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.

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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#551

Ronald Harwood

#4407

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

Sir Ronald Harwood was a South African-born British author, playwright, and screenwriter, best known for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly .

#552

Robert Ludlum

#2506

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Robert Ludlum was an American author of 27 thriller novels, best known as the creator of Jason Bourne from the original The Bourne Trilogy series. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 300 million and 500 million. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.

#553

Dana Gioia

#7085

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist. Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories. Gioia has also argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of poetry translators replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem.

#554

Jack Dann

#5821

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jack Dann is an American writer best known for his science fiction, as well as an editor and a writing teacher, who has lived in Australia since 1994. He has published over seventy books, the majority being as editor or co-editor of story anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He has published nine novels, numerous shorter works of fiction, essays, and poetry, and his books have been translated into thirteen languages. His work, which includes fiction in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and historical and alternative history genres, has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, J.

#555

Richard Powers

#6302

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.

#556

Jerry Pinkney

#12829

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Jerry Pinkney was an American illustrator and writer of children's literature. Pinkney illustrated over 100 books since 1964, including picture books, nonfiction titles and novels. Pinkney's works addressed diverse themes and were usually done in watercolors.

#557

John Simon

#5974

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

John Ivan Simon was an American writer and literary, theater, and film critic. After spending his early years in Belgrade, he moved to the United States, serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and studying at Harvard University. Beginning in the 1950s, he wrote arts criticism for a variety of publications, including a 36-year tenure as theatre critic for New York magazine, and latterly as a blogger.

#558

Patti Smith

#4575

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the R...

#559

Tom LeClair

#15418

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Thomas LeClair is a writer, literary critic, and was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati until 2009. He has been a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the Daily Beast.

#560

Salma Khadra Jayyusi

#11508

Overall Influence

1926 - 2023 (97 years)

Salma Khadra Jayyusi was a Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist. She was the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic , which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English.

#561

Gillian Clarke

#7909

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales. Life Gillian Clarke was born on 8 June 1937 in Cardiff.

#562

Ilan Stavans

#8056

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ilan Stavans is an American writer and academic. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. He is the author of Quixote and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature . He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.

#563

Stanley Kauffmann

#4495

Overall Influence

1916 - 2013 (97 years)

Stanley Kauffmann was an American writer, editor, and critic of film and theater. Career Kauffmann started with The New Republic in 1958 and contributed film criticism to that magazine for the next 55 years, publishing his last review in 2013. He had one brief break in his New Republic tenure, when he served as the drama critic for the New York Times for eight months in 1966.

#564

Edna O'Brien

#9486

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Josephine Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2019, whilst France made her Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021.

#565

Ann Charters

#8715

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Ann Charters is Professor Emerita of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar. Early life and career Charters was born on November 10, 1936, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major at the University of California, Berkeley she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading...

#566

Christopher Fry

Christopher Fry

#4516

Overall Influence

1907 - 2005 (98 years)

Christopher Fry was an English poet and playwright. He is best known for his verse dramas, especially The Lady's Not for Burning, which made him a major force in theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. Biography

#567

Ana Maria Machado

Ana Maria Machado

#10461

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Ana Maria Machado is a Brazilian writer of children's books, one of the most significant alongside Lygia Bojunga Nunes and Ruth Rocha. She received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2000 for her "lasting contribution to children's literature". She also won the SM Ibero-American Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature in 2012.

#568

Yūko Tsushima

#19208

Overall Influence

1947 - 2016 (69 years)

Satoko Tsushima , known by her pen name Yūko Tsushima , was a Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. Tsushima won many of Japan's top literary prizes in her career, including the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize and the Tanizaki Prize. The New York Times called Tsushima "one of the most important writers of her generation." Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

#569

Sven Birkerts

#10290

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies , which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture." In 2006 he published a revised edition with new introduction and afterword, reflecting on the endurance of reading.

#570

Dmitry Bykov

#8621

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Dmitry Lvovich Bykov is a Russian writer, poet, literary critic and journalist. He is also known as biographer of Boris Pasternak, Bulat Okudzhava and Maxim Gorky. Biography Born into a Jewish family, his father was a prominent medical scholar, Leva Zilbertrud.

#571

Jean Rousset

#13722

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

Jean Rousset was a Swiss literary critic who worked on French literature, and in particular on Baroque literature of the late Renaissance and early seventeenth century. He is sometimes grouped with the Geneva School and with early Structuralism.

#572

Amrita Pritam

#8854

Overall Influence

1919 - 2005 (86 years)

Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. A prominent figure in Punjabi literature, she is the recipient of the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award. Her body of work comprised over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.

#573

Barrett Watten

#12344

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he has taught modernism and cultural studies. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature; poetics; literary and cultural theory; visual studies; the avant-garde; and digital literature.

#574

Mary Karr

#7738

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

#575

Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff

#12078

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

Rosemary Sutcliff was an English novelist best known for children's books, especially historical fiction and retellings of myths and legends. Although she was primarily a children's author, some of her novels were specifically written for adults. In a 1986 interview she said, "I would claim that my books are for children of all ages, from nine to ninety."

#576

Paul Lester

#6063

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Paul Lester is a British music journalist, author and broadcaster from Elstree, North London. Career He began his career as a freelance journalist, for Melody Maker in the early 1990s, as well as City Limits, 20/20, Sky Magazine and The Jewish Chronicle. He covered grunge, shoegaze, Madchester and Britpop, also spending time with bands touring the UK and internationally.

#577

Timothy Gantz

#17707

Overall Influence

1945 - 2004 (59 years)

Timothy Nolan Gantz was an American classical scholar and the author of Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Education Gantz received his Bachelor of Arts from Haverford College in 1967, and his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1970.

