The Most Influential People Across History
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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#7101
Clara Royer
#184472
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Clara Royer is a French writer and screenwriter. Her first novel, entitled Csillag, was published in 2011. She is the co-writer of the 2015 Hungarian film Son of Saul, which won the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards.
Go to Profile#7102
Flore Zéphir
#171240
Overall Influence
1958 - 2017 (59 years)
Flore Zéphir was a Haitian American academic and author. Biography The daughter of Sylla Zéphir and France Garoute, she was born in Jérémie, Haiti. Zéphir came to the United States in 1975. She received a BA in French and Education from Hunter College in New York City and received two MAss and a PhD in French linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington. She has been teaching in the Romance Languages and Literatures department of the University of Missouri since 1988; she was department chair from fall 2008 to summer 2014. From August 2008 to December 2016, she was director of the Afro-Romance Institute at the University of Missouri.
Go to Profile#7103
John Trenwith
#137113
Overall Influence
1951 - 1998 (47 years)
John Francis Ernest Trenwith was a New Zealand writer, humorist and academic. He was principal lecturer, Advertising, Auckland Institute of Technology. He wrote two comic novels, A50 among the Angels and A50 Revs Up.
Go to Profile#7104
Hong Shin-seon
#191270
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hong Shin-seon is a Korean poet. His writing career dates back to the 1960s, when he was active as a modernist poet. During the 1970–80s, his poetry engaged critically with the politics of the time. From the 1990s, Hong's focus shifted to Buddhist thought, and the serial poem Maeumgyung , which was written over a period over twenty years, is considered his major work.
Go to Profile#7105
Ralph J. Mills Jr.
#129080
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Ralph J. Mills Jr. was an American poet, scholar and professor. Life Ralph Joseph Mills Jr. was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 16, 1931. His father was Ralph J. Mills, president of the Mills Novelty Company in Chicago and his mother was Eileen McGuire, whose family owned Beloit Dairy in Chicago. He and his sister, Anne , grew up in Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois.
Go to Profile#7106
Richard Robbins
#123284
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Richard Robbins is an American poet. He grew up in Southern California and Montana. He graduated from San Diego State University, and University of Montana, with an M.F.A. in 1979, where he studied with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees. Before his recent retirement, he taught for 37 years at Minnesota State University, Mankato,
Go to Profile#7107
Rion Amilcar Scott
#190946
Overall Influence
Rion Amilcar Scott is an American short story writer. He won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for his 2016 book Insurrections. Life Scott was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. His parents are from Trinidad and came to the United States to study at Howard University. He graduated from George Mason University and teaches at The University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#7108
John Thompson
#126576
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
John Anderson Thompson, Jr. was an American professor, poet, literary critic and writer whose literary career spanned sixty years, from 1938 to 1998. Early life Thompson was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His father, John Anderson Thompson, owned and operated a typewriter store there. His mother, Grace George, was active in promoting early childhood education. She died when he was five years old, a devastating loss and the subject of his posthumously published novel Things to Put Away.
Go to Profile#7109
Lee Byeong-cheon
#191599
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Lee Byeong-cheon is a South Korean novelist, poet, children's book author, and producer. His works are often based on real events. For example, his short story “Holidei” is a fictional retelling of the “Ji Kang Hun Incident,” a nationally broadcast hostage crisis in 1988 where four prison escapees held a family captive in Seoul. Ji Kang Hun, one of the escapees, became famous for shouting “Not guilty if you’re rich, guilty if you’re poor!” during the standoff with police and trying to commit suicide on camera as he listened to the song “Holiday” by Bee Gees. The short story begins with one of the policemen at the standoff marrying a hostage after the incident.
Go to Profile#7110
Imke David
#189561
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Imke David is a German viol player, author, Professor and Ensemble-Member. Early life David grew up in Erlangen in a musical family. As a six-year-old she was a member of the seven-member viol ensemble made up of her family members.
Go to Profile#7111
Sheila May Edmonds
#57194
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Sheila May Edmonds was a British mathematician, a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and Vice-Principal of Newnham College from 1960 to 1981. Early life and education Born in Kingston, Kent, Edmonds studied at Wimbledon High School and entered Newnham College, Cambridge in 1935 to study for the Mathematical Tripos. At this time women could attend lectures and sit examinations but were not permitted to graduate with a degree. She had an excellent undergraduate career and finished Part II as a "Wrangler", Cambridge nomenclature for a student achieving a First Class award. Edmonds followed this with a Distinction in Part III, and then studied for a PhD with G.
