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.

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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,

#5651

William Wenthe

#123217

Overall Influence

William Wenthe is an American poet and professor. His most recent poetry collection is Words Before Dawn . His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Georgia Review, Southern Review, Callaloo, Tin House, Paris Review, Poetry, and in anthologies including Poets on Place . His honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

#5652

Walt McDonald

#51776

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Walter Robert McDonald was an American poet and former professor. He served as Poet Laureate of Texas in 2001. In May 2002, he retired from Texas Tech University as "Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English" and "Poet in Residence".

#5653

Éric Dupont

#135329

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Éric Dupont is a Canadian writer from Quebec. His 2006 novel La Logeuse was the winner of the 2008 edition of Le Combat des livres, and his 2012 novel La fiancée américaine was a competing title in the 2013 edition of the program; the latter novel's English translation, Songs for the Cold of Heart, was shortlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

#5654

Shane Tilton

#97217

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Shane Tilton is an American academic and associate professor of multimedia journalism at the Ohio Northern University. He was the former director of the Center of Society and Cyberstudies, which is an international thinktank designed to study and observe the impact of the Internet on society as a whole. He has published research and provided media commentary on the topics of the digital divide, new media, and celebrities. He has also published research on the impact the connected society has on government, the definition of the web, digital distribution. & social media's connection to the r...

#5655

Lee Youn-taek

#172347

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Lee Youn-taek is a poet, dramatist, and producer. Life Lee Youn-taek was born July 9, 1952, in South Korea. A poet, dramatist and producer, Lee debuted in 1979 with Jack-O-Lantern which appeared in the magazine Contemporary Poetry. As the 1970s ended Lee worked as a reporter for Busan Daily while also focusing on writing and staging plays. In 1986, Lee formed his own theatrical company called Yeonhuidan georipae in Busan and since that time has traveled around the country staging plays.

#5656

John Tooze

#21419

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

John Tooze FRS was a British research scientist, research administrator, author, science journalist, former executive director of EMBO/EMBC, director of research services at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute and a vice president at The Rockefeller University.

#5657

James Basker

#110159

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

James G. Basker is an American scholar, writer, and educational leader. He is president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University.

#5658

Ruth Gilbert

#114702

Overall Influence

1917 - 2016 (99 years)

Florence Ruth Gilbert was a New Zealand poet whose work has been widely published in New Zealand and Commonwealth countries. She was born in Greytown and educated at Hamilton High School and the Otago School of Physiotherapy.

#5659

Cathy Day

#122256

Overall Influence

Cathy Day is an American novelist, short story writer, and English professor. She is the author of the linked story collection, The Circus in Winter , and a memoir, Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love .

#5660

Raimi Gbadamosi

#67811

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Raimi Olakunle Gbadamosi is a contemporary British conceptual artist and writer. His work addresses themes of identity and art theory, using his trademark motif of yellow, white and black. Life and work His middle name stems from the words "Ola" meaning "wealth" and "Kunle" meaning "surplus at home" in Yoruba. Gbadamosi attained his doctorate in fine art from The Slade, London, in 2001. He also has an MA in fine art from Manchester Metropolitan University and a BA in fine art from Staffordshire University . Gbadamosi taught fine art as an honorary research fellow at the Slade School of Art and has also curated various group exhibitions.

#5661

Josephine Gattuso Hendin

#99248

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Josephine Gattuso Hendin is an Italian American feminist novelist and critic. Life She grew up in Queens and now lives in Manhattan. She graduated from City College of New York, magna cum laude, and Columbia University with an M.A. in 1965, and Ph.D. in 1968. She taught at Yale University, and City College of New York. She teaches at New York University.

#5662

Toby Olson

#165155

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Toby Olson is an American novelist and winner of the 1983 PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction. Life Through high school and his four years in the Navy as a surgical technician, he lived in California, Arizona, and Texas.

#5663

Samuel Green

#123782

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Samuel Green is an American poet and bookbinder. He was appointed the first Poet Laureate of Washington in 2007. Green is the author of twelve poetry collections, including The Grace of Necessity, which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. In 2009, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and sat on the NEA panel for the 2011 fellowships. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner.

