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,

#5601

Juliet Kono

#152045

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Juliet Kono is a Hawaiian poet and novelist. Early life and education Kono was born in 1943 in Hilo, Hawaii to Yoshinori and Atsuko Asayama; her grandparents were immigrants from Japan. One of her earliest memories is from the April 1 tsunami resulting from the 1946 Aleutian Islands earthquake; her family lost their home, which was near the water's edge where Liliuokalani Gardens is today, and were forced to live near her grandparents, who operated a small sugar cane plantation in Kaiwiki. She was raised as a Shin Buddhist, and her mother and grandmother were active members of Honpa Hongwanji ...

#5602

Sanaul Huq

#98911

Overall Influence

1924 - 1993 (69 years)

Sanaul Huq was a Bangladeshi poet, translator, and educationist. Early life and education Huq was born in Chowra village, Brahmanbaria District to Zahurul Huq and Syeda Husaini Begum. He matriculated in 1939 from Annada School in Brahmanbaria, did his Intermediate Examinations in 1941 from Dhaka Intermediate College and his BA Honors in 1944 and MA in 1945 from University of Dhaka. He also earned his BL degree in 1946.

#5603

Sandro Jung

#145556

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Sandro Jung is a literary scholar and Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. In addition to his position at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, he also serves as Jack Ma Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Normal University. Since 2020, He has also served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Jung is the Founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University. He is the editor-in-chief of ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews.

#5604

Béatrix Beck

#83233

Overall Influence

1914 - 2008 (94 years)

Béatrix Beck was a French writer of Belgian origin. She was born at Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, the daughter of the poet Christian Beck. After several jobs, she became the secretary of André Gide who encouraged her to write about her experiences: her mother's suicide, the war, her poverty, etc. Beck died in Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 2008.

#5605

Néstor Osvaldo Perlongher

#75614

Overall Influence

1949 - 1992 (43 years)

Néstor Osvaldo Perlongher was an Argentine poet and anthropologist. He graduated and completed his degree in sociology; he moved to São Paulo, where he graduated from the University of Campinas with a Master of Social Anthropology; where he was appointed professor in 1985.

#5606

Judson Jerome

#106764

Overall Influence

1927 - 1991 (64 years)

Judson Jerome was an American poet, author, and literary critic, perhaps best known for having written the poetry column for Writer's Digest for over thirty years, beginning in 1959. He also taught poetry at Antioch College, where his students included Gregory Orr and Mark Strand.

#5607

Mansour Eid

#77109

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

Mansour Eid was a Lebanese writer, novelist, researcher and poet. Born in Bteddine El Loqch, a village of the Jezzine district in southern Lebanon on the 12th of February 1944. He completed his secondary studies in Our Lady of Mashmoushe School. He received a degree in Philosophical & Social Studies from Arab Beirut University and a degree in Arabic Literature from the Lebanese University and a PHD degree in Arabic Literature from Saint Joseph University.

#5608

Miriam Hoffman

#125487

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Miriam Hoffman is a Yiddish language playwright and lecturer. Hoffman was born in Łódź, Poland to a Yiddish-speaking family. While she was a child, her father was sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia, accompanied by Hoffman and her mother. After a difficult passage through several other countries, the family arrived in the United States in 1949. In 1957 Hoffman finished the Jewish Teacher's Seminary with a B.A. in pedagogy. In the 1970s she taught Yiddish at the University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. She received a B.A. from the University of Miami, cum laude, in 1981, and an M.A. from Columbia University, in 1983.

#5609

Shelia P. Moses

Shelia P. Moses

#68751

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Shelia P. Moses is an American writer whose subjects include comedian Dick Gregory and The Legend of Buddy Bush. In 2004, she was nominated for the National Book Award and named the Coretta Scott King Honoree for "The Legend of Buddy Bush" In 2009, her novel "Joseph" was nominated for the NAACP Image Award.

