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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#5801

Nora Roberts

#126726

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Nora Roberts is an American author of over 225 romance novels. She writes as J. D. Robb, Jill March and Sarah Hardesty. Roberts was the first author to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. As of 2011, her novels had spent a combined 861 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including 176 weeks in the number-one spot.

#5802

Orm Øverland

#143083

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Orm Harald Øverland was a Norwegian literary historian. He was born in Oslo and grew up in that city as well as in Bryne, Montreal and Aukra. He graduated with the cand.philol. degree from the University of Oslo in 1962, and was employed as a research assistant for one year. He then became a research fellow and took his PhD at Yale University in 1969. He was subsequently hired at the University of Bergen as a docent in 1970 and was promoted to professor in 1975, serving until his retirement in 2005. His fields of research were American literature and the Norwegian-Americans.

#5803

Sandy Solomon

#130673

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Sandy Solomon is an American poet. Life Solomon was raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from the University of Chicago. She worked in Washington, DC for the National Urban Coalition and then directed two groups: the National Neighborhood Coalition and the Coalition on Human Needs. She received an MA from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She teaches at Vanderbilt University.

#5804

Kathleen Woodward

Kathleen Woodward

#89057

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Kathleen Woodward is an American academic. She is a Lockwood Professor in Humanities and in English at the University of Washington and has been the Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities since 2000. Her areas of specialization include 20th-century American literature and culture; discourse of the emotions; technology and science studies; and age studies; digital humanities; and gender, women, and sexuality studies. She is working on risk in the context of globalization and population aging. Her writing talks about the invisibility status of older women and she advocates for an aren...

#5805

Jason Manford

#78934

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Jason John Manford is an English comedian, presenter, actor and singer. Manford was a team captain on the Channel 4 panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats from 2007 until 2010 and has presented numerous television shows for the BBC and ITV including Comedy Rocks , The One Show , Show Me the Funny , A Question of Sport: Super Saturday , Bigheads and Children In Need , and is one of four judges on ITV's Starstruck .

#5806

Julia Randall

#88429

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Julia Randall was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems . Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets” , her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America , the Poets’ Prize for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Institute of Arts & Letters , and a Sewanee Review Fellowship .

#5807

Robert King

#130251

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Robert King is an American film and television writer and producer. He is married to Michelle King, who is also his writing partner. The couple created the legal drama series The Good Wife , which earned them a Writers Guild of America Award; its spin-off The Good Fight ; the comedy-drama BrainDead ; the supernatural drama Evil ; and the upcoming police drama Elsbeth .

#5808

Meirion Pennar

#121965

Overall Influence

1944 - 2010 (66 years)

Dr Meirion Pennar was a Welsh poet and academic, who translated two works of Welsh language literature. Early life Born in Cardiff, he was the eldest of five children born to theologian and writer, Dr Pennar Davies. Brought up in Bangor, Brecon and Swansea, he graduated with an honours degree in Welsh from Swansea University, and was then a research student at Jesus College, Oxford, where he gained his D.Phil.

#5809

Mark Garnett

#96273

Overall Influence

Mark Garnett is a senior lecturer at the Department of Politics Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University and author of many books and articles covering post-1945 British politics. Garnett was educated at Gosforth High School, Newcastle, and Durham University .

#5810

Varley O'Connor

#153640

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Varley O'Connor is an American novelist and short story writer. She is an associate professor at Kent State University. Biography Having earned a BFA in acting from Boston University, O’Connor worked for several years as an actress. She enrolled in the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, graduating with an MFA in 1989.

#5811

Henry Graham

#120925

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Henry Graham - 20 March 2019 Publications . Kafka in Liverpool Bar Room Ballads . The Eye of the Beholder The Very Fragrant Death of Paul Gauguin . Bomb Europe After Rain . Poker in Paradise Lost Passport to Earth Good Luck to You, Kafka/You Need It, Boss . Soup City Zoo

#5812

Michael Laskey

#104729

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael George Laskey is an English poet and editor. Life Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Laskey was educated at Gresham's School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read English. After Cambridge, Laskey worked for ten years as a teacher in secondary schools and further education in Spain and England.

#5813

Lung Ying-tai

#103531

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Lung Ying-tai is a writer, cultural critic, and public intellectual. With more than 30 books to her credit, she not only has a large number of readers in her native Taiwan, but her works also have an impact in Chinese-language communities in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and North America. Lung became widely known for her criticism on the Kuomintang party's martial law regime and has since become a critic of Mainland China's increasing restrictions on press freedom and civil liberties. Her critical essays on cultural and political issues contributed to the democratization of Taiwan.

