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.

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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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#5001

Peter Zajac

#95311

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Peter Zajac is a Slovak literary critic and politician who served as an MP of the National Council between 1998 and 2001 and again between 2010 and 2012. He is married to the science fiction writer Alta Vášová. In 2020 president Zuzana Čaputová awarded Peter Zajac Ľudovít Štúr Order, 1st class.

#5002

George B. Handley

George B. Handley

#103613

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

George Browning Handley is a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University who has often written on issues related to environmentalism. Early life Handley was raised in Connecticut, United States.

#5003

James Richardson

#107602

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

James Richardson is an American poet. Career and education James Richardson is an American poet and critic. He is a retired Professor of English & Creative Writing at Princeton University, where he had taught since 1980. He grew up in Garden City, New York and attended Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude in 1971. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1975.

#5004

William Egginton

William Egginton

#101851

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

William Egginton is a literary critic and philosopher. He has written extensively on a broad range of subjects, including theatricality, fictionality, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and ethics, religious moderation, and theories of mediation.

#5005

Anne Élaine Cliche

#126841

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Anne Élaine Cliche is a Canadian writer living in Montreal, Quebec. Biography She was born in Val-d'Or and was educated there. She went on to study music at the École de musique Vincent d'Indy in Montreal. She continued her studies at the University of Ottawa, receiving a bachelor's degree in music, then a bachelor's and master's degree in French literature and a doctorate in French and Quebec literature. She taught in the French literature department at the University of Ottawa and then was an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Since 1992, she has been a professor in the literary studies department at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

#5006

Michael Davitt

#118924

Overall Influence

1950 - 2005 (55 years)

Michael Davitt was an Irish poet who published in the Irish language. He has been characterised as "...one of modern Ireland's finest poets in either of the nation's languages and key figure in the 1970s Irish Language poetry movement.

#5007

Thamarai

#36740

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Thamarai is a Tamil poet and lyricist. She is a prominent figure in the Tamil literary world. She made her debut in the Tamil film industry through the 1998 film Iniyavale, which was directed by Seeman and music composed by Deva.

#5008

Tracy Barrett

#96291

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Tracy Barrett is an American author of children’s books and young adult novels. She has published twenty-three books for young readers and one for adults. Life Tracy Barrett was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but grew up just outside New York CIty, New York.

#5009

Yaroslav Melnyk

Yaroslav Melnyk

#121625

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Jaroslav Melnik is a Ukrainian/Lithuanian novelist, philosopher, and critic. Life Born in West Ukraine, J.Melnik is graduated from Lviv University and did his postgraduate studies at Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. He worked as a magazine writer for Elle . In 1997, the novel Les Parias d’Eden was published by Robert Laffont Publishers in Paris. It received accolades from France’s literary critics and was praised by the country’s press.

#5010

Tracy Clayton

#104763

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Tracy Clayton is an American writer whose work has been recognized by Fast Company, Ebony, and The Root, who described her as "a superstar” who “writes big, funny things." She served as the co-host of the BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, which has been on hiatus since 2017. Clayton left BuzzFeed in September 2018 amid company-wide downsizing. She hosts the Netflix podcast Strong Black Legends, for which she interviews African Americans in the entertainment industry about their craft. Clayton and Josh Gwynn co-host Pineapple Street Studio podcast “Back Issue” which reminisces on how moments in ...

#5011

Franz-Josef Deiters

#65576

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Franz-Josef Deiters is a German-Australian literary scholar. From 2006 to 2020, he was associate professor in German Studies at Monash University. In December 2021, he was appointed as Honorary Associate with the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Sydney. Before moving to Australia he taught at University of Tübingen , and has held visiting appointments at the University of Sarajevo , Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt/M. and at the University of Bergamo . Deiters is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

#5012

Anthony Wilden

#11114

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Anthony George Wilden was a writer, social theorist, college lecturer, and consultant. Wilden published numerous books and articles which intersect a number of fields, including systems theory, film theory, structuralism, cybernetics, psychiatry, anthropological theory, water control projects, urban ecosystems, resource conservation, and communications and social relations.

#5013

Joanna Klink

#80033

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Joanna Klink is an American poet. She was born in Iowa City, Iowa. She received an M.F.A. in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in Humanities from Johns Hopkins University. She was the Briggs-Copeland Poet at Harvard University and for many years taught in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Montana. She currently teaches at UT Austin's Michener Center for Writers. Her most recent book, The Nightfields, was published July 7, 2020 by Penguin.

#5014

Fleda Brown

#92793

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Fleda Brown is an American poet and author. She is also known as Fleda Brown Jackson. Biography Fleda Brown was born in Columbia, Missouri, and raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In 1978 she joined the University of Delaware English Department. There she founded the Poets in the Schools Program, which she directed for more than twelve years. She served as poet laureate of Delaware from 2001 to 2007, when she retired from the University of Delaware and moved to Traverse City, Michigan. She currently teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

#5015

Shapour Bonyad

#110734

Overall Influence

1947 - 2000 (53 years)

Shahpour Bonyad was an Iranian poet. Biography He studied cinematography in France. A few months after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Bonyad returned to Iran but because of his political beliefs could not continue his activities in his homeland. He taught French literature at the University of Shiraz for a while but was sacked by the fundamentalist government.

#5016

Milena Minkova

#40407

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Milena Minkova is a Bulgarian scholar of the Latin language. She has lived, studied and taught in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. She is now a resident of the United States and teaches Latin and Classics at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Since the last decade of the 20th century, she has been one of the leading figures in the revival of the use of Latin among Latin scholars and teachers. She earned two Ph.Ds in Classics and Latin, one from the University of Sofia and the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome .

#5017

Traci Brimhall

#100875

Overall Influence

Traci Brimhall is a poet and professor in the United States. She teaches creative writing at Kansas State University. Life Brimhall was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1982. She graduated from Florida State University with a BA, and completed an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She received a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University, where she was a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

#5018

Sue Parrill

#111312

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Dr. Anna Sue Parrill is a scholar of 19th-century English literature. She has published articles and books on film and television productions set in the Tudor and Napoleonic periods, as well as on adaptations of Jane Austen's novels.

#5019

Niall Binns

#153535

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Niall Binns is a British poet who lives in Spain and writes in Spanish. He studied in Oxford, Santiago de Chile and Madrid, and has also lived in Paris and Coimbra. He teaches Latin American literature at Madrid's Complutense University.

#5020

JaHyun Kim Haboush

#64676

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

JaHyun Kim Haboush was a Korean American scholar of Korean history and literature. Haboush was the King Sejong Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University when she died in New York City in 2011.

#5021

Aaron Hamburger

#100382

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Aaron Hamburger is an American writer best known for his short story collection The View from Stalin's Head and novels Faith for Beginners and Is Here . Born in Detroit, Michigan, Hamburger went to college at the University of Michigan and then spent a year abroad teaching English in Prague, Czech Republic, the setting for his first book of stories, primarily about the lives of expatriates after the end of the Cold War. The View from Stalin's Head was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. His next book, Faith for Beginners, i...

#5022

John Edward Fletcher

#85726

Overall Influence

1940 - 1992 (52 years)

John Edward Fletcher was a British-Australian scholar best known for his research and publications on Athanasius Kircher as well as several other Germans who had lived in and/or influenced Australia.

#5023

Charles Gullans

#126720

Overall Influence

1929 - 1993 (64 years)

Charles Gullans was an American poet, bibliographer, and educator. His first book, Arrivals and Departures , was his most critically acclaimed publication. He published five more poetry collections during his life. He also published translations including Last Letters from Stalingrad and The Wrong Side of the Rug, and compiled bibliographies of the works of Sir Robert Ayton and J V Cunningham.

#5024

Laura Mullen

#108488

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Laura Mullen , is an American poet who has published 8 books of poetry. Life and work Mullen received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, before going to teach at, among other places, Colorado State University, where her courses included seminars on Modernism, Postmodernism, and Cross-Genre Writing. She’s also been invited as a guest author to teach at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program , Columbia College – Chicago - , Brown University , and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop Summer Program, . She was awarded a N...

#5025

Shelby Stephenson

#110449

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Shelby Stephenson is an American poet. On December 22, 2014, he was named by Governor Pat McCrory as the ninth North Carolina Poet Laureate, a position he held from 2014 to 2016. Biography Stephenson was born in Benson, Johnston County, North Carolina to Maytle and Paul Stephenson in 1938, and lived for fourteen years with his parents and three older siblings Paul, Marshall, and Rose Stephenson in a rural farmhouse known as "Plankhouse." In 1952, the Stephensons moved to a new house, and Shelby graduated from high school in 1956; he earned his bachelor's degree from the University of North Ca...

