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,
#301
Ruth Park
#21553
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Rosina Ruth Lucia Park AM was a New Zealand–born Australian author. Her best known works are the novels The Harp in the South and Playing Beatie Bow , and the children's radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat , which also spawned a book series .
Go to Profile#302
Diane Ackerman
#12645
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world. Education and career Ackerman received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Among the members of her dissertation committee was Carl Sagan, an astronomer and the creator of the Cosmos television series. She has taught at a number of universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
Go to Profile#303
Kirsten Boie
#25329
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kirsten Boie is a German children's author and activist. Having worked as a teacher, she began publishing in 1985 and is the author of more than 100 books. Among her best-known works are Paule ist ein Glücksgriff, the Kinder aus dem Möwenweg series, and Ritter Trenk. She has been recognised with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and an honorary citizenship of Hamburg.
Go to Profile#304
Katherine Dunn
#18184
Overall Influence
1945 - 2016 (71 years)
Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love . She was also a prolific writer on boxing.
Go to Profile#305
Gail Caldwell
#22744
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gail Caldwell is an American critic and author. She was the chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she was on staff from 1985 to 2009. Caldwell was the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The award was for eight Sunday reviews and two other columns written in 2000. According to the Pulitzer Prize board, those columns were noted for “her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature.”
Go to Profile#306
Helen Dunmore
#20757
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer. Her best known works include the novels Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege, and her last book of poetry Inside the Wave. She won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction, the National Poetry Competition, and posthumously the Costa Book Award.
Go to Profile#307
Liz Smith
#5424
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Mary Elizabeth Smith was an American gossip columnist. She was known as "The Grand Dame of Dish". In the 1960s and early 1970s, she was the entertainment editor for the magazines Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated. Between 1976 and 2009, she wrote a self-titled gossip column for newspapers including New York Newsday, the New York Daily News and the New York Post that was syndicated in 60 to 70 other newspapers. On television, she appeared on Fox, E!, and WNBC.
Go to Profile#308
Clare Cavanagh
#21642
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Clare Cavanagh is an American literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator. She is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz. She holds a B.A from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University . Before coming to Northwestern University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been transla...
Go to Profile#309
Lindy West
#20183
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Lindy West is an American writer, comedian and activist. She is the author of the essay collection Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. The topics she writes about include feminism, popular culture, and the fat acceptance movement.
Go to Profile#310
Margret Rey
#16117
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Margret Elizabeth Rey was a German-born American writer and illustrator, known best for the Curious George series of children's picture books that she and her husband H. A. Rey created from 1939 to 1966.
Go to Profile#311
Wendy Wasserstein
#9943
Overall Influence
1950 - 2006 (56 years)
Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright. She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles.
Go to Profile#312
Barbara Hambly
#16800
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Barbara Hambly is an American novelist and screenwriter within the genres of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction. She is the author of the bestselling Benjamin January mystery series featuring a free man of color, a musician and physician, in New Orleans in the antebellum years. She also wrote a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln.
Go to Profile#313
Gina Berriault
#33683
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Gina Berriault , was an American novelist and short story writer. Biography Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.
Go to Profile#314
Julia Glass
#32240
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Julia Glass is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002. Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.
Go to Profile#315
Lorna Goodison
#24564
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017 , serving in the role until 2020.
Go to Profile#316
Anne Lamott
#21462
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical. Lamott's writings, marked by their self-deprecating humor and openness, cover such subjects as alcoholism, single-motherhood, depression, and Christianity.
Go to Profile#317
Nahoko Uehashi
#34773
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese writer, primarily of fantasy books, for which she has won many awards. Uehashi is also Professor of Ethnology at Kawamura Gakuen Women's University, having completed a PhD focusing on the Yamatji, an indigenous Australian people.
Go to Profile#318
Lucinda Roy
#4440
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lucinda Roy is an American-based British novelist, educator and poet. Biography She was born in Battersea, South London, England, to Jamaican writer and artist Namba Roy and Yvonne Roy , an English actor and teacher. Lucinda Roy grew up in England and received her Bachelor of Arts in English from King's College London before moving to the United States, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Arkansas.
Go to Profile#319
Heidi Julavits
#26766
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and was a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace , The Effect of Living Backwards , The Uses of Enchantment , and The Vanishers . She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Go to Profile#320
Leslie Scalapino
#31360
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way , a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Go to Profile#321
Lucy Chao
#33325
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Lucy Chao or Zhao Luorui was a Chinese poet and translator. Biography Chao was born on May 9, 1912, in Xinshi, Deqing County, Zhejiang, China. She married Chen Mengjia, an anthropologist and expert on oracle bones, in 1932. In 1944 Chao and Chen were awarded a joint fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study at the University of Chicago in the United States. Chao earned her PhD from the institution in 1948, for a dissertation on Henry James. Afterwards, she returned to China to teach English and North American literature at Yenching University, Beijing.
Go to Profile#322
Kristin Ross
#9773
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kristin Ross is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at New York University. She is primarily known for her work on French literature and culture of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Life and work Ross received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1981 and since then has written a number of books, including The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune , Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May '68 and its Afterlives . She edited Anti-Americanism with Andrew Ross . In 2015, her book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary...
Go to Profile#323
NoViolet Bulawayo
#25529
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele , a Zimbabwean author. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. She was named one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2014. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, and her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her "the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker list twice".
Go to Profile#324
Rikki Ducornet
#19252
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rikki Ducornet is an American writer, poet, and artist. Her work has been described as “linguistically explosive and socially relevant,” and praised for “deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit.”
Go to Profile#325
J. Yellowlees Douglas
#28022
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jane Yellowlees Douglas is a pioneer author and scholar of hypertext fiction. She began writing about hypermedia in the late 1980s, very early in the development of the medium. Her 1993 fiction I Have Said Nothing, was one of the first published works of hypertext fiction.
Go to Profile#326
Liz Rosenberg
#35245
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lizbeth Meg Rosenberg is an American poet, novelist, children's book author and book reviewer. She is currently a professor of English at Binghamton University, and in previous years has taught at Colgate University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hamilton College, Bennington College, and Hollins College. Her children's book reviews appear monthly in The Boston Globe.
Go to Profile#327
Cristina Rivera Garza
#27111
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Cristina Rivera Garza is a Mexican author and professor best known for her fictional work, with various novels such as Nadie me verá llorar winning a number of Mexico’s highest literary awards as well as awards abroad. The author was born in the state of Tamaulipas, near the U.S.-Mexico border, and has developed her career in teaching and writing in both the United States and Mexico. She has taught history and creative writing at various universities and institutions, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico , Tec de Monterrey, Campus Toluca, and University of California, San Diego, but currently holds a position at the University of Houston.
Go to Profile#328
Florence King
#15310
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Florence Virginia King was an American novelist, essayist and columnist. While her early writings focused on the American South and those who live there, much of King's later work was published in National Review. Until her retirement in 2002, her column in National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner", was known for "serving up a smorgasbord of curmudgeonly critiques about rubes and all else bothersome to the Queen of Mean", as the magazine put it. After leaving retirement in 2006, she began writing a new column for National Review titled "The Bent Pin."
Go to Profile#329
Katie Roiphe
#15703
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus . She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End , and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an art...
Go to Profile#330
P. E. Easterling
#34415
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Patricia Elizabeth Easterling, FBA is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. She was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2001. She was the 36th person and the first — and, so far, only — woman to hold the post.
Go to Profile#331
Michelene Wandor
#22215
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michelene Dinah Wandor , known from 1963 to at least 1979 as Michelene Victor, is an English playwright, critic, broadcaster, poet, lecturer, and musician. Birth and education She was born Michelene Samuels in Essex, England, in 1940. Her parents, Abraham Samuels and Rosalia Wander, were early 20th-century Russian Jewish émigrés.
Go to Profile#332
Andrea Barrett
#13441
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Andrea Barrett is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for the Story Prize.
Go to Profile#333
Maria Rita Kehl
#6964
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Maria Rita Kehl, ORB is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, journalist, poet, essayist, cronista and literary critic. In 2010, she won the Jabuti Award in the Education, Psychology and Psychoanalysis category and the Human Rights Award from the Brazilian government in the Media and Human Rights category.
Go to Profile#334
Alissa Nutting
#40930
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alissa Nutting is an American author, creative writing professor and television writer. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB and the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.
Go to Profile#335
Alice McDermott
#20263
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.
Go to Profile#336
Delia Sherman
#35294
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Cordelia Caroline Sherman , known professionally as Delia Sherman, is an American fantasy writer and editor. Her novel The Porcelain Dove won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Background Sherman attended The Chapin School in New York. She received her B.A. at Vassar College in 1972, her Masters of Arts from Brown University in 1975, and her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1981. She has worked as a lecturer at Boston University from 1978 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 1992; and a reviewer with the Women's Review of Books, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction and Fantasy Review Annual between 1988 and 1989.
Go to Profile#337
Daphne Marlatt
#32359
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Daphne Marlatt, born Buckle, CM , is a Canadian poet and novelist who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. At a young age, her family moved to Malaysia and at age nine, they moved to British Columbia, where she later attended the University of British Columbia. There she developed her poetry style and her strong feminist views. In 1968, she received an MA in comparative literature from Indiana University.
Go to Profile#338
Janet Brennan Croft
#34005
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Janet Brennan Croft is an American librarian and Tolkien scholar, known for her authored and edited books and journals on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy. Academic career Croft earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Classical Civilization from Indiana University in 1982 and graduated as a Master of Library Science in 1983 at the Indiana University School of Library and Information. She has worked at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and has been director and associate professor at Warden Memorial Library, Martin Methodist College. She became the Head of Access Services at Bizzell Memorial Library, University of Oklahoma, in 2001 and was given associate professorship in 2007.
Go to Profile#339
Margaret Mahy
#30890
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Margaret Mahy was a New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. Many of her story plots have strong supernatural elements but her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. She wrote more than 100 picture books, 40 novels and 20 collections of short stories. At her death she was one of thirty writers to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her "lasting contribution to children's literature".
Go to Profile#340
Elleke Boehmer
#16700
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Ka...
Go to Profile#341
Imani Perry
#13417
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#342
Carme Riera
#37811
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Carme Riera Guilera is a novelist and essayist. She has also written short stories, scripts for radio and television and literary criticism. She holds a doctorate in Hispanic Philology and is a professor of Spanish literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Go to Profile#343
Jenny Offill
#41957
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Jenny Offill is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review. Early life Jenny Offill is the only child of two private-school English teachers. She spent her childhood years in various American states, including Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and North Carolina, where she attended high school and received a BA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and later, at Stanford University, was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs: wai...
Go to Profile#344
Judith Ortiz Cofer
#21659
Overall Influence
1952 - 2016 (64 years)
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Go to Profile#345
Shadi Bartsch
#18101
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is an American academic and is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She has previously held professorships at the University of California, Berkeley and Brown University where she was the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics in 2008-2009.
Go to Profile#346
Radwa Ashour
#31479
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Radwa Ashour was an Egyptian novelist. Life Ashour was born in El-Manial to Mustafa Ashour, a lawyer and literature enthusiast, and Mai Azzam, a poet and an artist. She graduated from Cairo University with a BA degree in 1967. In 1972, she received her MA in Comparative Literature from the same university. In 1975, Ashour graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a PhD in African American Literature. Her dissertation was entitled The search for a Black poetics: a study of Afro-American critical writings. While preparing for her PhD, Ashour was remarked as the first doctoral candidate in English who studied the literature of the African-American.
Go to Profile#347
Na Huideok
#52985
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Na Huideok is a South Korean poet. Life Na Huideok was born in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province. She was raised in an orphanage in which her parents - Christians who sought to carry out the teachings of their religion through communal living - served on the administrative staff. Na has confessed that the experience of living with orphans had made her a precocious child, and that the recognition of the difference between herself and her playmates early on gave her a unique perspective on the world.
Go to Profile#348
Patricia Cornwell
#6707
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.
Go to Profile#349
Tracie Morris
#23961
Overall Influence
Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Go to Profile#350
Amal El-Mohtar
#32133
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction. She has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, and has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly magazine Goblin Fruit since 2006.
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