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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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#6001

Wu Jiaxiang

#79076

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Wu Jiaxiang is a Chinese scholar, writer, and public intellectual. Wu once served in various political roles in the Chinese government. He is visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.

#6002

William K. Hathaway

#176440

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

William K. Hathaway is a contemporary American poet who has published ten collections of poetry with Ithaca House, Louisiana State University Press, University of Central Florida Press, Canios Editions, and Chester Creek Press. Hathaway's most recent book, Dawn Chorus: New and Selected Poems 1972-2017, was published in March 2018 by Somondoco Press. He is retired and currently resides in Belfast, Maine.

#6003

Manuel Alfonseca

Manuel Alfonseca

#92161

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Manuel Alfonseca is a Spanish writer and university professor. He is the son of the painter and sculptor Manuel Alfonseca Santana. Career He is a doctor of communications engineering and graduated in Computer Science. He worked for 22 years at IBM , where he was Senior Technical Staff Member. He has been a professor at several universities: Complutense de Madrid, Politécnica de Madrid and Autónoma de Madrid, where he was a full professor and director of the Escuela Politécnica Superior .

#6004

Martha Vicinus

#157623

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Martha Vicinus is an American scholar of English literature and Women's studies. She serves as the Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor of English, Women's Studies, and History at the University of Michigan. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, Vicinus was a faculty member in the English Department at Indiana University from 1968 to 1982. She has written several books about Victorian women as well as gender and sexuality. She earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1968.

#6005

Rebecca W. Keller

#97096

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Rebecca W. Keller, Ph.D., incorporated Gravitas Publications Inc in 2003 to develop and publish core sciences curriculum under the Real Science-4-Kids imprint. She has authored and published Real Science-4-Kids student texts, teacher manuals, and student laboratory workbooks in chemistry, biology and physics to serve kindergarten through ninth grade, available through mainstream and home school book distributors.

#6006

Richard Kenney

#54558

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Richard L. Kenney is a poet and professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of five books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, Orrery, The Invention of the Zero, The One-Strand River, and Terminator.

#6007

Yashwant Trivedi

#153315

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Yashwant Trivedi is a Gujarati poet, essayist and critic from Gujarat, India. Life Yashwant Trivedi was born on 16 September 1934 in Palitana to Ramshankar and Rambhaben. His family belonged to Mahuva. He completed B. A. in Economics and Statistics from Samaldas College, Bhavnagar in 1956. He completed M. A. in Gujarati in 1965. He was awarded Ph. D. in 1979 for his thesis, Kavyani Paribhasha. He served as a professor of Gujarati in several colleges of Mumbai. Later he served as the professor and head of the department of Gujarati in the University of Mumbai. He retired from there. He is the ...

#6008

James Runcie

#121392

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

James Robert Runcie is a British novelist, documentary filmmaker, television producer and playwright. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at Bath Spa University and was Commissioning Editor for Arts on BBC Radio 4 from 2016 - 2020.

#6009

Michael Kirby

#84295

Overall Influence

1931 - 1997 (66 years)

Michael Stanley Kirby was a professor of drama at New York University. He wrote several groundbreaking books, including Happenings, Futurist Performance and The Art of Time. He was editor of The Drama Review from 1969 to 1986.

#6010

Nick Drake

#116771

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Nick Drake is a British poet and author. Career Drake's poems include "From The Song Dynasty" and "Static". Drake's "choral play" for the stage, All the Angels, was first performed in 2015 at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre.

#6011

William Hamilton

#76131

Overall Influence

1939 - 2016 (77 years)

William Hamilton was an American cartoonist and playwright. He was most closely associated with the magazine The New Yorker. Hamilton was noted for his wit and irony and for presenting his characters, most often examples of modern, affluent types, with distinctive "ski-jump" noses noted for a peculiar shape that has become a sort of unofficial trademark.

#6012

James Arthur

#169018

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

James Arthur is an American-Canadian poet. He grew up in Toronto, Canada. Arthur's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, London Review of Books, The Walrus, and The American Poetry Review.

#6013

Kim Soo-hyun

#100679

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Kim Soo-hyun is a South Korean screenwriter and novelist. Career Kim Soon-ok graduated from Korea University in 1965 with a degree in Korean Language and Literature. She was hired at MBC after winning in their radio drama competition in 1968 with her radio play 그 해 겨울의 우화 . Using the pen name Kim Soo-hyun, the first television drama she wrote, Rainbow, went on air in 1972.

#6014

Debra Allbery

#110156

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Debra Allbery is an American poet. Life Allbery is an Ohio native, though she currently lives in Fairview, North Carolina. She has graduated from College of Wooster, University of Virginia, and University of Iowa, has taught at Dickinson College, Randolph College, the University of Michigan, and is the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she's been on the poetry faculty since 1983.

#6015

Todd James Pierce

#122051

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Todd James Pierce is an American novelist and short story writer. Life Todd James Pierce is primarily known as a novelist and short story writer. He is a graduate of the MFA program at UC Irvine and the Ph.D. program at Florida State University. As the winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, he is the author of four books , and his work has appeared in over 80 literary journals and magazines including The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Northwest Review, Poets & Writers, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, The Sun, and Willow Springs.

#6016

Patricia Klindienst

#142404

Overall Influence

Patricia Klindienst is an American writer, and independent scholar. She graduated from Stanford University, with a Ph.D. She taught at Yale University. Awards 2007 American Book Award2008 Phillip and Eric Heiner Endowed Fellowship, Virginia Center for Creative Arts

#6017

Kim Gu-yong

#173886

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Kim Gu-yong ', pen name of Kim Kku , was a poet and calligrapher living in what is now South Korea. His poetry showed the spirit of Taoism but also reflected Buddhism. He was a graduate of Seongkyungwan University and later a professor at the same school.

#6018

Maya Sonenberg

#171389

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Maya Sonenberg is an American short story writer. Life She graduated from Wesleyan University, in 1982 and from Brown University, in 1984. She teaches at University of Washington. Her work appeared in Gargoyle, Santa Monica Review,

#6019

Tan Lin

#119656

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Tan Anthony Lin is an American poet, author, filmmaker, and professor. He defines his work as "ambient" literature, which draws on and samples source material from the Internet and popular culture to address issues involving plagiarism, copyright, and technology.

#6020

Chris Butler

#134516

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Chris Butler is an English animator, writer and director, known for his works at Laika, such as ParaNorman and Missing Link, which were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

#6021

Sabine Wichert

#125134

Overall Influence

1942 - 2014 (72 years)

Sabine Wichert , was a German born poet and historian who lived in Northern Ireland Biography Born Sabine Wichert on 8 June 1942 in Graudenz, West Prussia which is now Grudziadz, Poland, Wichert was educated in West Germany. She studied in Frankfurt, Marburg, FU Berlin and Mannheim. She also studied at the London school of Economics and Oxford University in Britain. She first came to Belfast as a tourist.

#6022

Cynthia Farah

#133245

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Cynthia Weber Farah Haines is an American photographer and writer. She is best known for her work on documenting Southwest writers and art and life in El Paso, Texas. Farah has also taught at the University of Texas at El Paso where she was involved with the university's first film studies program.

#6023

Nandini Das

#105241

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. She is a specialist in Shakespeare studies, Renaissance romance writing, early travel literature, and encounters between different cultures.

#6024

Brigitte Peucker

#171195

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German Languages and Literatures and Professor of Film Studies at Yale University. A disciple of Yale University's Geoffrey Hartman, she has written on and teaches in film studies, particularly German cinema, as well as in German lyric poetry and literature. She is an expert on Alfred Hitchcock, horror film, and painting and cinema. She has been Chair of the Film Studies Program at Yale University 1986-2000, and of the German Department 1997-2002, 2003-4.

#6025

Susan Sandler

#115130

Overall Influence

Susan Sandler is an American writer and currently a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She has numerous writing credits but is probably best known for her play Crossing Delancey, which she also adapted into a film with the same name starring Amy Irving and directed by Joan Micklin Silver.

