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).
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#7901
R. P. Blackmur
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Richard Palmer Blackmur was an American literary critic and poet. Life Blackmur was born and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended Cambridge High and Latin School, but was expelled in 1918. An autodidact, Blackmur worked in a bookshop after high school, and attended lectures at Harvard University without enrolling. He was managing editor of the literary quarterly Hound & Horn from 1928 to 1930, at which time he resigned, although he continued to contribute to the magazine until its demise in 1934.
Go to Profile#7902
Ernest Weekley
1865 - 1954 (89 years)
Ernest Weekley was a British philologist, best known as the author of a number of works on etymology. His An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English has been cited as a source by most authors of similar books over the 90 years since it was published. From 1898 to 1938, he was Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham.
Go to Profile#7903
Robert J. Getty
1908 - 1963 (55 years)
Robert John Getty was a Classicist and expert on the ancient author Lucan. Getty earned an A.B. from Queens University, Belfast, in 1928 and a master's degree from St John's College, Cambridge in 1930, where he was lecturer from 1937–1947. He became professor of Latin at the University of Toronto in 1947. In 1958 he became the first George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#7904
Sheila Coronel
Sheila S. Coronel is a Philippines-born investigative journalist and journalism professor. She is one of the founders of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism . In 2006, she was named the inaugural director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 2014, she was appointed the School's Academic Dean, a position she held until the end of 2020.
Go to Profile#7905
Arnold Wycombe Gomme
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Arnold Wycombe Gomme was a British classical scholar, lecturer for ancient Greek and Greek history , Professor of Greek, University of Glasgow , Fellow of the British Academy . Life He was born to Laurence and Alice Gomme, noted folklore experts. He studied at Merchant Taylor's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1911, he became assistant lecturer for Greek and Greek history at the University of Glasgow. In 1946, he became professor of ancient Greek at the same university.
Go to Profile#7906
Kemp Malone
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Kemp Malone was an American medievalist, etymologist, philologist, and specialist in Chaucer who was lecturer and then professor of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University from 1924 to 1956. Life and career Born in an academic family, Kemp Malone graduated from Emory College as it then was in 1907, with the ambition of mastering all the languages that impinged upon the development of Middle English. He spent several years in Germany, Denmark and Iceland. When World War I broke out, he served two years in the United States Army and was discharged with the rank of captain.
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Louis Booker Wright
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Louis Booker Wright was an American author, educator and librarian. Wright was the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the author of numerous books about the American colonial period, and in 1928 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Go to Profile#7908
Donald F. Bond
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Donald F. Bond was professor emeritus of English at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of the standard edition of The Spectator in five volumes, published in 1965, selections from which may be found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He was also the joint editor of the scholarly edition of the first three volumes of The Tatler. He was a contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was a Guggenheim Fellow.
Go to Profile#7909
Howard Mumford Jones
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Howard Mumford Jones was an American intellectual historian, literary critic, journalist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard University. Jones was the book editor for The Boston Evening Transcript.
Go to Profile#7910
Ángel Rosenblat
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Ángel Rosenblat was a Poland-born Venezuelan philologist, essayist and hispanist of Jewish descent. Life He and his family moved to Argentina when he was six and he spent his whole education there, including at the University of Buenos Aires, where his classmates included Amado Alonso, and in its Institute of Philology, where his teachers included Pedro Henríquez Ureña.
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Nicoletta Momigliano
1900 - Present (126 years)
Nicoletta Momigliano is an archaeologist specialising in Minoan Crete and its modern reception. Early life and education Momigliano was born in Milan, Italy, in 1960, where she attended primary and secondary school. She read Classics at the University of Pisa, where she graduated in 1982. She obtained her MA from the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London , and her PhD from University College London , under the supervision of John Nicolas Coldstream. From 1990 to 1993 she was a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Research Assistant to Ann Br...
Go to Profile#7912
Caroline Spurgeon
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon was an English literary critic. In 1913, she was appointed Hildred Carlisle Professor of English at the University of London and became head of the Department of English at Bedford College, London. She was the first woman to be awarded a chair at the University of London, and only the third in Britain . She co-founded the International Federation of University Women with Virginia Gildersleeve.