Go to Profile#7112
Christopher Lewis
#188042
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Paul Lewis was an American writer and film producer, primarily for television, also known for his involvement in a child pornography scandal in 1973. Family Christopher Lewis was the elder son of Hollywood actress Loretta Young and Hollywood producer Tom Lewis. His younger brother is Peter Lewis, one of the founding members of the seminal 1960s rock band Moby Grape. Christopher and Peter Lewis were the half-brothers of actress Judy Lewis , daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable. Their aunts were the actresses Polly Ann Young and Sally Blane, who were sisters of Loretta Young. Musician David Lindley is their cousin.
Go to Profile#7113
Xawery Stańczyk
#104569
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Xawery Tadeusz Stańczyk is a Polish poet, sociologist and essayist. Life Xawery Stańczyk was born in 1985 in Poland. His debut poetry book Skarb piratów was nominated to Nike Award. The reviews of his work have been published in Newsweek, Dwutygodnik and Art Papier amongst others. His main fields of interest are popular music, social movements, youth culture, and public spaces in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe.
Go to Profile#7114
Randall Reid
#191361
Overall Influence
1931 - 1992 (61 years)
Randall C. Reid was a literary critic and fiction writer who served as a director and dean of Deep Springs College, and taught at The University of Chicago, University of Nevada, Reno, and San Diego State College. He is the author of The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer, No Promised Land , the novel Lost and Found, and several short stories, including Detritus, selected for the O'Henry Prize Stories 1973. He was born in Paso Robles, California, attended Deep Springs College and San Francisco State University, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#7115
Veronica Gonzalez Peña
#191671
Overall Influence
Veronica Gonzalez Peña is an American writer and filmmaker, and is a faculty member at Stetson University, Florida. Biography In 2006 she founded rockypoint Press, a series of artist/writer collaborative prints, books, and films.
Go to Profile#7116
Matt Clark
#177906
Overall Influence
1967 - 1998 (31 years)
Matt Clark was a prolific short story writer and the author of the novel Hook Man Speaks. He held an MFA from Louisiana State University, and while a graduate student there, he was a fiction editor of the New Delta Review. He became the director of the graduate writing program at LSU at the age of 29, and he died of liver and colon cancer in 1998 at the age of 31.
Go to Profile#7117
Catherine Nakalembe
#128341
Overall Influence
Catherine Nakalembe is an Ugandan remote sensing scientist and an associate research professor at the University of Maryland in the Department of Geographical Sciences and the NASA Harvest Africa program Director. Her research includes drought, agriculture and food security.
Go to Profile#7118
Don Lind
#31300
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Don Leslie Lind was an American scientist, naval officer, aviator, and NASA astronaut. He graduated from the University of Utah with an undergraduate degree in physics in 1953. Following his military service obligation, he earned a PhD in high-energy nuclear physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964.
Go to Profile#7119
Steven Jack Land
#39392
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Steven Jack Land is a Canadian renewal theologian within the Pentecostal movement who began serving as the president of the Church of God Theological Seminary, now Pentecostal Theological Seminary, in 2002. He is the first president of the institution to have been selected from the seminary faculty. He began teaching full-time in 1979 and is currently Distinguished Professor of Pentecostal Theology. Land received the B. A. in psychology from Birmingham-Southern College in 1968, the M.Div. from Candler School of Theology, Emory University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in theological studies from Em...
Go to Profile#7121
Cara Cilano
#184360
Overall Influence
Cara Cilano is currently the chair professor of English at Michigan State University and also a published author of articles and books, being largely collected by libraries worldwide. She previously held the Fulbright Visiting Professor at University of Graz.
Go to Profile#7122
Alessandro Carrera
#191764
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alessandro Carrera is an Italian poet and translator. He is Director of Italian Studies and Graduate Director of World Cultures & Literatures at the University of Houston. See also Peter Carravetta External links Alessandro Carrera
Go to Profile#7123
Michael Galvin
#184577
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Michael Galvin is a New Zealand actor, singer and playwright, well known for his role as Chris Warner on the soap opera Shortland Street, a character he has played almost since the show's debut in 1992 until 1996 and again from 2000 to present, and remains as of 2023, the only original cast member. He is the longest serving television soap opera actor in New Zealand.
Go to Profile#7124
Manabu Murakami
#191778
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Manabu Murakami is a Japanese scholar specializing in medieval Japanese literature. Publications Works cited
Go to Profile#7125
Franklin White
#69767
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Peter Franklin White was a British ballet dancer, a principal dancer with Ballet Rambert and The Royal Ballet . Early life Franklin White was born in Shoreham, Kent, England, the son of artist Franklin White and violinist Olga White, née Hart.
