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 people in Literature,
#5351
Derick Burleson
#121758
Overall Influence
1963 - 2016 (53 years)
Derick Wade Burleson was an American academic and writer. He was the author of Never Night . His first collection of poems, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991–94, won the 2000 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He was also the recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and many other journals.1 He lived and taught English in Rwanda in the two years leading up to the genocide which took place in 1994. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson t...
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Philip Schwyzer
#85523
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Philip Schwyzer is an American-British literary scholar and author, who since 2001 has been Professor of Renaissance Literature at Exeter University. Family background Schwyzer was born in Santa Barbara, California. His father was Hubert Schwyzer , a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was born in Austria, taken to England as a child when his parents, a Vienna-based Jewish physician father and half-Jewish mother, fled after the Anschluss, and later emigrated to California. His mother, Alison Schwyzer, taught philosophy at Monterey Peninsula College. His...
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Robert Boswell
#124154
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert Boswell is an American short story writer and novelist. He has been faculty at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson. Boswell teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.
Go to Profile#5354
Guido Bastianini
#126418
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Guido Bastianini is an Italian papyrologist and palaeographer. Bastianini completed his papyrological studies in Florence 1970. He took part in various archaeological missions in Egypt organized by the Istituto Papirologico "G. Vitelli" and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo , both on the excavation of Antinoe .
Go to Profile#5355
Oswald A. W. Dilke
#108232
Overall Influence
1915 - 1993 (78 years)
Oswald Ashton Wentworth Dilke was an English classicist and philologist who was Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. Early life Dilke was born at Hove, Sussex, the son of Clement Wentworth Dilke, younger brother of Sir Fisher Wentworth Dilke, 4th Baronet. He studied Classics at Stowe School and King's College, Cambridge from which he held an MA.
Go to Profile#5356
Frederick Reiken
#115652
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Frederick Reiken is an American author from Livingston, New Jersey He has published three novels to critical acclaim, and he teaches creative writing at Emerson College. Early life and education Reiken was born in New Jersey in 1966, and he attended the Pingry School. He earned a B.A. in Biology at Princeton University in 1988, where for his senior thesis he researched the behavioral ecology of island feral horses. He earned an M.F.A. at the University of California, Irvine, in 1992.
Go to Profile#5357
Steven H. Kaplan
#128220
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Steven H. Kaplan is an American academic and university administrator. Kaplan became president of the University of New Haven in 2004, and he served in this position until 2022. He took a lesser position in 2022 as the university's chancellor and CEO, and he has announced his intention to step down entirely in June 2023.
Go to Profile#5358
Christopher Lloyd
#130236
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Christopher Lloyd is an American television producer and screenwriter. Lloyd is the co-creator and executive producer of the ABC mockumentary family sitcom Modern Family, which he co-created and produced with Steven Levitan. Lloyd has had an extensive career on many series, primarily Frasier.
Go to Profile#5359
Paul Wilkes
#54042
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Paul Wilkes is a journalist, writer, and documentarian who has written extensively about individual spirituality as well as the role of religion in public and personal lives. As a social entrepreneur he has worked to aid the poor and marginalized both in America and in India
Go to Profile#5360
Michèle Lowrie
#87788
Overall Influence
Michèle Lowrie is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the college at the University of Chicago. She is a specialist in Roman literature and political thought. Education Lowrie completed a bachelor's degree at Yale University in 1984, followed by a PhD at Harvard University in 1990. Her doctoral thesis was entitled 'Horace's Lyric Exempla' and she was supervised by Richard Tarrant.
Go to Profile#5361
Ciaran Berry
#114162
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ciaran Berry is an Irish-American poet. Life He grew up in Carna, County Galway and Falcarragh, County Donegal. He graduated from New York University, a New York Times Fellow. He teaches at Trinity College, Hartford.
Go to Profile#5362
James Robison
#154251
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
James Robison is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and screenwriter. The author of The Illustrator and Rumor and Other Stories , his work has frequently appeared in The New Yorker and numerous other journals. He is a recipient of the Whiting Award for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has held teaching posts at numerous universities across the United States, including the University of Houston and Loyola University Maryland.
Go to Profile#5363
D. B. Gilles
#140082
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
D.B. Gilles is an American screenwriter, playwright, academic, script consultant and writing coach specializing in screenplays, TV pilots, plays and novels. Career Gilles' plays Inadmissible and Sparkling Object had their world premieres at The Canal Park Playhouse, a new theater in Tribeca in New York City. Four of his plays are published by Dramatists Play Service: The Girl Who Loved The Beatles, The Legendary Stardust Boys, Cash Flow and Men's Singles. He is the creator of seven pilots, among them, for CBS: The Late Bloomer and Man of the House. He wrote for Herman's Head, Love, Sidney and Barclay's Beat starring Jeff Garland.
Go to Profile#5364
Mark Baker
#73599
Overall Influence
Mark Baker is an architectural historian and author of several books on country houses, estates and their families. Baker has contributed to several television series and programmes. He became a Welsh Conservative Party councillor for Gele in May 2017.
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César Fernández García
#167331
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
César Fernández García is a Spanish novelist. His novels and short stories have been distributed in several countries and have been translated into many languages, including Turkish language and Korean language.
Go to Profile#5366
John O'Donohue
#32066
Overall Influence
1956 - 2008 (52 years)
John O'Donohue was an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. He was a native Irish speaker, and as an author is best known for popularising Celtic spirituality. Early life and education Eldest of four siblings, O'Donohue was reared in west Ireland in the area of Connemara and County Clare, where his father Patrick O'Donohue was a stonemason, while his mother Josie O'Donohue was a housewife.
Go to Profile#5367
George G. Williams
#112666
Overall Influence
1902 - 2000 (98 years)
George G. Williams was professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Rice University. In 1996 he was named as a Rice distinguished alumnus. Williams graduated from the Rice Institute with a BA in 1923 and subsequently completed his master's degree at the same institution. After an interlude teaching at New York University he returned to Rice, where he spent the rest of his career.
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Fernando Iwasaki
#70336
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Fernando Iwasaki Cauti is a Peruvian writer and historian. Born into a family with multiple roots . While in Peru, he taught at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima. Since 1989, he has lived in Seville.
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Věnceslava Hrdličková
#108198
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Věnceslava Hrdličková also Věna was a leading Czech sinologist and Japanese historian. Biography Professional life Věnceslava Hrdličková graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in 1950, where she also received a doctorate in philosophy, in 1967 the title of candidate of science, and in the early 1990s the position of an associate professor.
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Theodore J. Flicker
#126126
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Theodore Jonas Flicker was an American playwright, theatrical producer, television and film director, actor, television writer, screenwriter, author and sculptor. Early life Born in 1930 at Freehold Borough, New Jersey, Flicker attended Admiral Farragut Academy in Tom's River, New Jersey from 1947 to 1949. From 1949 to 1951, he studied at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, alongside fellow drama students Joan Collins and Larry Hagman.
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Jesse McCarthy
#113499
Overall Influence
Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, cultural critic, and assistant professor in English and African-American studies at Harvard University. Publications Non-fiction He is the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, an essay collection addressing questions such as: “What do people owe each other when debts accrued can never be repaid?”
Go to Profile#5372
Liliana Díaz Mindurry
#90199
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Liliana Díaz Mindurry is an Argentine writer. Biography Liliana Díaz Mindurry was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1953. She earned a law degree at the University of Buenos Aires, where she had previously taught philosophy of law. She was forced to flee to France during the military dictatorship. She stayed there for seven years, until democracy was restored to Argentina. Since then, she has devoted herself exclusively to writing. She leads the literary group Malosayres. She has received several prizes.
Go to Profile#5373
Jacqueline Rose
#168237
Overall Influence
#5374
Charles Bawden
#81867
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Charles Roskelly Bawden, FBA was a professor of the Mongolian language in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London from 1970 to 1984. Early years Charles Bawden was born in Weymouth. His father was George Charles Bawden and his mother was Eleanor Alice Adelaide Russell . Both of his grandfathers had served in the Royal Navy. His parents were schoolteachers, though his mother was required to resign upon marriage. Charles had one older brother, Walter Harry Bawden, who joined the Royal Navy as an engineer cadet before the outbreak of the Second World War. Charles spent Christmas Day 1945 with him aboard his submarine in Hong Kong harbour.
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Peter Steele
#112611
Overall Influence
1939 - 2012 (73 years)
Peter Daniel Steele AM was an Australian poet and academic, a member of the Jesuit order and a Catholic priest, who was awarded the Christopher Brennan Award, for lifetime achievement in poetry, in 2010.
Go to Profile#5376
Deryn Rees-Jones
#105401
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Deryn Rees-Jones is an Anglo-Welsh poet, who lives and works in Liverpool. Although Rees-Jones has spent much of her life in Liverpool, she spent much of her childhood in the family home of Eglwys-bach in North Wales. She considers herself a Welsh writer.
Go to Profile#5377
Lauren K. Alleyne
#121240
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Lauren K. Alleyne is a Trinidadian-American poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer and educator born and raised in the dual-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Biography In 1997, Alleyne moved to the United States to begin her undergraduate studies in Radiologic Science and Nuclear Medical Technology at St. Francis College in New York. It was not until her junior year that she decided to shift her focus towards English, then graduated with honors from St. Francis College with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. In 2002, she received her Masters of Fine Arts in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Iowa State.
Go to Profile#5378
Myrna Casas
#117580
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Myrna Casas was a Puerto Rican experimental playwright, director, actress, and theatre scholar. She was the co-founder and artistic director of the company Producciones Cisne. Early life Casas was born in San Juan to Carmen Busó Carrasquillo and Sixto Casas Semidei. She studied Drama at Vassar College, graduating in 1954, and earned a master's degree in acting at Boston University in 1961. She went on to study at New York University where she obtained a doctorate in Theatre education in 1974.
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Andrew Lintott
#49899
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Andrew William Lintott is a British classical scholar who specialises in the political and administrative history of ancient Rome, Roman law and epigraphy. He is an emeritus fellow of Worcester College, University of Oxford.
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Beth Gutcheon
#83726
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Beth Gutcheon is a best-selling American author who has written ten novels and two quilting books. Life and career A graduate of Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, Gutcheon went on to study at Harvard University, earning a bachelor of arts with honors in English.
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Mariano Siskind
#133944
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Mariano Siskind is an Argentine writer, scholar and poet. He is currently Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#5382
Marcel Prawy
#61228
Overall Influence
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
Marcel Prawy was an Austrian dramaturg, opera connoisseur and opera critic. He was born into a Jewish Austro-Hungarian noble family and studied law, but his life belonged to the opera. He became secretary of the tenor Jan Kiepura and they both emigrated to the United States when persecution of the Austrian Jews became unbearable in the late 1930s.
Go to Profile#5383
Katsuhiro Otomo
#93340
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese manga artist, screenwriter, animator and film director. He is best known as the creator of Akira, in terms of both the original 1982 manga series and the 1988 animated film adaptation. He was decorated a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005, promoted to Officier of the order in 2014, became the fourth manga artist ever inducted into the American Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2012, and was awarded the Purple Medal of Honor from the Japanese government in 2013. Otomo later received the Winsor McCay Award at the 41st Annie Awards in 2014 and the 2015 Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the first manga artist to receive the award.
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Todd Temkin
#66692
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Todd Temkin is an American poet. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Temkin has carved a niche as poet turned social entrepreneur and cultural activist. His poems are rich in humor, intimacy, and self-deprecating irony.
Go to Profile#5385
Patricia Engel
#72215
Overall Influence
Patricia Engel is a Colombian-American writer and author of Vida, which was a PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Finalist and winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, Colombia's national prize in literature. She was the first woman, and Vida the first book in translation, to receive the prize. She is also the author of It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, and the novel The Veins of the Ocean, which won the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The San Francisco Chronicle called Engel "a unique and necessary voice for the Americas."
Go to Profile#5386
Stanley Eveling
#87712
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Stanley Eveling, or Harry Stanley Eveling was an English playwright and academic, based in Scotland. Life Eveling was educated at Rutherford College and Samuel King's School. After serving as an officer with the Durham Light Infantry in the Far East at the end of the Second World War, he attended King's College, Durham University, where he was editor of King's Courier, the student newspaper. He then completed a postgraduate degree in philosophy at Oxford University. Eveling taught at the University of Aberdeen and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, before becoming a senior lecturer...
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Yoo Yeong
#117400
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Yoo Yeong was a South Korean literary scholar, translator, and poet. He was a professor at the Department of English Language and Literature of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea from 1956 to 1983. He taught English Poetry at school, his specialty being in John Milton and Rabindranath Tagore. He was given the Dongbaeg Medal by the South Korean government for his contribution to education when he retired from his professorate in 1983. He translated many literary works such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained into Korean. He was the first Korean to translate the complete collection of Tagore’s poetry.
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Geoffrey G. O'Brien
#129990
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Geoffrey G. O'Brien is an American poet. Educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa, O'Brien has taught at Brooklyn College, The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been the Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary's College of California and the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches. He also teaches in the Prison University Project at San Quentin.
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Sergio Raimondi
#145723
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sergio Raimondi is an Argentine poet. He is also a professor at Universidad Nacional del Sur, where he is in charge of the subject Contemporary Literature . Until June, 2011, he was the director of the Museo del Puerto de Ingeniero White.
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Alejandro Gándara
#50092
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alejandro Gándara is a Spanish writer. Born in Santander, Cantabria, Gandara studied political science and sociology at Complutense University in Madrid, where he also now teaches. He won the Premio Ignacio Aldecoa for short stories in 1979, and published his first novel La media distancia in 1984. He has published more than a dozen volumes of fiction and non-fiction, and his work has been translated into English, German and Italian among other languages.
Go to Profile#5391
Cho Byung-hwa
#69361
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Cho Byung-Hwa was a major South Korean poet, critic and essayist, known for the accessibility of his writing. As well as his work as a writer and academic, he was also an amateur athlete and painter.
Go to Profile#5392
Alberto Moreiras
#81312
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alberto Moreiras is a Spanish-born academic and cultural theorist who currently works at Texas A&M University. Previously he taught at Duke University and at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen.
Go to Profile#5393
Roger Le Moine
#124964
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Roger Le Moine was an emeritus professor of Québec and French literature at the University of Ottawa. Biography After growing up in La Malbaie, Le Moine briefly studied law before opting for literature . As a professor, he specialized in European exotic literature, freemasonry, and, more importantly, participated in the rediscovery of Québec's 18th and 19th century literature.
Go to Profile#5394
Emily Fragos
#138681
Overall Influence
Emily Fragos is an American poet. She was a Witter Bynner Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellow. Life She graduated from Syracuse University, Paris-Sorbonne University, and Columbia University. She teaches at New York University, and Columbia University.
Go to Profile#5395
Rajmund Kupareo
#90464
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Rajmund Kupareo was a Croatian Roman Catholic priest, poet, theological writer, composer, translator and editor. He wrote in Croatian, Czech, Latin and Spanish. He spent most productive years of his life working in Chile as a professor of aesthetics and axiology in Santiago de Chile; he served there as the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and the vice-rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
Go to Profile#5396
Carlo Vecce
#103602
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Carlo Vecce is Professor of Italian Literature in the University of Naples "L'Orientale", he taught also in the University of Pavia , the D'Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara and the University of Macerata. Abroad he was visiting professor at Paris 3 and University of California Los Angeles .
Go to Profile#5397
Armand D'Angour
#110595
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Armand D'Angour is a British classical scholar and classical musician, Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. His research embraces a wide range of areas across ancient Greek culture, and has resulted in publications that contribute to scholarship on ancient Greek music and metre, innovation in ancient Greece, Latin and Greek lyric poetry, the biography of Socrates and the status of Aspasia of Miletus. He writes poetry in ancient Greek and Latin, and was commissioned to compose odes in ancient Greek verse for the 2004 and 2012 Oly...
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Rich Orloff
#94563
Overall Influence
Rich Orloff is a playwright living in New York City. He has taught playwriting at his alma mater Oberlin College, at Miami's City Theater, and for the Connecticut Young Playwrights program. He has also given lectures and workshops at Central Washington University, Western Michigan University and State Fair College in Missouri.
Go to Profile#5399
Adam Lowe
#122249
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Adam Lowe is a British writer, performer and publisher from Leeds, though he currently lives in Manchester. He is the UK's LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Poet for 2012 . He writes poetry, plays and fiction, and he occasionally performs as Beyonce Holes.
Go to Profile#5400
Birutė Ciplijauskaitė
#115262
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Birutė Ciplijauskaitė was a Lithuanian literary scholar and translator. She is considered one of the greatest Hispanists in American academia in the twentieth century. The daughter of physician and gynecologist, director of Klaipeda hospital, she attended Kaunas Conservatory and fled Lithuania during World War II. She graduated from the University of Tübingen in 1956 and then the University of Montreal. She received her PhD in Spanish and French from Bryn Mawr College in 1960. Her dissertation, that she wrote under the supervision of Spanish philosopher Jose Ferrater Mora, explored the topic ...
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