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,

#5551

Žamila Kolonomos

#121599

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Žamila Andžela Kolonomos was a Sephardi Jewish freedom fighter, writer, academic, and political activist in what is now North Macedonia. During the Bulgarian occupation of her home city of Monastir , Kolonomos joined the anti-fascist Yugoslav Partisan resistance. After fighting to liberate Macedonia, she returned to Monastir to find her entire family had been killed in an extermination camp. She moved to the capital, where she became a professor at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje and worked to preserve the language and history of the country's Jewish community.

#5552

Jennifer Vanderbes

#138125

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Jennifer Vanderbes is an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Biography Early life Vanderbes was born in New York City. She attended the Dalton School and earned a B.A. in English magna cum laude from Yale University. While at Yale, she began writing for the Yale Daily News and was featured on CBS Evening News for her investigation into a suspicious egg donor agency that was then closed down due to her reporting. She graduated from Yale in seven semesters, and worked at CNN during her junior year. After Yale, Vanderbes worked as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette before mov...

#5553

Jeremy J. Smith

#122279

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Jeremy J. Smith is a British philologist who is Professor of English Philology at the University of Glasgow. Biography Jeremy J. Smith has served as Professor of English Philology at the University of Glasgow since 2000. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Stavanger. Smith specialises in English historical linguistics, in the history of Scots, and in the textual cultures of Britain and Ireland. He has published a number of books and articles, and teaches a range of courses, in these areas, in which he is internationally renowned.

#5554

Christine Hume

#135435

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Christine Hume is an American poet and essayist. Christine Hume is the author of three books of poetry, Musca Domestica , Alaskaphrenia , and Shot and two works of nonfiction, Saturation Project and Everything I Never Wanted to Know. Her chapbooks include Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense , Ventifacts , Hum , Atalanta: an Anatomy , Question Like a Face , a collaboration with Jeff Clark and Red: A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story . She is faculty in the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

#5555

Susan Treggiari

#114366

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Susan Treggiari is an English scholar of Ancient Rome, emeritus professor of Stanford University and retired member of the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. Her specialist areas of study are the family and marriage in ancient Rome, Cicero and the late Roman Republic.

#5556

Helene P. Foley

#154431

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Helene P. Foley is an American classical scholar. She is Professor of Classical Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and a member of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia. She specialises in ancient Greek literature , women and gender in antiquity, and the reception of classical drama.

#5557

Vitaly Vulf

#45154

Overall Influence

1930 - 2011 (81 years)

Vitaly Yakovlevich Vulf was a Russian art, drama, film critic, literary critic, translator, TV and radio broadcaster and critic. Biography Vitaly Vulf was born in Baku, where his father Yakov was a lawyer. Vulf's mother, Helen Yelena Belenkaya, graduated from Baku University and was a teacher of Russian language. She died in 1974.

#5558

David Castillo i Buïls

#171033

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

David Castillo i Buïls is a Spanish poet, writer, and literary critic. He started out as a poet with counterculture and underground publications in the 1970s, although his first published work, a declaration of principles, was the biography of Bob Dylan in 1992. Three years earlier, he had been the anthologist of Ser del segle, which brought together leading voices of the generation of the 1980s. They were followed by a series of poems among them "Game over", which won the . Then he began a career as a writer with novels like El cel de l'infern and No miris enrere, that were well accepted both by critics and the general public.

#5559

Warwick Gould

#105314

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Warwick Leslie Gould, is a literary scholar born in Sydney. He specializes in the Irish Literary Revival, particularly in the writings of W. B. Yeats, and in Textual Transmission studies and the History of the Book. Having studied at the University of Queensland, he joined Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in 1973 as a Lecturer in English Language and Literature. He became Professor of English Literature of the University of London and was the Founding Director of the Institute of English Studies in the university's School of Advanced Study . He continues as Professor Emeritus since hi...

#5560

Carolyne Wright

Carolyne Wright

#120253

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Carolyne Wright is an American poet. Life She studied at Seattle University, New York University, and graduated from Syracuse University with master's and doctoral degrees. She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe College, Sweet Briar College, Emory University, University of Wyoming, University of Miami, Oklahoma State University, University of Central Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, The College of Wooster, and Cleveland State University.

#5561

Joy Katz

#161871

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Joy Katz is an American poet who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She is the author of three poetry collections, most recently All You Do Is Perceive, a National Poetry Series finalist , The Garden Room , and Fabulae . Her work appears in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast,Conduit, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Court Green, and Verse, Slope, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, and Prairie Schooner. Katz was raised in Buffalo; Philadelphia; Camden, Maine; and Cincinnati. She earned a B.S. at Ohio State University, an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, and she held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

#5562

Lieve Van Hoof

#99283

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Lieve Van Hoof is a Belgian classical scholar and Research Professor at the University of Ghent. She specialises in work on the socio-political role of Greek and Latin literature in the Roman Empire. Van Hoof is currently engaged in examining Greek and Latin letters in order to understand lobbying in late antiquity. Van Hoof is known in particular for her work on Plutarch and Libanius.

#5563

Louie Crew

#53598

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Erman Louie Clay was an American professor emeritus of English at Rutgers University. He was best known for his long and increasingly successful campaign for the acceptance of gay and lesbian people by Christians in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular.

#5564

Syed Mohammad Shahed

#162722

Overall Influence

Syed Mohammad Shahed is a Bangladeshi professor, researcher, writer and a former Director General of Bangla Academy. He received Bangla Academy Award in essay and research category in 2018. Shahed obtained his Bachelor's, Master's and PhD from the University of Dhaka in Bangla language and literature. In 1988, he started his career as a faculty member in Bangla Department of the same university. From 13 May 2007 to 12 May 2009, he served as the Director General of Bangla Academy.

#5565

Manousos Manousakas

#128681

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Manousos Ioannou Manousakas , was a Greek Byzantinist and Modern Greek scholar. Life Manousakas was born in Rethymno, Greece to Ioannis Manousakas and Anna Petroulaki. His father was a lawyer who hailed from the villages of Argyroupoli and Imbros in Sfakia on his father's side. After attending high school in his home town, he studied at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Athens from 1932 to 1937. From 1938 to 1941 he was the secretary of the editorial committee of the Society for Cretan Studies. In 1942 he was appointed editor of the Medieval Archive, the later Research Center for ...

#5566

Martin Simonson

#115334

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Martin Simonson is a Swedish scholar, novelist, and translator, specialized in fantasy literature and science fiction. He teaches at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, and is mainly known for being the Spanish translator of some of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

#5567

Averill Curdy

#165638

Overall Influence

Averill Ann Curdy is an American poet and academic. Life She received her MFA from the University of Houston and her PhD from the University of Missouri. Curdy worked as an arts administrator and as a marketing manager and technical editor.

#5568

Leni Zumas

#152883

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Leni Zumas is an American writer from Washington, D.C., who lives in Oregon. She is the author of Red Clocks, The Listeners, and the story collection Farewell Navigator. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in BOMB, The Cut, Granta, Guernica, Portland Monthly, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times Style , Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Portland State University.

#5569

Jon Lovett

#64595

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Jonathan Ira Lovett is an American podcaster, comedian, and former speechwriter. Lovett is a co-founder of Crooked Media, along with fellow former White House staffers during the Obama administration, Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor. Lovett is a regular host of the Crooked Media podcasts Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It. As a speechwriter, he worked for President Barack Obama as well as for Hillary Clinton when she was a United States senator and a 2008 presidential candidate. Lovett also co-created the NBC sitcom 1600 Penn, and was a writer and producer on the third season of HBO's The N...

#5570

Jim Barnes

#84172

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Jim Weaver McKown Barnes is an American writer who was born near Summerfield, Oklahoma . He received his BA from Southeastern State University and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas. He taught at Truman State University from 1970 to 2003, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature and Writer-in-Residence. After retiring from Truman State, he was Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University until 2006. On January 15, 2009, Barnes was named Oklahoma Poet Laureate for 2009–2010. He describes his ancestry as "an eighth Choctaw" and "a qu...

#5571

Evan Adams

#85717

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Evan Tlesla Adams is an Indigenous Canadian actor, playwright, and physician. A Coast Salish from the Sliammon First Nation near Powell River, British Columbia, he is best known internationally for his roles in the films of Sherman Alexie, as Thomas Builds-the-Fire in the 1998 film Smoke Signals and Seymour Polatkin in the 2002 film The Business of Fancydancing.

#5572

Kiril Merdzhanski

#51819

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Kiril Merdzhanski is a Bulgarian poet, playwright and translator from English. He graduated in History from Saint Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia. He lives in the United States where he graduated with Master's in History from Wright State University. He is considered to be one of the most influential postmodern Bulgarian poets. His works have been translated into English, French, Bosnian, Croatian, German, Czech and Swedish.

#5573

Christopher Buckley

#86503

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Christopher Buckley is an American poet. Buckley was born in Arcata, California. He graduated from St. Mary's College with a BA, San Diego State University with a MA, and University of California, Irvine with an MFA. He taught at Fresno State University, University of California, Santa Barbara, Murray State University, West Chester University, and University of California, Riverside.

#5574

Henry D. Abelove

#115492

Overall Influence

Henry D. Abelove is an American historian and literary critic, most of whose writings focus on the history of sex during the modern era. He is widely considered to be an important figure in the development of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. He is best known for his groundbreaking books The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists and Deep Gossip along with The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader which codified the fields of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory and provided them with their first teaching anthology.

#5575

Hal Roach

#92168

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Hal Roach was a prominent Irish comedian. He spent over 60 years in show business as a live performer, having also recorded albums, DVDs and was featured in the Guinness World Records for the longest-running engagement of a comedian at the same venue: 26 years at Jury's Irish Cabaret, Jury's Ballsbridge Hotel, Dublin.

#5576

Hadrien Laroche

#118984

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Hadrien Laroche is a French writer. Biography Born in Paris in 1963, Hadrien Laroche is a former student of the Ecole normale supérieure. He was visiting professor at Dartmouth College and a fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory. There he met Jacques Derrida and Patricia Williams. He completed his doctorate in philosophy under Derrida in 1996 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales ; Derrida considered Laroche his last doctoral student, and as "one of the most talented and original thinkers of his generation." He has worked for the past two decades as part of the French Fo...

#5577

Jane Springer

#109033

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Jane Springer is an American poet. Her honors include a 2010 Whiting Award, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, and the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Life She graduated from Florida State University with a PhD in creative writing. She is associate professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Hamilton College.

#5578

Eugène Nicole

#126552

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Eugène Nicole is a French writer. He became a professor at New York University in 1989 and has written five books about his childhood and his life journeys. He won the Prix Joseph Kessel and has also been recognized as a specialist in Marcel Proust.

#5579

Anna Goldsworthy

#113852

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons. She has held several academic positions, and is director of the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide. She is a founder member of the Seraphim Trio, which has toured Australia and the world since 1995.

#5580

Richard Wesley

#97673

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Richard Wesley is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is an associate professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.

#5581

Marusya Bociurkiw

#133579

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Marusya Bociurkiw is a Canadian born, Ukrainian film-maker, writer, scholar, and activist. She has published six books, including a novel, poetry collection, short story collection, and a memoir. Her narrative and critical writing have been published in a variety of journals and collections. Bociurkiw has also directed and co-directed ten films and videos which have been screened at film festivals on several continents. Her work appears in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the National Archives of Canada, and many university libraries. She founded or co-founded the media org...

#5582

Carlos Hernandez

#164413

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Carlos Alberto Pablo Hernandez is an American writer of science fiction and fantasy. He is best known for the young adult novels Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, which won the 2020 Pura Belpré Award, and its sequel, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe.

#5583

Naoíse Mac Sweeney

#87701

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Naoíse Mac Sweeney is a classical archaeologist and ancient historian. Since 2020 she has been Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna.

#5584

Jane Mead

#108662

Overall Influence

1958 - 2019 (61 years)

Jane Mead was an American poet and the author of five poetry collections. Her last volume was To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019 . Her honors included fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations and a Whiting Award. Her poems appeared in literary journals and magazines including Ploughshares, Electronic Poetry Review, The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Antioch Review and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 1990.

#5585

Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

#68456

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

is a Japanese animator, manga artist, and anime director. He is best known for being the character designer and animation director of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime, which began in 1979. That same year, he began working as a manga artist, which had been his dream since childhood. His manga have been critically acclaimed and have won numerous awards.

#5586

Ken Kuhlken

#139216

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Ken Kuhlken was born and grew up in San Diego, played semi-pro baseball in Tijuana, and attended San Diego State University, first as a philosophy and then as an English major. After college, he wrote, played guitar and sang in a rock and blues band, and taught high school, before relocating to attend the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

#5587

William Bell

#95051

Overall Influence

1945 - 2016 (71 years)

William Edwin Bell was a Canadian author of young adult fiction, born in Toronto, Ontario. He lived in Orillia, Ontario. Personal life and education Bell was born in Toronto on 27 October 1945 to William B. and Irene Bell. He attended New Toronto Secondary School, which inspired his novel Crabbe. In 1969, he received a Master of Arts in literature from the University of Toronto, and in 1984, he received a Master of Education in education curriculum and administration from the university's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

#5588

Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton

#130969

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Cassandra Atherton is an Australian prose-poet, critic, and scholar. She is an expert on prose poetry, contemporary public intellectuals in academia, and poets as public intellectuals, especially hibakusha poets. She is married to historian Glenn Moore.

#5589

Jonathan Wordsworth

#116371

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

Jonathan Fletcher Wordsworth was an English academic, literary critic and expert on the Romantic era in literature. Life He was a great-great-great nephew of William Wordsworth and the great-great-grandson of Christopher Wordsworth, the younger brother of the poet and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an authority on the work of William Wordsworth on whom he concentrated the bulk of his academic writings. He was educated at Westminster School and Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1957 he became a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, where there is now a postgraduate scholarship in his name.

#5590

Eleanor Dickey

#86357

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Eleanor Dickey, FBA is an American classicist, linguist, and academic, who specialises in the history of the Latin and Greek languages. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Classics at the University of Reading in England.

#5591

Steven J. R. Ellis

#111302

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Steven J. R. Ellis is an Australian classicist and archaeologist, and a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on Roman cities and archaeological methodologies, and he is widely known for his archaeological excavations at Pompeii. Ellis won the Rome Prize in 2012-2013. In 2018, Ellis wrote the book called The Roman Retail Revolution, published with Oxford University Press.

#5592

Richard Rapson

#40613

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Richard L. Rapson is professor emeritus of American history at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Background Rapson earned his B.A. magna cum laude at Amherst College in June 1958, and served briefly there as an instructor in American Studies. He then taught history at Stanford University from 1961 to 1965 while pursuing his Ph.D. at Columbia University, granted in 1966. His dissertation was on The British Traveler in America, 1860–1935; his doctoral advisor was Richard Hofstadter.

#5593

Camille Bordas

#140496

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Camille Bordas is a French writer and academic. She is an assistant professor at the University of Florida and her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, Chicago Magazine, and LitHub.

#5594

Richard Jones

#70406

Overall Influence

Richard Jones is an American poet. He was born in London, England, received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently The Minor Key , as well as a number of limited edition volumes. His first book, Country of Air, won the Posner Award in 1986. The Blessing: New and Selected Poems, a selection of poems from six of his books, received the Midland Authors Award for Poetry for 2000. He is also the editor of the critical anthology Poetry and Politics . In 2000, he published a compact disc, Body and Soul, in which he discusses the art of poetry.

#5595

Robert Vilain

#115729

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Robert Vilain is a British literary scholar. He has been Fellow and Senior Tutor of St Hugh's College, Oxford, since September 2021. Previously he was Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol, where he still holds an Honorary Professorship, and Director of the AHRC-funded South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium of nine universities and National Museum Wales dedicated to funding and training PhD students. He is also Lecturer in German at Christ Church, Oxford, and responsible for the College's teaching in German.

#5596

Gwynn ap Gwilym

#82692

Overall Influence

1950 - 2016 (66 years)

Gwynn ap Gwilym was a Welsh poet, novelist, editor and translator. He was born in Bangor but raised in Machynlleth, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. He was educated at the University of Wales, University College, Galway , and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, with an MA degree.

#5597

Emily Mitchell

#137367

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Emily Mitchell is an Anglo-American writer. Her debut novel, The Last Summer of the World, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2007. It concerns the photographer Edward Steichen in the context of World War I and was a finalist for the 2008 Young Lions Award for fiction.

#5598

D. J. MacHale

#135534

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

D.J. is a writer, director, executive producer and creator of several television series, specials and movies that entertain both the young and the young at heart. He is a best-selling author who has published twenty five novels filled with adventure, science fiction and supernatural frights. As co-creator of the Nickelodeon series: Are You Afraid of the Dark? he was the Executive Producer and Showrunner of 91 episodes while writing and directing dozens. The series received several Gemini and CableAce award nominations and won the Gemini for “Best Youth Series”. D.J. wrote and directed the TV ...

#5599

Admiel Kosman

#73178

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Admiel Kosman is an Israeli poet and professor of Talmud. Biography Admiel Kosman was born in Haifa, Israel to an Orthodox Jewish family. His father hailed from a German Jewish family living in France, and his mother immigrated from Iraq. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces in an artillery unit and attending Yeshivat Hakotel in the Old City of Jerusalem, he studied graphic art and pottery at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He did his Ph.D. in Talmud at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.

#5600

Boyd Petersen

#115104

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Boyd Jay Petersen is program coordinator for Mormon Studies at Utah Valley University and teaches English and literature at UVU and Brigham Young University . He has also been a biographer of Hugh Nibley, a candidate for the Utah House of Representatives, and president of the Association for Mormon Letters. He was named editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought for the term 2016-2020.

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