The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#5751

Vincenzo Ortoleva

#110870
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Vincenzo Ortoleva is an Italian classical philologist. Ortoleva studied from 1983 to 1988 Classical Philology at University of Catania. In 1996 he took his PhD with the dissertation "La tradizione manoscritta della Mulomedicina di Publio Vegezio Renato". After his teach licence in 2003, he became in 2005 Full Professor of Classical Philology at University of Catania. His particular fields of research are Greek and Latin literature, text tradition, textual criticism and history of classical scholarship. He has also discovered several manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors: for instance an anonymous Greek translation of the Disticha Catonis in the Cod.
Go to Profile
#5752

Ella Shohat

#173820
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#5753

Lorenzo Perilli

#119697
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Lorenzo Perilli is an Italian classicist and academic at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. A Professor of Classical Philology, he is Head of the Institute of Literature, Philosophy and Art history, and the Director of the interdisciplinary Research Centre in Classics, Mathematics and Philosophy Forms of Knowledge in the Ancient World, established in 2013 and devoted to ancient science and related disciplines. He is Co-director of the periodical An international journal on ancient science and technology, and serves on the board of the journal of ancient medicine .
Go to Profile
#5754

Catherine Imbriglio

#172840
Overall Influence
Catherine Imbriglio is an American poet. Life Catherine was born and lives in Rhode Island. She graduated from Regis College, Boston College, Brown University, M.A. , and Ph.D. 1995. She teaches at Brown University.
Go to Profile
#5755

Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor
#148383
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Taylor is a screenwriter who is best known for his work as a writer for both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Taylor is a native New Yorker. He attended The Bronx High School of Science and Yale University. Taylor had a varied career prior to writing for television, including working as a newspaper and magazine reporter, as well as a musician who performed on guitar and sang with a rock band. He began his television work as a freelance writer for the Deep Space Nine, where he wrote one of the franchise's classic episodes, "The Visitor," while living in New York and still pursuing his musical interests.
Go to Profile
#5756

Carol Houlihan Flynn

#144437
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Carol Houlihan Flynn was an American academic, literary critic, and writer of fiction. A professor emerita at Tufts University, Flynn was previously on the faculty of New York University and Princeton University. She is the author of Samuel Richardson, a Man of Letters; The Body in Swift and Defoe; a noir mystery, Washed in the Blood; and a memoir, The Animals, among other works. She was co-creator of the Somerville Conversations, a project designed to encourage dialogue between diverse members of the community.
Go to Profile
#5757

Enid Shomer

#108067
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Enid Shomer is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five poetry collections, two short story collections and a novel. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Criterion, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including Poetry: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology.
Go to Profile
#5758

Michel Arrivé

Michel Arrivé
#62989
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Michel Arrivé was a French novelist, short story writer, linguist and academic. He was a Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics at Paris Nanterre University from 1983 to 2006. He authored several novels and short stories.
Go to Profile
#5759

Bunny McBride

#85662
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carol Ann McBride is an American author of a wide range of nonfiction books on subjects ranging from cultural survival and wildlife conservation to Native Americans. Her most recent ethnohistory book is Indians in Eden: Wabanakis and Rusticators on Maine's Mt.Desert Island . Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she regularly published her poetry and essays in the Christian Science Monitor, and reported on her travels in China, West Africa, East Africa, and northern Europe. Her articles appeared in various US newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, International Wildlife, Travel & Leisure, Sierra, Yankee Magazine, Downeast, and Reader's Digest.
Go to Profile
#5760

Joe Amato

Joe Amato
#86869
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joe Amato is an American writer best known for his poetry and his work in poetics. Biography A licensed Professional Engineer in New York State, Amato spent seven years in industry working in various project engineering capacities before returning to graduate school. He holds degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering from Syracuse University , and degrees in English from University at Albany . Amato is the author of eleven books, including a memoir and three novels, and numerous essays and reviews. With his frequent writing partner, Kass Fleisher, he wrote several screenplays . From 2...
Go to Profile
#5761

Brian Jones

#95158
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Brian Jones was a British poet. He was educated at Ealing County Grammar School for Boys and Selwyn College, Cambridge. Jones' first major collection, Poems , was published in 1966, and proved to be successful. Those poems dealt with both the joy and the unease that may be present beneath the surface of what seems to be placid middle-class domesticity. This was very much in a style popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and Jones was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in a 1970 anthology of post-war British poetry as "certainly one of the very best practitioners of this overworked vein". Subsequent c...
Go to Profile
#5762

