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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#5101

Folake Onayemi

#51496

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Folake Oritsegbubemi Onayemi is Professor of Classics and Head of the Department of Classics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She was the first woman to be awarded a PhD in Classics in Nigeria and the first black woman to be Professor of Classics in sub-Saharan Africa. She is an expert on comparative Greco-Roman and Nigerian literature, cultures, and mythology, particularly relating to the roles and representations of women.

#5102

Janice N. Harrington

#98241

Overall Influence

Janice N. Harrington is an American storyteller, poet, and children's writer. Life She grew up in Vernon, Alabama. Her family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to escape racial segregation when she was eight. She now lives in Illinois.

#5103

Michael Harris

#56472

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael Harris is a Canadian poet and translator. His book Circus was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English language poetry at the 2010 Governor General's Awards. He has taught at McGill University, Concordia University and Dawson College.

#5104

Robert McGill

#87186

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Robert McGill is a Canadian writer and literary critic. He was born and raised in Wiarton, Ontario. His parents were physical education teachers. He graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1999. He attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then completed the MA program in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. After graduating with a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, Robert moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and took up a Junior Fellowship with the Harvard University Society of Fellows. He now teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Li...

#5105

Niaz Zaman

#80793

Overall Influence

Niaz Zaman is a Bangladeshi translator and a supernumerary professor at the University of Dhaka. She was awarded 2016 Bangla Academy Literary Award in the translation category. Education and career Zaman completed her I.A. and B.A. from Holy Cross College and M.A. from the University of Dhaka. She joined Dhaka University as a lecturer of English in 1972. She founded her publishing house writers.ink in 2005. Zaman was affiliated to the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington, D.C. as Educational Attaché for around three years.

#5106

David Musselwhite

#82509

Overall Influence

1940 - 2010 (70 years)

David Musselwhite was a British literary critic and academic. Life He was born in Bristol and studied first at Cambridge University, then later at the University of Essex, where he subsequently became a Senior Lecturer. He also taught in Argentina, at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and at Curtin University in Western Australia.

#5107

Zinovia Dushkova

#54402

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Zinovia Vasilievna Dushkova is a Russian author, poet, philosopher, and historian. Dushkova has written approximately 60 books which have been published in both Russia and Ukraine and translated into seven languages. Dushkova's philosophy is influenced by Blavatsky's Theosophy.

#5108

Minnie Pearl

#59068

Overall Influence

1912 - 1996 (84 years)

Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon , known professionally as her stage character Minnie Pearl, was an American comedian who appeared at the Grand Ole Opry for more than 50 years and on the television show Hee Haw from 1969 to 1991.

#5109

Sandra Lim

#130728

Overall Influence

Sandra Lim is a Korean American poet and professor. Career She is the author of three poetry collections -- The Curious Thing , The Wilderness , and Loveliest Grotesque . The Wilderness was the winner of the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The New York Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, and The New Republic. Her poems and essays have been anthologized in Atlantic Currents , Counterclaims , The Poem’s Country , and The Echoing Green , among others. She serves on the editorial board of Poetr...

#5110

Sheila Murnaghan

#119336

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Sheila Murnaghan is the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek at the University of Pennsylvania. She is particularly known for her work on Greek epic, tragedy, and historiography. Career Murnaghan gained her AB in Classics from Harvard University in 1973 followed by a BA from Cambridge University in 1975 and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1980. Murnaghan taught at Yale University from 1979 until 1990 then moved to the University of Pennsylvania where she is now the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek.

#5111

Sue Welfare

#115704

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Susan Welfare is an English romantic fiction writer who also writes under the pseudonyms Kate Lawson and Gemma Fox. She is also the creator of BBC Radio Norfolk's first audio drama Little Bexham. She attended Downham Market Grammar School and has lived in Norfolk all her life.

#5112

Caroline Adderson

#107682

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Caroline Adderson is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. She has published four novels, two short story collections and two books for young readers. Biography Adderson was born on September 9, 1963, in Edmonton, Alberta to James Neil and Bernice Adderson.

#5113

Maurice Lebel

#74053

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

Maurice Lebel, was a Canadian academic. Born in Saint-Lin, Quebec, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1928 from Université de Montréal and a Master of Arts degree in 1930 from Université Laval. In 1931, he received a Diplôme d'Études Supérieures in language and classical literature from the Sorbonne. In 1932, he received a Diploma in language and English literature and a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935 from the University of London. He received a Ph.D. in education in 1952 and a D.Litt. from the University of Athens in 1957.