#5664

Mary Travis Arny

#92121

Overall Influence

1909 - 1997 (88 years)

Mary Wilson Travis Arny was a writer, naturalist, historian, and educator. Arny served as a professor of biology at Montclair State College in Montclair, New Jersey. She also authored several books on history, nature, and ecology, and she wrote articles for newspapers in New Jersey.

#5665

David Reiter

#142789

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

David Philip Reiter is a poet and writer of fiction and multimedia based in Brisbane, Australia. Biography In North America Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in the USA in 1947, he was adopted shortly after birth by Jewish parents Alexander and Freda Reiter, and brought up in a working-class neighbourhood. His adoptive father, a self-employed truck driver, died of a heart attack in 1958, leaving his mother to raise Reiter as an only child. Aged 19, Reiter moved to Oregon, where he completed his BA in the Independent Studies Program at the University of Oregon. He married Carol Geneva Rechard in 1969 and moved to Alberta, Canada, where both attended the University of Alberta.

#5666

Michael Worton

#91892

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Michael John Worton is a British scholar of French. He was Vice-Provost of University College London , appointed 1998. He held this appointment concurrently with the university's Fielden Professorship of French Language and Literature. He retired at the end of September 2013.

#5667

David Morse

#118867

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

David Morse is a British literary author and former lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. He was an early authority on Motown but is now best known for his work on Romanticism and the culture and times of the Victorian age. His seminal work, High Victorian Culture, was described by The Times Literary Supplement as ‘an illuminating survey work by a robust and powerful intelligence with an impressive grasp of a great deal of material’.

#5668

Eric Miles Williamson

#134581

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Eric Miles Williamson is an American novelist and literary critic, former member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and former editor of American Book Review, Boulevard, and Texas Review. Williamson is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and was previously an associate professor of English at the Central Missouri State University.

#5669

Jorge Ruffinelli

Jorge Ruffinelli

#88246

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Jorge Enrique Ruffinelli Altesor is a Uruguayan academic and critic. Biography In his youth he was a disciple of Ángel Rama and a contributor to the weekly Marcha. Later he was professor of Latin American Literature at the Universidad Veracruzana and Stanford University.

#5670

Paul McDonald

#102756

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Paul McDonald is a British academic, comic novelist, and poet. He teaches English and American Literature at the University of Wolverhampton, where he also runs the Creative and Professional Writing Programme.

#5671

Alan Simpson

#110205

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Alan Francis Simpson was an English scriptwriter, best known for the Galton and Simpson comedy writing partnership with Ray Galton. Together they devised and wrote the BBC sitcom Hancock's Half Hour , the first two series of Comedy Playhouse , and Steptoe and Son .

#5672

Berthold Wulf

#105371

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Berthold Wulf was a German priest, poet and philosopher. Life Wulf was born in Hanover, Province of Hanover. He was the third child of Bertha Wulf and Karl Wulf, who was a musician and conductor. He spent his childhood with his elder brother and his twin brother in Hildesheim near Hanover. When he was 17 he had to join the German army. He survived World War II as a common soldier.

#5673

Tony Crunk

#83552

Overall Influence

Tony Crunk is an American poet whose first volume of poetry, Living in the Resurrection, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. Biography Crunk was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He received his B.A. at Centre College, an M.A. in philosophy at University of Kentucky, and an M.A. in literature and M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Virginia.

#5674

Richard Carpenter

#108425

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Richard Michael "Kip" Carpenter was an English screenwriter, author and actor. He created a number of British television series, including Robin of Sherwood and Catweazle. Early life Carpenter was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, and educated at Downham Market Grammar School

#5675

Dennis Wilson

#51483

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (105 years)

Dennis B. Wilson was a British poet known mainly for his writings as a soldier in World War II. Biography Poems he wrote during the 1944 Normandy landings were published for the first time in 2012 by Kultura Press with the assistance of Tim Crook, a researcher at Goldsmiths College who was working on a biography of Wilson's father, the writer and spy Alexander Wilson. His mother was Alexander Wilson's first wife, Gladys.

