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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#6851

Ryan McIlvain

#185876

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Ryan McIlvain is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of Elders and The Radicals . A former recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, McIlvain is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa.

#6852

Patricia Colleen Murphy

Patricia Colleen Murphy

#183316

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Patricia Colleen Murphy is an American poet and teacher. She founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. She won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry for her second collection Bully Love. She won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award judged by Stephen Dunn, and her poetry collection Hemming Flames was published by University Press of Colorado in summer 2016. Hemming Flames went on to win the 2017 Milt Kessler Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, American P...

#6853

Salim Maush

#185430

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Salim Maush is a Lebanese critic, researcher and academic. He has contributions in literary criticism, language, biography, and prison poetry, and novels. He received honorary certificates, cultural and literary.

#6854

Frank Doyle

#178439

Overall Influence

1917 - 1996 (79 years)

Frank Doyle was the head writer for Archie Comics for over thirty years. He wrote over 10,000 stories featuring the Archie characters. Artist Dan DeCarlo referred to Doyle as "the best". Doyle, one of several Archie contributors who studied art at the Pratt Institute, was originally a penciller for Fiction House comics, working on such titles as Planet Stories. After he was let go from Fiction House, he decided that he was better suited to writing stories: "It was easier," he said. "My mind worked better that way." In 1951 he joined Archie Comics as a writer. Though he no longer drew stories ...

#6855

Sarah Broom

#180484

Overall Influence

1972 - 2013 (41 years)

Sarah Broom was a New Zealand poet, Oxford graduate, university lecturer and mother of three children. Her work included two books of poetry, Tigers at Awhitu and Gleam. After her early death from lung cancer, the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, was established to remember and celebrate her life and work.

#6856

Malcolm Davies

#181540

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Malcolm Davies is a British classicist and textual critic of Ancient Greek literature, and is Emeritus Research Fellow in Classics at St John's College, Oxford. He specialises in the Greek epic cycle, Greek lyric poetry and Greek tragedy, and has edited texts from various ancient Greek poets.

#6857

Elizabeth Wong

#155971

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Elizabeth "Libby" Wong Chien Chi-lien is a former civil servant and politician from Hong Kong, born in Shanghai, China. Wong holds New Zealand citizenship, and is currently residing in Sydney. She is now a popular fiction writer. Her novels in English and Chinese are Rainbow City and its sequel Flower Mountain. Elizabeth's husband is third generation Chinese New Zealanders, Elizabeth settled in Australia some years ago.

#6858

Kwon Teckyoung

#184238

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Teckyoung Kwon is a literary critic, translator and professor in English literature at the School of English, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, ecology, American and British fiction, narrative theory, neuro-humanities, Korean literature and Dao.

#6859

Ransom Stephens

#173495

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Ransom Stephens is an American scientist and author. Professional life As a particle physicist, Ransom Stephens worked on experiments at SLAC, Fermilab , CERN , and Cornell , discovered a new type of matter, and worked on the team that discovered the Top quark. During the tech boom that ended in 2001, he directed patent development for a wireless web startup, and later became an expert on timing noise. His specialty at this time was the analysis of electrodynamics in high-rate digital systems.

#6860

Helga Tawil-Souri

#135358

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Helga Tawil-Souri is a Palestinian-American Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies and a Director of Graduate Studies New York University Steinhardt. Her work focuses on technology, media, culture, territory and politics, with a focus on Palestine and Israel.

#6861

Georg Nicolaus Knauer

#168817

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Georg Nicolaus Knauer was a German-American Vergilian philologist who was a Professor in the Classics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He also previously taught at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1954 to 1974 before becoming a Penn professor the following year. He is best known for Die Aeneis und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils mit Listen der Homerzitate in der Aeneis, published in 1964 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen, which is regarded as a comprehensive work on the influence of Homer upon Vergil. That work explains the similarities between the Aeneid and...

#6862

Elton Glaser

#143039

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Elton Glaser is an American poet. He has published collections of poetry and been published in literary magazines. Life He is a native of New Orleans, is a retired Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English from the University of Akron, and former editor of the Akron Series in Poetry.

#6863

Chin Jung-kwon

#71262

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Chin Jung-kwon is a South Korean aesthetician, critic, and professor. He was born at Gonghang-dong, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul . He has three siblings, two older sisters, and one younger brother. His second oldest sister, Unsuk Chin is well known as contemporary classical composer. In 1982 he entered the School of Aesthetics at Seoul National University, and graduated in 1986.