#5814

Harold Toliver

#168471

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Harold Toliver is an American literary critic, theorist and writer. Currently, he is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the areas of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, English and Comparative Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism. He received Guggenheim awards and the Distinguished Research Award . Toliver is married and has two children.

#5815

Mariko Bando

#101910

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Mariko Bando is a Japanese writer, critic, and former bureaucrat. Bando started her career in the Prime Minister's office, later becoming a consul general and the first director general of the Japanese Cabinet Office's Gender Equality Bureau. Her 2006 book The Dignity of a Woman has sold more than three million copies in Japan. She is currently the president and chancellor of Showa Women's University.

#5816

Pamela L. Caughie

#109783

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Pamela L. Caughie is a professor and graduate program director in the English Department at Loyola University of Chicago. She served as president of the Modernist Studies Association from 2009-2010. Caughie received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 1987. She is also a highly acclaimed Virginia Woolf scholar, and in 2010 was granted a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $175,000 to continue her work on an electronic edition of Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Through Loyola University of Chicago's digital humanities center Caughie has worked on a digital archive for Lili Elbe, a well-known figure in transgender history.

#5817

Baron Wormser

#118862

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Baron Wormser is an American poet. Biography Baron Wormser was born in Baltimore on February 15, 1948. He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University, later doing graduate studies at the University of California-Irvine and University of Maine. Wormser served as librarian for 25 years in Madison, Maine.

#5818

Franklin Burroughs

#116286

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Franklin Burroughs is an American author of nonfiction. Biography Burroughs holds a B.A. in English from Sewanee: The University of the South and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is the Harrison King McCann Research Professor of the English Language Emeritus at Bowdoin College. He retired from teaching in 2002. He writes primarily about the people and natural environments in and around Conway, South Carolina where he was raised, and Bowdoinham, Maine, where he has lived his adult life.

#5819

Liza Wieland

#114503

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Liza Wieland is an American novelist, short story writer and poet. Wieland has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Council, and her work has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. Her novel A Watch of Nightingales won the 2008 Michigan Literary Fiction Award. Wieland earned her B.A. in English from Harvard and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She graduated high school in 1978 from The Lovett School in Atlanta. She has taught at Colorado College and California State University-Fresno, and has been a Professor of English at East Carolina University since 2007.

#5820

Ruby Yayra Goka

#147465

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Ruby Yayra Goka is a Ghanaian dentist and author. She has 15 books to her credit and is best known for being a multiple Burt Award for African Literature winner in Ghana. Goka, who is an alumnus of the University of Ghana Dental School, currently heads the Dental Department of the Volta Regional Hospital, Ho.

#5821

Lawrence Osgood

#127000

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Lawrence Osgood was a novelist, playwright and essayist with joint US/Canadian citizenship. He held a bachelor’s degree cum laude in English Literature from Harvard and a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.

#5822

Theodore Silverstein

#90238

Overall Influence

1904 - 2001 (97 years)

Theodore Silverstein was a British-born American scholar of medieval literature. His focuses for research included Middle English poetry and medieval poetry in general; Dante's The Divine Comedy; the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and the 4th-century Apocalypse of Paul , a popular and influential work in the Middle Ages. Silverstein initially taught at the University of Kansas City. He then served in the United States Army Air Forces as an intelligence officer from 1942 to 1945 during World War II, specializing in interrogating captured German and Italian pilots and analyzing intercepted Luftwaffe communications.

#5823

John Gilgun

#105978

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

John Gilgun was an American writer. He is best known for his 1989 novel Music I Never Dreamed Of, which was a shortlisted nominee for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction at the 3rd Lambda Literary Awards in 1990.

#5824

Pramodkumar Patel

#93694

Overall Influence

1933 - 1996 (63 years)

Pramodkumar Bhagubhai Patel was Gujarati language critic from Gujarat, India. Life Patel was born on 20 September 1933 at Khara-Abrahma village . His family belonged to Moti Karod village. He completed his schooling from Khara-Abhrama. He completed B. A. with Gujarati in 1957 and M. A. in 1959 from University of Bombay. He also completed Ph.D in Gujarati in 1969 from the same university. His subject of thesis was Gujaratima Kavyatatvavichar: Narmad, Navalram, Ramanbhai Nilkanth, Narsinhrao Divetia ane Manilal Dwivedina Kavyavicharnu Samikshatmak Adhyayan. He taught at the arts college in Bardoli initially and later at Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar.