#578

K. R. Norman

#4880

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Kenneth Roy Norman was a British philologist at the University of Cambridge and a leading authority on Pali and other Middle Indo-Aryan languages. Life Norman was born on 21 July 1925, and was educated at Taunton School in Somerset and Downing College, Cambridge, receiving his M.A. in 1954.

#579

Ko Un

#12468

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Ko Un is a South Korean poet whose works have been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. He had been imprisoned many times due to his role in the campaign for Korean democracy and was later mentioned in Korea as one of the front runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

#580

Manfred Fuhrmann

#15667

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Manfred Fuhrmann was a professor for classical Latin philology and one of the most eminent German philologists. Life Fuhrmann was born on 23 June 1925 in Hiddesen . He started his studies in Leiden. While Fuhrmann wanted to study music, he gave up this plan in favour of classical philology and jurisprudence, whereby the classical philology was decisive for him. 1953 he obtained his doctorate in classical philology in Freiburg, followed by his habilitation ibidem. 1962 Fuhrmann accepted a chair at the University of Kiel, 1966 one at the University of Konstanz. Also, he was a member of the Heid...

#581

Brian Boyd

#9582

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Brian David Boyd is a professor of literature known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution. He is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

#582

Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano

#4317

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Eduardo Hughes Galeano was an Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, "a literary giant of the Latin American left" and "global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters".

#583

Hans Mayer

#6365

Overall Influence

1907 - 2001 (94 years)

Hans Mayer was a German literary scholar. Mayer was also a jurist and social researcher and was internationally recognized as a critic, author and musicologist. Life Hans Mayer was born in an upper-class Jewish family. He was influenced in his youth by the writings of Georg Lukács and Karl Marx. He was a socialist.

#584

George Shevelov

#9840

Overall Influence

1908 - 2002 (94 years)

George Yurii Shevelov also known by his numerous literary pseudonyms Yurii Sherekh, Hryhory Shevchuk, Šerech, Sherekh, Sher; , , etc. was a Ukrainian-American professor, linguist, philologist, essayist, literary historian, and literary critic of German heritage. A longtime professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University, he challenged the prevailing notion of a unified East Slavic language from which Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian later developed, instead proposing that these languages emerged independently from one another.

#585

Anne Carson

#12243

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton.

#586

Barry Hannah

#16318

Overall Influence

1942 - 2010 (68 years)

Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. Hannah was born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 23, 1942, and grew up in Clinton, Mississippi. He wrote eight novels and five short story collections.

#587

Robert Fagles

#10741

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Robert Fagles was an American professor, poet, and academic. He was best known for his many translations of ancient Greek and Roman classics, especially his acclaimed translations of the epic poems of Homer. He taught English and comparative literature for many years at Princeton University.

#588

John Batki

#17896

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

John Batki is an American short story writer, poet, and translator. Life Batki was born in Hungary in 1942, and has been living in the United States since 1957. He has taught at Harvard University. Batki's work has appeared in The New Yorker.

#589

Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick

#12618

Overall Influence

1916 - 2007 (91 years)

Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer. Early life and education Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born as the eighth of eleven children in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 27, 1916, to strict Protestant parents, the daughter of Eugene Allen Hardwick, a plumbing and heating contractor, and Mary Hardwick.

#590

Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks

#6940

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

#591

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#5568

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

#592

Robert Walter

#15016

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Robert Walter is an editor and an executive with several not-for-profit organizations. Most notably, he is the executive director and board president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation , an organization that he helped found in 1990 with choreographer Jean Erdman, Joseph Campbell's widow.

#593

Gopi Chand Narang

Gopi Chand Narang

#10486

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Gopi Chand Narang was an Indian theorist, literary critic, and scholar who wrote in Urdu and English. His Urdu literary criticism incorporated a range of modern theoretical frameworks including stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and Eastern poetics.

#594

Ihab Hassan

#6972

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Ihab Habib Hassan was an Egypt-born American literary theorist and writer. Biography Ihab Hassan was born in Cairo, Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. He was Emeritus Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His writings include Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel , The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett , The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature , Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times , The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change , The Postmodern Turn...

#595

Sharon Olds

#13234

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

#596

Rudolf Nureyev

#1687

Overall Influence

1938 - 1993 (55 years)

Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev was a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer. Nureyev is regarded by some as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation. Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union, to a Tatar family. He began his early career with the company that in the Soviet era was called the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. He defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him. This was the first defection of a Soviet artist during the Cold War, and it created an international sensation. He went on to dance with The Royal Ballet in London and from 1983 to 1989 served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet.

#597

Jamie Delano

#6543

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jamie Delano is an English comic book writer. He was part of the first post-Alan Moore "British Invasion" of writers which started to feature in American comics in the 1980s. He is best known as the first writer of the comic book series Hellblazer, featuring John Constantine.

#598

Philip Nel

#7960

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Philip W. Nel is an American scholar of children's literature and University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. He is best known for his work on Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter, which has led to him being a guest on such media programs as CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and CNN's Don Lemon Tonight.

#599

Peter Morgan

#3855

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Peter Julian Robin Morgan, is a British screenwriter and playwright. He gained acclaim for writing for theatre, films and television often writing about historical events or figures such as Queen Elizabeth II who he has covered extensively in all major mediums. He received numerous accolades including five BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, a Tony Award and a Laurence Olivier Award. In February 2017, Morgan was awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship.

#600

Emily Wilson

#6988

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Emily Rose Caroline Wilson is a British American classicist, author, translator, and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions