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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#6451

John T. Flanagan

#121290

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

John Theodore Flanagan was a professor of literature at the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois who specialized in early literature of the Midwest. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and earned a bachelor, master, and PhD degrees from the University of Minnesota.

#6452

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

#108296

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès is a French writer. He was born in Sidi bel Abbes in Algeria. He has lived and worked in Brazil, Taiwan and Libya. He is best known for his novel Where Tigers Are at Home which won the Prix du roman Fnac, the Grand prix Jean Giono, and the Prix Médicis. It has been translated into English by Mike Mitchell.

#6453

Jacques Robert

#86034

Overall Influence

1921 - 1997 (76 years)

Jacques Robert was a French author, screenwriter and journalist. Biography Jacques Robert was born on 27 June 1921 in Lyon, France. He started his writing career as a journalist. In May 1945 Jacques Robert was the only Western journalist to descend into Hitler's bunker in Berlin, Germany. During his career he wrote more than 40 books and novels. Around 20 of his novels have been adapted for cinema, notably The Long Teeth directed by Daniel Gélin, Marie-Octobre directed by Julien Duvivier and Someone Behind the Door with Charles Bronson and Anthony Perkins. Jacques Robert was also a prolific s...

#6454

Verónica Reyes

#177876

Overall Influence

Verónica Reyes is a Chicana, Latina, LGBT poet from East Los Angeles, California. She is known for her book of poetry Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives, which won her several awards. In 2014, she was honored with the International Latino Book Award and the Golden Crown Literary Society Award, and was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. In 1999, she won the AWP Intro Journals Project award and was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

#6455

Gillen Wood

#118084

Overall Influence

Gillen D'Arcy Wood is Professor of Environmental Humanities and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is originally from Australia, the son of H. D'Arcy Wood and a grandson of A. Harold Wood. He studied at Monash University in Melbourne and received his Ph.D from Columbia University in New York City under a Fulbright scholarship and has published extensively on nineteenth-century environmental history, art and literature.

#6456

Todd Hasak-Lowy

#166805

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Todd Hasak-Lowy is an American novelist, essayist, non-fiction and short story writer. Currently, he is a professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of Florida before moving to Evanston, Illinois to focus on writing. His first book, The Task of this Translator , a short story collection, was published in 2005. His first novel, Captives, appeared in fall 2008. 33 Minutes, his first middle-grade novel, was published in 2013, and Me Being Me is Exactly as Insane as You Being You, his first young adult novel was published in 2015.

#6457

Virginia MacKenny

#138656

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Virginia MacKenny is a South African artist and writer. She is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa.

#6458

Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira

#38833

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira is a Brazilian journalist and feminist writer. Biography She was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944, she graduated in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In the 1960s, she began her professional career as a journalist at Revista Senhor, Jornal do Brasil, Revista Visão and O Globo.

#6459

Josep Maria Nadal i Farreras

Josep Maria Nadal i Farreras

#79442

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Josep Maria Nadal i Farreras is Professor of History of Language at the University of Girona. Biography He graduated in Romance Philology at the University of Barcelona and is Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona since 1975. He worked at this university for sixteen years, where he became Professor in 1987 and he held several management positions. From this position he promoted the creation of the University of Girona, which happened in December 1991. He was Chancellor of this new university from 1993 to early 2002. He has also been Chair of the Department of Language and Communication from 2009 to 2012.

#6460

Helen Morales

#182100

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Dr Helen Morales is a classicist and the second Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is best known for her scholarship on the ancient novel, gender and sexuality, and Greek mythology, as well for her public writing and lectures.

#6461

Louis S. Peterson

Louis S. Peterson

#101047

Overall Influence

1922 - 1998 (76 years)

Louis Stamford Peterson was an American playwright, actor, screenwriter, and professor. He was an American playwright and the first African-American playwright to have a dramatic play produced on Broadway. He was also one of the first African-American writers to be nominated for an Emmy Award.

#6462

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

#168666

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is an Indian feminist scholar, a professor in English, and author of several books on issues related to feminism and gender. Her research interest has covered many subjects such as of the pre and post colonial period, Indian English writing, gender and cultural issues related to South Asia, and the English literature of the Victorian era. She has also edited a series called the "Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism", and "Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India". She has authored many books of which the notable ones are the Scandal of the State: Women, Law...

#6463

Kole Ade-Odutola

#114566

Overall Influence

Kole Ade-Odutola is a Nigerian Yoruba poet, photographer, and academic. He has published several books of poetry, including The Poet Bled and The Poet Fled. He was critical in the founding of the Coalition of Nigerian Artists , that advocates the Nigerian government for better visibility of the arts. He has participated in various events pushing for greater rights and access to the arts and free speech in Nigeria.

#6464

C. W. Smith

#176550

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

C. W. Smith is a novelist, short-story and essay writer who serves as a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University. Early life C. W. Smith was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and grew up in Hobbs, New Mexico. He received a B.A. in English from the University of North Texas in 1964 and an M.A. in English from Northern Illinois University in 1967. After teaching at Southwest Missouri State University, he moved to Mexico for a year to work on his first novel, Thin Men of Haddam. Published by Viking/Grossman in 1973, the book won the Jesse H.

#6465

Tzvetan Todorov

#183153

Overall Influence

#6466

Samiya Bashir

#143783

Overall Influence

Samiya A. Bashir is an American lesbian poet and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

#6467

Glyn O'Malley

#165054

Overall Influence

1951 - 2006 (55 years)

Glyn William O'Malley was an American playwright. Glyn O'Malley was born in Providence and grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. His initial involvement with theatre was with the R. I. Governor's School for the Gifted in the Arts, a summer program for high school students. This led to programs of study at Trinity Square Repertory in Providence. He went on to a degree from the School of Drama at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

#6468

Tlaloc Rivas

#77317

Overall Influence

Tlaloc Rivas is a Mexican-American writer, producer, and theatre director. He is one of the co-founders of the Latinx Theatre Commons, which works side by side with HowlRound to revolutionize American theater and to highlight and promote the contributions and presence of Latinos in theatre. Central to Rivas' work is the Latino experience, but also exploring the American experience through the lens' of underrepresented voices. Rivas focuses on writing and directing plays that significantly explore Latino identity and history. Additionally, Rivas has also translated and adapted plays from the S...

#6469

Danièle Chatelain

#116157

Overall Influence

Danièle Chatelain is a professor of French and a writer. She holds master's degrees from the University of Strasbourg and the University of California, Riverside, where she also got a Ph.D. in 1982. She is a professor of French at the University of Redlands.

#6470

Philip Martin

#164176

Overall Influence

1931 - 2005 (74 years)

Philip John Talbot Martin was an Australian academic, poet, translator, critic and broadcaster. Born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, Martin graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1958. He taught English at Monash University from 1964. His poems have been published, anthologised and broadcast both in Australia and overseas.

#6471

Carolina López-Ruiz

#172316

Overall Influence

Carolina López-Ruiz is a Spanish classicist specializing in comparative mythology, Ancient Mediterranean religions, Greek language and literature, North-West Semitic languages and literatures, and cultural exchange. She has authored several works on the Phoenician civilization, and contacts between Greek and Near Eastern cultures.

#6472

Do Jong-hwan

#151647

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Do Jong-hwan is a Korean poet and politician. He is a member of the South Korean National Assembly and former Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism. He was also the interim president of the Democratic Party from 8 to 16 April 2021.

#6473

Murasaki Yamada

#144887

Overall Influence

1948 - 2009 (61 years)

Murasaki Yamada, born as Mitsuko Shiratori, was a Japanese manga artist, feminist essayist and poet. She was associated with the alternative manga magazine Garo. Life She made her debut as a professional manga artist in 1969 in Osamu Tezuka's avantgarde magazine COM and had formal art training before becoming a manga artist. When COM stopped being published, she started working for Garo magazine instead. Her first short story in Garo was "Aa Seken-sama" in 1971. For another short story, "Kaze no Fuku Koro", she won a Honorable Mention at the Big Comic Award associated with the Big Comic magazi...

#6474

Fred Fangyu Wang

#165442

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Fred Fangyu Wang was a Chinese calligrapher, art collector, and a Professor of Chinese at Yale University and Seton Hall University. Biography Wang was born in Beijing in 1913, and emigrated to United States of America in 1945. Fred was an alumnus of the Catholic University in Beijing and Columbia University in New York City. In the 1940s he worked with Henry Courtenay Fenn on Chinese grammar at the Institute of Far Eastern Languages at Yale. He taught Chinese language and literature between 1945 and 1965 at Yale. At Seton Hall University, he was the chairman of the department of Asian studies and founder and curator of the Wang Fangyu Collection of Asian Art.

#6475

George Wallace

#112135

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

George Henry Wallace is an American comedian and actor. Early life and education Wallace was born in Atlanta, Georgia to Mary Lou and George Wallace Sr. Wallace was educated at Lynwood Park Elementary School and Lynwood Park High School. His mother died when he was sixteen, prompting him to move to Ohio where he found a job with Firestone Tire. As part of the company's tuition reimbursement program, Wallace enrolled in the University of Akron, in Akron, Ohio. He studied transportation, marketing and advertising.

#6476

Anthony McCann

#134196

Overall Influence

Anthony McCann is an American poet. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including Father of Noise, Moongarden, and I ♥ Your Fate. He is also the author of Gentle Reader!, a book of erasures of the English Romantics, written with fellow poets Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he teaches poetry at California Institute of the Arts and University of Southern California. He is also the acting Poet Laureate of Machine Project.

#6477

Sarah Maddison

#38510

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sarah Maddison CF is an Australian author and political scientist. Education Maddison has a PhD in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Career She is a former Director of GetUp! and the 2018–19 president of the Australian Political Studies Association. She was awarded a very large grant from the SEROS Foundation which was withdrawn under unclear circumstances.

#6478

Daniel Karlin

#99322

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Daniel Karlin is a British literary scholar. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied for his BA and PhD . He was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford , and held appointments at University College London , Boston University , University of Sheffield , and University of Bristol , where he was Winterstoke Professor of English Literature. He retired in 2020 and was appointed Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Bristol. In the same year he was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy. His research interests i...

#6479

Peter Telep

#119367

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Peter Telep is an American author, screenwriter, and educator who has collaborated with the late Tom Clancy. He has written over 50 books, and written scripts for multiple television shows. He is currently a teacher at The University of Central Florida.

#6480

Kevin McLaughlin

#178681

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Kevin McLaughlin is an American scholar of comparative literature.Currently he is at the George Hazard Crooker Distinguished University as Professor of English, Professor of comparative studies and German studies, and Dean of the Faculty at Brown University. He is also a published author.

#6481

Kim Nyeon-gyun

#183409

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Kim Nyeon-gyun is a Korean poet. Since his debut in 1972, he has been active as a poet, writer, and essayist. He has also served various Korean literary organizations, such as being a board member of the Korean Centre of PEN International and the board director of the Korean Writers' Association. Kim's poetry depicts lives of pain and suffering on the surface, but paints the joy and beauty of life through the desire for resurrection and renewal on the inside.

#6482

Brian Clark

#135794

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Brian Robert Clark was a British playwright and screenwriter, best known for his play Whose Life Is It Anyway?, which he later adapted into a screenplay. Biography Clark was born on 3 June 1932 in Bristol, United Kingdom, the son of a blacksmith. Clark was educated at the University of Nottingham. He married Maggie Clark, his first wife, and raised two sons. Clark taught in schools, colleges and universities and was a member of the Drama Department at the University of Hull from 1968 to 1972.

#6483

Maura Stanton

#138084

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Maura Stanton , is an American poet, and writer. Biography Maura Stanton was born to Joseph Stanton, a salesman, and Wanda Haggard Stanton, a nurse, in Evanston, Illinois. She received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1969, and her M.F.A. in 1971 from the University of Iowa.

#6484

Sebastian de Grazia

#40313

Overall Influence

1917 - 2000 (83 years)

Sebastian de Grazia was an American philosopher who was Professor of Political Philosophy at Rutgers University. He received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1989 book Machiavelli in Hell.

#6485

Brian Shaw

#93515

Overall Influence

1928 - 1992 (64 years)

Brian Shaw was a British ballet dancer and teacher. As a leading dancer with the Royal Ballet during the 1950s and 1960s, he was widely regarded as "one of the finest classical male dancers of his generation".

#6486

Lisa Gorton

#155054

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion , and Empirical. Her novel The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, and the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction . Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.

#6487

Bob Merrill

#156081

Overall Influence

1921 - 1998 (77 years)

Henry Robert Merrill Levan was an American songwriter, theatrical composer, lyricist, and screenwriter. He was one of the most successful songwriters of the 1950s on the US and UK single charts. He wrote musicals for the Broadway stage, including Carnival! and Funny Girl .

#6488

Siomara España

#178656

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Siomara España Muñoz is an Ecuadorian poet, essayist, professor and literary critic. She is director of the area of Literature of the House of Culture Núcleo del Guayas. Trajectory She is the author of six books and other works, with a critical and essay style within Ecuadorian literature. She has also collected poems from her previous publications in an anthology in which she has added some unpublished verses.

#6489

Oliver Mayer

#145570

Overall Influence

Oliver Mayer is an American playwright, professor, author, essayist and screenwriter currently residing in Los Angeles, California with his wife, the actress Marlene Forte. He is currently employed with the University of Southern California School of Dramatic Arts as a tenured professor of dramatic writing as well as an Associate Dean of Faculty and Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives. Some of his written works include the plays Blade to the Heat, Members Only and Yerma in the Desert along with several other works which have brought him attention in part for their regular addressing of issues of sexuality and gender rights.

#6490

Robert Garland

#101864

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Robert S.J. Garland is a British classical philologist and historian. He is currently the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor of the Classics at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Biography Robert Garland earned his Bachelor of Arts in Classics at Manchester University, and later his Master of Arts in Classics at McMaster University. He received his doctorate in Ancient History from University College London. Garland has been a Fulbright Scholar and received the George Grote Ancient History Prize. He is a professor at Colgate University, and has taught at the British School of Ar...

#6491

Paul Smyth

#156435

Overall Influence

1944 - 2006 (62 years)

Paul Smyth was an American poet, writer, and teacher. Background Paul Smyth was born in Boston and raised in Holliston, Massachusetts. At the age of sixteen, he left home to hitchhike across the North America. During this time, he spent time in Mexico, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Provincetown. It was in Massachusetts that he got his first writing job as a freelancer for the New Beacon Newspaper.

#6492

Timothy Behrens

#104842

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Timothy John Behrens was a British painter who spent most of his professional life as a painter and a writer abroad, in Greece, Italy, and Spain. Early life Timothy John Behrens was born in London on 2 June 1937, the son of Michael Behrens, a financier, and later co-owner of Ionian Bank, and his wife Felicity. They lived in a Nash terrace overlooking Regent's Park, and in 1949 bought Culham Court, a large house in Berkshire on the river Thames. He was educated at Eton and the Slade School of Fine Art.

#6493

David T. Runia

#100818

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

David Theunis Runia is a Dutch-Australian classical scholar and educational administrator who has worked in both Australia and the Netherlands. Early life Runia was born in the Noordoostpolder, the Netherlands. At the age of four he emigrated to Australia when his father Klaas Runia took up a chair at the Reformed Theological College in Geelong. After attending Newtown State School and The Geelong College, he studied Classics at the University of Melbourne from 1969 to 1976 and was a resident of Queen's College from 1969 to 1971. In 1977 he returned to the Netherlands, where he obtained his do...

#6494

David Bailey

#71135

Overall Influence

David Bailey is a British editor and author whose published output to date comprises a combination of short stories, audio dramas and magazine articles. Biography Both before and since being professionally published, Bailey contributed to a number of Doctor Who fanzines in writing and editorial capacities, including Matrix, Silver Carrier and Cottage Under Siege.

#6495

Tom Marshall

#173178

Overall Influence

1938 - 1993 (55 years)

Thomas Archibald Marshall was a Canadian poet, critic and novelist. Born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, he grew up in the United States. He was educated at Queen's University in Kingston, where he received his MA in 1965, writing his thesis on poet A. M. Klein. Marshall taught at the institution from 1964 until his death.

#6496

Doris Runge

#129998

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Doris Runge is a German writer. She was the daughter of a manufacturer whose business was expropriated after World War II. Her family moved to Neukirchen in Schleswig-Holstein in 1953, and he attended schools in Oldenburg and Lübeck before following high education in Kiel where she became a teacher. She married the painter Jürgen Runge and they divorced in 1981. They couple used to live partially in Ibiza during the 1970s. Runge moved back to Germany where she lives in the so-called Weiße Haus in , Holstein. She organizes there readings with important contemporary authors. Runge has been continuously publishing poetry books since 1981.

#6497

Janine Joseph

#123682

Overall Influence

Janine Joseph is a Filipino-American poet and author. Early life and influences Janine Joseph was born in the Philippines. Her father, at the time, worked for President Corazon Aquino. He held a strong belief that if they stayed then their children would never learn the values of hard work and would inherit the social and economic status that their family had in the Philippines. In 1991, Joseph and her family immigrated to California on tourist visas, where the family had previously visited multiple times before. First settling in Riverside, California, then in Arizona.

#6498

Frederick M. Combellack

#183618

Overall Influence

1906 - 2002 (96 years)

Frederick Malcolm Combellack was an American classicist. He was a professor of Greek literature at the University of Oregon. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1942. He served on the board of directors of the American Philological Association in 1962, and he became its president in 1968.

#6499

Andrea Brady

#163158

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary. She studied at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge Her academic work focuses on contemporary poetry and the early modern period. She is the curator of the Archive of the Now and the co-editor of Barque Press.

#6500

Lloyd Kropp

#177571

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Lloyd Edward Kropp was an American novelist, composer, and educator. Kropp achieved popular acclaim after the publication of his third and fourth novels One Hundred Times to China and Greencastle. Greencastle was nominated for a Penn/Faulkner Award and was named to one of the American Library Association's "Best Books of the Year" lists in 1985. For this novel the author received the "Illinois Author of the Year" award from the Illinois Association of Teachers of English . His books have been favorably reviewed in many journals and newspapers in the United States, Great Britain, and Spain.

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