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).

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#5501

Christopher Looby

Christopher Looby

#147155

Overall Influence

Christopher Looby is an American literary critic specializing in 18th and 19th century American literature. He is a Professor of English at UCLA. Background Looby received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1979 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1989.

#5502

Michael Mott

#134966

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Michael Charles Alston Mott was a British-born American author. He produced eleven poetry collections, four novels and a renowned biography of Thomas Merton. Life and career Mott was born in London in December 1930. His father, Eric Mott, was a solicitor and his mother, Margaret "Totts" Berger Mott, was a sculptor from Denver, Colorado.

#5503

Joseph A. Walker

Joseph A. Walker

#98749

Overall Influence

1935 - 2003 (68 years)

Joseph Alexander Walker was an American playwright and screenwriter, theater director, actor and professor. He is best known for writing The River Niger, a three-act play that was originally produced Off-Broadway in 1972 by the Negro Ensemble Company, before being transferred to Broadway in 1973 and then adapted into a 1976 film of the same name starring James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. In 1974, Walker became the first African-American writer to win a Tony Award, receiving the Tony Award for Best Play for The River Niger. The playwright previously won an Obie Award during that play's 1972 t...

#5504

Donna Masini

#135486

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Donna Masini is a poet and novelist who was born in Brooklyn and lives in New York City. Life She graduated from Hunter College and New York University. Her work frequently deals with urban life and the working-class. Her first book of poems, That Kind of Danger, received the Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Mona Van Duyn. In addition, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her poem, "Anxieties," recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2015.

#5505

Michèle Sarde

#111642

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Michèle Sarde, is a French writer , born in 1939. She taught French literature and culture, together with gender and intercultural studies at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., from 1970 to 2000. She is now a Professor emerita at that university and lives in Chile and France.

#5506

Nicholas Purcell

#78678

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Nicholas Purcell FBA is Camden Professor of Ancient History and a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Before holding this post he was University Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at St John's College, Oxford.

#5507

Steve Allen

#92723

Overall Influence

1921 - 2000 (79 years)

Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was an American television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer and actor. In 1954, he achieved national fame as the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, which was the first late-night television talk show.

#5508

Maite Carranza

#153206

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Maite Carranza Gil-Dolz del Castellar is a Spanish writer and educator, mainly writing in Catalan. She is a recipient of the Premio Crítica Serra d'Or, TP de Oro award, Premio Ondas award, and the Spanish National Prize for Children's and Juvenile Literature.

#5509

Moncef Ouahibi

#113289

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Muhammad Al-Moncef Al-Wahaibi is a Tunisian poet, writer and academic. Education and Academic Career Muhammad Al-Moncef Al-Wahaibi was born in Hajeb El-Ayoun in the Kairouan governorate of Tunisia. He obtained his master's degree with the thesis "The visible body and the imagined body in the poetry of Adonis;" his PhD thesis at the Manouba University was on "The poetry industry of Abu Tammam and its components: in reading ancient and poetic text." He works as a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Kairouan and University of Sousse, Tunisia. He is a member of the...

#5510

Jung Hanmo

#166412

Overall Influence

1923 - 1991 (68 years)

Jung Hanmo was a Korean poet. The primary subject matter of his poems was the bleak reality after the Korean War but he wrote poems representing his love for life and hope for the future. He taught Korean literature in universities for a long time, leaving many achievements as a scholar. When he was the Minister of Culture and Public Information in 1988, he decisively carried out the lifting of the ban on around 100 writers who had defected or had been kidnapped to North Korea.

#5511

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Orlando Ricardo Menes

#102180

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Orlando Ricardo Menes is a Cuban-American poet, short story writer, translator, editor, and professor. Born in Lima, Peru, to Cuban parents, Menes immigrated to the United States at the age of 10 after a leftist coup d'etat forced his family out of Peru. He has lived almost his entire life in the US, except for two years spent in Madrid, Spain, right before the death of Francisco Franco.

#5512

Daphne Athas

#111551

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Daphne Athas was an American author, best known for the 1971 novel Entering Ephesus, which was included on Time magazine's Ten Best Fiction List of 1971. Her other books include The Weather of the Heart, The Fourth World, and Greece by Prejudice. Athas was the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and the University of North Carolina's Lifetime Mentor Award.

#5513

Alan Heathcock

#101853

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Alan Heathcock is an American fiction writer. He grew up in the Chicago suburb of Hazel Crest, Illinois and attended the University of Iowa, where he graduated in 1993 with a BA in Journalism. Heathcock earned MFAs from both Bowling Green State University , and Boise State University . He lives in Boise, Idaho.

