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,
#2801
Jean Garrigue
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
Jean Garrigue was an American poet. In her lifetime, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a nomination for a National Book Award. Life Jean Garrigue was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus in Evansville, Indiana, to Allan Colfax and Gertrude Garrigus. She was born in 1912 but later gave 1914 as her birth year. She had one sister, Marjorie, and one brother, Ross.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 - 1797 (38 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
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Adeline Rittershaus
1876 - 1924 (48 years)
Adeline Rittershaus was a German philologist, a scholar in old Scandinavian literature, and champion for the equality of women. She earned her doctorate in 1898, at the University of Zurich, being one of the first women to do so at that institution, and acquired in 1902, as the first woman, a Venia legendi at the Faculty of Arts of the same university. Her most famous work is a collection of Icelandic folk tales.
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Mary Abigail Dodge
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Mary Abigail Dodge was an American writer and essayist, who wrote under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton. Her writing is noted for its wit and promotion of equality of education and occupation for women. She was an abolitionist.
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Adela Rogers St. Johns
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies, but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.
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Margaret Wilson
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson was an American novelist. She was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins. Early years and education Born in Traer, Iowa, Wilson grew up on a farm and attended the University of Chicago, earning degrees in 1903 and 1904.
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Catharine Trotter Cockburn
1674 - 1749 (75 years)
Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English novelist, dramatist and philosopher who wrote on various subjects, including moral philosophy and theology, and maintained a prolific correspondence. Trotter's writings encompass a wide range of topics, such as necessity, the infinitude of space and substance. However, her primary focus was on moral issues. She believed that moral principles were not inherent but could be discovered by each individual through the use of reason, a faculty bestowed by God. In 1702, she published her first significant philosophical work, titled "A Defence of Mr. Lock's [...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 .
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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.
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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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Marguerite Yourcenar
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980.
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