#6864

Ursula Masson

#122460

Overall Influence

1945 - 2008 (63 years)

Ursula Masson , born Ursula O'Connor, was a Welsh academic and writer who worked closely with Jane Aaron and Honno Press/Gwasg Honno, the Welsh Women's Press, on the imprint Welsh Women's Classics – to bring back into print the works of forgotten Welsh women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

#6865

S. A. Stepanek

#184591

Overall Influence

1960 - 2019 (59 years)

Sally Anna Stepanek was an American poet. She graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop with an M.F.A. and from the University of Houston with a Ph.D. Stepanek taught at Wheaton College. She was on a panel at the 2007 Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Stepanek won the 2005 National Poetry Series award.

#6866

Eirikur Bergmann

Eirikur Bergmann

#89554

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Eirikur Bergmann is an Icelandic academic and writer. He is author of ten academic books and three novels. Early life and education Eirikur Bergmann was born in Reykjavík in 1969 and studied political science at the University of Iceland and Copenhagen University.

#6867

Michael Donovan

#171537

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Michael Patrick Donovan is a Canadian film producer, executive, and screenwriter. Career Salter Street Films Michael Donovan co-founded Salter Street Films with his brother Paul Donovan in 1983. Though the company got off to a slow start, Donovan eventually had major success with projects such as the Canadian satirical comedy series This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

#6868

Ahuvia Kahane

#126940

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Ahuvia Kahane is a British academic working in Ireland, specializing in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, its traditions and the relations between the ancient world and modern culture and thought. Kahane is the 17th Regius Professor of Greek at Dublin, the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He is also Senior Associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.

#6869

David Butler

#170000

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

David Dalrymple Butler was a Scottish writer of numerous screenplays and teleplays who won a Primetime Emmy Award and was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. He specialized in period-piece drama and is particularly remembered for a string of hit British television shows, including Within These Walls, Lillie, We'll Meet Again and Edward the Seventh, as well as for his acting, most specifically as Dr. Nick Williams on British television's first medical soap opera, Emergency - Ward 10 in 1960–62.

#6870

Lada Kaštelan

#187449

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Lada Kaštelan is a Croatian dramatist and screenwriter. Between 1987 and 2007, Kaštelan worked as a dramaturge at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb. Since 2007, she works as a professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb.

#6871

Şirin Tekeli

#58506

Overall Influence

1944 - 2017 (73 years)

Şirin Tekeli was a feminist, academician, translator, writer, activist and one of the pioneers of second wave feminism in Turkey. Career In 1967, she returned to Turkey and became the first female academician to enter the Chair in political science at Istanbul University. In 1973 she obtained her PhD with a thesis on David Easton's System Theory. In 1978, she obtained her associate professor title with her, at the time "controversial", habilitation thesis on women’s participation to politics named "Kadınlar ve Siyasal Toplumsal Hayat". . This thesis, had a great effect on her ideology, she re...

#6872

Eri Watanabe

#162923

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Eri Watanabe, who was previously known as Eriko Watanabe, is a Japanese actress. She won the award for Best Supporting Actress at the 21st Hochi Film Awards for Shall We Dance?. Filmography Films Comic Magazine Crest of Betrayal Shall We Dance? Swing Girls - Sanae SuzukiMemories of Tomorrow Ichi Lady Maiko My Dad and Mr. Ito Survival Family Mary and the Witch's Flower - Banks Talking the Pictures Tezuka's Barbara Romance Doll Labyrinth of Cinema

#6873

Stacey Waite

#173032

Overall Influence

Stacey Waite is a poet—focusing on both slam and written verse—who also works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Waite's poetry often explores themes of the body—of the intersections of gender, sexuality, place and relationships. She has published four collections of poetry over the past several years.

#6874

Ian Buruma

#188687

Overall Influence

#6875

Frances Chung

#68258

Overall Influence

Frances Chung is a Canadian ballet dancer. She is currently a principal dancer at the San Francisco Ballet. Early life Chung was born in Vancouver and is of Chinese descent. Her father worked for an electronic company, her mother was a cook, and her sister works in finance. She started ballet and playing the piano when she was five, at a community centre near her home. She attended Magee Secondary School and trained at Goh Ballet Academy. Though most of Chung's teachers are Chinese, she was trained in multiple dance styles, such as French, Russian and English. She also did contemporary, jazz, and Asian dance.