#5676

Karsten Friis Johansen

#115594

Overall Influence

1930 - 2010 (80 years)

Karsten Friis Johansen was a Danish philosopher and classical philologist. He was a brother of Holger Friis Johansen. He was a librarian at the Royal Library, Denmark from 1957 to 1968, took the dr.phil. degree with the thesis Studier over Platons Parmenides in 1964 and was a professor of antique and medieval philosophy at the University of Copenhagen from 1969 to 1998. He was a fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Society for Danish Language and Literature. He also chaired Platonselskabet and Den Arnamagnæanske Stiftelse...

#5677

Jacques Dubois

#116709

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Jacques Dubois , Professor emeritus of Literature at the Université de Liège invented the concept of the Literary Institution following the work of Pierre Bourdieu by analogy with other social institutions such as military, medical, and political. He is also a Member of the Groupe µ. In 1983, he was the main editor of the Manifesto for Walloon culture.

#5678

Heinrich von Staden

#65915

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Heinrich von Staden is a South African historian and classical scholar who has written several books and hundreds of articles and encyclopedia entries on ancient medicine, ancient philosophy, the history of science, and comparative literature. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient science and medicine and has contributed to the transformation of the history of the subject in the period from the fifth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. His monumental book Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria is considered the standard in the field.

#5679

Pierre Nepveu

#94459

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Pierre Nepveu is a French Canadian poet, novelist and essayist. As a scholar, he specializes in modern Quebec poetry, in particular the work of Gaston Miron. He taught at the French Studies Department of Université de Montréal from 1979 until his retirement in 2009.

#5680

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

#131619

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is an American poet of Pakistani origins. Her poetry, written in English, has been translated into Spanish and Urdu. She has been the editor of the Magee Park Poets Anthology and MahMag and is a columnist for 3 Quarks Daily. Many of Hashmi's poems explore feminism, history and perspectives on Islam.

#5681

Karin Coonrod

#78694

Overall Influence

Karin Coonrod is an American theater director and writer who teaches at Yale School of Drama. Coonrod is known for her modern adaptations of classic plays by William Shakespeare and other playwrights. She often chooses to direct plays produced from unusual sources such as lesser-known works by notable playwrights, adaptations from non-dramatic sources, and the writings of notable figures in history.

#5682

Ardis Butterfield

#127062

Overall Influence

Ardis Butterfield is a scholar of medieval music and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor of English, and Professor of Music and French at Yale University United States. Education Butterfield read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, followed by a Master's degree in medieval literature at the University of Bristol, both in England, after which she returned to Trinity College to complete a PhD. Her PhD was entitled 'Interpolated lyric in medieval narrative poetry' .

#5683

John Newton

#116897

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

John Newton is a New Zealand poet, novelist, literary critic and musician. His poetry appears in several major New Zealand anthologies, he has written books about literary history and art, and his first novel was published in October 2020. He was the 2020 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago.

#5684

Julie Carr

#163971

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Julie Carr is an American poet who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. She graduated from Barnard College with a BA in 1988, from New York University with an MFA in 1997, and from University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in 2006. She teaches at University of Colorado.

#5685

Sarah Einstein

#166522

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Sarah Einstein is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. She is a recipient of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Pushcart Prize.

#5686

Tony Tost

#144973

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Tony Tost is an American film director, poet, critic and screenwriter. His first poetry book Invisible Bride won the 2003 Walt Whitman Award judged by C.D. Wright. He is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Damnation, a neo-western period drama about the labor wars in America during the 1930s that aired on USA Network and on Netflix outside the US. He is the writer-director of Americana, a rural crime drama forthcoming from Bron Studios.

#5687

Thomas Swiss

#115886

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Thomas Swiss is an American poet and writer. He taught at Drake University and the University of Iowa before teaching at the American University of Paris and the University of Minnesota. Life Swiss grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, mostly in Aurora, Illinois, where his father had an optometric practice. He graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana, moved to Nottingham, England and returned to Illinois to work for the National Council of Teachers of English. In 1976, Swiss went to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and earned an M.F.A. in creative writing. He was awarded ...

#5688

Kathy Psomiades

#124664

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Kathy Alexis Psomiades is an American literary critic and an associate professor of English at Duke University. Education Psomiades graduated from Bryn Mawr College and received her M.A. and M.Phil. from Yale University before earning her Ph.D. at Yale.

