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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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#651

Kenneth Dover

#8367

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Sir Kenneth James Dover, was a distinguished British classical scholar and academic. He was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1976 to 1986. In addition, he was president of the British Academy from 1978 to 1981, and chancellor of the University of St Andrews from 1981 to 2005. A scholar of Greek prose and Aristophanic comedy, he was also the author of Greek Homosexuality , a key text on the subject.

#652

Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn

#2737

Overall Influence

1941 - 2012 (71 years)

Alexander Claud Cockburn was a Scottish-born Irish-American political journalist and writer. Cockburn was brought up by British parents in Ireland, but lived and worked in the United States from 1972. Together with Jeffrey St. Clair, he edited the political newsletter CounterPunch. Cockburn also wrote the "Beat the Devil" column for The Nation, and another column for The Week in London, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

#653

Tom Mankiewicz

#8477

Overall Influence

1942 - 2010 (68 years)

Thomas Frank Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures and television whose credits included James Bond films and his contributions to Superman: The Movie and the television series Hart to Hart. He was the son of Joseph Mankiewicz and nephew of Herman Mankiewicz.

#654

Jeffrey Angles

#17181

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

is a poet who writes free verse in his second language, Japanese. He is also an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern Japanese poetry and fiction into English. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.

#655

Walter Kerr

#7232

Overall Influence

1913 - 1996 (83 years)

Walter Francis Kerr was an American writer and Broadway theatre critic. He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, generally on the subject of theater and cinema.

#656

Mikhail Epstein

Mikhail Epstein

#5881

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mikhail Naumovich Epstein is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His writings encompass Russian literature and intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, the creation of new ideas in the age of electronic media, semiotics, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. His works have been translated into over 26 languages.

#657

Jacob M. Appel

#1397

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Jacob M. Appel is an American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics, and euthanasia. Appel's novel The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. He is the director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and medical education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and he practices emergency psychiatry at the adjoining Mount Sinai Health System. Appel is the subject of the...

#658

Calvert Watkins

#11209

Overall Influence

1933 - 2013 (80 years)

Calvert Watkins was an American linguist and philologist, known for his book How to Kill a Dragon. He was a professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and after retirement went to serve as professor-in-residence at UCLA.

#659

Helen Edmundson

#4983

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Helen Edmundson is a British playwright, screenwriter and producer. She has won awards and critical acclaim both for her original writing and for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage and screen.

#660

Luis Valdez

#6326

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Luis Miguel Valdez is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and playwriting, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.

#661

Hermann Zapf

#2929

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Hermann Zapf was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Palatino, Optima, and Zapfino. He is considered one of the greatest type designers of all time.

#662

Fredson Bowers

#6903

Overall Influence

1905 - 1991 (86 years)

Fredson Thayer Bowers was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing. Career Bowers was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard University . He taught at Princeton University before moving to the University of Virginia in 1938.

#663

Susan Sontag

#8888

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation , On Photography , Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others, as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now , The Volcano Lover , and In America .

#664

William Boyd

#8172

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. Biography Boyd was born in Accra, Gold Coast , to Scottish parents, both from Fife, and has two younger sisters. His father Alexander, a doctor specialising in tropical medicine, and Boyd's mother, who was a teacher, moved to the Gold Coast in 1950 to run the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast, Legon . In the early 1960s the family moved to western Nigeria, where Boyd's father held a similar position at the University of Ibadan. Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria and, at...

#665

Leo Ou-fan Lee

#12416

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Leo Ou-fan Lee is a Chinese commentator and author who was elected Fellow of Academia Sinica in 2002. Lee also was a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Princeton University, Indiana University, University of Chicago, University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard University.

#666

David Damrosch

#18889

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Damrosch is an American literary historian, was born in Maine and raised there and in New York, currently the Ernest Bernbaum Professor at Harvard University and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

#667

Mary Louise Pratt

#10531

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mary Louise Pratt is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 1970, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1971, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1975.