#5825

Michael Griffith

#150375

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Michael Griffith is an American novelist and short story writer. His stories and essays have appeared in literary journals such as The Oxford American, The Southwest Review, Salmagundi, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.

#5826

Dorothea Lasky

#120720

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Dorothea Lasky is an American poet. She is currently an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts. Background and education She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1978. She graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins High School in 1996. She earned a BA in classics and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers, and her Ed.M. in Arts & Education from Harvard University, and her Ed.D. in Creativity and Education from the University of Pennsylvania.

#5827

Sandra Doller

#168290

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Sandra Doller is an American poet and writer. Life She attended Amherst College, University of Washington, and University of Chicago. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the two year Iowa Arts Fellowship.

#5828

Ofelia Rey Castelao

Ofelia Rey Castelao

#57049

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Ofelia Rey Castelao is a Galiciann historian, writer, and university professor. Focusing her research on women's history, she studies female migration and the insertion of Galician women in the literate culture. Rey Castelao was awarded the in 2022.

#5829

Benjamin Saltman

Benjamin Saltman

#104879

Overall Influence

1927 - 1999 (72 years)

Benjamin Saltman was an American poet and Professor of verse writing and contemporary American literature at California State University, Northridge. The Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award is given annually by Red Hen Press in his honor.

#5830

Hugh Seidman

#122314

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Hugh Seidman was an American poet. Life He was a graduate of Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He taught writing at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, Columbia University, the College of William and Mary, The New School.

#5831

Hillary Homzie

#172257

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Hillary Homzie is a lecturer, playwright and author from Charlottesville, Virginia. Early life Homzie was born Denver and raised in Virginia, United States of America. She is the daughter of the late M.J. Homzie.

#5832

Frank B. Wilderson III

#92255

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Frank B. Wilderson III is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is Chancellor's Professor of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine. He received his BA in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College, his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University and his PhD in rhetoric and film studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

#5833

Sa'ida Bint Khatir al-Farisi

#169619

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Sa'ida Bint Khatir al-Farisi is an Omani poet. Born in Sur, at the time part of Ash Sharqiyah Region, al-Farisi is a graduate from Kuwait University, from which she received her BA in Arabic and Islamic law in 1976. She also took a degree in education, and has since begun work on a master's degree in the field of Arabic literary criticism. Apart from her literary work she has served as assistant dean of students at Sultan Qaboos University. She has served on the board of the Cultural Club, and worked as editor-in-chief of al-'Umaniya magazine. Her earliest poetry collections date from the 198...

#5834

Max Wickert

#122059

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Max Wickert is a German-American teacher, poet, translator and publisher. He is Professor of English Emeritus at the University at Buffalo. Early life and education Max Wickert was born Maxalbrecht Wickert in Augsburg, Germany, the oldest child of Stephan Phillip Wickert, an artist and art teacher , and Thilde Wickert. Four younger children, all sisters, were born between 1940 and 1946. In 1943, he was evacuated to Langenneufnach, a small farming village after the Augsburg raid. He received his early education in Langenneufnach, Passau, and Augsburg. In 1952, his family immigrated to Rochest...

#5835

Bin Ramke

#104023

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Lloyd Binford Ramke is an American poet and editor. Life He graduated from Louisiana State University, from University of New Orleans, and from Ohio University with a Ph.D. He taught at Columbus College.

#5836

K. S. Bhagawan

#65388

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Kallahalli Sannegowda Bhagawan , known as Prof. K. S. Bhagawan, is an Indian Kannada writer, rationalist, translator, critic, scholar and retired professor. In addition to his works on Hinduism, Indian culture and history, he has translated the works of William Shakespeare including Julius Caesar and Hamlet. He is a recipient of many awards including the Rajyotsava Award, Kuvempu Award and the Lokayata Award.

#5837

Dapo Adelugba

#129439

Overall Influence

1939 - 2014 (75 years)

Adedapo Abayomi Adelugba was a Nigerian academic, theatre critic and playwright who spent a considerable part of his academic career at University of Ibadan where he was a director of the university's theatre troupe. Adelugba was also the director of Nigeria's drama entry to the Second World Festival of Arts and Culture.

#5838

Christopher Tilghman

Christopher Tilghman

#131185

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Christopher Tilghman is an American novelist and short story writer. Life He graduated from Yale University. He served three years in the Navy. He worked at a sawmill in New Hampshire, moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a corporate copywriter and journalist. He edited Ploughshares. He lived with his wife and three sons in rural Massachusetts.