Teresa Dovalpage

#172215
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Teresa Dovalpage is a Cuban writer. She was born in Havana but left in 1996 for the United States where she has been living ever since. She obtained her doctorate in Latin American literature from the University of New Mexico. She has published eight novels till date. Her third novel Muerte de un murciano en La Habana was runner-up for the Premio Herralde. Her next novel El difunto Fidel won the Rincon de la Victoria Award in Spain in 2009. She has also published several plays and short story collections.
Go to Profile
#5763

Haruko Momma

#84314
Overall Influence
Haruko Momma is a philologist and a scholar of Old English literature and language. She has published on Old English poetic composition, Beowulf, philology in the nineteenth century, and teaching Old English. She is currently Professor of English at New York University.
Go to Profile
#5764

Gonzalo Celorio

Gonzalo Celorio
#97373
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Gonzalo Celorio Blasco is a writer and an academic and former director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica. Celorio has written two novels, Amor Propio, a coming-of-age story and Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra.
Go to Profile
#5765

Angus M. Bowie

#98437
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Angus Morton Bowie is a British academic, Emeritus Lobel fellow in Classics at The Queen's College, University of Oxford. His research interests include Homer, Herodotus, Greek lyric, tragedy and comedy, Virgil, Greek mythology, structuralism, narratology, and other theories of literature.
Go to Profile
#5766

Jonathan Edwards

#107321
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Jonathan Edwards is a Welsh poet, who was born in Newport and grew up in Crosskeys. His debut poetry collection My Family and Other Superheroes won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2014. Biography Edwards first came to prominence as the winner of the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, before picking up prizes at both the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Poetry Competition in 2012.
Go to Profile
#5767

Shinji Watanabe

#174044
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Go to Profile
#5768

Daniel Newman

#92637
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Daniel Lawrence Newman is a British writer, scholar and translator of Arabic literature. He serves as a special advisor to the Islamic Criminal Justice Project at the Centre for Criminal Law & Justice, Durham Law School, and served as a member of council at the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies from 2008 to 2012.
Go to Profile
#5769

Jean-Didier Urbain

#70986
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jean-Didier Urbain is a French sociologist, linguist, ethnologist and tourism specialist. As explains Jean-Didier Urbain, “life with nature embodies the anti-Facebook spirit. A world apart, where we feel we can build authentic social relations with your neighbors, the baker or the teacher of your children.” He has a PhD in social and cultural anthropology from the University Paris-Descartes , with a thesis on "Le mort-là : anthropologie et séminologie de l'imaginaire de la mort en Occident à partir des ses cimitières" where he currently teaches.
Go to Profile
#5770

Sue Henry

#110905
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Sue Henry was an American writer of mystery thriller fiction. She was also a librarian, college administrator, instructor at the University of Alaska. Biography According to her obituary in the Anchorage Daily News, she was born Mathilda Sue Hall in Salmon, Idaho, married Paul K. Henry in 1965; they had two boys, Bruce and Eric. After they divorced, she moved the boys to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1975.
Go to Profile
#5771

Donald Gutierrez

#102784
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Donald Kenneth Gutierrez was an American writer and professor emeritus of English literature. Biography The eldest son of Latin-American immigrants, he was born in Oakland, California, in 1932. He taught at the University of Notre Dame and the Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico. He studied English literature at University of California, Berkeley in the early 1950s. Gutierrez left Berkeley in 1958 to pursue a career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library in New York, and wound up at book publisher Grosset & Dunlap.
Go to Profile
#5772

H. G. Carrillo

#34861
Overall Influence
1960 - 2020 (60 years)
H. G. Carrillo was an American fiction writer and academic. In the 1990s, he began writing as "H. G. Carrillo," and he eventually adopted that identity in his private life as well. Carroll constructed a false claim that he was a Cuban immigrant who had left Cuba with his family at the age of seven; in fact, he was an African-American. Carroll wrote frequently about the Cuban immigrant experience in the United States, including in his only novel, Loosing My Espanish . He was an assistant professor of English at George Washington University from 2007 to 2013, and was later chair of the PEN/Faul...
Go to Profile
#5773

Andrew Sinclair

Andrew Sinclair
#91615
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Andrew Annandale Sinclair FRSL FRSA was a British novelist, historian, biographer, critic, filmmaker, and a publisher of classic and modern film scripts. He has been described as a "writer of extraordinary fluency and copiousness, whether in fiction or in American social history".
Go to Profile
#5774

Sandra McPherson

#79296
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sandra Jean McPherson is an American poet. Born in San Jose, California, McPherson received her B.A. at San José State University, and studied at the University of Washington, with Elizabeth Bishop and David Wagoner. She considers her "literary mothers" to be Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer, and Adrienne Rich.
Go to Profile
#5775