#668

Dennis Cooper

#13171

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist. He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000 and described by Tony O'Neill "as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted." Cooper is the founder and editor of Little Caesar Magazine, a punk zine, that ran between 1976 and 1982.

#669

Charles Wright

#10887

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Charles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States.

#670

Mary Beard

#3626

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.

#671

Carol Shields

#11047

Overall Influence

1935 - 2003 (68 years)

Carol Ann Shields, was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.

#672

Jennifer Egan

#15210

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the president of PEN America.

#673

Wally Lamb

#15552

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Wally Lamb is an American author known as the writer of the novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, both of which were selected for Oprah's Book Club. He was the director of the Writing Center at Norwich Free Academy in Norwich from 1989 to 1998 and has taught Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Connecticut.

#674

Deborah E. McDowell

Deborah E. McDowell

#23828

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Deborah E. McDowell is a scholar, author and member of the University of Virginia faculty since 1987 where she serves as the Alice Griffin professor of Literary Studies. In 2008 professor McDowell was named director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, at the University of Virginia.

#675

André Brink

#9259

Overall Influence

1935 - 2015 (80 years)

André Philippus Brink was a South African novelist, essayist and poet. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town. In the 1960s Brink, Ingrid Jonker, Etienne Leroux and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the significant Afrikaans dissident intellectual and literary movement known as Die Sestigers . These writers sought to expose the Afrikaner people to world literature, to use the Afrikaans language to speak out against the extreme Afrikaner nationalist and white supremacist National Party-controlled government, and also to introduce literar...

#676

Malorie Blackman

Malorie Blackman

#10844

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Malorie Blackman is a British writer who held the position of Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues. Her critically and popularly acclaimed Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional alternative Britain to explore racism. Blackman has been the recipient of many honours for her work including, most recently, the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize.

#677

Minae Mizumura

#18018

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

is a Japanese novelist. Among other literary awards, she has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize. Early life Born into a middle-class family in Tokyo, she moved to Long Island, New York at the age of twelve. Her years of reading and re-reading European literature during her childhood in post war Japan, and modern Japanese literature while attending American high school, later became the foundation for her novels. After studying studio art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and French at Sorbonne in Paris, she went on to Yale College, majoring in French. W...

#678

Scott Adams

#1189

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Scott Raymond Adams is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of business, commentary, and satire. Adams worked in various clerical roles before he became a full-time cartoonist in 1995. While working at Pacific Bell in 1989, Adams created Dilbert; by the mid-1990s the strip had gained national prominence in America and began to reach a worldwide audience. Dilbert remained popular throughout the following decades, spawning several books written by Adams and becoming a cultural touchstone until it was dropped from syndication.

#679

Bernard Knox

#12228

Overall Influence

1914 - 2010 (96 years)

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen. He was the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. In 1992 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Knox for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

#680

Russell Hoban

#8414

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Russell Conwell Hoban was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London from 1969 until his death.

#681

Jane Smiley

#10866

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres . Biography Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from Community School and from John Burroughs School. She obtained a BA in literature at Vassar College , then earned an MA , MFA , and PhD from the University of Iowa. While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996 she was a Professor of English at Iowa State University, teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops.

#682

Mary Gaitskill

#11309

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories , and The O. Henry Prize Stories . Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior and Veronica , which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

#683

Eugene England

#15579

Overall Influence

1933 - 2001 (68 years)

George Eugene England, Jr. , usually credited as Eugene England, was a Latter-day Saint writer, teacher, and scholar. He founded Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the oldest independent journal in Mormon Studies, with G. Wesley Johnson, Paul G. Salisbury, Joseph H. Jeppson, and Frances Menlove in 1966, and cofounded the Association for Mormon Letters in 1976. He is also widely known in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for his many essays about Mormon culture and thought. From 1977–1998, England taught Mormon Literature at Brigham Young University. England described the...

#684

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye

#15725

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.

#685

Hans Egon Holthusen

#18334

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Hans Egon Holthusen was a German Nazi, lyric poet, essayist, and literary scholar. Holthusen was born in Rendsburg the Province of Schleswig-Holstein, the son of a Protestant clergyman. He studied German philology, history, and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen, Berlin, and Munich, gaining reputation as a Rilke scholar with the publication of his Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus: Versuch einer Interpretation in 1937, at the age of 24.

#686

Rainbow Rowell

#16106

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Rainbow Rowell is an American author known for young adult and adult contemporary novels. Her young adult novels Eleanor & Park , Fangirl and Carry On have been subjects of critical acclaim. She was the writer of the 2017 revival of Marvel Comics' Runaways and is currently the writer for She-Hulk.

#687

Kim Scott

#9055

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Kim Scott is an Australian novelist of Aboriginal Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the Noongar people of Western Australia. Biography Scott was born in Perth in 1957 and is the eldest of four siblings with a white mother and an Aboriginal father.

#688

Laurie Lee

#6399

Overall Influence

1914 - 1997 (83 years)

Laurence Edward Alan Lee, was an English poet, novelist and screenwriter, who was brought up in the small village of Slad in Gloucestershire. His most notable work is the autobiographical trilogy Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning , and A Moment of War . The first volume recounts his childhood in the Slad Valley. The second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1935, and the third with his return to Spain in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigades.

#689

Terry McMillan

#7134

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Terry McMillan is an American novelist. Her work centers around the experiences of Black women in the United States. Early life McMillan was born in Port Huron, Michigan. She received a B.A. degree in journalism in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. She also attended the Master of Fine Arts program in film at Columbia University.

#690

Rubén Bonifaz Nuño

Rubén Bonifaz Nuño

#16740

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Rubén Bonifaz Nuño was a Mexican poet and classical scholar. Born in Córdoba, Veracruz, he studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1934 to 1947. In 1960, he began lecturing in Latin at the UNAM's Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and received a doctorate in Classics in 1970. Among his publications are translations of works by Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius and others into Spanish; his translation of Vergil's Aeneid was particularly well received.

#691

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

#15180

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

#692

Jerome Rothenberg

#12705

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Jerome Rothenberg is an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry. Early life and education Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in New York City, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, and is a descendant of the Talmudist rabbi Meir of Rothenburg. He attended the City College of New York, graduating in 1952, and in 1953 he received a Master's Degree in Literature from the University of Michigan. Rothenberg served in the U.S. Army in Mainz, Germany from 1953 to 1955, after which he did further graduate study at Columbia University, finishing in 1959.

#693

Dale Spender

#8547

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dale Spender was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation". She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987. Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the cont...

#694

Joxe Azurmendi

#3037

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Joxe Azurmendi Otaegi is a Basque writer, philosopher, essayist and poet. He has published numerous articles and books on ethics, politics, the philosophy of language, technique, Basque literature and philosophy in general.

#695

Naomi Alderman

#11215

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.

#696

Karl Shapiro

#9025

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.

#697

Rae Armantrout

#15969

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including poetry and prose. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed which was also nominated for the National Book Award. Versed later received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

#698

George V. Higgins

#13559

Overall Influence

1939 - 1999 (60 years)

George V. Higgins was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, raconteur and college professor. He authored more than thirty books, including Bomber's Law, Trust, and Kennedy for the Defense, and is best known for his bestselling crime novels, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which established the Boston noir genre of gangster tales that spawned several popular films by followers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

#699

Walter Benn Michaels

#14848

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist and author whose areas of research include American literature , Critical Theory, identity politics, and visual arts. Known for challenging the "prevailing trends of postmodernist theory," Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism, and socioeconomic inequality. Two of his best-known books are Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History —the latter being adopted from his 2001 essay of the same name.

#700

Mimi Reisel Gladstein

Mimi Reisel Gladstein

#5495

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Mimi Reisel Gladstein is a professor of English and Theatre Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her specialties include authors such as Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck, as well as women's studies, theatre arts and 18th-century British literature. In 2011 she was named to the El Paso Historical Hall of Honor.

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