#5839

Fred Newman

#45523

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

Frederick Delano Newman was an American psychotherapist and left-wing political activist. Newman and Lois Holzman created a therapeutic modality, Social Therapy. Newman insisted "that there was nothing wrong with psychotherapists having sex with patients".

#5840

John Bensko

#174460

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

John Bensko is an American poet who taught in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, along with his wife, the fiction writer Cary Holladay. Career Bensko has an MFA in creative writing from The University of Alabama and a Ph.D. in 20th-century poetry and narrative technique from Florida State University . He was a student of Thomas Rabbitt in poetry and Barry Hannah in fiction, and classmate of Clark Powell: Our weekly workshops were simple - take the latest purple mimeographed worksheet of student's poems, and have everyone critique the poems. I once wrote a four-line poem that had an epigraph from Moby Dick that was almost an entire paragraph.

#5841

Tom Stanton

#58515

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Tom Stanton is the author of several nonfiction books, including two memoirs. In 1983, Stanton, a journalist, co-founded The Voice Newspapers in suburban Detroit and served as editor for sixteen years before embarking on a literary career in 1999. A former Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, Stanton teaches journalism at the University of Detroit Mercy. In 2008, Stanton won the Michigan Author Award.

#5842

Anthony Neil Smith

#106716

Overall Influence

Anthony Neil Smith is a mystery/crime fiction writer who has had a great number of his short stories published in literary magazines and crime writing zines, and has also published numerous novels. His work will appear in Best American Mystery & Suspense 2023 in October 2023. He is co-creator of the well-received online noir journal Plots with Guns. He was also an associate editor with the highly regarded literary magazine Mississippi Review, having put together several special issues featuring crime fiction for the online edition. He is a Professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State Univ...

#5843

Judith Frank

#128923

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Judith Frank is an American writer and professor. She has been a two-time Lambda Literary Award nominee, winning in the Lesbian Debut Fiction category at the 17th Lambda Literary Awards in 2005 for her novel Crybaby Butch, and being a shortlisted nominee in the Gay Fiction category at the 27th Lambda Literary Awards in 2015 for All I Love and Know. She is Jewish.

#5844

Jaume Subirana i Ortín

#142241

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Jaume Subirana is a Catalan writer, scholar, and blogger. Associate Professor of literature at Pompeu Fabra University . He holds a PhD in Catalan Language and Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona , and a degree in Arts from the same university.

#5845

Maurice Mierau

#93137

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Maurice Mierau is an American-Canadian writer of non-fiction and poetry. Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Mierau grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas and Saskatchewan and has a Mennonite background. Mierau currently lives with his family in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and was president of the League of Canadian Poets from 2006-2008. Mierau holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Manitoba.

#5846

James Gill

#35225

Overall Influence

James Gill is a writer and a columnist from the United Kingdom. Gill emigrated to the United States from Great Britain in 1977. Gill worked for the Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, Louisiana, before joining the staff of The Advocate. He has written books about the Mardi Gras celebration.

#5847

Leah Naomi Green

#92973

Overall Influence

Leah Naomi Green is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of The More Extravagant Feast, winner of the Walt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.

#5848

Stacy Doris

#113850

Overall Influence

1962 - 2012 (50 years)

Stacy Doris was a poet who wrote in English and French. Doris used the name "Madame Wiener" or «Sa Femme» in some of her French work. Life and work Stacy Doris was an innovative writer who imparted her “ferocity of living and invention” as she created new worlds of relationships with each book. As a teacher, each semester she would offer deep, exploratory seminars in different topics. For Doris, writing, learning, living and romancing were all in the service of one another.

#5849

Tom Roeser

#81132

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Thomas F. Roeser was a Chicago-based conservative writer and broadcaster, who broadcast for many years on WLS 890 AM talk radio. He also was the founder and former chairman of the editorial board of a Chicago Internet newspaper, The Chicago Daily Observer, as well as a lecturer, teacher and former vice president of the Quaker Oats Company.

#5850

Jean Kent

#149349

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jean Kent is an Australian poet. Education Jean Kent was educated at the Glennie Memorial School in Toowoomba and graduated from University of Queensland with Bachelor of Arts majoring in psychology. She has worked in vocational guidance, educational guidance of disabled children, counselling of students and staff in TAFE colleges and, most recently, teaching creative writing. Jean now lives on the New South Wales north coast, which is a feature in her verse, as well the memories and experiences formed in youth and childhood in South East Queensland.

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