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,
#351
Carolivia Herron
#33057
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Carolivia Herron is an American writer of children's and adult literature, and a scholar of African-American Judaica. Personal life She was born to Oscar Smith Herron and Georgia Carol Herron, in Washington, D.C.
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Kathleen Jamie
#26145
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar. Life and work Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Raised in Currie, near Edinburgh, she studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, publishing her first poems as an undergraduate. Her writing is rooted in Scottish landscape and culture, and ranges through travel, women's issues, archaeology and visual art. She writes in English and occasionally in Scots. Jamie's collections include The Queen of Sheba . Her 2004 collection The Tree House revealed an increasing interest in the natural world.
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Rachel Cusk
#24603
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer. Childhood and education Cusk was born in Saskatoon to British parents in 1967, the second of four children with an older sister and two younger brothers, and spent much of her early childhood in Los Angeles. She moved to her parents' native Britain in 1974, settling in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, and was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge. She studied English at New College, Oxford.
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Mary Ann Caws
#21904
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Mary Ann Caws is an American author, translator, art historian and literary critic. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and on the film faculty. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell.
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Wanda Coleman
#30292
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Wanda Coleman was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles". Biography Wanda Evans was born in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. She is the eldest of four children. Her parents were George and Lewana Evans, who were introduced to one another at church by his aunt. In 1931, her father had relocated to Los Angeles from Little Rock, Arkansas, after the lynching of a young man who was hung from a church steeple. He was an ex-boxer and long-time friend and sparring partner of Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore.
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Sarah Schulman
#8270
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
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Maria Corti
#39758
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Maria Corti was an Italian philologist, literary critic, and novelist. Considered one of the leading literary scholars of post-World War II Italy, she was awarded numerous prizes including the Premio Campiello for the entire body of her work. Her works of fiction were informed by her literary scholarship but also had a distinctly autobiographical vein, particularly her Voci del nord-est and II canto delle sirene . For most of her career she was based at the University of Pavia where she established the Fondo Manoscritti di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei, an extensive curated archive of mater...
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Monika Fludernik
#36322
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Monika Fludernik , a native Austrian, is professor of English literature and culture at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany. Fludernik earned her doctorate at the University of Graz, Austria, where she studied with professor Franz Karl Stanzel. In 1984, she took up an associate professorship at the University of Vienna, and since 1994 she has been a full professor at Freiburg. Fludernik has held several temporary fellowships, at the Universities of Oxford, and Harvard, among other places, and she is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 2008 she is al...
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Norma Field
#22301
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Norma M. Field is an author and emeritus professor of East Asian studies at the University of Chicago. She has taught Premodern Japanese Poetry and Prose, Premodern Japanese Language, and Gender Studies as relating to Japanese women.
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Midge Decter
#11594
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Midge Decter was an American journalist and author. Originally a liberal, she was one of the pioneers of the neoconservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Early life Decter was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on July 25, 1927. She was the youngest of three daughters of Rose and Harry Rosenthal, a sporting goods merchant. Her family was Jewish. She attended the University of Minnesota for one year, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1946 to 1948, and New York University, but did not graduate from any of them. She initially identified as a liberal on the political spectrum.
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Toni Cade Bambara
#15354
Overall Influence
1939 - 1995 (56 years)
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade , was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Biography Early life and education Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York, to parents Walter and Helen Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant , Queens, and New Jersey. At the age of six, she changed her name from Miltona to Toni, and then in 1970, changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group, Bambara, after finding the name written as part of a signature on a sketchbook discovered in a trunk among her great-grandmother's other belongings.
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Doris Lessing
#24600
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia , where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing , the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence , The Golden Notebook , The Good Terrorist , and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives .
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Mamoni Raisom Goswami
#25187
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
Indira Goswami , known by her pen name Mamoni Raisom Goswami and popularly as Mamoni Baideo, was an Indian writer, poet, professor, scholar and editor. She was the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award , the Jnanpith Award and Principal Prince Claus Laureate . A celebrated writer of contemporary Indian literature, many of her works have been translated into English from her native Assamese which include The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, Pages Stained With Blood and The Man from Chinnamasta.
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Blakey Vermeule
#29957
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Emily Dickinson Blake "Blakey" Vermeule is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind. She is a Professor of English at Stanford University. Biography Vermeule is the daughter of classicist Emily Vermeule and former Museum of Fine Arts curator Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III. Her brother, Adrian Vermeule, is a professor at Harvard Law School. Her wife is Terry Castle, also a professor of English at Stanford.
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Marie Gil
#39639
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Marie Gil is a French writer and Professor of French Literature in Paris. She studied at HEC Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure and Paris-Sorbonne University, was a Fellow of the Fondation Thiers and taught French Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and at the University of Franche-Comté, and is currently vice-president of the Collège international de philosophie. She is also director of the Roland Barthes research group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
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Hollis Robbins
#18853
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Hollis Robbins is an American academic and essayist; Robbins currently serves as dean of humanities at University of Utah. Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature. Education and early career Robbins was born and raised in New Hampshire. She entered Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16 and received her B.A. in 1983. From 1986 to 1988 Robbins worked at The New Yorker magazine in the marketing and promotions department. She received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1990, and subsequently enrolled as a doctoral student in the de...
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Rachel Blau DuPlessis
#32329
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized. Early life DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941 to Joseph L. and Eleanor Blau; her father was a professor, and her mother was a librarian. She received her BA from Barnard College in 1963, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1964 and 1970 respectively. Her dissertation project was titled The Endless Poem: Paterson of William Carlos Williams and The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.
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Karen Joy Fowler
#22319
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation. She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name.
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Alicia Markova
#7589
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
Dame Alicia Markova DBE was a British ballerina and a choreographer, director and teacher of classical ballet. Most noted for her career with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and touring internationally, she was widely considered to be one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of the twentieth century. She was the first British dancer to become the principal dancer of a ballet company and, with Dame Margot Fonteyn, is one of only two English dancers to be recognised as a prima ballerina assoluta. Markova was a founder dancer of the Rambert Dance Company, The Royal Ballet and American Ball...
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Sarah Churchwell
#19713
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless P...
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Idea Vilariño
#19908
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Idea Vilariño Romani was a Uruguayan poet, essayist and literary critic. She belonged to the group of intellectuals known as "Generación del 45". In this generation, there are several writers such as Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Sarandy Cabrera, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Ángel Rama, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Maggi, Alfredo Gravina, Mario Arregui, Amanda Berenguer, Humberto Megget, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Gladys Castelvecchi and José Pedro Díaz among others.
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Diane Wakoski
#30777
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Diane Wakoski is an American poet. Wakoski is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism.
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Naomi Wallace
#11823
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work. Biography Naomi Wallace was born in Prospect, Kentucky, to Henry F. Wallace, a photo journalist and correspondent for Time and Life magazines, and Sonja de Vries, a Dutch justice and human rights worker.
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Jay Macpherson
#36599
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Jean Jay Macpherson was a Canadian lyric poet and scholar. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls her "a member of 'the mythopoeic school of poetry,' who expressed serious religious and philosophical themes in symbolic verse that was often lyrical or comic."
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Leela Majumdar
#20909
Overall Influence
1908 - 2007 (99 years)
Leela Majumdar was an Indian Bengali-language writer. Early life Born to Surama Devi and Pramada Ranjan Ray , Leela spent her childhood days at Shillong, where she studied at the Loreto Convent. Surama Devi had been adopted by Upendra Kishor Ray Choudhuri . Lila's grandfather had left his younger two daughters in care of his friends after his wife died. The eldest daughter was sent to a boarding house. Her maternal grandfather was Ramkumar Bhattacharya, who later became a sannyasi and was christened Ramananda Bharati. He was the first among Indians to visit Kailash and Mansarovar and wrote a travelogue Himaranya.
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Margot Fonteyn
#4731
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
Dame Margaret Evelyn de Arias DBE , known by the stage name Margot Fonteyn, was an English ballerina. She spent her entire career as a dancer with the Royal Ballet , eventually being appointed prima ballerina assoluta of the company by Queen Elizabeth II. Beginning ballet lessons at the age of four, she studied in England and China, where her father was transferred for his work. Her training in Shanghai was with Russian expatriate dancer Georgy Goncharov, contributing to her continuing interest in Russian ballet. Returning to London at the age of 14, she was invited to join the Vic-Wells Ballet School by Ninette de Valois.
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Aleida Assmann
#16677
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, who studied Egyptology and whose work has focused on cultural anthropology and Cultural and Communicative Memory. Life Born Aleida Bornkamm in , North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, she is the daughter of the New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm and his wife, Elisabeth. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen from 1966 to 1972. In 1977 she wrote her dissertation in Heidelberg about The Legitimacy of Fiction . She had to take her minor field examination in Egyptology in Tübingen becaus...
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Aminatta Forna
#22908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones , The Memory of Love , The Hired Man and Happiness . Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lann...
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Minnie Bruce Pratt
#28553
Overall Influence
1946 - 2023 (77 years)
Minnie Bruce Pratt was an American poet, educator, activist, and essayist. She retired in 2015 from her position as Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university's first LGBT studies program.
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Mary Lee Settle
#22669
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Mary Lee Settle was an American writer. She won the 1978 National Book Award for her novel Blood Tie. She was a founder of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "Settle has gone so unnoticed by the academic community that the most recurrent subject among those few who have written about her is the fact that she has gone so unnoticed." Hurting Settle's reputation is that she does not fit clearly into any type of writer, and wrote on a wide variety of fields; this detracts from a writer's authority.
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Mary Anne Mohanraj
#33480
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth. Background Mohanraj was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka but moved to the United States at the age of two and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut.
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Frances Mayes
#30821
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Frances Mayes is an American writer. Her 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun was on the New York Times Best Seller list for over two years and was the basis for the film Under the Tuscan Sun. Biography Frances Mayes was born on March 23, 1940 in Fitzgerald, Georgia to Garbert Mayes, a cotton mill manager, and Frankye Mayes. Mayes was the youngest of three sisters. Garbert Mayes died of cancer at age 47, when Frances was 14.
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Olga Broumas
#19525
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Olga Broumas is a Greek poet, resident in the United States. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. Biography Born and raised on the island of Syros, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she earned her bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Oregon.
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Taslima Nasrin
#15241
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Taslima Nasrin is a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist. She is known for her writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion; some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. She has also been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region, both from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.
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Wang Anyi
#39464
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Wang Anyi is a Chinese writer, vice-chair of the China Writers Association since 2006, and professor in Chinese Literature at Fudan University since 2004. Wang widely write novels, novellas, short stories and essays with diverse themes and topics. The majority of her works are set in Shanghai, where she lived and worked for the majority of her life. Wang also regularly writes about the countryside in Anhui, where she was "sent down" during the Cultural Revolution. Her works have been translated into English, German and French, and studied as zhiqing , xungen , Haipai , and dushi literature.
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Ann Hood
#41652
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ann Hood is an American novelist and short story writer; she has also written nonfiction. The author of fourteen novels, four memoirs, a short story collection, a ten book series for middle readers and one young adult novel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares,, and Tin House. Hood is a regular contributor to The New York Times' Op-Ed page, Home Economics column. Her most recent work is "Fly Girl: A Memoir," published with W.W. Norton and Company in 2022.