#5610

Kim Sang-ok

#114572

Overall Influence

1920 - 2004 (84 years)

Kim Sang-ok was a South Korean poet. Life Kim Sang-ok was born on March 15, 1920, in Tongyeong, Kyeongsangnam-do, Korea and died on October 31, 2004. Kim's sobriquet was Chojeong. During his life, Kim was repeatedly imprisoned for spreading anti-Japanese sentiments. In 1938, along with Kim Yongho and Ham Yunsu, Kim participated in the literary group that produced the magazine 'Barley', in which Kim published the poems "A Grain of Sand” and "The Tea Room” in 1938. Following Korean Liberation, Kim taught at Masan High School, Busan Girls' High School, and Gyeongnam Girls' High School. He fou...

#5611

Chisa Hutchinson

#107271

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Chisa Hutchinson is an American playwright. Her plays have won multiple awards including the 2010 GLAAD Award, a Lilly Award in 2010, as well as a Lanford Wilson Award in 2015. She was a Lark Fellow as well as a Dramatist Guild Fellow in 2010–11. She was also a cast member of the Neo-Futurists in New York. Hutchinson was a staff writer for the Blue Man Group. She has been a member of New Dramatists for four years. Currently she is a Humanitas Fellow and the Tow Foundation Fellow at Second Stage. Hutchinson teaches creative writing at the University of Delaware. Most recently her play Somebody'...

#5612

Jill McDonough

#82566

Overall Influence

Jill Susann McDonough is an American poet. Life She grew up in North Carolina. She graduated from Stanford University and has an MA from Boston University. She taught in the Prison Education Program of Boston University.

#5613

Kristin Dimitrova

Kristin Dimitrova

#97839

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Kristin Dimitrova, a Bulgarian writer and poet, was born in Sofia on May 19, 1963. Graduated in English and American Studies from the Sofia University, she now works there at the Department of Foreign Languages. From 2004 to 2006, she was editor of Art Trud, the weekly supplement for arts and culture of the Trud Daily, and in 2007-2008 was a columnist for Klasa Daily Since 2008 she has been a regular participant on the Darik Radio Friday talk show The Big Jury.

#5614

Joseph McBride

#91622

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Joseph McBride is an American film historian, biographer, screenwriter, author and educator. He has written books on a variety of subjects including notable film directors, screenwriting, the JFK assassination, and a memoir of his youth.

#5615

Enrico Mario Santí

#76133

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Enrico Mario Santí is a Cuban-American writer, poet, and scholar of Spanish American Literature known for his critical essays and annotated editions of Latin American classics, including works by Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. A frequent political commentator and art critic, he is also a sculptor and voice actor. As a child, Santí emigrated from Cuba to the United States, where he has had an extensive career as a professor in several universities. Currently, he is research professor at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California.

#5616

Gary Gygax

#94192

Overall Influence

1938 - 2008 (70 years)

Ernest Gary Gygax was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson. In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he helped develop Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The next year, he and Arneson created D&D, which expanded on Gygax's Chainmail and included elements of the fantasy stories he loved as a child. The same year, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game.

#5617

Kentaro Takekuma

#99942

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Kentaro Takekuma is a Japanese manga author. He is one of the authors of Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga. He is also the story writer of Super Mario Adventures. External links Takekuma Memo

#5618

Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting

#96985

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting is a feminist scholar and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Vice Provost of Arts and Libraries as well as Director of the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics. She served as Associate Provost for Academic Advancement from October 2021-June 2022. She was also the Chair of African American and Diaspora Studies until August 2022. She is editor of The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union", and editor of the academic journal Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.

#5619

Aimee Parkison

#123295

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Aimee Parkison is an American writer known for experimental, lyrical, feminist fiction. She has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize as well as the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Oklahoma State University.

#5620

Julienne van Loon

#108586

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Julienne van Loon is an Australian author and academic. In 2004 van Loon won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her first book, Road Story. Van Loon lived in Perth, where she was a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University from 1997 to 2015. In September 2015 she was appointed Vice Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University. She was director of the Australian Society of Authors from 2015 to 2017.