#5514

Kathleen George

#142233

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Kathleen Elizabeth George is an American professor and writer best known for her series of crime novels set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She teaches theatre arts at the University of Pittsburgh and fiction writing at the Chatham University Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

#5515

Yang Chia-hsien

#153540

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Yang Chia-hsien is a contemporary Taiwanese writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is also an assistant professor of Department of Chinese Literature at the National Tsing Hua University. Yang sees Lu Xun, Zhang Ai-ling and Yang Mu as the influences of her writings. Yang is regarded as an iconic poet of the cyber-age. Her works, including The Civilization of Holding One’s Breath and Sea Breeze and Sparks, are described as incorporating classical concepts and modern perceptions. Yang was also the youngest poet to be included in the Comprehensive Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Lit...

#5516

Joe Lo Truglio

#90612

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Joseph Vincent Lo Truglio is an American actor and comedian. Best known for his role as Charles Boyle on the Fox/NBC sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, he also was a cast member on the television series The State and Reno 911!. His notable film roles include Wet Hot American Summer, I Love You, Man, Superbad, Paul, Role Models, and Wanderlust.

#5517

Jorge B. Rivera

#122888

Overall Influence

1935 - 2004 (69 years)

Jorge B. Rivera was an Argentine poet, essayist, critic, journalist and researcher on issues of history and popular culture. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1935 and died on August 27, 2004. He is considered a pioneer in research in mass communication in Argentina.

#5518

Evelyn Lord Smithson

#170433

Overall Influence

1923 - 1992 (69 years)

Evelyn Lord Smithson was a noted twentieth-century scholar of classics and Classical archaeology and an expert on Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece. Evelyn Lord Smithson was educated at the University of Washington and at Bryn Mawr College where she took her Master's degree and her doctorate in Classical archaeology and ancient Greek in 1956. She was a student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1948 to 1950.

#5519

Warren Leight

#73457

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Warren Donald Leight is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and television producer. He is best known for his work on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Lights Out and as the showrunner for In Treatment and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. His play Side Man was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

#5520

Rosemary Hennessy

#101822

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Rosemary Hennessy is an American academic and socialist feminist. She is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She has been a part of the faculty at Rice since 2006.

#5521

Dorothy Auchterlonie Green

#104538

Overall Influence

1915 - 1991 (76 years)

Dorothy Auchterlonie was an English-born Australian academic, literary critic and poet. Life Auchterlonie was born in Sunderland, County Durham in England. In 1927 when she was 12 years old, her family moved to Australia.

#5522

Elaine Romero

#146112

Overall Influence

Elaine Romero is a Latina playwright, who grew up close to the border in San Juan Capistrano, California and has lived in Tucson, Arizona for many years. She is now an associate professor at the University of Arizona, teaching playwriting, script writing, and dramaturgy.

#5523

Siobhan Vivian

#160280

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Siobhan Vivian is a bestselling American novelist, editor, and screenwriter. Early life and education Siobhan Vivian was born in New York City on January 12, 1979. At a young age, Vivian moved to Rutherford, New Jersey where she went to school and often got in trouble for sneaking out and not doing her homework. A 1997 graduate of Rutherford High School, Vivian has used her childhood in Rutherford as a "deep well" of ideas for her work.

#5524

Nancy Reisman

#123556

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Nancy Reisman is an American author. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Biography Reisman received her M.F.A. from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her B.A. from Tufts University.

#5525

Liv Lundberg

#134722

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Liv Lundberg was a Norwegian poet, novelist, essayist and translator. She was also a professor at the University of Tromsø. Literary career Lundberg made her literary debut in 1979 with the poetry collection Den klare tonen. Further collections are Hjertespeil , Språkets hus har åpninger and Steindrømt . In 1986 she published Sylvia Plath: Lady Lazarus, a translation of works by Sylvia Plath into Norwegian language. Her poetry collection Tveegget engel from 1988 was also influenced by Plath. In the 1990s she wrote two novels,Vinterens hjerte and Nybegynnerens forutsetningsløshet . In 1997 she translated Inger Christensen's Alfabet into Norwegian language.

#5526

Nina Burton

#170525

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Eva Ulla Nina Burton is a Swedish poet and essayist. Career Burton's writings have, among other things, focused on the intersection between natural sciences and humanities. The essay book Den nya kvinnostaden was nominated for the August Prize in 2005. Her book Flodernas bok won Stora fackbokspriset in 2012. In 2016 Burton was awarded the August Prize for non-fiction for Gutenberggalaxens nova. She was nominated to the culture prize of Dagens Nyheter in 2021 for her book Livets tunna väggar.