#6876

Tom McKeown

#101752

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Thomas Shanks McKeown is an American poet and educator. He published his first poetry chapbooks in the late 1960s and continued to develop his reputation as a poet of surrealist sensibilities throughout the 1970s, publishing in major magazines such as The New Yorker.

#6877

Kirstin Chen

#186271

Overall Influence

Kirstin Chen is a Singaporean writer. Biography Kirstin Chen was born and raised in Singapore. She moved to the United States at age 15 to attend boarding school, then attended Stanford University, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Emerson College.

#6878

Lucy C. Turnbull

Lucy C. Turnbull

#180846

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Lucy Curtis Turnbull was an American classics scholar, and director of the University of Mississippi Museums from 1983 to 1990. Early life Lucy Curtis Turnbull was born in Lancaster, Ohio, the daughter of Donald Turnbull and Lucy Taylor Turnbull. She earned a bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1952 and both master's and doctoral degrees from Radcliffe College. She focused her doctoral research on geometric bronzes in Greece, at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

#6879

José Barreiro

#77596

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

José Barreiro is an American novelist, journalist and activist. He is recognized as an advocate of Native community self-determination and autochthonous development . Barreiro is an elder and advisor in the Nación Taina.

#6880

Thomas Devaney

#163870

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Thomas Devaney is an American poet and a 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts. His poem “The Blue Stoop,” which is after a photograph by Zoe Strauss, is also the name of a community literary hub in Philadelphia, founded in 2018. His 2014 book The Picture that Remains with Will Brown is a collaboration between image and text with Devaney’s poems and Brown’s photographs from the early 70’s in Philadelphia. From 2001-2005, he was program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2011, he has taught in the English Department at Haverford College.

#6881

Gwenaëlle Aubry

Gwenaëlle Aubry

#68264

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Gwenaëlle Aubry is a French novelist and philosopher. Biography After two years of preparatory classes at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, Aubry began her studies at the École Normale Supérieure in 1989 at the age of eighteen, earning an agrégation in Philosophy in 1992. She then received the Knox Scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she earned a Master of Philosophy. In 1999 she received a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne.

#6882

Dan Golding

#147169

Overall Influence

Daniel "Dan" Golding is an Australian writer, composer, broadcaster, and academic. Early life and education Golding holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Academic career Golding is Deputy Chair of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Victoria.

#6883

Donald Mastronarde

#187313

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Donald J. Mastronarde is an American classical scholar, currently the Professor of the Graduate School, Emeritus Melpomene Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at University of California, Berkeley and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

#6884

Allal El Hajjam

#128732

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Allal El Hajjam is a poet and professor of Arabic language in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Previously he taught at the School of Arts and Humanities in Meknès. He also taught at the Centers for Teacher Training at Errachidia, Rabat, and Meknès.

#6885

Octavio Escobar Giraldo

#185199

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Octavio Escobar Giraldo is a Colombian physician and writer. He won the International Short Novel Award Ciudad de Barbastro XLV and the National Award for Best Novel from the Ministry of Culture for Después y antes de Dios. His narrative style is substantially influenced by television, music, cinema because, as he himself states, he went more to the movies than to class. He is the Director of the Manizales Book Fair, which he founded in 2009. He is a professor at the graduate school of Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Caldas, located in the city where he was born, Manizales, Colombia.

#6886

Jina Valentine

#177655

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Jina Valentine is a contemporary American visual artist whose work is informed by the techniques and strategies of American folk artists. She uses a variety of media to weave histories—including drawing, papermaking, found-object collage, and radical archiving.

#6887

Kent R. Brown

#116493

Overall Influence

Kent R. Brown was an American playwright and director. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and former Playwright-In-Residence and Adjunct Professor of English at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

#6888

Royal Miller

#188644

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Royal E. Miller is an American television soap opera script writer. He earned a B.A. in literature & society and semiotics from Brown University, an M.F.A. in film direction and screenwriting from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. He has also been the recipient of an ABC/Disney Daytime Writing Fellowship and served an appointment as a lecturer for two years in the undergraduate college at Harvard University.

#6889

Hilda Bastian

#75787

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Hilda Bastian is a health consumer advocate. Starting in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s and moving to Europe and the USA, she is involved in evidence-based medicine and communicating medical science to the public.

#6890

Éric Holder

#176795

Overall Influence

1960 - 2019 (59 years)

Éric Holder was a French novelist. His novels, Mademoiselle Chambon, L'Homme de chevet and were adapted to the cinema in 2009 and 2012. He was awarded several literary prizes, including the Prix littéraire de la vocation , the Prix Fénéon , the Prix Thyde Monnier , the Prix Décembre , the Prix Roger Nimier , and the Prix Service Littéraire . He died on 23 January 2019, aged 58.

#6891

Angie Farrow

#178800

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Angela Rosina Farrow is a New Zealand academic and writer for theatre and radio. Born in the United Kingdom, Farrow was appointed professor emerita at Massey University in November 2022. She was promoted to full professor in 2011 and in the same year was awarded Massey University lecturer of the Year. Farrow has published books on the production of physical theatre as well as her own numerous plays for theatre and radio. In April 2015, her series of 10-minute-long sketches Together All Alone was performed at Bats Theatre in Wellington. In the 2021 New Year Honours, Farrow was appointed an Of...

#6892

Saralyn R. Daly

#137354

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Saralyn Ruth Daly was an American writer and translator. Early life and career Saralyn Ruth Daly was born on May 11, 1924, in Huntington, West Virginia. She earned a Ph.D from Ohio State University in English in 1950. The title of her doctoral dissertation was "The Historye of the Patriarks". After graduation she joined the faculty at Midwestern State University in the early 1950s.

#6893

Øivind Andersen

#186493

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Øivind Andersen is a Norwegian philologist. He was born in Oslo, and took the dr.philos. degree in 1976 with the thesis Paradeigmata. Beiträge zum Verständnis der Ilias. He was appointed as a professor at the University of Trondheim in 1980, and from 1989 to 1993 he was the first director of the Norwegian Institute at Athens. In 1997 he became professor at the University of Oslo. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

#6894

Amy Wright

#185987

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Amy Wright is an American writer and editor. Early life and education Wright was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia in 1997, an M.A. in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver. In 2007, she joined the Creative Writing faculty of Austin Peay State University.

#6895

Fernando Valerio-Holguin

#187789

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Fernando Valerio-Holguin , is a college professor at Colorado State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature and has conducted research on the Caribbean Diaspora, slavery narrative, and post-modern hybridity among music, film, and literature. He has published two poetry books, four books filled with short stories, along with many published essays on the topics of Caribbean culture, literature, and film.

#6896

Daniel Peña

#186147

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Daniel Inouye Peña is a Mexican-American novelist, essayist, and critic frequently published in The Guardian and Ploughshares blogs, as well as several other publications. He received the Pushcart Prize in 2016 for his short story "Safe Home" which appeared in the 2017 Pushcart anthology. His debut novel Bang was originally published on January 30, 2018, through Arte Público Press, a publisher of contemporary literature by Hispanic authors. Peña currently resides in Houston, Texas.

#6897

Sidnie White Crawford

#91568

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Sidnie White Crawford is professor emerita of Classics and Religious Studies at the University Of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. She also taught at St. Olaf College and Albright College. She has also been a visiting professor at Boston College.

#6898

Harry Jocelyn

#155202

Overall Influence

1933 - 2000 (67 years)

Henry David Jocelyn, FBA, FAHA , commonly known as Harry Jocelyn, was an Australian Latinist and classical scholar. He was the Hulme Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester from 1973 to 1996.

#6899

Antonio Velasco Piña

Antonio Velasco Piña

#59805

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

Antonio Velasco Piña was a Mexican novelist, spiritual writer and essayist. He was the founder of La Nueva Mexicanidad, a group advocating the Mexicanism or Mexicanista movement purportedly based on Aztec religion and Aztec Superiority over all other indigenous tribes. The movement is partly inspired by the writings of French anthropologist Laurette Séjourné who specialized on Aztec and Mesoamerican spirituality.

#6900

Kim Myung-su

#187736

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Kim Myung-su is a South Korean poet and writer who is famous for his short lyric poetry in simple language, demonstrating his intuitive insights into real objects. In his early works, he criticized Korean society through allegorical objects that embody our gloomy days and circumstances in a condensed manner. And later, many of his poems mainly related to nature and human beings.

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