#5621

Hanan Qassab Hassan

#109830

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Hanan Qassab Hassan is a prominent Syrian writer, theatre director and academic. Biography Hanan's father was the prominent lawyer and writer Najat Qassab Hassan. She holds a PhD in French literature from the University of Paris III. She is currently the dean of the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Damascus and a professor of Art history at the University of Damascus. She also served as the general secretary of the 2008 Arab Capital of Culture festivity.

#5622

Raffaella Cribiore

#87160

Overall Influence

1948 - 2023 (75 years)

Rafaella Cribiore was professor of Classics at New York University. She specialised in papyrology, ancient education, ancient Greek rhetoric and the Second Sophistic. Education Cribiore received her PhD from the Department of Classics at Columbia University in 1993. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Writing, Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt. She received her BA from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 1972.

#5623

Diana Cavallo

#92449

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

Diana Cavallo was an American novelist, educator, playwright, and performer. Biography Early life and education Cavallo was born in Philadelphia in 1931, the daughter of Genuino and Josephine Cavallo. She grew up in an Italian neighborhood of South Philadelphia, where she attended public schools. Her grandparents, who lived with the family, spoke the Abruzzese dialect; Cavallo learned Italian from them, and later based two characters in her first novel on them. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and spent time in Florence, Italy, as a Fulbright scholar.

#5624

Julie Ann Ward

#73793

Overall Influence

Julie Ann Ward is the first poet laureate of Norman, Oklahoma. Norman was the first city in Oklahoma to appoint a poet laureate. She was born in Antlers, Oklahoma, and grew up in Elko, Nevada and Stillwater, Oklahoma. She is a graduate of University of Tulsa, University of Kansas and University of California, Berkeley. She taught at the University of Oklahoma as an Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American literature from 2014 to 2022.

#5625

Anelise Chen

#155665

Overall Influence

Anelise Chen is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. She was named "5 under 35" by the National Book Foundation in 2019. Her first novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was published in 2017 by Kaya Press and was named one of the best books of the year by Brooklyn Rail. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and New York University . Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, National Public Radio, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, Vice, and The Village Voice. She writes a column on mollusks for Paris Review.

#5626

Jane McCafferty

#128371

Overall Influence

Jane McCafferty is an American novelist, and short story writer. Life Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, Glimmer Train, Story, Witness. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has two daughters.

#5627

Sonya Sones

#100778

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sonya Sones is an American poet and author. She has written seven young adult novels in verse and one novel in verse for adults. The American Library Association has named her one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century.

#5628

Alleen Pace Nilsen

Alleen Pace Nilsen

#148457

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Alleen Pace Nilsen is an American literary scholar, linguist, and one of the pioneers of both humor studies and children's literature studies. She is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where she was previously the director of the English Education Program. Together with her husband Don Nilsen, she co-founded the International Society for Humor Studies.

#5629

Maud Casey

#133533

Overall Influence

Maud Casey is an American novelist, and professor of creative writing at University of Maryland, College Park. Life She is the daughter of novelist John Casey. She graduated from University of Arizona with an M.F.A.

#5630

Abigail Child

#145483

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Abigail Child is a filmmaker, poet, and writer who has been active in experimental writing and media since the 1970s. She has completed more than thirty film and video works and installations, and six books. Child's early film work addressed the interplay between sound and image through reshaping narrative tropes, prefiguring many concerns of contemporary film and media.

#5631

Dennis Smith

#46760

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Dennis Smith was an American firefighter and author. He was the author of 16 books, the most notable of which is the memoir Report from Engine Co. 82, a chronicle of his career as a firefighter with the New York City Fire Department in a South Bronx firehouse from the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Smith served for 18 years as a New York City firefighter, from 1963 to 1981, and is a well-known advocate for firefighters in the United States. After 9/11, he chronicled the 57 days he spent in rescue and recovery operations at the World Trade Center collapse in a bestselling book, Report from Gro...

