Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#6501

Ellen Sue Miller

#183653

Overall Influence

1967 - 2008 (41 years)

Ellen Miller was an American fiction writer. She was born and raised in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, New York, though lived in New York's East Village for the last 20 years of her life. Miller's novel Like Being Killed was published in 1998 and appeared briefly on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list. Her fiction also appeared in the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Brooklyn Noir, and Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. She was at work on a second, untitled novel at the time of her death.

#6502

Audacia Ray

#169339

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Audacia Ray is an American human sexuality and culture author, who focuses on the influences of modern technology. She is a sex worker rights advocate and leads media skills workshops intended to train sex workers to deal with interviews.

#6503

Michael Waters

#101831

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael Waters is a poet and editor. He currently teaches at Monmouth University, in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He received his BA and MA at The College at Brockport, State University of New York, MFA at the University of Iowa, and PhD at Ohio University.

#6504

Albert Lange Fliflet

#131665

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Albert Lange Fliflet was a Norwegian philologist and translator. He is best known for translating Kalevala. He was born in Inderøy as a son of dean Andreas Vilhelm Agersborg Fliflet and nurse Charlotte Lange . He grew up in Stjørdal and Øvre Sandsvær, and learned Latin, Hebrew, German and English from his parents. He started learning Finnish after the Finnish geology professor Aarne Laitakari visited the district in 1923, catching his interest in the language. The two subsequently wrote letters to each other. Fliflet finished his secondary education in 1926 in Kongsberg, and after enrolling at the Royal Frederick University in the same year, he graduated with the mag.art.

#6505

Charles Ardai

#159038

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Charles Ardai is an American businessman, and writer of crime fiction and mysteries. He is founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a line of pulp-style paperback crime novels. He is also an early employee of D. E. Shaw & Co. and remains a managing director of the firm. He was the former chairman of Schrödinger, Inc.

#6506

Patrick Finglass

#126153

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Patrick J. Finglass is a British classicist of Ancient Greek literature and the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol and former Fifty-Pound Fellow at All Souls College Oxford. His field of research includes Greek lyric poetry and Greek tragedy, with a particular interest in the authors Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Stesichorus. He is a current editor of The Classical Quarterly, and has penned numerous articles and critical editions of Greek texts with extensive commentary.

#6507

Carrie Oeding

#174332

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Carrie Oeding is an American poet. Life She was born and raised in Luverne, in southwestern Minnesota. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and a PhD in Creative Writing from Ohio University. She has taught at Ohio University, University of Houston, and is currently teaching at Bridgewater State University in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

#6508

Karen Mulhallen

#173991

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Karen Mulhallen is a Canadian educator, poet, essayist, critic and editor. She taught English at Ryerson University from 1967 to 2014. She served as the poetry review editor of The Canadian Forum from 1974 to 1979, and their features editor from 1975 to 1988. In 1973, Mulhallen became editor-in-chief of Descant until its closure in 2015.

#6509

KJ Sanchez

#142253

Overall Influence

KJ Sanchez is an American theatre actor, director, and playwright. She is currently an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where she serves as head of the MFA Directing program.

#6510

Caroline T. Schroeder

#146273

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Caroline Theresa Schroeder is professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is an expert on early Christianity. Early life Schroeder is the daughter of Mary M. Schroeder.

#6511

Quinn Eades

#174160

Overall Influence

Quinn Eades is a Senior Lecturer in Gender, Sexuality & Diversity Studies, best known for both academic work and poetry on queer theory and experience. He is particularly known for integrating his trans-masculine perspective into both academic and personal writing.

#6512

Jim Thomas

#173876

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James E. Thomas is an American screenwriter based in California. With his brother John Thomas, he wrote and/or was substantially involved with the screenplays of several films - including Predator and Predator 2 , Executive Decision , Wild Wild West , Behind Enemy Lines and the TV series Hard Time on Planet Earth.

#6513

Peggy Kamuf

#183822

Overall Influence

#6514

Robert Roripaugh

#177922

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Robert Roripaugh was an American poet. He was the poet laureate of Wyoming from 1995 to 2002. He became a professor of English at his alma mater, the University of Wyoming. Roripaugh died on January 2, 2019, in Laramie, Wyoming.

#6515

W. R. Moses

#136633

Overall Influence

1911 - 2001 (90 years)

William Robert Moses was an American poet known for his books Identities, Passage, Double View, Memoir, Edges, Tu Fu Poems, and other works. Biography The son of an itinerant newspaperman, Moses lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and later in Tennessee and Ohio. He was born in Minnesota in 1911.

#6516

Aquilino Cayuela

#87004

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Aquilino Cayuela Cayuela is a Spanish writer, columnist, and professor. He specializes in moral philosophy, politics, bioethics, and theology. He was awarded the Vicente Blasco Ibáñez Narrative Prize in 2008 for his work El hombre de arena. In 2021 he began working as a columnist on matters of international relations in the digital newspaper El Debate.

#6517

Doug Anderson

#166097

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Doug Anderson is an American poet, fiction writer, and memoirist. His most recent book is Horse Medicine . He has written a memoir,'Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery . His honors include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, and the MacDowell Colony. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Connecticut Review, The Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, Field, and The Autumn House Anthology of American Poetry, as well as this year's Contemporary American War Poetry.

#6518

Emilie Pine

#173403

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Emilie Pine is a writer and lecturer in modern drama at University College Dublin . Her story, Notes to self, shows events in her private life. Biography Pine was born in 1978. She lived in Dublin before her family moved to London.

#6519

Richard Kell

#115791

Overall Influence

1927 - 2023 (96 years)

Richard Alexander Kell was an Irish poet, composer and teacher. Biography Kell was born in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, on 1 November 1927, as the second of a Methodist missionary's four children. After early years in India he was educated mainly in Belfast and Dublin, where he graduated from Trinity College. He taught in England, finally as a senior lecturer in English and American literature. He contributed critical essays and poetry reviews to various periodicals , and after retirement co-edited Other Poetry.

#6520

Lisa Downing

#127598

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Lisa Downing is an author and academic. She is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. Downing's work is innovative in its dialogue between the critical humanities and the sciences, especially psychiatry. Her published work focuses principally on theories of sexual perversion and queer theory; the work of Michel Foucault; ethical philosophy and film; and, most recently, the cultural meanings of criminality.

#6521

Susan Rubin Suleiman

#183919

Overall Influence

#6522

Kristin Linklater

#134467

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Kristin Linklater was a Scottish vocal coach, acting teacher, actor, theatre director, and author. She retired from the Theatre Arts Division of Columbia University where she was professor emerita. She taught residential courses in Orkney.

#6523

Karin Lin-Greenberg

#173189

Overall Influence

Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions , won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award . Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University.

#6524

Ashlee Adams Crews

#181518

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Ashlee Adams Crews is an American fiction writer who typically incorporates her rural Middle Georgia roots in her works of literature. Biography Crews was born and raised just outside Sandersville, Georgia. Crews earned an English degree from the University of Georgia and later earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College and State University. She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two daughters and has taught composition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#6525

Joseph C. Harris

#173406

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Joseph C. Harris is Francis Lee Higginson Research Professor in English and Research Professor of Folklore at Harvard University. Career A scholar of Old English, Old Norse, folklore, and mythology, he earned a B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1961, a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1963 , and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969 with a dissertation on Old Icelandic literature . He taught at Stanford and Cornell for thirteen years before returning to Harvard in 1985; he retired in 2012.

#6526

Gary Day

#48617

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Gary Day is a British academic and lecturer in English literature at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has written books on F. R. Leavis, literary criticism and class, and is also co-editor for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Eighteenth Century Literature. Day held a satirical column in Times Higher Education for a number of years and now reviews television programmes for the same publication.

#6527

Shaul Bassi

#160094

Overall Influence

Shaul Bassi is professor of English and postcolonial literature at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He is the director of the Venice Center for Humanities and Social Change. His work has focused on Shakespeare and post-colonial theory. Bassi has also written about the present environmental and social issues of Venice, as well as the city's history.

#6528

Andrzej Tadeusz Kijowski

Andrzej Tadeusz Kijowski

#72703

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Not to be mistaken for Andrzej Kijowski, his father.Andrzej Tadeusz Kijowski is a Polish aesthetician, theatre critic, literary critic, poet and publicist.Commander's Cross of the Polonia RestitutaSon of the writer Andrzej Kijowski. From 1976 to 1989 participated in the democratic opposition. Cooperated with KOR and NOWa . From 1990 to 1994 helped to create the new self-government.

#6529

Bill Bailey

#125303

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Mark Robert Bailey , known professionally as Bill Bailey, is an English musician, comedian and actor. He is known for his role as Manny in the sitcom Black Books and his appearances on the panel shows Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Have I Got News for You, and QI, as well as for his stand-up comedy work. He plays a variety of musical instruments and incorporates music into his performances.

#6530

Kari edwards

#184003

Overall Influence

1954 - 2006 (52 years)

kari edwards was a poet, artist and gender activist. Her name is written all lowercase. She won the New Langton Arts Bay Area Award in literature and posthumously won a Lambda Literary Award. She authored have been blue for charity ; obedience ; iduna ; a day in the life of p ; a diary of lies, Belladonna #27 ; obLiqUE paRt: colLABorationS ; and post/ .

#6531

Peter Sears

#163130

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Peter H. Sears was an American poet based in Oregon. In 2014, he was named the seventh poet laureate of the U.S. state of Oregon. Literary career Sears was born in New York City on May 18, 1937. He graduated from Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He won the 1999 Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition and the 2000 Western States Poetry Prize for his book of poems, The Brink. His first book-length collection, Tour, was published in 1987. He has also published four chapbooks of poetry and two teaching books, Secret Writing and Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. His work has been published i...

#6532

Mireya Cueto

#145047

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Mireya Cueto was a Mexican puppeteer, writer and dramaturg. She was also co-founder of the national marionette museum Museo Nacional de Títeres in Huamantla, Tlaxcala. Biography Cueto, born on February 3, 1922, in Mexico City, is one of two daughters of artists Lola and Gérman, who were also well-known puppeteers.

#6533

Hans Turley

#110050

Overall Influence

Hans Turley was a literary scholar, known for advancing the role of queer studies within eighteenth-century English literature, especially queer readings of pirate fiction. Turley received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Washington. He taught briefly at Texas Tech University after graduation, then joined the faculty at the University of Connecticut in 1998.

#6534

Wendy James

#127179

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Wendy James is an Australian author of crime and literary fiction. James received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney an MA from University of Technology, Sydney and a PhD from the University of New England, Armidale.

#6535

Wendy Battin

#179261

Overall Influence

1953 - 2015 (62 years)

Wendy Battin was an American poet. Life Wendy Battin was born in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from Cornell University and the University of Washington. She taught at MIT, Smith College, Syracuse University, Boston University, Connecticut College.

#6536

Christine Fell

#129235

Overall Influence

1938 - 1998 (60 years)

Professor Christine Elizabeth Fell OBE taught English at the University of Nottingham from 1971 until 1993. She was awarded a first-class Honors in English from Royal Holloway, University of London and later completed an MA in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at University College London. Professor Fell was Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Nottingham from 1986 to 1989, and Head of the English department from 1990 to 1993. She moved onto become the first Director of Humanities Research Centre in 1994, continuing until her retirement in 1997 due to ill health.

#6537

Dennis List

#100766

Overall Influence

1946 - 2007 (61 years)

Dennis List was a New Zealand poet, editor and novelist. List was born in Wellington to a professional family whose name was originally Liszt but grew up in Rotorua. He became a student at Victoria University of Wellington in 1964 and quickly gained prominence as a writer and editor. His work appeared in Argot, Experiment, Frogslegs, Salient, Poetry Broadsheet, NZ University Arts Festival Yearbook, Poetry New Zealand and other literary magazines.

#6538

Eve MacDonald

#102833

Overall Influence

Eve MacDonald is a Canadian classicist and archaeologist who specialises in social history. She is a Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University. MacDonald previously worked at the Universities of Edinburgh and Reading. In 2015 she published Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life with Yale University Press.

#6539

Marjorie Kowalski Cole

#107268

Overall Influence

1953 - 2009 (56 years)

Marjorie Kowalski Cole was an American writer of poetry, short stories and novels. She won the 2004 Bellwether Prize with her first novel Correcting the Landscape. History Born in Boston, Cole lived in Alaska from 1966 until her death. She earned a BA and an MA in English from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MLS in Library Science from the University of Washington. She worked as a librarian and for a time as an instructor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, retiring in 1999 to focus on writing.

#6540

Ken Dodd

#125768

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd was an English comedian, singer, and occasional actor. He was described as "the last great music hall entertainer", and was primarily known for his live stand-up performances.

#6541

David Diamond

#177073

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

David Diamond is an American screenwriter. He frequently collaborates with David Weissman. Early life Diamond was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Diamond and Weissman met in high school, at Akiba Hebrew Academy . They graduated in 1983.

#6542

Irene Lemos

#156194

Overall Influence

Irene S. Lemos is a British classical archaeologist and academic, specialising in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Greece. She is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

#6543

Andrew Feldherr

#181711

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Andrew Feldherr is professor of classics at Princeton University from where he also earned his bachelor's degree. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Selected publications Spectacle and Society in Livy's History. University of California Press, 1998.The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge University Press, 2009.Playing Gods: Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton University Press, 2010.The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600. Oxford University Press, 2011.

#6544

Maja Solar

#162892

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Maja Solar is a Serbian poetress and Marxist-feminist philosopher. Biography Maja Solar studied philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad, graduated with Magister thesis on Darwin and Essentialism in 2008 and obtained her doctorate as PhD with thesis on The problem of ownership in Rousseau’s and Marx's philosophy in 2014. She was assistant at the department of philosophy of the university, specialized in philosophy of economics with focus on Marxism, political philosophy, philosophy of science and feminist theory from 2009–14.

#6545

R. R. R. Smith

#89429

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Roland Ralph Redfern "Bert" Smith, is a British classicist, archaeologist, and academic, specialising in the art and visual cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Since 1995, he has been Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford.

#6546

Thee Kian Wie

#57554

Overall Influence

1935 - 2014 (79 years)

Thee Kian Wie was an Indonesian economist, academic and senior member of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences . The Jakarta Post has called him "one of Indonesia’s most respected economists." He was also a long time lecturer at the University of Indonesia's Faculty of Economics.

#6547

John Glenday

#175030

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

John Glenday grew up in Monifieth. Life John lives in Angus, with his wife Erika. His work appeared in Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Poetry , The Scotsman, The Guardian, Financial Times, Wascana Review, Ploughshares, Candlestick Press and Magma to name but a few.

#6548

Valentin Yezhov

#177245

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Valentin Ivanovich Yezhov was a Soviet and Russian screenwriter, playwright, writer and professor at VGIK. Early years Valentin Yezhov was born in Samara, Russian SFSR into a Russian family. His father Ivan Vasilyevich Yezhov came from the Belye Kolodezi village . As a Red Army soldier he took part in battles against the Czechoslovak Legion and was heavily wounded in action. While in a hospital he met Anna Ivanovna Maskalina, a senior nurse who later became his wife. Valentin was a premature child born after seven months of pregnancy. He was named after the character of the Faust opera that m...

#6549

Linda Leavell

#177928

Overall Influence

Linda Leavell is an American writer, scholar, and professor. Her biography of Marianne Moore won the PEN Weld Award for Biography and the Plutarch Award. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

#6550

George Makana Clark

#121319

Overall Influence

George Makana Clark is a writer born in Rhodesia and living in the United States. He is the author of the 2011 novel The Raw Man, as well as "The Center of the World", a short story for which he won the 2006 O'Henry Prize. Clark teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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