#5527

Arthur Berry

#73635

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

Arthur Berry was an English playwright, poet, teacher and artist, who was born in Smallthorne, Stoke-on-Trent. His individual creative work became deeply rooted in the culture, people and landscape of the industrial pottery town of Burslem.

#5528

Lucy Thurber

#78109

Overall Influence

Lucy Thurber is an American playwright based in New York City. She is the recipient of the first Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting, a Lilly Award and a 2014 OBIE Award for The Hill Town Plays.

#5529

Sharon Marcus

#136117

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Sharon Marcus is an American academic. She is currently the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance. Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim Fellowship, and ACLS fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia.

#5530

Louise McNeill

#101971

Overall Influence

1911 - 1993 (82 years)

Louise McNeill , also known as Louse McNeil Pease, was an American poet, essayist, and historian of Appalachia. She began teaching in a one roomed schoolhouse in West Virginia and would eventually move on to teach at other universities. She would eventually become a professor of history and English at West Virginia University where her archives are held today.

#5531

Ann Jones

#48891

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Ann Jones is an American journalist and author of a number of non-fiction books about her research into women's and humanitarian issues: Women Who Kill, Kabul in Winter, Looking for Lovedu, Next Time She'll be Dead and When Love Goes Wrong. She has also written and taken photographs for a number of publications including National Geographic Traveler, Outside, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. The majority of her work and writings centers on women's issues, especially domestic violence. Jones has provided humanitarian aid around the world, including Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast.

#5532

Yoon Dae-nyeong

Yoon Dae-nyeong

#163432

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Yoon Dae-nyeong is a South Korean writer. Life Yoon Dae-nyeong was born in 1962 in Yesan, South Chungcheong Province. He graduated from Dankook University with a degree in French Language and Literature. He admitted, however, that in his college days he attended more Korean literature classes than French ones. His early boyhood was spent with his grandparents before he joined his parents at the age of eight. Yoon's family was semi-nomadic and he lived in a variety of places, but always in poverty. His habit of reading seems to have been established very early and by the time he attended jun...

#5533

Helen Bevington

#86500

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Helen Smith Bevington was an American poet, prose writer, and educator. Her most noted book, Charley Smith's Girl , was "banned by the library in the small town of Worcester, N.Y., where she grew up, because the book tells of her minister father's having been divorced by her mother for affairs that he was carrying on with younger female parishioners."

#5534

Demico Boothe

#102545

Overall Influence

Demico Boothe is an African-American bestselling author of several books on the plight of African-American men in the American prison system. Boothe's book Why Are So Many Black Men in Jail? addresses the issue of racism in the Crack versus Cocaine Laws and was published in 2007, three years before Michelle Alexander's better-known book that also addresses the subject, The New Jim Crow . Why Are So Many Black Men in Prison? is on the Black Lives Matter recommended reading list.

#5535

Epp Annus

#116165

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Epp Annus is an Estonian writer and literary scholar. In 2002, she graduated from the University of Tartu, studying Estonian literature. Her doctoral thesis topic was "Kuidas kirjutada aega". Works 2007: novel "Sina, Matilda"children books: "Jaak ja lumi", "Jaak läheb poodi", "Oravaraamat", "Oravalapsed vanas majas", "Oravalapsed talvises metsas", "Mari päev", "Oskar läheb õue", "Unelaul kahel häälel", "Väike lumehelbeke", "Täheraamat"

#5536

Jane Aaron

#126679

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jane Rhiannon Aaron FEA FLSW is a Welsh educator, literary researcher and writer. She was Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan in south Wales, until her retirement in September 2011. She then became an associate member of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of South Wales. Aaron is known for her research and publications on Welsh literature and the writings of Welsh women. She was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2011.

#5537

Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami

#144470

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami is a literary critic, writer and Iranologist. He studied Persian and French literatures in the University of Texas at Austin and he received his PhD in 1996. Currently he teaches Persian language and literature at New York University. His research is focused on the literary characteristics of contemporary Persian fiction and classical Persian poetry. He is also a specialist in Persian literature in migration.

#5538

Manuel Fernández Álvarez

Manuel Fernández Álvarez

#61407

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Manuel Fernández Álvarez was a Spanish historian, academic and writer. Biography He was the son of Enrique Fernández and María Álvarez. In 1942 he graduated in Philosophy at the University of Valladolid.