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Adrienne Kennedy
#28564
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
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Nazik Al-Malaika
#32843
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Nazik al-Malaika was an Iraqi poet. Al-Malaika is noted for being among the first Arabic poets to use free verse. Early life and career Al-Malaika was born in Baghdad to a cultured family. Her mother Salma al-Malaika was also a poet, and her father was a teacher. She wrote her first poem at the age of 10. During her life, she studied English and French literature, Latin, and Greek poetry. Al-Malaika graduated in 1944 from the College of Arts in Baghdad and later completed a master's degree in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a Degree of Excellence. She entered the Institute of Fine Arts and graduated from the Department of Music in 1949.
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Mary Helen Washington
#30785
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mary Helen Washington is an African-American literary scholar who is the author of numerous books on the African-American female experience. She is best known for her influence on increasing representation of Black authors in education and in literary schools of thought. Washington is a past president of the American Studies Association, and an experienced English professor.
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Jane Hamilton
#40601
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jane Hamilton is an American novelist. Early life Jane Hamilton was born and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois , the youngest of five children. She won prizes for poetry and short stories throughout high school and college but was always told that being a writer would not be a viable career. Because she was not a good speller, she did not believe she could be a copy editor or editor either. She graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1975.
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Janet Fitch
#13710
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Janet Fitch is an American author. She wrote the novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College. Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night ...
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Rabia Djelti
#49415
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Rabia Djelti is an Algerian writer, fluent in both Arabic and French. In 2002, for her poetry and novels, she was awarded the prize for Arabic literature in Abu-Dhabi. In addition to her writing, Djelti teaches literature at the University of Algiers.
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Antonine Maillet
#12256
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Antonine Maillet, is an Acadian novelist, playwright, and scholar. She was born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada. Education Following high school, Maillet received her BA from the Collège Notre-Dame d'Acadie in 1950, followed by an MA from the Université de Moncton in 1959. She then received her PhD in literature in 1971 from the Université Laval. Her thesis is entitled Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie.
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Nancy Willard
#23231
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Nancy Willard was an American writer: novelist, poet, author and occasional illustrator of children's books. She won the 1982 Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Biography Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she later received the B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and won five Hopwood Awards for creative writing. She also studied at Stanford University, where she received her M.A.
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Susan Cheever
#21356
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Susan Cheever is an American author and a prize-winning best-selling writer well known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at The New School in New York City.
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Maria Velho da Costa
#24823
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Maria de Fátima de Bivar Velho da Costa was a Portuguese writer who was awarded the Camões Prize in 2002. She took part in the Portuguese Feminist Movement, and became one of the authors of the book Novas Cartas Portugesas , together with Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Isabel Barreno. The authors, known as the "Three Marias," were arrested, jailed and prosecuted under Portuguese censorship laws in 1972, during the last years of the Estado Novo dictatorship. The book and their trial inspired protests in Portugal and attracted international attention from European and American women's liberation ...
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Judith Simmer-Brown
#10972
Overall Influence
Judith Simmer-Brown is a Distinguished Professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies Emerita at Naropa University. She has expertise in Tibetan Buddhism, Women and Buddhism, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, Western Buddhism and Contemplative Education. She is an acharya — a senior Buddhist teacher — in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and was a senior student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She serves on the board of the Society of Buddhist-Christian Studies, and is on the steering committee of the Contemplative Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion. Previously she was a member of th...
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Nilima Ibrahim
#22738
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Neelima Ibrahim was a Bangladeshi educationist, littérateur and social worker. She is well known for her scholarship on Bengali literature but even more so for her depiction of raped and tortured women in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War in her book Ami Birangana Bolchi. She was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1969, Begum Rokeya Padak in 1996 and Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh for her contributions to Bangla literature.
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Joan Aiken
#25250
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Joan Delano Aiken was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Night Fall.
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Celia Britton
#21891
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Celia Margaret Britton, FBA is a British scholar of French Caribbean literature and thought. She was Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen from 1991 to 2002 and Professor of French at University College London from 2003 to 2011. She had previously lectured at King's College London and the University of Reading.
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