#5632

Esther Cohen

#120890

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Esther Cohen Dabah is a Mexican writer and academic. Early life Esther Cohen Dabah was born in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1949. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants to Mexico: Her father was Moisés Cohen, who immigrated from Turkey, and her mother was Sarah Dabah de Cohen, who came from Syria.

#5633

Irina Reyn

#117730

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Irina Reyn is a Russian-born American novelist. Her novel, What Happened to Anna K., was selected as the tenth best fiction book of 2008 by Jennifer Reese of Entertainment Weekly, and won the 2009 Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by emerging writers.

#5634

Igor Fesunenko

#58032

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Igor Fesunenko was a Soviet and Russian journalist, foreign affairs writer, and teacher at the MGIMO. Biography Father Sergey Fesunenko worked as a chief mechanic at the Zaporozhye aluminum plant, the whole family moved there when the war broke out, they were evacuated to the Urals aluminum plant, and there my father worked in the production of aluminum for aircraft. Mother Evdokia Ivanovna graduated from law school Fesunenko in Irkutsk, was a housewife, in 1944 returned to his father in Kiev on recovery plant.

#5635

Tom Healy

#101411

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tom Healy is an American poet and public servant. From 2011-2014, Healy was the chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright scholars program worldwide. He was appointed to the Fulbright Board by President Barack Obama in 2011 and was elected by the Board three times to serve as its chairman. Under his leadership, the Fulbright program won the Princess of Asturias Awards presented by the King of Spain. Under President Bill Clinton, Healy was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS . Since the 1990s, Healy has played an active role in the New York City arts scene.

#5636

Rocío Orsi

#28369

Overall Influence

1976 - 2014 (38 years)

Rocío Orsi Portalo was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and translator, as well as a professor of philosophy at Charles III University of Madrid . She is considered to be one of the most important Spanish-language thinkers of her generation.

#5637

Ahmos Zu-Bolton

#109023

Overall Influence

1948 - 2005 (57 years)

Ahmos Zu-Bolton II was an activist, poet and playwright also known for his editing and publishing endeavors on behalf of African-American culture. Life Born in Poplarville, Mississippi, Zu-Bolton grew up in DeRidder, Louisiana, near the Texas border. In 1965 he was one of several black students who integrated Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. After serving in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, Zu-Bolton founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, published A Niggered Amen: Poems, and coedited Synergy D.C. Anthology, in 1975. He also opened the Copestetic Booksto...

#5638

Arnold Weinstein

#141333

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Arnold Louis Weinstein is an American literary scholar. He is currently Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Weinstein was born in Memphis, Tennessee. After earning a B.A. in Romance Languages Princeton University in 1962, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he received both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He studied in Europe during his undergraduate and graduate years, spending time at Universite de Paris, Freie Universitat Berlin, and Universite de Lyon.

#5639

Kaltham Jaber

#108147

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Kaltham Jaber is a Qatari writer and poet. Considered a pioneer among women writers in the country, she was the first Qatari woman to author a collection of short stories, doing so in 1978. This feat also made her the first Qatari woman to publish a major work. She teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at Qatar University.

#5640

Douglas Kennedy

Douglas Kennedy

#99962

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Douglas Kennedy is an American novelist. He is known for international bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, Leaving the World and The Moment. Biography Douglas Kennedy was born in New York City in 1955, the son of a commodities broker and a production assistant at NBC. He was educated at The Collegiate School and graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1976. He also spent a year studying at Trinity College Dublin. "I was a history major," Kennedy explained. "Retrospectively, I think the history major provides much better training for a novelist. So much of what I do in my own fiction is observational; is looking at behavior.

