oxford.

#2745

Clarice Short

1910 - 1977 (67 years)

Clarice Short was an American poet and academic. Early life and education Clarice Short was born in Ellinwood, Kansas, and grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, and later near Taos, New Mexico. She attended the University of Kansas, where she earned her B. A. and M. A., She received her PhD from Cornell University in 1941.

#2746

Hazel Hutchins Wilson

1898 - 1992 (94 years)

Hazel Hutchins Wilson was an American writer of children's books who turned to writing after a career as a school and university librarian. Biography Born in Portland, Maine, she attended Bates College in Lewiston, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1919. In 1920 she received a Bachelor of Science degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston.

#2747

Jessie Raven Crosland

1879 - 1973 (94 years)

Jessie Crosland was a scholar of medieval French literature, Lecturer in French at Westfield College. Life Jessie Raven was the youngest daughter of the Plymouth Brethren preacher Frederick Edward Raven . She married Joseph Beardsall Crosland, a civil servant whom she met through the Brethren, in 1904. In 1921, she accompanied her husband to the Cairo Conference on the Middle East, later relating her recollections of Winston Churchill's behaviour at the conference: She retired in 194647. Her son was the politician Anthony Crosland . She died on 16 June 1973, in Merton, London.

#2748

Eliza Hall Kendrick

1863 - 1940 (77 years)

Eliza Hall Kendrick was an American college professor. She taught Biblical history at Wellesley College from 1899 to 1931. She was active in ecumenical efforts both internationally and in New England.

#2749

Helena Theresa Goessmann

1868 - 1926 (58 years)

Helena Theresa Goessmann was an American lecturer, academic, and writer. During the course of 12 years, she gave over 1,000 lectures and talks on historical, educational, literary, and ethical subjects, in the US, including a period of four months in the winter of 1906, when she delivered in the leading Catholic girls' academies, between New York City, Saint Paul, Minnesota, Omaha, Nebraska, and New Orleans, Louisiana, a course, aggregating 125 lectures, on the "Ethics of Scholarship and Education Today". Goessmann served as the head of the department of History, Notre Dame College, Baltimore and professor of English at State College of Massachusetts .

#2750

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...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions