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
Charlotte Anne Moberly
1846 - 1937 (91 years)
Charlotte Anne Elizabeth Moberly was an English academic, and first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. Her claimed time-travel book An Adventure, written in 1911 with fellow academic Eleanor Jourdain, became a bestseller.
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Mildred K. Pope
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Mildred Katherine Pope was an English scholar of Anglo-Norman England. She became the first woman to hold a readership at Oxford University, where she taught at Somerville College. Biography Mildred Pope was educated at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham. She read French at Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1893 was placed in the first-class of the Oxford University women's examination. Interested in Old French philology, as an undergraduate "she had to rely mainly on tuition by correspondence from Paget Toynbee at Cambridge". She taught at Somerville College, Oxford, first as a librarian, and from 1894 as a lecturer.
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Anne Charlotte Leffler
1849 - 1892 (43 years)
Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, duchess of Caianello , was a Swedish author. Biography She was the daughter of the school principal John Olof Leffler and Gustava Wilhelmina Mittag. Her brother was noted mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler. Leffler was initially educated privately and then a student at the Wallinska skolan from the age of thirteen, at that time perhaps the most progressive school open to females in Stockholm.
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Helen L. Webster
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Helen L. Webster was an American philologist and educator. She taught at Vassar College, 1889–90, at same time giving a course of lectures on comparative philology at Barnard College. She served as professor of comparative philology in Wellesley College. 1890–9; and was the principal of the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Institute, 1899–1904. Webster was the author of: A Treatise on the Guttural Question in Gothic . She edited, The Legends of the Micmacs, 1893. Additional, she lectured and contributed to educational periodicals. Webster made her home in Farmington, Connecticut.
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María Bibiana Benítez
1783 - 1873 (90 years)
María Bibiana Benítez Batista was Puerto Rico's first female poet and one of its first playwrights. She was the first of three renowned poets in her family, the others being her niece and adopted daughter Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier, and Alejandrina's son José Gautier Benítez.
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Elizabeth Inchbald
1753 - 1821 (68 years)
Elizabeth Inchbald was an English novelist, actress, dramatist, and translator. Her two novels, A Simple Story and Nature and Art, have received particular critical attention. Life Born on 15 October 1753 at Stanningfield, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Elizabeth was the eighth of the nine children of Mary Simpson and her husband John Simpson , a farmer. The family, like several others in the neighbourhood, was Roman Catholic. Her brother was sent to school, but Elizabeth and her sisters were educated at home.
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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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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.
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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.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Renata von Scheliha
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Renata Johanna von Scheliha was a German classical philologist. She authored a number of books, treatises and monographs and carried out several translations. Life Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia , as the daughter of Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. Her mother was a daughter of the Prussian Minister of Finance Johann von Miquel. Her older brother by four years was the diplomat and resistance fighter Rudolf von Scheliha who was executed in December 1942 by the Nazis on a charge of being a member of the Red Orchestra
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Elizabeth Bentley
1767 - 1839 (72 years)
Elizabeth Bentley was an English poet, one of a small wave of British and Irish writers from the labouring classes in the eighteenth century. She was a local poet who was nonetheless engaged with larger political and social issues.
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Margarita de Mayo Izarra
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Margarita de Mayo Izarra was a Spanish writer, teacher, and journalist. Professional career Margarita de Mayo, after obtaining the title of teacher of Primary Higher Education, taught at a graduate school for girls in Valdepeñas from 1914 to 1918.
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Carolina Marcial Dorado
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Carolina Marcial Dorado was a Spanish educator, writer, and lecturer based in the United States. She was head of the Spanish department at Barnard College from 1920 until her death in 1941. Early life Carolina Marcial Dorado was born in Camuñas, Toledo, the daughter of José Marcial Palacios, a Protestant clergyman, and María de la Luz Marcial-Dorado; her parents were originally from Andalusia. Her older brother, José Marcial Dorado, was a journalist and briefly a member of the Spanish parliament; he was also secretary of the American Bible Society for the Caribbean, based in Cuba.
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Katharine Lambert Richards Rockwell
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Katharine Lambert Richards Rockwell was an American theologian, writer, and professor. Rockwell served as national secretary for the YWCA and as a member of their Board of Trustees for two terms. She also chaired the YWCA's Department of Religious Education.
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Branca Edmée Marques
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Branca Edmée Marques de Sousa Torres was a leading Portuguese specialist in the peaceful applications of nuclear technology who obtained a doctorate in Paris under the guidance of Marie Curie. Returning to Lisbon she founded the Radiochemistry Laboratory, where she continued her research for three decades.
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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.
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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...
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