#5641

Carlos Calderón Fajardo

#135543

Overall Influence

1946 - 2015 (69 years)

Carlos Calderón Fajardo was a Peruvian journalist, novelist, and short story writer. He worked as a sociologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. In 1974 he won first place in the José María Arguedas Story Contest. In 1981 he won the Unanue Novel Competition with his novel La colina de los árboles. In 1984 he won the Gaviota Roja Novel Prize for Así es la pena en el paraíso. In 1985 he won the Hispamérica Best Short Story Prize, organized by the University of Maryland, with Roa Bastos, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar as judges. In the year 2006 he was a finalist for the Tus...

#5642

Kim Jong-chul

#172146

Overall Influence

1947 - 2014 (67 years)

Kim Jong-chul was a South Korean poet. He rose to fame in 1968 when he was awarded a prize by the Hankook newspaper for his poem Sound of a Loom. In 1970 Kim won another prize with the Seoul Daily newspaper for his poem Drowned Dreams. He is considered one of the most significant modern Korean poets.

#5643

William Hailey Willis

#84495

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

William Hailey Willis was an American classicist and a leading twentieth century papyrologist. Early life Willis was the son of William W. Willis and Clara B. Willis. He married Rachel E. Willis on December 20, 1943, in Meridian, MS.

#5644

Evelyn Shakir

#122464

Overall Influence

1938 - 2010 (72 years)

Evelyn Shakir was a literary scholar. She was a pioneer in the study of Arab American literature, publishing some of the first academic papers to name Arab American literature as a field. She published several books, including Remember Me to Lebanon: Stories of Lebanese Women in America, a 2007 short story collection that won the Arab American National Book Award. Her memoirs were published posthumously as Teaching Arabs, Writing Self: Memoirs of an Arab-American Woman . She is remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, and the Arab American Book Award nonfiction prize was renamed in he...

#5645

Tiziana Andina

#80675

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Tiziana Andina is full professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin. Biography Tiziana Andina was born in Asti in 1970. Andina attended the University of Turin where she studied philosophy graduating in 1994. She got her PhD in aesthetics and theory of art in 2003 from the University of Palermo. She went on to become researcher and professor at the University of Turin, where she teaches theoretical philosophy. Her recent research interests concern aesthetics and philosophy of art, social ontology, transgenerational action, the relationship between generations and problems of intergenerational justice.

#5646

Rebecca Dunham

#121386

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Rebecca Dunham is a contemporary American poet. Her work has been described as post-Confessional and concerns itself with feminist and ecological issues. Dunham's lyric poetry is distinguished by its use of extended poetic sequences, its interrogation of the persona as artifice, as well as grounding itself frequently in accounts of women's lives.

#5647

Achour Fenni

#60111

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Achour Fenni is an Algerian poet, translator and academician, who has participated in several scientific, cultural and literary meetings in Algeria, North Africa, Europe, North America and South America.

#5648

Mark H. Gelber

#124058

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Mark. H. Gelber is an American-Israeli scholar of comparative literature and German-Jewish literature and culture. He received his B.A. magna cum laude and with high honors in Letters and German . He also studied at the University of Bonn, the University of Grenoble, and Tel Aviv University. He was accepted for graduate studies as a Lewis Farmington Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Yale University and he received his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. In 1980 he accepted an appointment as post-doctoral lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics.

#5649

Edward Courtney

#145552

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Edward Courtney was a Northern Irish classicist. After reading Classics at Trinity College Dublin, he taught Latin literature at King's College London until 1983. He then worked in the United States and held the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professorship at the University of Virginia when he retired. He specialised in textual criticism, publishing critical editions of Valerius Flaccus, Juvenal, Statius, and Petronius.

#5650

Allan Coxon

#101345

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Allan H. Coxon was an English scholar. Biography Coxon was born in Derby, England, and was educated at Derby Grammar School and at Oriel College Oxford under Sir David Ross. He also studied in Germany with Julius Stenzel and in Austria with Heinrich Gomperz. He was appointed to the University of Edinburgh in 1933.

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