#6026

Madeleine Doran

#88945

Overall Influence

1905 - 1996 (91 years)

Madeleine Kathryn Doran was an American literary critic and poet who taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1935 until her retirement in 1975. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Doran graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in 1927. She received her M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1928, and her Ph.D. in 1930 from Stanford. She joined the English department at the University of Wisconsin in 1935, and was made a full professor in 1952.

#6027

Robert Wilson

#75111

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Robert Wilson is a British crime writer currently resident in Portugal. He is the son of an RAF fighter pilot, and has a degree in English from Oxford. Wilson is the author of the Bruce Medway series, set in and around Benin, West Africa, and the Javier Falcón series, set largely in Seville, Spain. He is also the author of the espionage novel The Company of Strangers and A Small Death In Lisbon, which consists of a historically split narrative, and won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999. He was shortlisted for the same award again in 2003 for The Blind Man of Seville, the first in the Javier Falcón series.

#6028

Réal Ouellet

#146619

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Réal Ouellet was a Canadian writer and academic. Biography After his studies in psychology and literature at the Université Laval, Ouellet earned a doctorate from the University of Paris in 1963 with a thesis titled "Les relations humaines dans l’œuvre de Saint-Exupéry". That year, he became teaching literature at Laval. He was one of the founders of in 1968.

#6029

Yaba Badoe

#121952

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker, journalist and author. Career Yaba Badoe was born in Tamale, northern Ghana. She left Ghana to be educated in Britain at a very young age. A graduate of King's College, Cambridge, Badoe worked as a civil servant at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ghana, before beginning her career in journalism as a trainee at the BBC. She also was a researcher at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and has worked as a producer and director making documentaries for the main television channels in Britain.

#6030

Roberto Ransom

#85169

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Roberto Ransom Carty is a Mexican writer. Regarded as one of Mexico's most original authors, his published work includes novels, collections of short stories, poetry, an essay on Graham Greene and work on Mexico, as well as several award-winning children's books. He is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

#6031

Chin Wan

#41806

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Horace Chin Wan-kan , better known by his pen name Chin Wan, is a Hong Kong scholar advocating localism, best known for his publications On the Hong Kong City-State series. He is the founder and leader of the Hong Kong Resurgence Order and is the ideological leader of the "Hong Kong Autonomy Movement," dubbed as the "godfather of localism" in Hong Kong. Until mid-2016, Chin was an assistant professor at the Department of Chinese of Lingnan University.

#6032

Forrest Hamer

#135727

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Forrest Hamer is an American poet, psychologist, and psychoanalyst. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Rift . His first collection, Call & Response, won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and his second, Middle Ear , received the Northern California Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the California Arts Council, and he has taught at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops.

#6033

Cary Holladay

#176399

Overall Influence

Cary Holladay is an American writer and professor, best known for her historical short fiction. In 1999, her story "Merry-Go-Sorry" about the West Memphis Three murder case was selected by Stephen King for an O. Henry Award.

#6034

Dick Ringler

#147104

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Dick Ringler is an emeritus Professor of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and is one of the world's foremost authorities on Icelandic literature. Ringler's book Bard of Iceland: Jónas Hallgrimsson: Poet and Scientist, a biography and translation of selected works of Icelandic poet Jónas Hallgrimsson was named a top ten University Press title for 2003 by Book Sense. In 2007 he completed a new translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, in which particular emphasis was given to preserving the oral rhythm and meter of the original text. This transla...

#6035

Penelope Schott

#65454

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Penelope Scambly Schott is a feminist poet and former professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College and Rutgers University. She has published several books of poetry and has taught poetry writing for Thomas Edison State College.

#6036

Joanna Fuhrman

#111117

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Joanna Furhman is an American poet and professor. She is the author of six collections of poems and her poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals, as well as in anthologies. Fuhrman is a member of the Alice James Books Cooperative Board, and poetry editor for Boog City, a community newspaper for the Lower East Side in New York.

#6037

Tim Liardet

#84454

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Tim Liardet is a poet twice nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize, a critic, and Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University. He was born in London in 1949, and has produced eleven collections of poetry to date.

#6038

John Gray

#122328

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

John Gray was a Scottish mythologist and author of books about the religion, mythology and the culture of ancient Mesopotamia and the Near East. He was known for his 1969 book Near Eastern Mythology. He was also Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at the University of Aberdeen until his retirement in 1980.

#6039

Doris Dungey

#121997

Overall Influence

1961 - 2008 (47 years)

Doris J. Dungey was an American blogger who wrote extensively about the United States housing bubble for the blog Calculated Risk under the pseudonym Tanta. Early life and work Born in Oxnard, California to Byron and Eileen Dungey in 1961, she was raised in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. She earned a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, where she taught until 1989. She then returned to Bloomington, where she wrote the training manual for a local rape crisis center. She worked in the mortgage industry for many years, starting at Champion Federal Savings and Loan Association where she was a trainer and technical writer.

#6040

Kim Seunghui

#173715

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Kim Seunghui is a South Korean poet, essayist, and novelist. Life Kim was born in Gwangju on March 1, 1952. She graduated from Chon-nam Girls' High School. She majored in English Literature at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea from which she later received a doctorate in Korean Literature. In 1973, she made her official literary debut with her poem "Geu-rim sog-ui mul" when it won an entry in the Annual Contest for new writers held by Kyung-hyang Shin-mun . Kim is currently a professor of Korean Literature at Sogang University.

#6041

William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

#111427

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

William S. Yellow Robe Jr. was an Assiniboine actor, author, director, educator, playwright, and poet. Life and career A member of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Yellow Robe was raised by his mother on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana. He studied writing and performing arts at the University of Montana.

#6042

Ayaz Gul

#177616

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Ayaz Gul is a prominent contemporary poet from Sindh, Pakistan. His works are in the indigenous Sindhi language. He was honoured with the Pride of Performance for literature by President Arif Alvi in 2021.

#6043

Bruce Baum

#30881

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Bruce Baum is an American comedian. His live act consists of prop comedy as well as more traditional stand-up material. One of his best-known stand-up routines is his diaper-wearing Babyman character. Baum is recognized for his large mustache, long hair and remarkable resemblance to musician David Crosby. Baum and comedian Barry Marder co-authored the first three Letters From a Nut books, written under the pseudonym Ted L. Nancy.

#6044

Sable Elyse Smith

#124839

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, write and educator based in New York. Smith works in photography, neon, text, appropriated imagery, sculpture, and video installation connecting language, violence, and pop culture with autobiographical subject matter. In 2018, Smith was an Artist-in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work was first featured at several areas such as MoMA ps1, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia, MIT list visual arts center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other places. The artist lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and New York City. She has ...

#6045

Alexander Matthews

#101651

Overall Influence

Alexander Matthews is an American playwright and philosopher. Matthews was born in New York City. He taught Philosophy in a number of universities between 1975 and 1989 and in 1986 was awarded a Visiting Fellowship to Princeton University.

#6046

Richard Hamblyn

#164461

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Richard Hamblyn is a British environmental writer and historian. He is a lecturer in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and has contributed articles and reviews to the Sunday Times, The Guardian, the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.

#6047

Maggie Kilgour

#134721

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Margaret "Maggie" Kilgour is a Molson professor of English Language and Literature at McGill University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Education Kilgour earned her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto and her PhD at Yale University. She wrote her dissertation under the title "Ingestion as Metaphor and Literary Technique in Rabelais, Milton, Burton, Ruskin, and Northorp Frye," although it was late republished in 1990 by Princeton University Press as "From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation."

#6048

Rachelle Cruz

#158112

Overall Influence

Rachelle Cruz is an American poet. She won a 2018 American Book Award. She teaches at University of California, Riverside. In 2019, she was Inlandia Literary Laureate. Works God’s Will for Monsters

#6049

Caroline Vout

#102443

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Caroline Vout is a British classicist and art historian. she is a Professor in classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Christ's College. In 2021 she became Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge.

#6050

Paola Pruneti

#177754

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Paola Pruneti , Italian papyrologist and palaeographer. Pruneti worked at the University of Florence. She is a member of the Editor Committee of Analecta Papyrologica, a journal edited by the Department of Philology and Linguistic of the University of Messina.

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