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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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#6201

Francisco González Bree

#77372

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Francisco González Bree , also known as Paco Bree, is a corporate executive, professor, writer, researcher, artist and a professional in the field of creativity and innovation. In addition to his academic contribution, he is business advisor and regular collaborator in different media such as El Español, on matters related to innovation and creativity, and the importance of these issues in companies, people and society.

#6202

Myra Jehlen

#113891

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Myra Jehlen is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley for her dissertation on William Faulkner, directed by Henry Nash Smith, a founding scholar of the field of American Studies. She holds a BA from City College of the City University of New York. She has taught at New York University, Columbia University, The State University of New York, College at Purchase, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Fellow of ...

#6203

Masako Watanabe

#131174

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Masako Watanabe is a Japanese manga artist. She began her professional career as an illustrator of books in 1949. She switched to creating manga after reading Osamu Tezuka's works, debuting in 1952 with Namida no Sanbika. She quickly became the most popular female manga artist of her time.

#6204

Eric Samuelsen

#142372

Overall Influence

1956 - 2019 (63 years)

Eric Roy Samuelsen was an American playwright and emeritus professor of theatre at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He is considered one of the most important Mormon playwrights, and has been called a Mormon Charles Dickens or Henrik Ibsen. He won the Association for Mormon Letters drama award in 1994, 1997, and 1999, and was AML president from 2007 to 2009. In 2012 he received the Smith–Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.

#6205

Craig Detweiler

#118919

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Craig Detweiler is a writer, filmmaker, and cultural commentator. He is dean of the College of Fine Arts and Production at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. Early life and career Detweiler grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Davidson College with a B.A. in English. He went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema/TV. Later he received a Masters of Divinity and PhD in theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. While at Fuller, he co-founded the Windrider Forum, a "vehicle to promote the presentation and exploration of the human story through film and visual media".

#6206

Ko Hyeong-ryeol

#176158

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Ko Hyeong-ryeol born 1954 is a modern Korean poet. Life Ko Hyeong-ryeol was born in the town of Haenam at the southern tip of Korean Peninsula and grew up in Sokcho, Gangwon-do. After high school, Go passed an exam to become a government employee and worked as a clerk in his township. He made his literary debut in 1979 with "Zhuangzi" which was published in Contemporary Literature.

#6207

Erling Nielsen

#179652

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Erling Frede Nielsen was a Danish philologist. He worked as a lecturer in Danish language and Danish literature at the University of Oslo from 1950 to 1990. Notable releases include H. C. Andersen og andre danskere and Navne i dansk litteratur . He also edited the series Cappelens nordiske bibliotek, with about thirty titles of Nordic poetry released on Cappelens Forlag in the post-war period, as well as the anthologies Dansk skrivekunst, Norsk skrivekunst and Norske dikt. He was decorated with the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav.

#6208

Victor Săhleanu

Victor Săhleanu

#66041

Overall Influence

1924 - 1997 (73 years)

Victor Aurelian Săhleanu was a Romanian physician and anthropologist. He was a leading figure in anthropology in his country from the late 1960s until his death. Biography Education and early career Săhleanu was born in Gura Humorului, in the Bukovina region of the Kingdom of Romania. After finishing secondary school at the Aron Pumnul High School in Cernăuți, he entered the medical faculty of the University of Bucharest, from which he graduated in 1948. At that point, with the onset of the Communist regime, the institution became the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy. Between...

#6209

Virginia Jackson

Virginia Jackson

#167889

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. She is more recently credited with revising the racialized history of American poetics, as the poet Terrance Hayes writes, “If there is a kind of ‘poet’s poet,’ might there also be a kind of ‘poet’s scholar,’ someone a poet reads for lucid, explosive doses of insight and history? Yes: Virginia Jackson. Actually, she’s more than a poet’s favorite scholar, she is a poet’s favorite pathfinding detective.

#6210

David Lazar

#110856

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

David Lazar is an American writer and editor, primarily known as an essayist. Born in Brooklyn, NY, he has been involved in the development of "creative nonfiction" in the United States, creating graduate programs, writing theoretically about the essay, and mentoring and publishing many subsequent writers of note.

#6211

William Ingram

#151170

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

William Ingram is an American academic who was Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He is known for his work on early modern drama and performance. Life and career Ingram was born in 1930. He earned the PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.

#6212

Emily Stipes Watts

#124600

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Emily Stipes Watts was an American educator, writer, and literary historian. In parallel with her academic career, she wrote Ernest Hemingway and the Arts , The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 and The Businessman in American Literature . A laureate of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she also served as chair of the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

#6213

José Antonio Mazzotti

#168187

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

José Antonio Mazzotti is a Peruvian poet, scholar, and literary activist. He is Professor of Latin American Literature and King Felipe VI of Spain Professor of Spanish Culture and Civilization in the Department of Romance Studies at Tufts University, President of the International Association of Peruvianists since 1996, and Director of the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana since 2010. He is considered an expert in Latin American colonial literature, especially in El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the formation of criollo cultures, a critic of Latin American contemporary poetry, and a prominent member of the Peruvian 1980s literary generation.

#6214

Lauren Wilkinson

#175165

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Lauren Wilkinson is an American fiction writer. Her debut novel American Spy was published by Random House in February 2019 in the US and in July 2019 in the UK via Dialogue Books . Early life Wilkson grew up in New York City. She earned an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University.

#6215

George Szanto

#176754

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

George Szanto is an American-Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, and scholar. His published work includes more than a dozen novels and short-story collections as well as plays, full-length works of literary criticism, mysteries, and a memoir. His work has also appeared in literary periodicals including the Kansas Quarterly, the Bucknell Review, the Massachusetts Review, and the Canadian Comparative Literature Review and in anthologies. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he won the Hugh MacLennan Award for Fiction in 1995 for his novel Friends & Marriages.

#6216

Jacqueline Assaël

#103625

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Jacqueline Assaël is a French Hellenist and a professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis since 2004. She is also an essayist and poet. Assaël is a specialist in the works of the tragic Greek poet Euripides, and she has also published works on the phenomenon of poetic inspiration in Antiquity. Also a philologist, she has also created some works of New Testament exegesis.

#6217

Helen Farish

#169886

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Helen Farish is a British poet. Life She received her B.A. from University of Durham, M.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford Brookes University. She lectured in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust . She has also been a visiting lecturer at Sewanee University, and a visiting scholar at the University of New Hampshire.

#6218

Priscilla Gilman

#158490

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Priscilla Gilman is an American writer and former college professor. She has written about literature, parenting, education, and autism for numerous publications, and is an advocate for autistic people and children. She is the author of The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy, which was inspired by her autistic son Benjamin.

#6219

Philippe Desan

#103668

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Philippe Desan is Howard L. Willett Professor of French and History of Culture at the University of Chicago. Originally from France, Desan is among the top Montaigne scholars alive today. He received his PhD from the University of California Davis , and has published widely on several topics pertaining to the literature and culture of the French Renaissance, often in relation to their economic, political and sociological context. At the University of Chicago, he has served as Master of the Humanities Collegiate Division and as Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He is the general editor of the Montaigne Studies.

#6220

Don Berry

#118379

Overall Influence

1932 - 2001 (69 years)

Don George Berry was an American author and artist best known for his trilogy of historical novels about early settlers in the Oregon Country. Described as one of "Oregon's best fiction writers of the post-World War II generation", and a "Forgotten Beat", Berry's second novel, Moontrap , was nominated for the National Book Award in 1963.

#6221

Sulayman S. Nyang

#86934

Overall Influence

1944 - 2018 (74 years)

Dr. Sulayman S. Nyang was a professor and former chairman of the African Studies Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a co-principal investigator of the Project MAPS and also a former deputy ambassador and head of chancery of the Gambia Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Nyang served as consultant to several national and international agencies and on the boards of the African Studies Association, the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, America's Islamic Heritage Museum, and the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. He wrote extensively on Islamic, African and Middle Eastern affairs.

#6222

Beryl Rawson

#131973

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Beryl Rawson was an Australian academic. She was Professor and Visiting Fellow in Classics at the Faculty of Arts of the Australian National University . Her work "made ANU a significant centre for classical studies".

#6223

Ghulam Ali Allana

#168712

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Ghulam Ali Allana was a writer, critic and linguist. He was Vice-chancellor of Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad and chairman of the Sindhi Language Authority based in Hyderabad, Sindh. Professional career He was appointed as a teacher at Training College for men, then, lecturer in Sindhi at City College Hyderabad. He was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Sindh in 1958. He was given additional charge as assistant director of Institute of Sindhology in 1963 and held the position until 1983. Besides, he was lecturer in Sindhi Department in University of Sindh from 1977. From 9 August 1983 to 18 April 1989 he was a Vice-chancellor of Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad.

#6224

Christopher Ball

#46882

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Sir Christopher John Elinger Ball is a British academic, who served as Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1980 to 1988, and as the first Chancellor of the University of Derby, from 1995 to 2003. Life Ball was educated at St George's School, Harpenden, and served in the Parachute Regiment as a Second Lieutenant . He then read English at Merton College, Oxford, where he was a scholar, obtaining a first-class degree in 1959. After lecturing in Oxford, he moved to be a lecturer in comparative linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1961. He returned to the University of ...

#6225

Greg Garrett

#132967

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Greg Garrett is a writer, professor, speaker, preacher, and musician based in Austin, Texas. Education Born November 6, 1961, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Garrett attended Mustang High School in Mustang, Oklahoma. He then went on to the University of Central Oklahoma, where he received his B.A. in English with a minor in History and was a member of Alpha Chi and Phi Alpha Theta national honor societies. He continued his education at University of Central Oklahoma, receiving an M.A. in Creative Studies .

#6226

Susan Sherman

#163975

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Susan Sherman is an American author, poet, playwright, and a founder of IKON Magazine. Sherman's poems "convey the different voices of those who have felt the pang of suffering and burning of injustice."

#6227

Divya Victor

#72053

Overall Influence

Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet and professor, known for her poetry book Curb which won the PEN Open Book Award. Early life and education Divya Victor was born in Nagercoil, India. Victor earned her B.S. in English from Towson University, her M.A. in Creative Writing from Temple University, and her Ph.D. in English at University at Buffalo .

#6228

Leila Philip

#173131

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Leila Philip is an American writer, poet and educator. She is the author of award-winning books of nonfiction which have received glowing national reviews. Her books include: Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, Hidden Dialogue: A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States, The Road Through MiyamaWater Rising

#6229

Martin Guevara Urbina

#86077

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

#6230

Julie Iromuanya

#168441

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Julie Iromuanya is an American author and academic. Her 2015 novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, was the runner-up for the 2016 Etisalat Prize for Literature and was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction.

#6231

Rhonda Garelick

#141729

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Rhonda K. Garelick is an American professor and author. She is currently a professor of English with a special joint appointment in the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts. She is the founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Symposium based in the Hixson-Lied College. She is a scholar of performance, fashion, literature, visual arts, and cultural politics.

#6232

Karen Kovacik

#172382

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Karen Kovacik is a former poet laureate of the American state of Indiana from 2011 until 2013. George Kalamaras succeeded her.

#6233

Jun Won-tchack

#121778

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Jun Won-tchack is a South Korean lawyer, writer and broadcaster. He is well known for holding right-wing political views. He was born in Ulsan, South Korea. He served in the military as a lawyer and was discharged as a colonel.

#6234

Reinhold F. Glei

#63741

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Reinhold F. Glei is a German philologist and translator. External links Eintrag in der Bochumer Hochschulbibliographie

#6235

Maria Rybakova

#78450

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Maria Aleksandrovna Rybakova is a Russian writer whose works have been published in multiple languages. Life Rybakova is the only daughter of literary critic Natalia Ivanova, deputy editor of the magazine Znamya, and a granddaughter of the writer Anatoly Rybakov.

#6236

Ailbhe Darcy

#173640

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Ailbhe Darcy is an Irish poet and Wales Book of the Year award laureate. Career Ailbhe Darcy was born in 1981 and grew up in Dublin. In 2015, she was awarded an MFA and a PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Darcy now lives in Cardiff. She won the Wales Book of the Year award and the Pigott Poetry Prize at the 2019 Listowel Writers' Week with her collection Insistence, which was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

#6237

James W. Douglass

#29560

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

James W. "Jim" Douglass is an American author, activist, and Christian theologian. He is a graduate of Santa Clara University. He and his wife, Shelley Douglass, founded the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Washington, and Mary’s House, a Catholic Worker house in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1997 the Douglasses received the Pacem in Terris Award.

#6238

Monroe K. Spears

#105672

Overall Influence

1916 - 1998 (82 years)

Monroe K. Spears was an American university professor and literary critic. He was the editor of the Sewanee Review from 1952 to 1961, and the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English at Rice University from 1964 to 1986. He was the author of several books about American and British poetry.

