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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#6301

Annemarie Jacir

Annemarie Jacir

#128994

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Annemarie Jacir is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and producer. Career Filmmaking Jacir has been working in independent cinema since 1998 and has written, directed and produced a number of award-winning films. Two of her films have premiered as Official Selections in Cannes, one in Berlin and in Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Telluride. All three of her feature films were selected as Palestine's Oscar Entry for Foreign Language Film. Her short film, like twenty impossibles was the first Arab short film to ever be an official selection of the Cannes International Film Festival and...

#6302

Teolinda Gersão

#88837

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Teolinda Gersão is a Portuguese writer. Born in Coimbra, she studied at the universities of Coimbra, Tübingen and Berlin. She also taught at the Technical University of Berlin, Lisbon University, and the Universidade de Lisboa, among others. A full-time writer since the mid-1990s, Gersao is the author of more than a dozen books. She has won several literary prizes for her work. Her novel The Word Tree set in colonial Mozambique, was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa.

#6303

James Dodson

#54114

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James Dodson is an American sports writer. He is currently a Writer-in-Residence for The Pilot newspaper, an editor of PineStraw magazine in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and an editor of the arts and culture magazine of the Carolina Sandhills. He also serves as Founding Editor of O. Henry Magazine, the arts and culture sister publication in Greensboro, North Carolina, Dodson's hometown, and Salt Magazine in Wilmington, North Carolina.

#6304

George Guțu

#173139

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

George Guțu is a Romanian philologist, teacher in the Department of German Language and Literature of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. He is also director of the Paul Celan Center for Research and Excellence and the Master programme "Intercultural Literary and Linguistic Communication Strategies" , initiated by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures together with other departments of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His academic activity is based on the history of German literature ; German and Austrian contemporary lite...

#6305

Cusi Cram

#140079

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Cusi Cram is an American playwright, screenwriter, actress, model, director, educator, and advocate for women in the arts. Early life Cusi Cram was born in Manhattan, New York, on September 22, 1967, to Lady Jeanne Campbell, daughter of Ian Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll and Janet Gladys Aitken, and granddaughter of Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook; Lady Jeanne was married at the time to John Cram III, a descendant of railroad developer Jay Gould. Her biological father, however, was Bolivian and worked at the United Nations. She identifies as Latina and has written extensively about her Latin...

#6306

V. P. Sivakumar

#168702

Overall Influence

1947 - 1993 (46 years)

Vazhappilliyil Padmanabhan Nair Sivakumar , commonly identified as V. P. Sivakumar, was an Indian writer and translator, known for bringing in a new sensibility in Malayalam literature through his short stories. Besides four short story anthologies, he published a compilation of satirical articles and translated several works of Jorge Luis Borges and Eugène Ionesco into Malayalam.

#6307

Stephen Lewis

#105839

Overall Influence

1936 - 2015 (79 years)

Stephen Lewis , credited early in his career as Stephen Cato, was an English actor, comedian, director, screenwriter and playwright. He is best known for his roles as Inspector Cyril "Blakey" Blake in On the Buses, Clem "Smiler" Hemmingway in Last of the Summer Wine and Harry Lambert in Oh, Doctor Beeching!, although he also appeared in numerous stage and film roles.

#6308

Frank Huyler

#127603

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Frank Huyler is an emergency physician, poet and author in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is best known for his book The Blood of Strangers: True Stories from the Emergency Room which has been translated into a number of languages.

#6309

Christopher Thompson

Christopher Thompson

#138512

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Christopher Thompson is a French actor, screenwriter, and film director. Early life Thompson comes from a family deeply associated with theatrical arts. He is the son of film director and screenwriter Danièle Thompson, and his maternal grandfather is director Gérard Oury ; his sister is the actress Caroline Thompson. He is married to actress Géraldine Pailhas. They have two children.

#6310

Rosemary Harris

#105847

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Rosemary Jeanne Harris was a British author of children's fiction. She won the 1968 Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Harris was born in London in February 1923, the daughter of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and his wife, Barbara Daisy Kyrle Money. She attended school in Weymouth, and then studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Chelsea School of Art and the Courtauld Institute. She served in the British Red Cross Nursing Auxiliary Westminster Division during World War II and subsequently worked as a picture restorer and as a reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer....

#6311

Ylljet Aliçka

#124665

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Ylljet Aliçka is an Albanian writer and scriptwriter, mostly known as the author of the novel The Stone Slogans, and the controversial novel A Story With Internationals, which satirizes the diplomatic elite accredited in transition countries.

#6312

Hank Heifetz

#158256

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Henry S. Heifetz is an American poet, novelist, documentarian, critic, and translator. He has published poems in various collections and journals, one novel, critical writings on film and other topics, numerous translations of Spanish to English, and translations of ancient Sanskrit and Tamil poetry into American English verse. His translation of Kalidasa's "Kumarasambhavam," entitled "The Origin of the Young God", was selected as one of the twenty-five best books of the year by the Village Voice in 1990. Heifetz has lived and traveled extensively in India, Latin America, Europe, and Turkey, and he has translated works in several languages, including Spanish, Tamil, and Sanskrit.

#6313

Cho Taeil

#179178

Overall Influence

1941 - 1999 (58 years)

Cho Taeil was a Korean poet. He was one of the poets who actively engaged in social matters during the Yushin era, and led the Minjung poetry in the 1970s along with Shin Kyeongrim and Kim Jiha. He launched a poetry magazine, Siin and played a leading role in establishing the Council of Writers for Freedom and Practice.

#6314

Rudy Andeweg

#59197

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Rudolf Bastiaan "Rudy" Andeweg is a former Professor of Empirical Political Science at Leiden University. He has written on political psychology, voting behavior, political elites, political leadership, comparative politics and political institutions.

#6315

Hideki Noda

#169253

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Hideki Noda is a Japanese actor, playwright and theatre director who has written and directed more than 40 plays in Japan, and is working to bring modern Japanese theatre to an international audience.

#6316

Xu Xin

#97477

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Xu Xin is a professor at Nanjing University and China's leading Judaic scholar, as well as the founder and director of the Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China.

#6317

Yoshiko Noguchi

#147654

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Yoshiko Noguchi is one of the leading researchers on Grimm's Fairy tales in Japan. She is a professor of German, comparative literature, cultural studies, children's literature, folklore, and gender studies. She is a professor emeritus at Mukogawa Women's University and a professor at division of children's literature, graduate school of Letters, Baika Women's University. She was born in Osaka and her maiden name is Hiiragi . She is different from other researchers in that she discusses how Grimm's fairy tales are accepted in Japan and the UK from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has recently unraveled a long-standing mystery in the history of German-Japanese cultural exchange.

#6318

Ralph Pomeroy

#114777

Overall Influence

1926 - 1999 (73 years)

Ralph Pomeroy was an American poet. Biography Born in Evanston, Illinois, and raised in Winnetka, Illinois. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois. At eighteen he had already published poems in "Poetry", which was one of the leading poetry magazines in America at the time. He pursued painting in Paris, France, in the 1940s, and then worked as an editor, art critic, curator and exhibiting artist in New York City. In the 1950s he was active in San Francisco's poetry scene, although he was not a Beat poet. The New York Times published his poetry on five separate occasions in 1968 and 1969.

#6319

Brenda DoHarris

#175076

Overall Influence

Brenda Chester DoHarris is a writer and academic from Guyana. Career Doharris was born in Georgetown, British Guiana and attended Bishops' High School on scholarship. Her education and experience growing up in rural Kitty were a major influence on her writing.

#6320

Kotiganahalli Ramaiah

#146874

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kotiganahalli Ramaiah is a Dalit poet, playwright, philosopher and cultural activist from Karnataka, India. He is one of the founders of Aadima, an institution that experiments with children's theatre, film, education and caste consciousness.

#6321

Rachel Feldhay Brenner

#171617

Overall Influence

1946 - 2021 (75 years)

Rachel Feldhay Brenner was a Polish-born college professor, writer, and scholar of Jewish literature. She was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2007 to 2009. Early life and education Rachel Feldhay was born in Zabrze, Poland, the daughter of Michael Feldhay and Helena Feldhay. She moved to Israel with her family in 1956. She earned a bachelor's degree at Hebrew University, a master's degree at Tel Aviv University, and a PhD at York University.

#6322

Debra Marquart

#177112

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University , she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone." She is the Poet Laureate of Iowa since 2019.

#6323

Jeffrey Stanley

Jeffrey Stanley

#165541

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Jeffrey Stanley is a playwright born in Roanoke, Virginia. He began writing in elementary school, and graduated from New York University Tisch School of the Arts Undergraduate Film & TV Program and Graduate Dramatic Writing Program. He was also a fellow at Yaddo, a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, an Amtrak Residency for Writers recipient, and a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar.

#6324

Michael Squire

#123876

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Michael Squire FBA is a British art historian and classicist. He became the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge in 2022. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

#6325

Brad Vice

#125522

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Brad Vice is an English language and composition professor at the University of West Bohemia. He grew up in Alabama. His short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press, but the award was later rescinded and the book recalled after portions of the story were alleged to be plagiarized from an earlier work by Carl Carmer. Academics still disagree on whether this was really an instance of plagiarism; in 2013, it became apparent that Vice had been one of the victims of a minor writer turned Wikipedia edi...

#6326

Mark O'Connor

#147432

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Mark O'Connor is an Australian poet, writer, and environmental activist. He is the author of twelve books of poetry on regions of Australia such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Blue Mountains, often collaborating with renowned nature photographers. He has also written two books on the issue of overpopulation, This Tired Brown Land and, more recently, Overloading Australia . He has been a staunch advocate of incorporating quality poetry into civil celebrant ceremonies as evidenced for them in his professional development sessions.

#6327

Lew Hunter

#150359

Overall Influence

1935 - 2023 (88 years)

Lewis R. Hunter was an American screenwriter, author, and educator. He was chairman Emeritus and Professor of Screenwriting at the UCLA Department of Film and Television. Over half of the Oscar winning scripts over the past twenty years have been written by students of Hunter. His former students and advocates include such people as Adrienne Parks, Allison Anders, David Koepp, Mike Werb, Sacha Gervasi, Dan Pyne, David Titcher, James Dalessandro, Diane Saltzberg, Michael Colleary, Don Mancini, Kathy Stumpe, Darren Star, Alexander Payne and Tom Shadyac. Other students include Chuck Loch, Paige...

#6328

Mark Ellis

#144512

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Mark Ellis is an American novelist/graphic novelist, journalist, and comics creator who under the pen name James Axler has written scores of books for the Outlanders and Deathlands paperback novel series as well as numerous other books under his own name.

#6329

Neil Baldwin

#164178

Overall Influence

Neil Baldwin is a poet, critic, cultural historian, biographer, arts executive, and emeritus professor in the College of the Arts at Montclair State University. Early life and education Neil Baldwin - a fourth-generation New Yorker – was born on June 21, 1947. The eldest of four sons of David S. Baldwin, MD , and Halee Baldwin , he grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near Central Park, and went to neighborhood public schools. From 1961-1965, Baldwin attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, N.Y., where he wrote theatre, book and jazz reviews for the student newspaper, The Record...

#6330

Jennifer Cornell

#181286

Overall Influence

Jennifer C. Cornell is a Northern Ireland – American short story writer. Life She graduated from University of Ulster with an MA, and Cornell University with an MFA in 1994. She teaches at Oregon State University.

#6331

Mark W. Smith

#76670

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Mark W. Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, a former professor of law, and the founding partner of a Rockefeller Center-based law firm in New York City. Smith is a regular political and legal commentator in the national media and is a former semi-professional baseball player.

#6332

Cyrus Hamlin

#176048

Overall Influence

1936 - 2011 (75 years)

Cyrus Hamlin was a Yale professor emeritus who is well-recognized for his contributions to the study of European Romanticism and literary theory. Early life Hamlin was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Phillips Exeter and Harvard College, where he graduated magna cum laude. He was a descendant of Cyrus Hamlin .

#6333

Mary Ashun

#129207

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Mary A. Ashun is a Ghanaian-Canadian educator, author and researcher; she is principal of Ghana International School in Accra, Ghana. Education Mary Ashun was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1968 as Mary Asabea Apea to Emmanuel Apea, former diplomat with the Commonwealth Secretariat in London and UN Ambassador and Coordinator to Nigeria and ECOWAS, and Emma Elizabeth Apea a teacher.

#6334

Héloïse Côté

#140429

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Héloïse Côté is a Québécoise author of fantasy novels and a researcher in the sciences of education. Biography Héloïse Côté began studying in 1998 for a Bachelor of Science in Education at Laval University in Quebec. Rather than teaching high school at the end of her undergraduate studies, as she had originally planned, she continued at Laval for her master's degree. She accumulated four annual citations on the honour roll of the Faculty of Education, and another on the honour roll of the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Côté also won the prize for the best Master's dissertation and the Raymond-...

#6335

Diana Spencer

#151177

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Diana Jane Spencer is an Irish classical scholar. She is Professor of Classics and dean of liberal arts and natural sciences at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on how ancient Romans articulate and explore their own identity.

#6336

Nora Decter

#33892

Overall Influence

Nora Decter is an instructor at the University of Winnipeg and an award-winning author. She won the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for fiction for her novel How Far We Go and How Fast. The Kobo Prize comes with a $10,000 cash award.

#6337

Jim Dingley

#166654

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Jim Dingley is a researcher and promoter of Belarusian culture in the UK as well as a translator of Belarusian literature. Early life Dingley was born in Leeds on 24 March 1942. After studies of Russian and other Slavonic languages at the University of Cambridge, he became a lecturer at the University of Reading and then the University of London.

#6338

Alper Görmüş

#72705

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Ahmet Alper Görmüş is a Turkish journalist and writer, formerly a columnist for Taraf and Yeni Aktüel. He was the editor-in-chief of the news weekly Nokta . He was previously a contributor to Aydınlık , working outside journalism in a variety of roles after it was closed down following the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. He resumed journalism at Nokta , and was then editor-in-chief of Yeni Aktüel . He received the Hrant Dink International Award in 2009, with Amira Hass.

#6339

Susan Johnson

#155441

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Susan Johnson is an American author of numerous New York Times bestselling sexually explicit romance novels. She is unusual among romance writers for providing footnotes in some of her novels. Bibliography

#6340

Carol Guess

#111658

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Carol Guess is an American poet and fiction writer. Her work emphasizes compression, musicality, and experimental structure. Biography Guess attended Columbia University, majoring in English while studying ballet. She later earned graduate degrees in Creative Writing and English from Indiana University. Currently Professor of English at Western Washington University, she lives in Bellingham, WA. Guess identifies as queer and was a member of the Lesbian Avengers in the 1990s. Her books Homeschooling, Femme's Dictionary, and Gaslight were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Switch was a finalist for the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award in 1999.

#6341

Daniel Alexander Jones

#116946

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Daniel Alexander Jones is an American performance artist, playwright, director, essayist and educator. Birth Jones was born on February 9, 1970, to Georgina Leslie Jones and Arthur Leroy Jones at Wesson Women's Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts.

#6342

Jeffrey Masten

#164436

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Jeffrey A. Masten is an American academic specializing in Renaissance English literature and culture and the history of sexuality. He is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles. Masten's book Queer Philologies was awarded the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book in the field of early modern drama by the journal SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in English Literature for 2022.

#6343

Judith Baumel

#99314

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Judith Baumel is an American poet. Life She grew up in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science. She graduated from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, studying with Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert B. Shaw, James Richardson, and Jane Shore. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Richard Howard, Cynthia Macdonald, and David St. John. She taught at Boston University, and Harvard University.

#6344

Judith Merkle Riley

#39174

Overall Influence

1942 - 2010 (68 years)

Judith Merkle Riley was an American writer, teacher and academic who wrote six historical romance novels. Biography Judith Astria Merkle was born in 1942 and grew up in Livermore, California. Her great-uncle was baseball player Fred Merkle. Her father, Theodore Charles Merkle, ran Project Pluto, and her brothers, Ted Merkle DVM is a well respected veterinarian serving Shasta County, Ralph is a pioneer in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. She earned a MA from Harvard University and held a Ph.D. from the University of C...

#6345

Elizabeth Minchin

#108968

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Elizabeth Hume Minchin is an Australian classicist and former professor of classics at the Australian National University . Until 2014 she was one of the two editors of Antichthon, the journal of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies.

#6346

Hanni Ossott

#169960

Overall Influence

1946 - 2002 (56 years)

Hanni Ossott was a Venezuelan poet, translator and critic. Life She was born in Caracas and she received her bachelor's degree in the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where she was also a professor. She was awarded the José Antonio Ramos Sucre Prize and the Lazo Martí Prize and she worked as a translator and a critic.

#6347

William Sewell

#155301

Overall Influence

1951 - 2003 (52 years)

William Seymour Sewell was a New Zealand poet. He was a Burns Fellow at Otago University, Dunedin in 1981–82. He was a frequent reviewer of books, particularly for the periodical New Zealand Books, to which he was appointed co-editor in 1997. He was also a book editor. He died of cancer in Wellington.

#6348

Manuel Guerra Gómez

#115101

Overall Influence

1931 - 2021 (90 years)

Manuel Guerra Gómez was a Spanish writer and religious figure. Biography Gómez was a consultant for the Spanish Episcopal Conference and a member of the . He specialized in classical antiquity, religious history, and Freemasonry, on which he wrote numerous books and articles. He was a co-founder of the in 2005. He was the author of La trama masónica, which denounced the Masonic affiliation of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

#6349

Pumla Dineo Gqola

#102302

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Pumla Dineo Gqola is a South African academic, writer, and gender activist, best known for her 2015 book Rape: A South African Nightmare, which won the 2016 Alan Paton Award. She is a professor of literature at Nelson Mandela University, where she holds the South African Research Chair in African Feminist Imaginations.

#6350

Michael Walsh

#120489

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael A. Walsh is an American music critic, author, screenwriter, media critic, historian, and cultural-political consultant. Career Walsh began his journalism career as a reporter and later music critic in 1972 at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in upstate New York. He was named chief classical music critic of the San Francisco Examiner in November 1977, where in 1980 he won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism. He became music critic of Time magazine in the spring of 1981, where his cover story subjects included James Levine, Vladimir Horowitz and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He...

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