#5026

Bertrand Visage

#106104

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Bertrand Visage is a French academic and writer. He was a Professor of Literature in France for 3 years before moving to Italy to teach French literature for 2 years at the University of Catania in Sicily and afterwards at Naples Eastern University. Following a 2 years residence at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici, he returned to Palermo, Sicily as a cultural attaché at the French Embassy. From 1987 to 1992 he taught French literature at the University of Rome and at the University of Naples.

#5027

Carolyn Dinshaw

#113203

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context. Education and career Dinshaw was born to an Indian father, Dudley Dinshaw a Parsi from Lucknow and an American mother.

#5028

Philippe Leveau

#94137

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Philippe Leveau is a 20th-century French historian and archaeologist, a specialist of the ancient world. Works Caesarea de Maurétanie : une ville romaine et ses campagnes, Éditions de l'École française de Rome, 1984, X + 556 pages Ph. Leveau et J.-L. Paillet, L'alimentation en eau de Caesarea de Maurétanie et l'aqueduc de Cherchel , Ed. L'Harmattan, Paris 1976, 185 pages, 10 plans hors-texte.J. Gascou, Ph. Leveau et J. Rimbert, Inscriptions latines de la cité d'Apt, Supplément à Gallia, Paris, CNRS, 1997, 220 p.Burnouf J. et Leveau Ph., , Fleuves et Marais, une Histoire au Croisement de la Nature et de la Culture.

#5029

Jane Harris

#132504

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages . Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.

#5030

Xenofon Verykios

#86286

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Xenofon Verykios is a Greek poet, and a professor in chemical mechanics at the University of Patras. The professor is the member of the Administrative Committee of TEI of the Ionian Islands and benefactor, he does reports and has benefits on an innovator at the production of electrical energy from biomatic uses as the first glass experiment. He made several proceedings that succeeded the ciphered dirt emission He is also the president of the Poetic Symposium and member of many unions and councils with his benefits.

#5031

Soupy Sales

#39693

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Milton Supman , known professionally as Soupy Sales, was an American comedian, actor, radio-television personality, and jazz aficionado. He was best known for his local and network children's television series, Lunch with Soupy Sales , a series of comedy sketches frequently ending with Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark. From 1968 to 1975, he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What's My Line? and appeared on several other TV game shows. During the 1980s, he hosted his own show on WNBC in New York City.

#5032

Yuko Taniguchi

#82976

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Yuko Taniguchi is a Japanese American poet and novelist. Life She graduated from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University and from the University of Minnesota with a Master of Fine Arts degree.

#5033

Patricia Broderick

Patricia Broderick

#70392

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Patricia Biow Broderick was an American playwright and painter. She was the wife of actor James Broderick and the mother of actor Matthew Broderick. Early life and career Broderick was born Patricia Biow in New York City, the daughter of Sophie and Milton H. Biow , president of an advertising firm. Her family were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland. When she was 18, her mother died in 1943 at the age of 48. Her father died 33 years later. In Mexico, Broderick studied painting with Rufino Tamayo who had been her art teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan. She began writing plays in the 1940s and several of them were performed in New York and London.

#5034

Anne Pippin Burnett

#90694

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Anne Pippin Burnett was an American classical scholar and academic who specialised in Greek literature, especially tragedy and the lyric poetry of the archaic and early classical periods. Career She earned her BA from Swarthmore College in 1946 and followed this with an MA in 1947 at Columbia University. In 1953 she gained her PhD from Berkeley. She subsequently taught at Vassar College and was an editor and translator for the publishing house Hachette. She joined the University of Chicago, in 1961 as an assistant professor, becoming a professor in 1970. She was chair of the Department of Cl...

#5035

Vern Rutsala

#79077

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Vern Rutsala was an American poet. Born in McCall, Idaho, he was educated at Reed College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop . He taught English and creative writing at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon for more than forty years, before retiring in 2004. He also taught for short periods at the University of Minnesota, Bowling Green State University, University of Redlands, and the University of Idaho, and served in the U.S. Army, 1956–58. He died in Oregon on April 2, 2014.

#5036

Natalie Kusz

#65216

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Natalie Kusz is an American memoirist. Life She graduated from University of Alaska Fairbanks with a B.A. and an M.F.A. She taught at Bethel College, and Harvard University. She teaches at Eastern Washington University. Her work appeared in O, Harper's, Threepenny Review, McCall's, Real Simple, and The New York Times.