#5539

Antoaneta Sabău

#87038

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Antoaneta Sabău is a Romanian classicist, translator and editor. Her main contribution are mainly in the field of medieval and translation studies. Studies Antoaneta Sabău studied classical languages at Bucharest University, and medieval studies at Central European University. She had research stays at Centre Sèvres , University College Dublin, Warburg Institute , Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies . She received a certificate in medieval Latin from the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies .

#5540

Peter LaSalle

#144837

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Peter LaSalle is an American novelist, short story writer, and travel essayist. Life He graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in 1969, and the University of Chicago with an M.A. in 1972. His books include the novels Mariposa's Song and Strange Sunlight; the short story collections Tell Borges If You See Him , Hockey Sur Glace, The Graves of Famous Writers, What I Found Out About Her, and Sleeping Mask: Fictions; and two collections of essays on literary travel, The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling and The World Is a Book, Indeed.

#5541

Peter Wright

#49087

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (100 years)

Sir Peter Wright CBE is a British ballet teacher, choreographer, director and former professional dancer. He worked as a choreographer and as the artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, a classical ballet company based in Birmingham, England. On retiring from the company in 1995, he was bestowed the honorary title of director laureate of the company.

#5542

Gideon Lester

#54550

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Gideon Lester is a Tony Award-winning artistic director, dramaturg, curator, and creative producer. He is currently Artistic Director of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, Senior Curator of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and a professor at Bard. He has collaborated with a broad range of American and international artists including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Krystian Lupa, Peter Sellars, Tania El Khoury, Anna Deavere Smith, and Neil Gaiman. In 2015 he produced Daniel Fish's production of Oklahoma! at the Fisher Center; it subsequently transferred to St.

#5543

Colin James

#57603

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Colin Charles James is a New Zealand political journalist and commentator. He is a life member of the Parliament of New Zealand's press gallery and has a focus on party and election politics. James wrote a weekly column in the Otago Daily Times, a monthly column in Management Magazine and previously wrote a weekly column in The New Zealand Herald. He was formerly editor of the National Business Review and has also written for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

#5544

Ching-In Chen

#139769

Overall Influence

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American poet and multi-genre writer. They graduated from Tufts University, University of California, Riverside, and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. They are the author of recombinant, The Heart's Traffic, and to make black paper sing. Chen is also the co-editor of the anthologies The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They are a Callaloo, Kundiman, and Lambda Fellow.

#5545

Sonja Tomić

#107082

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Sonja Tomić is a contemporary Croatian writer, translator, illustrator, croatist, Germanist and radio presenter. She has been noted for her works in children's literature and traveloguess. She won the 2011 Literary Kranjčić.

#5546

Mark Axelrod

#153449

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Mark Axelrod is an American writer and academic, who is a professor of Comparative Literature in Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences. For twenty-five years he has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing, which has received five National Endowment for the Arts Grants.

#5547

Katharine Worth

Katharine Worth

#89823

Overall Influence

1922 - 2015 (93 years)

Katharine Worth was a British academic, Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. Biography Early life and education Katherine Joyce Worth was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 4 August 1922 to George and Elizabeth Lorimer. The family later moved to Newbiggin-by-the-Sea and Whitley Bay, Northumberland, where she grew up. She was successful in obtaining a scholarship to Bedlington High School but left to sit the Civil Service entry exam when she was sixteen years-old. She obtained a BA in English through a correspondence course with the University of London whilst employed as a junior civil servant.

#5548

Lydia Baumbach

#83702

Overall Influence

1924 - 1991 (67 years)

Lydia Baumbach was a South African classical scholar, known particularly for her work in the field of Mycenaean studies. Early life Lydia Baumbach was born in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 1924, to a German missionary family associated with the Rhenish Mission.

#5549

Stanisław Srokowski

#168812

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Stanisław Srokowski is a Polish writer, poet, dramatist, literary critic, translator, academic teacher and publicist. Life He was born on 29 June 1936 in Hnilcze . In 1945, after the expulsion from the Eastern Borderlands, he and his family settled in Mieszkowice, Western Poland. He graduated from high school in 1955. He was subsequently expelled from the Higher School of Diplomatic Service on the grounds of his church attendance and the refusal to join the Polish United Workers' Party , the Communist party which governed the Polish People's Republic. Between 1955 and 1956, he worked as a tea...

#5550

Robert Anthony Welch

#103920

Overall Influence

1947 - 2013 (66 years)

Robert Anthony Welch was an Irish author and scholar. Biography Robert Anthony Welch was an emeritus professor of English and former dean of the faculty at the University of Ulster. He joined the university in 1984 as professor of English and head of the School of English, Media, and Theatre Studies, having previously taught at the School of English, University of Leeds, and the University of Ife in Nigeria.

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