#5114

Nathan Keonaona Chai

#107319

Overall Influence

Nathan Keonaona Chai is an American novelist known for having written Fire Creek , which was turned into the film Fire Creek, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Chai was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He studied at Brigham Young University , receiving both a bachelor's degree in then a masters in English with an emphasis in creative writing. He also worked as an editorial intern with BYU Magazine.

#5115

Louie Mar Gangcuangco

Louie Mar Gangcuangco

#84735

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Louie Mar Gangcuangco is a Filipino physician, HIV researcher and novelist. He is the author of the novel Orosa-Nakpil, Malate and is working as Assistant Professor of Medicine for the Hawaii Center for AIDS-University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

#5116

Martin Greif

#59462

Overall Influence

1938 - 1996 (58 years)

Martin Joel Greif was an American editor, lecturer, publisher and writer. He was the uncle of heavy metal music personality and lawyer Eric Greif. Background Son of an immigrant Harlem grocery store owner, Martin Greif graduated from Stuyvesant High School and was further educated at Hunter College, NYC, graduating in 1959 and Princeton University, graduating in 1961 , where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and groomed as an expert in Daniel Defoe. After graduation he became a professor of English and taught in NY universities from 1963 to 1973, including lecturing in biblical literature at N...

#5117

Robert Kirstein

#143474

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Robert Kirstein is a German classical philologist and professor of Latin philology at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Life Born in Bonn, Kirstein studied Classical Philology and Protestant Theology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität and Oxford University from 1987 to 1993. He was a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. After his state examination, he worked from 1996 to 1997 as a research assistant at the Institute for Classical Philology at the University of Münster, where he completed his dissertation Paulinus Nolanus.

#5118

Mark Thomas

#74831

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Mark Clifford Thomas is an English comedian, best known for the political stunts that he performs on his show, The Mark Thomas Comedy Product on Channel 4. Thomas first became known as a guest comic on the BBC Radio 1 comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience first broadcast in March 1989 . He describes himself as a "libertarian anarchist".

#5119

Ekaterina Velmezova

#52940

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Ekaterina Valeryevna Velmezova is a Russian and Swiss philologist, professor of Slavistics and of history and epistemology of language sciences in Eastern Europe at the University of Lausanne, whose principal works concern Russian and Czech ethnolinguistics, as well as history and epistemology of language sciences in Central and Eastern Europe.

#5120

Lisa Russ Spaar

#116550

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lisa Russ Spaar is a contemporary American poet, professor, and essayist. She is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and the director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Rough: Poems and Cash: Poems. Her latest collection, Orexia, was published by Persea Books in 2017. Her poem, Gaudete, published in IMAGE Journal, won a 2016 Pushcart Prize.

#5121

Lacy M. Johnson

#126530

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Lacy M. Johnson is an American writer, professor and activist. She is the author of Trespasses: A Memoir , The Other Side: A Memoir and The Reckonings: Essays . Early life and education Johnson was born in Iowa. She grew up in rural Missouri, in a town called Macon, Missouri, which was featured in her 2012 book, Trespasses: A Memoir.

#5122

Robert Hollingworth

Robert Hollingworth

#93993

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Robert Hollingworth is an Australian artist and writer. Overview Robert Hollingworth is an Australian artist and writer with an abiding interest in Australian history, environment, ecology, the natural sciences and nature in general. He now writes, paints and makes videoworks full-time.

#5123

Lee Clark Mitchell

#110152

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Lee Clark Mitchell is an American author and professor American studies and literature. He is the Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University and the former chair of the English Department and director of the program in American studies. In 2004, he was suspended as a faculty member and resigned from his position as master of Butler College at Princeton, after he was found to have "inappropriately spent" approximately $20,000 from the English department.

#5124

Tony Holland

#90532

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

Anthony John Holland was a British screenwriter and actor, best known as a writer and co-creator of the BBC soap opera EastEnders. Early life Holland was the oldest of three children born to John and Pat Holland, with his younger twin brothers Allan and Bryn. As a military family, Holland moved around with the postings assigned to his father and spent time in Aldershot, Gravesend and Chelmsford.