Go to Profile#7126
Virginia Walcott Beauchamp
#160290
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Virginia Walcott Beauchamp was an American educator and writer who was the founding coordinator of the Women's studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Walcott was born in Sparta, Michigan, the daughter of two teachers. She earned a B.A. in English at the University of Michigan in 1942, and after serving with the Red Cross during World War II, she returned to Michigan to complete an M.A. in 1948. She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 1955.
Go to Profile#7127
Janine Tavernier
#174584
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Janine Tavernier was a Haitian poet, novelist and academic.
Go to Profile#7128
Margaret C. McCulloch
#159979
Overall Influence
1901 - 1996 (95 years)
Margaret Callender McCulloch was a writer, teacher, and activist during the civil rights movement. McCulloch authored several books and articles on race relations and the segregation of African Americans, as well as two biographies. Her most influential books included Segregation, a Challenge to Democracy and Integration: Promise, Process, Problems. The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana houses McCulloch's articles, speeches, and correspondences.
Go to Profile#7129
Ragnhild Nilstun
#182974
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ragnhild Nilstun is a Norwegian novelist, children's writer and literary critic. She was born in Lofoten, is a philologist by education, and has worked at the University of Tromsø. She made her literary debut in 1979 with the novel Etterbyrden, with descriptions of postnatal depression. The novel was also adapted for theatre and staged at Fjernsynsteatret. In 1988 she published the short story collection Begjærets pris. The novel For mitt blikk depicts life in Finnmark and Troms in the late nineteenth century, and is the first in a trilogy which also includes For kjærlighets skyld , and Min lange reise ender her .
Go to Profile#7130
Jeannine Savard
#121425
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jeannine Savard is an American poet, born in the Adirondack Mountain Region of New York State. Her poems are lyrical and involve and reflect the lush region of the country, as well as the Sonoran Desert where she has lived since the 1980s as an Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University.
Go to Profile#7131
Bill Lee
#172057
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
William Lee is an American writer. He is the author of three books. He is a former member of the San Francisco Chinatown gang that was responsible for the 1977 Golden Dragon massacre. Biography Lee grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown, and went to Marina Middle School, Galileo High School and was a student majoring in psychology at San Francisco State University when he joined the Chung Ching Yee, also known as the Joe Boys.
Go to Profile#7132
Morri Creech
#178195
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Morri Creech is an American poet. He earned a BA at Winthrop University and an MA and MFA at McNeese State University. His collection The Sleep of Reason was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and his collection Field Knowledge won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from Waywiser Press. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Go to Profile#7133
Mélissa Verreault
#170747
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Mélissa Verreault is a Canadian writer and translator from Montreal, Quebec. She is most noted as the winner of the Governor General's Award for English to French translation at the 2022 Governor General's Awards for Partie de chasse au petit gibier entre lâches au club de tir du coin, her translation of Megan Gail Coles's novel Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.
Go to Profile#7134
Geoff Gibbs
#159412
Overall Influence
1940 - 2006 (66 years)
Geoffrey George Gibbs was an Australian actor and acting teacher. Biography Gibbs was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia in 1940, and was educated at Aquinas College, Perth. He studied for bachelor's and master's degrees in arts at the University of Western Australia, and later a PhD from Ohio State University in the United States.
Go to Profile#7135
Anna Monardo
#84530
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Anna Monardo is an American novelist of the Italian-American experience. Originally from Pittsburgh, she graduated from Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1983. She is a professor of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Go to Profile#7136
Niall Livingstone
#191935
Overall Influence
1966 - 2019 (53 years)
Niall Livingston was a British-South African classical scholar and Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham. He won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose in 1987.
Go to Profile#7137
Karl Muru
#163578
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Karl Muru was an Estonian literary scholar and literary critic. In 1958 he graduated from the University of Tartu. Since 1958 he taught at Tartu University, and became a professor there in 1978. His major work was the Estonian poetry anthology "Sõnarine".
Go to Profile#7138
Kate Fagan
#183155
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Kate Fagan is an Australian poet, musician and academic. Education Fagan attended James Ruse Agricultural High School. She came second in the state in the 1990 New South Wales Higher School Certificate, distinguishing herself in mathematics, modern history, agriculture and English. Initially studying arts/law at university, her academic interests began to focus on literary culture.