Roan Johnson

Roan Johnson
#153354
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Roan Occam Anthony Johnson is an Italian director and screenwriter. Biography Born in London from an English father and a mother from Matera, Johnson grew up in Pisa, where he attended the University and graduated in Modern Literature. In 1999, Johnson moved to Rome and attended the National Film School.
Go to Profile
#5776

Daniel Anderson

#169773
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Daniel Anderson is an American poet and educator. Biography Anderson, an Ohio native, holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of three collections of poetry and the editor of Howard Nemerov's Selected Poems. He has held teaching positions at Murray State University, the University of the South, Kenyon College, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Currently, he is Associate Professor at the University of Oregon, where he teaches in the graduate Creative Writing program.
Go to Profile
#5777

Mai Der Vang

#136421
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Mai Der Vang is a Hmong American poet. Life and education Vang was born in Fresno, California. Vang's parents resettled in the United States in 1981 as Hmong refugees fleeing Laos. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a degree in English, and from Columbia University with an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry.
Go to Profile
#5778

Alegría Bendayán de Bendelac

#77485
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Alegría Bendayán de Bendelac was a Venezuelan philologist, professor, writer and Jewish poet. During her career she was dedicated to studying sephardic culture, especially the Judeo-Spanish language of northern Morocco. She was professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania and published several works about sephardic traditions.
Go to Profile
#5779

Sue Thomas

Sue Thomas
#44804
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sue Thomas is an English author. Writing since the late 1980s, she has used both fiction and nonfiction to explore the impact of computers and the internet on everyday life. In recent years her work has focused on the connections between life, nature and technology.
Go to Profile
#5780

Alvin Aubert

#126201
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Alvin Bernard Aubert was a professor of English, poet, playwright, editor, literary critic, and scholar who championed African-American culture and rural life along the southern Mississippi River. He grew up in Lutcher, Louisiana, and attended Southern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois. He taught at Southern University, SUNY Fredonia,University of Oregon, and Wayne State University. At WSU he was a professor of English, taught creative writing and Afro-American literature, while serving as Interim Chair of the Department of Africana Studies. He founded and...
Go to Profile
#5781

Danielle Fournier

#154779
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Danielle Fournier is a Quebec educator and writer. She was born in Montreal and received a PhD in literature from the Université de Sherbrooke. She also studied German at the University of New Brunswick. She has taught at the college and university level at various institutions including the Université de Sherbrooke, the University of New Brunswick, at McGill University, the Université du Québec à Montréal, at Concordia University and at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, where she held a permanent position.
Go to Profile
#5782

Josep M. Armengol

#137896
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Josep María Armengol Carrera is a Spanish literary scholar and researcher in the field of gender and masculinity studies. Career BA and PhD in English from the University of Barcelona , having authored the first doctoral thesis in Spain on cultural and literary representations of masculinity. In 2007 he moved to the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, USA, where he carried out his postdoctoral research together with Dr. Michael Kimmel.
Go to Profile
#5783

John Knoepfle

#95157
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
John Ignatius Knoepfle was an American poet, translator, and educator, principally at Sangamon State University, who is credited with helping to revive Midwestern poetry in the 1960s. He also served in the United States Navy during World War II and participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Go to Profile
#5784

N. H. Pritchard

#156046
Overall Influence
1939 - 1996 (57 years)
Norman Henry Pritchard, or N. H. Pritchard , was an American poet. He was a member of the Umbra poets, a collective of Black writers in Manhattan's Lower East Side founded in 1962. Pritchard's poetry is considered avant-garde. His poems often include unconventional typography and spacing, as in "Harbour," or lack sentences entirely, as in " " ".
Go to Profile
#5785

Oji Hiroi

#102406
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Oji Hiroi, real name Teruhisa Hiroi, is an author and video game developer. He co-authored Samurai Crusader with Ryoichi Ikegami. He also created the Far East of Eden and Sakura Wars role-playing video game franchises, and wrote the Sakura Wars manga.
Go to Profile
#5786

Ramzi Fawaz

#80006
Overall Influence
Ramzi Fawaz is an American associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches courses in queer and feminist theory, American cultural studies, and LGBTQ literature. He is the author of New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, published in January 2016 by NYU Press, which received the 2012–2013 Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award for Best First Book Manuscript in LGBT Studies, as well as Forms, published in 2022 by NYU Press. His essays have been published in American Literature, GLQ, Feminist Studies, Callaloo...
Go to Profile
#5787

Michelle Boisseau

#98547
Overall Influence
1955 - 2017 (62 years)
Michelle Boisseau was an American poet. Life and career Boisseau was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 26, 1955. She attended Ohio University, where she received a BA in 1977 and an MA in 1980, and the University of Houston where she received her PhD in 1985. She began teaching at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1995.
Go to Profile
#5788