#5125

Bayo Adebowale

#91083

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Bayo Adebowale is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, critic, librarian and founder of the African Heritage Library and Cultural Centre, Adeyipo, Ibadan Oyo State Early life and education He was born on 6 June 1944 in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, Southwestern Nigeria into the family of Akangbe Adebowale, who was a farmer.

#5126

Sue Ann Alderson

#115804

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Sue Ann Alderson , an American children's novelist. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Ohio State University in 1962 and a Master of Arts in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. Alderson moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1967, where she taught at Simon Fraser University. She also was a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia.

#5127

Cesare Questa

#82696

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Cesare Questa was an Italian classicist particularly known for his studies of the metres of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. His researches over many years were summed up in his major work published in Urbino in 2007.

#5128

Lana Lopesi

#96601

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (34 years)

Alana Marissa Lopesi is a writer and critic based in Auckland, New Zealand. She has been published in multiple places in New Zealand and Australia, and has been an editor in chief at The Pantograph Punch. Her recent book Bloody Women is a series of essays which describes her experiences as a Samoan woman living in New Zealand.

#5129

Brian Morton

#81420

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Brian Morton is an American author of five works of fiction and one memoir. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University and The Bennington Writing Seminars. Morton's 1998 novel Starting Out in the Evening was adapted into the 2007 film of the same name. His 2006 novel Breakable You was adapted into the 2017 film of the same name.

#5130

Katharine Coles

#103823

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Katharine Coles is an American poet and educator. She served from 2006 to 2012 as Utah's third poet laureate and currently serves as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute and the co-director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.

#5131

John Smelcer

#111475

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

John Smelcer is an American poet and novelist whose claims to Native American heritage and citizenship have been the subject of multiple controversies. Background Neither of Smelcer's birth parents is Native American. Smelcer is a shareholder in Ahtna, Incorporated, an Alaska Native Regional Corporation associated with the Ahtna tribe. Based on unique laws in Alaska that allow for non-Natives to join a tribal corporation, he enrolled with the Native Village of Tazlina, located in Tazlina, Alaska.

#5132

Nadia Nurhussein

#96598

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Nadia Nurhussein is an American academic and author specialized in African-American literature, culture, and poetics. She is an associate professor of English and Africana studies at the Johns Hopkins Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

#5133

Ota Ulč

#70590

Overall Influence

1930 - 2022 (92 years)

Ota Ulč was a Czech-American author and columnist. Ulč studied law at the Charles University in Prague, then became a district court judge in Stříbro. In 1959 he escaped via West Berlin to the West and finally to the U.S. There he proceeded to study political science at the Columbia University in New York. Afterwards, he gave classes on comparative governments at Binghamton University.

#5134

Donald Wayne Foster

#87172

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Donald Wayne Foster is a retired professor of English at Vassar College in New York. He is known for his work dealing with various issues of Shakespearean authorship through textual analysis. He has also applied these techniques in attempting to uncover mysterious authors of some high-profile contemporary texts. As several of these were in the context of criminal investigations, Foster was sometimes labeled a "forensic linguist". He has been inactive in this arena, however, since Condé Nast settled a defamation lawsuit brought against one of his publications for an undisclosed sum in 2007.

#5135

Kathleen Nott

#58378

Overall Influence

1905 - 1999 (94 years)

Kathleen Cecilia Nott FRSL was a British poet, novelist, critic, philosopher and editor. Life Kathleen Nott was born in Camberwell, London. Her father, Philip, was a lithographic printer, and her mother, Ellen, ran a boarding house in Brixton; Kathleen was their third daughter. She was educated at Mary Datchelor Girls' School, London, before attending King's College, London. She soon left King's College on an Open Exhibition scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. The scholarship was in English Literature, but on arriving at Oxford, Nott switched to Philosophy, Politics and Economics in w...

#5136

Barbara Rosenthal

Barbara Rosenthal

#88813

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Barbara Ann Rosenthal is an American avant-garde artist, writer and performer. Rosenthal's existential themes have contributed to contemporary art and philosophy. Rosenthal's pseudonyms are "Homo Futurus," which was taken from the title of one of her books, and "Cassandra-on-the-Hudson," which alludes to "the dangerous world she envisions" while creating art in her studio and residence on the Hudson River in Greenwich Village, NYC. Rosenthal successfully trademarked "Homo Futurus" in 2022.