Go to Profile#7139
Yim Chol-kyu
#191627
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Yim Chol-kyu is a literary scholar and emeritus professor of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Born in Changnyeong County, South Gyeongsang Province, Yim graduated from Yonsei University, after which he completed his doctoral degree at Indiana University, Bloominton. He returned to teach English Literature at Yonsei University in 1976 until his retirement in 2004. During his tenure, he was heralded as one of Korea's foremost scholars of literary criticism and analysis, especially in the fields of classical literature and critical theory. Following his retirement he has focused on encouraging emerging scholarship as well as continuing literary research.
Go to Profile#7140
James Brasfield
#132947
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
James Brasfield is an American poet and translator. Life He graduated from Armstrong State College, and Columbia University, with an MFA. His work has appeared in AGNI, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, Poetry Wales, The Seattle Review, and The Southern Review.
Go to Profile#7141
Morgan Jenness
#155307
Overall Influence
Morgan Jenness is an American freelance dramaturg based in New York City. Biography For over ten years, Jenness worked at The Public Theater, under both George C. Wolfe and Joseph Papp in roles ranging from literary manager to Director of Play Development to Associate Producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival. They were also Associate Artistic Director at the New York Theatre Workshop, and an Associate Director at the Los Angeles Theater Center in charge of new projects. They have worked with the Young Playwrights Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, the Playwrights Center/Playlabs, the Bay Are...
Go to Profile#7142
Michał Cholewa
#191980
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Michał Cholewa is a Polish fantasy and science fiction writer. His 2014 book Forta won the Janusz A. Zajdel Award. Works Algorytm wojny seriesGambit, WarBook 2012Punkt cięcia, WarBook 2013Forta, WarBook 2014Inwit, WarBook 2016Echa , WarBook 2017Sente, WarBook 2018
Go to Profile#7143
Ron Weighell
#189832
Overall Influence
1950 - 2020 (70 years)
Ron Weighell was a British writer of fiction in the supernatural, fantasy and horror genre, whose work was published in the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, Germany, Ireland, Romania, Finland, Belgium and Mexico. His stories were included in over fifty anthologies and published in six volumes containing his own work exclusively. Weighell is listed as an author in the online Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with a selected bibliography. A short biography and limited bibliography are available in the goodreads.com website. A more extensive bibliography of his published work is available in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
Go to Profile#7144
Rodrigo Pesántez Rodas
#142609
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Rodrigo Abelardo Pesántez Rodas was an Ecuadorian writer and poet. Personal life Pesántez Rodas was born in Azogues. He died on 2 April 2020, in Guayaquil, after contracting COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador.
Go to Profile#7145
Herwig Maehler
#112163
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Herwig Maehler, FBA was a German historian and papyrologist, who specialized in classics and ancient history. Biography He completed his PhD at the University of Hamburg in 1961. In 1975, he completed his Habilitation in classics from the Free University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#7146
Heloísa Teixeira
#191997
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Heloísa Teixeira, formerly known as Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda is a Brazilian writer, essayist, editor and literary critic. Her research activity focuses on the relationship between culture and development, particularly with regard to poetry, feminism, gender and ethnic relations, marginalized cultures, and digital culture.
Go to Profile#7147
Michael Chitwood
#192004
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#7148
Miguel Ángel Hernández
#168863
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer. He teaches art history at the University of Murcia, and has published several books on art and visual culture. He is best known for his fictional works, among them the novels Intento de escapada , which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated in five languages, and El instante de peligro , which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela. His latest novel is El dolor de los demás , selected among the books of the year by El País and The New York Times en Español.
Go to Profile#7149
Roland Viau
#102544
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Roland Viau is a Canadian academic and writer from Quebec. An ethnologist who teaches in the department of anthropology at the Université de Montréal, he is a two-time winner the Governor General's Award for French-language non-fiction at the 1997 Governor General's Awards for Enfants du néant et mangeurs d'âmes – Guerre, culture et société en Iroquoisie ancienne and at the 2016 Governor General's Awards for Amerindia : essais d'ethnohistoire autochtone.
Go to Profile#7150
Egil Pettersen
#191375
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Egil Pettersen was a Norwegian philologist. He was born in Bergen and grew up in Fana. He took the cand.philol. degree in 1950, and was a lecturer at Stockholm University, teacher at Bergen Handelsgymnasium and Bergen Teachers' College. He was hired at the University of Bergen in 1958, and was a professor of North Germanic languages from 1971 to 1989, being a scholar on medieval language. He was a member of the Norwegian Language Council from 1972 to 1991, and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
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