#6239

Ingrid Wendt

#168087

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Ingrid Wendt , is an American writer and poet. Personal life Married to Ralph Salisbury, she lives in Eugene, Oregon. Education Wendt graduated from Cornell College in Iowa in 1966, and that year she moved to Oregon.

#6240

Patricia Brieschke

#143380

Overall Influence

Patricia A. Brieschke is an American short story writer. Life She graduated from Northeastern Illinois University, Alfred Adler Institute with an MA, in 1979, and from University of Illinois at Chicago with a Ph.D., in 1983. She teaches at Hofstra University. Her work has been published in Appalachee Review, Karamu, The Rambler Magazine, The MacGuffin, PMS, Rainbow Curve, Sou'wester, and StoryQuarterly.

#6241

Louise L. Lambrichs

#80183

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Louise L. Lambrichs is a French novelist and essayist. Lambrichs was born into a family of writers in Boulogne-Billancourt. Her father Georges Lambrichs was considered one of the greatest French-speaking editors of the second half of the 20th century. Her mother Gilberte Lambrichs who translated the works of Fritz Zorn and Thomas Bernhard wrote under the pseudonym Constance Delaunay.

#6242

Amy MacDonald

#105385

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Amy MacDonald is an American author of children's books. Her works include Little Beaver and the Echo, which has been translated into 28 languages around the world, and Rachel Fister's Blister. Her first book, a satire of Jill Krementz's children's books, was A Very Young Housewife.

#6243

Steve Orlen

#174887

Overall Influence

1942 - 2010 (68 years)

Steve Orlen was an American poet and professor at the University of Arizona. He was visiting professor at the University of Houston, Goddard College, and Warren Wilson College. Orlen was a co-founder of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona and a 1967 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#6244

Malcolm Andrew

#172816

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Malcolm Andrew is an author, teacher and scholar who was previously Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen's University Belfast. He started teaching at Queen's in 1985, before which he had worked at the University of East Anglia. He retired in 2007. He also served as Head of School , Dean of Humanities , and Pro-Vice-Chancellor .

#6245

Charles Gordone

Charles Gordone

#138925

Overall Influence

1925 - 1995 (70 years)

Charles Edward Gordone was an Americann playwright, actor, director, and educator. He was the first African American to win the annual Pulitzer Prize for Drama and he devoted much of his professional life to the pursuit of multi-racial American theater and racial unity.

#6246

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#107796

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Thorsten J. Pattberg is a German philologist and cultural critic from Peking University. He is the author of the East-West Dichotomy. Background Pattberg studied Asian Studies and Sanskrit at the University of Edinburgh and Linguistics at Fudan University and Peking University. He is a former Researcher at the University of Tokyo and Harvard University. He received his PhD degree from Peking University in 2012. He is a disciple of Ji Xianlin and Tu Weiming.

#6247

Jerome J. Workman Jr.

#41088

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jerome J. Workman Jr. is an American analytical spectroscopist, author, editor, and inventor born on August 6, 1952, in Northfield, Minnesota. Jerry Workman, Jerry Workman, Jr., and J.J. Workman are also names he uses for publishing.

#6248

K.E. Allen

#178503

Overall Influence

K. E. Allen is an American poet. Life K.E. Allen received her B.A. in English from Seattle University and M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Center, Kenyon Review, LIT, Lynx, Poetry Daily, Rivendell, Spinning Jenny, Sycamore Review, Verse.

#6249

Ian McKay

#72937

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Ian McKay is a British writer, art critic, publisher and translator. A former editor of Contemporary Art magazine, and the founder-editor of The Journal of Geography and Urban Research, throughout the 1990s he was best known for his writings on the arts of Eastern Europe, being cited as the first British art critic to emphasize the negative impact of the western art market in that region. Throughout the 1990s and early-2000s, he was a contributor to a wide range of art journals, as well as writing on subjects relating to photography, cinema, and music. Since 2007 his publishing activities have mainly centred on UK Rural Affairs, and the environment however.

#6250

Sarah Colvin

#174695

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Sarah Jean Colvin is a British scholar of German, literary theory, and gender studies. Since 2014, she has been Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. She previously held the Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh , and was Professor in Study of Contemporary Germany at the University of Birmingham , then Professor of German at the University of Warwick .

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