Marcella Polain

Marcella Polain
#134258
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Marcella Polain is an Australian-resident poet, novelist and short fiction writer. Early life and education Marcella Polain was born in Singapore and migrated to Australia at the age of two with her Irish father and Armenian mother.
Go to Profile
#5789

Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts
#43586
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mark Roberts is an English streaker who has run naked during numerous international events. Roberts' streaking began when he saw a news report about a female streaker at a 1993 rugby sevens game in Hong Kong. After a bet in a bar, he exposed himself to the crowd the next day.
Go to Profile
#5790

Irene de Jong

#168913
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Irene J. F. de Jong is a classicist and professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam. She is known for her pioneering work on narratology and Ancient Greek literature. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile
#5791

Ivan Charota

Ivan Charota
#174379
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ivan Alexeyevich Charota is a Belarusian literary critic, Slavist, critic, historian of culture, translator. He is a Doctor of Philological Sciences 1998, and professor since 1999. He is a Laureat of the Republic of Belarus Prize for Spiritual Revival 2003. Foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts 2009. Member of the Association of Writers of Belarus, the Association of Writers of Russia and the Association of Writers of Serbia 1985.
Go to Profile
#5792

R. Howard Bloch

#88827
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
R. Howard Bloch is an American literary critic currently the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University, and also a published author. Bloch was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010.
Go to Profile
#5793

Catherine Merriman

#141595
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Catherine A. Merriman is a British novelist, short-story writer and editor who has published five novels and three short-story collections. Her work often addresses the experiences of women. Her first novel, Leaving the Light On , won the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award; her other works include the novels Fatal Observations and State of Desire ; the short-story collections Silly Mothers , shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year, and Getting a Life ; and the edited collection Laughing, Not Laughing: Women Writing on 'My Experience of Sex , which won an Erotic Award. Born in London, she has live...
Go to Profile
#5794

James J. Clauss

#171100
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
James Joseph Clauss is an American classics professor. Biography Clauss received a B.A. in 1974 from University of Scranton, a Master of Arts in 1976 from Fordham University, and a Ph. D. 1983 from University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation entitled Allusion and the Narrative Style of Apollonius Rhodius. He spent the academic year of 1982–1983 at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Go to Profile
#5795

Michael Castro

#114836
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Michael Castro was a poet and translator. In 2015 Castro was named the first Poet Laureate of St. Louis. He was a founder of the literary journal River Styx. Early life Castro was born in 1945 in New York to Greek Jewish parents before moving to St. Louis to attend Washington University.
Go to Profile
#5796

Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng

#48821
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng was a Norwegian philosopher, illustrator, mountain climber, environmental activist and politician. He was born in Trondheim. Among his publications are Musikk-kritikk og kommunikasjon from 1966, Økokrise, natur og menneske from 1976, and Mangfold og tid. Pyramide-mennesket ved skillevegen: System, frihet eller kaos? from 2001.
Go to Profile
#5797

Matilda Bruckner

#101267
Overall Influence
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner is an American scholar of medieval French literature. She is an authority on French romance from the twelfth and thirteenth century, and author and editor of four books on romance, Chrétien de Troyes, and the women troubadours.
Go to Profile
#5798

Eugene Paul Nassar

Eugene Paul Nassar
#92244
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Eugene "Gene" Paul Nassar , was a writer, editor, professor, and literary critic. He was a professor emeritus of english at Utica College, Utica, New York. Biography Eugene Paul Nassar was born on 20 June 1935 in East Utica, New York, the son of Mintaha and Michael Nassar. He lived in his childhood home for more than 65 years. He wrote a memoir, Wind of the Land, of growing up in a Lebanese Christian family in East Utica, an Italian-American neighborhood.
Go to Profile
#5799

Brian K. Vaughan

Brian K. Vaughan
#131542
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Brian K. Vaughan is an American comic book and television writer, best known for the comic book series Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Pride of Baghdad, Saga, and Paper Girls. Vaughan was a writer, story editor and producer of the television series Lost during seasons three through five. He was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for his work on the fourth season. The writing staff was nominated for the award again at the February 2010 ceremony for their work on the fifth season. He was formerly the showrunner and execut...
Go to Profile
#5800

Sarah Corbett

#130042
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sarah Corbett is a British poet. She graduated with a degree in English and sociology from the University of Leeds in 1992, an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 1998, and a PhD in creative and critical writing from the University of Manchester in 2013. She has published five collections of poetry, including the verse-novel, 'And She Was' and 'A Perfect Mirror' . The Red Wardrobe won an Eric Gregory Award in 1998, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. She is a lecturer at Lancaster University, having previously taught for the Open Universi...
Go to Profile