#5689

Rafael Argullol

Rafael Argullol

#111005

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Rafael Argullol Murgadas is a Spanish writer, philosopher, poet and professor of aesthetics at Pompeu Fabra University from Catalonia. The author of more than 30 books, he was granted the 1993 Nadal prize for his novel La razón del mal, the 2002 Fondo de Cultura Económica essay prize for Una educación sensorial, and the 2010 Cálamo prize and the Ciutat de Barcelona prize in the same year for his book desde el fondo del mar.

#5690

Catherine Wagner

#168648

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Catherine Wagner is an American poet and academic. Life Wagner lived in Asia and the Middle East until 1977, when her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Iowa , and University of Utah .

#5691

Xie Zhiliu

#74736

Overall Influence

1910 - 1997 (87 years)

Xie Zhiliu was a leading traditional painter, calligrapher, and art connoisseur of modern China. He was a noted member of the Shanghai School of art. Xie and his wife Chen Peiqiu are one of the most famous couples in Chinese art. The government of Shanghai has opened a museum in Nanhui New City dedicated to them.

#5692

Werner Winter

#61384

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Johann Karl Werner Winter was a German Indo-European specialist and linguist. Life Winter was born in Haselau. His brother was killed during the Second World War. He studied under Ernst Fraenkel at the University of Kiel, where he later succeeded Fraenkel. Although he wrote hardly any individual volumes of his own, he established himself in the study of Tocharian and, as a result of his work as the editor of many series and work in general linguistics, he had far-reaching influence. Winter spent his life in his native Holstein. His students included Olav Hackstein, Peter Kuhlmann, and Christian T.

#5693

Dee Caruso

#138908

Overall Influence

1929 - 2012 (83 years)

Dee Caruso was an American television and film screenwriter and television producer, whose credits included Get Smart, The Monkees and The Smothers Brothers Show. Caruso and his longtime writing partner, Gerald Gardner, frequently collaborated on projects. The writing duo were the head writers for the 1960s television comedy series, Get Smart.

#5694

Davis McCombs

#129916

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Davis McCombs is an American poet. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, the University of Virginia as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas.

#5695

Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry

#53380

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry is an American literary critic and writer of Hispanic descent. Personal life The daughter of Carlota and Canuto Gonzáles, she was born on the family farm near Roy, New Mexico and grew up in Roy and in Rosebud, New Mexico. She married Edward Berry; the couple had one daughter.

#5696

Alison Townsend

#118860

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Alison Townsend is an American poet. Life She grew up in New York. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her work has appeared in Calyx, Clackamas Literary Review, Fourth Genre, New Letters, The North American Review, and The Southern Review.

#5697

Claudia Moscovici

Claudia Moscovici

#150168

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Claudia Moscovici is a Romanian-American novelist and art/literary critic. Life Moscovici was born in Bucharest, Romania. At the age of 12, she immigrated with her family to the United States where she has gone on to obtain a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Moscovici taught philosophy, literature and arts and ideas at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she writes from her experience of life in a totalitarian regime, which marked her deeply.

#5698

Luke Whisnant

#130441

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Luke Whisnant is an American novelist, short story writer and poet. His first novel, Watching TV with the Red Chinese, was published in 1992 and was made into a feature film in 2010. Street, a poetry chapbook, was published in 1990; Down in the Flood, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2006; and Above Floodstage, an 800-line narrative poem, was published in 2014. Whisnant earned his B.A. in English from East Carolina University and his M.F.A. in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis. He is Professor of English at East Carolina University, where he also edits Tar Riv...

#5699

Matt Simpson

#93906

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Matt Simpson was an English poet and literary critic. He published six full poetry collections, and after retiring from a senior lectureship in English at Liverpool Hope University, wrote numerous books of literary criticism.

#5700

Sultana Wahnón

#168344

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Sultana Wahnón Bensusan is a Spanish essayist and literary critic, a professor at the University of Granada specializing in literary theory and comparative literature. Academic activity Sultana Wahnón graduated in Spanish Philology in 1982, with a licentiate in the poetry of the National Literature Prize winner , a Melillan author to whom she has dedicated two books. Her doctoral thesis, defended in 1987 and published by Rodopi in 1998, consists of a description of the Spanish fascist aesthetic system and the analysis of its progressive dissolution in postwar literary criticism. Specializing ...

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