#5137

Edward J. Delaney

#93370

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Edward J. Delaney is an American author. Delaney is the author of six books of fiction, the novels Warp & Weft , Broken Irish , Follow The Sun and The Acrobat , and the short-story collections The Drowning and Other Stories and The Big Impossible: Novellas + Stories . He was awarded the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Warp & Weft; Broken Irish received the Grand Prize at the New England Book Festival. His short story ‘The Drowning’ appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and was included in both the Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories, as well as being named a finalist for the National Magazine Awards.

#5138

Kenneth Sacks

#79886

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Kenneth Sacks is an American historian and classicist, noted for his work on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Currently he serves as Professor of History and Classics at Brown University, where he was previously Dean of the College.

#5139

Robert Melançon

#102939

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Robert Melançon is a Canadian writer and translator. He has been a professor of literature at the Université de Montréal since 1972. Melançon was born in Montreal, Quebec. Publications 1972 – The Poetic Image in France, Philippe Desportes Hopil Claude, 1570–1630

#5140

John Wells

#71699

Overall Influence

1936 - 1998 (62 years)

John Campbell Wells was an English actor, writer and satirist. Early life The son of a cleric, Wells was born in Ashford, Kent, in 1936. He was educated at Eastbourne College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

#5141

R. Clifton Spargo

#130736

Overall Influence

R. Clifton Spargo is an American novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. He is the author most notably of the novel Beautiful Fools, The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald . Life Spargo is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yale Divinity School. Edinburgh University, and the doctoral program in literature at Yale University.

#5142

Stephanie Powell Watts

Stephanie Powell Watts

#30029

Overall Influence

Stephanie Powell Watts is an American author. She won a Whiting Award in 2013 and an Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence in 2012 for her book We are Taking Only what We Need a collection of 11 stories which chronicles the lives of African-Americans in North Carolina. Her short fiction has been included in two volumes of the Best New Stories from the South anthology and honored with a Pushcart Prize.

#5143

Leslie Ullman

#136974

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Leslie Ullman is an American poet and professor. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Progress on the Subject of Immensity . Her third book, Slow Work Through Sand , was co-winner of the 1997 Iowa Poetry Prize. Other honors include winning the 1978 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for her first book, Natural Histories, and two NEA fellowships. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, and in anthologies including Five Missouri Poets .

#5144

Grant Parker

#89857

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Grant Parker is a South African-born associate professor of classics at Stanford University in the United States. Parker's principal research interests are Imperial Latin Literature, the portrayal of Egypt and India in the Roman Empire and Classical Reception in South Africa.

#5145

Janet Bately

#72562

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Janet Bately is a British academic, the Sir Israel Gollancz Professor Emerita of English Language and Medieval Literature at King's College London since 1977. She has a bachelor's degree from Somerville College, Oxford and began her academic career as a lecturer at Birkbeck College. Her research interests include Old English and Middle English literatures, the court of King Alfred the Great, and early modern bilingual dictionaries.

#5146

Lisa Lowe

#98880

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and ...

#5147

Anna Chahoud

#97515

Overall Influence

Anna Chahoud is Professor of Latin in the Department of Classics at Trinity College Dublin, and is known for her research on Latin literature and linguistics. Education Anna Chahoud holds a BA in classics from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Greek and Latin philology from the University of Pisa .

#5148

Loren Hightower

#45662

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Loren Hightower was an American dancer who split his performing career between ballet and musical theatre. He was no relation to ballerina Rosella Hightower. Originally from Belton, Texas, Hightower trained with Ted Shawn. He danced principal roles with the Metropolitan Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre; in addition, he performed regularly at the Metropolitan Opera. Like many ballet dancers of the 1940s and 1950s, Hightower frequently supplemented his income by working in musical theatre, and his Broadway appearances include Peter Pan, 110 in the Shade, Camelot, Anyone Can Whistle, and Brigadoon.

#5149

James Reiss

#84006

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

James Reiss was an American poet and novelist. Early life and education Reiss grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City and in northern New Jersey. He earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in English from the University of Chicago.

#5150

Miriam N. Kotzin

Miriam N. Kotzin

#142071

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Miriam N. Kotzin is Professor of English at Drexel University, a poet and short-story writer, founding editor of Per Contra, a literary journal, and a contributing editor at Boulevard Magazine edited by Richard Burgin. Kotzin has published over 120 poems and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of over 50 short stories. She has published several volumes: three collections of poetry, Reclaiming the Dead , Weights and Measures , and Taking Stock ; and Just Desserts , a collection of short stories.

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