#5037

Kenneth Ramchand

#106682

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Kenneth Ramchand is a Trinidad and Tobago academic and writer, who is widely respected as "arguably the most prominent living critic of Caribbean fiction". He has written extensively on many West Indian authors, including V. S. Naipaul, Earl Lovelace and Sam Selvon, as well as editing several significant cultural publications. His seminal text, The West Indian Novel and Its Background , had a transformational effect on the syllabus of the University of the West Indies and the internationalization of West Indian literature as an academic discipline.

#5038

Gina Luria Walker

#100445

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Gina Luria Walker is Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The New Historia at The New School in New York City. She teaches Women's Intellectual History and is one of world's foremost scholars on eighteenth-century feminist intellectual Mary Hays and her circle.

#5039

Jeremy Ingalls

#104822

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Mildred Dodge Jeremy Ingalls was an American poet and scholar of Chinese literature. In 1943, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on her major poem, The Thunder Saga of Tahi, which was published in 1945 by Alfred Knopf.

#5040

Andrew Waterman

#52381

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Andrew Waterman was an English poet. Biography Born in London, Waterman grew up in Woodside and Croydon, and at the age of eleven won a scholarship to the Trinity School of John Whitgift. He left before sitting his A levels, and after six years of clerical and manual jobs in London and Jersey began studying English at the University of Leicester as a mature student, graduating in 1966. With the help of poet G. S. Fraser, Waterman was then awarded funding to conduct postgraduate research at Worcester College, Oxford, although he stayed there only briefly and did not graduate. From 1968 to 1997...

#5041

Cleopatra Mathis

#124172

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Cleopatra Mathis is an American poet who since 1982 has been the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the English department at Dartmouth College, where she is also director of the Creative Writing Program. Her most recent book is White Sea . She is a faculty member at The Frost Place Poetry Seminar.

#5042

Helju Rebane

#73443

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Helju Rebane is an Estonian writer. She writes mainly prose and science fiction in the Estonian and Russian languages. She was born in Tallinn. Her father was philosopher and her uncles were physicist and former president of the Academy of Sciences of the ESSR Karl Rebane, physicist , and mathematician . She graduated from Tartu State University Tartu with a degree in theoretical mathematics in 1971. From 1972 until 1973, she worked in the department of logic and psychology at the university. Later she studied logic at Moscow University. In Moscow, she was as a lecturer at the Institute of ...

#5043

David Diop

#88664

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

David Diop is a French novelist and academic, who specializes in 18th-century French and Francophone African literature. His research, at the University of Pau in south-west France, focuses on representations of Africa in 18th-century accounts and images by travellers. Diop received the 2021 International Booker Prize for his novel At Night All Blood Is Black as the first French author . The novel was also shortlisted for ten French awards and won them in other countries.

#5044

Maria Semple

#110238

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of This One Is Mine , Where'd You Go, Bernadette , and Today Will Be Different . Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan, and Ellen. She is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards.

#5045

Andrew Mangham

#150372

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Andrew Mangham is a literary critic and professor at the University of Reading, UK. He is best known for his work on Victorian literature and is the author of We Are All Monsters: How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us , The Science of Starving , Dickens's Forensic Realism and Violent Women and Sensation Fiction . Mangham was born in Thurnscoe, a coal-mining village near Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

#5046

Cecilia Woloch

#94971

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Cecilia Woloch is an American poet, writer and teacher, known for her work in communities throughout the U.S. and around the world. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient and the author of six collections of poems, a novel, and numerous essays.

#5047

David Kherdian

#98555

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

David Kherdian is an Armenian-American writer, poet, and editor. He is known best for The Road from Home , based on his mother's childhood—cataloged as biography by some libraries, as fiction by others.

#5048

Jamie Foxx

#75724

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Eric Marlon Bishop , known professionally as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, comedian, and singer. He received acclaim for his portrayal of Ray Charles in the film Ray , winning the Academy Award, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. That same year, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the crime film Collateral.

#5049

Luke Kennard

#102759

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Luke Kennard is a British poet, critic, novelist and lecturer. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 for his first collection The Solex Brothers. His second collection, The Harbour Beyond The Movie, was shortlisted for the 2007 Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the youngest ever poet to be nominated. In 2014 he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets. His debut novel, The Transition, was published by Fourth Estate in March 2017. The novel was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. His poetry collection Notes on the Sonnets won the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Col...

#5050

Oliver de la Paz

#106986

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Oliver de la Paz is an American poet and educator. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including Requiem for the Orchard , winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry. His honors include a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award and a 2009 GAP Grant from Artist Trust. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation .

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