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Gleb Struve
1898 - 1985 (87 years)
Gleb Petrovich Struve was a Russian poet and literary historian. Biography Gleb Petrovich Struve was born on 1 May 1898. His father was the political theorist Peter Berngardovich Struve. Struve came from St. Petersburg and joined the Volunteer Army in 1918. Later that year he fled to Finland, then to Britain, where he studied at the University of Oxford until 1921. It was there that he met Vladimir Nabokov, with whom he remained on friendly terms and corresponded until the novelist's death.
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John Neihardt
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
John Gneisenau Neihardt was an American writer and poet, amateur historian and ethnographer. Born at the end of the American settlement of the Plains, he became interested in the lives of those who had been a part of the European-American migration, as well as the Indigenous peoples whom they had displaced.
Go to Profile#7915
Gilbert Norwood
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Gilbert Norwood was a British classical philologist and essayist. Life Gilbert Norwood studied at St John's College of Cambridge University with John Edwin Sandys and Richard Claverhouse Jebb. After completing his Bachelor's degree , he was employed as an Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Manchester. He also completed his master's at Cambridge and was a Fellow at St. John's College from 1906 to 1909.
Go to Profile#7916
Frank Aydelotte
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Franklin Ridgeway Aydelotte was a U.S. educator. He became the first non-Quaker president of Swarthmore College and between 1921 and 1940 redefined the institution. He was active in the Rhodes Scholar program, helped evacuate intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis during the 1930s and served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study during World War II.
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John Berryman
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
Go to Profile#7918
Edith Morley
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Edith Julia Morley, was a literary scholar and activist. She was the main twentieth century editor of the works of Henry Crabb Robinson. She was a Professor of English Language at University College, Reading, now the University of Reading, from 1908 to 1940, making her the first woman to be appointed to a chair at a British university-level institution. She was a socialist and member of the Fabian society, active in various suffrage campaigns, and received an OBE for her efforts coordinating Reading's refugee programme during the Second World War.
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Gabriel Turville-Petre
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was an English philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Born at Bosworth Hall, Leicestershire to a prominent Roman Catholic family, Turville-Petre was educated in English at the University of Oxford under the tutelage of J. R. R. Tolkien. He eventually became Professor of Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford and a leading member of the Viking Society for Northern Research. He was the husband of fellow philologist Joan Turville-Petre, who was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies at Oxford. Turville-Pet...
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Nicholas Vakar
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Nicholas P. Vakar , Belarusian, author of Belorussia: The Making of a Nation. Harvard U. Press. 1956 and The Taproot of Soviet Society. Harper. 1959. A Word Count of Spoken Russian. OSU Press, 1966.
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Yoo Juhyun
1921 - 1982 (61 years)
Yoo Juhyun was a South Korean novelist. He was a prolific writer, having written 26 full-length novels and over 100 novellas and short stories. His early works were mostly devoted to social issues, but the majority of his works since the 1960s are historical novels. Unlike conventional historical novels that focus on entertainment, his novels feature profound historical perspectives. His representative work Joseonchongdokbu has received critical attention for its realistic depiction of the Korean people’s sufferings during the 36 years of Japanese colonial rule.
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William Sale Jr.
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
William Merritt Sale Jr. was a professor of English at Cornell University, considered an authority on 18th-century English literature. After studying at Yale, where Chauncey Brewster Tinker directed his thesis, Sale went on to join the faculty at Cornell in 1936. Named Goldwin Smith Professor of English in 1959, he was named professor emeritus upon retirement in 1968.
Go to Profile#7923
S. Foster Damon
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Samuel Foster Damon was an American academic, a specialist in William Blake, a critic and a poet. When remembered as a Blake scholar, he is often compared in importance to Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman.
Go to Profile#7924
Charles Upson Clark
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Charles Upson Clark was a professor of history at Columbia University. He discovered the Barberini Codex, the earliest Aztec writings on herbal medicines extant. Biography Clark was born in 1875 to Edward Perkins Clark and Catharine Pickens Upson. Throughout his life he was the author of many books on a variety of subjects. Among them was the history of West Indies by Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa translated into English, and the modern history of Romania.
Go to Profile#7925
Horst Frenz
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Horst Frenz was a German-American literary scholar and a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and English at Indiana University. He is known for his works on comparative literature.
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Frederick Morgan Padelford
1875 - 1942 (67 years)
Frederick Morgan Padelford , pronounced Pa-DEL-ford, was an American professor and author. He worked at the University of Washington in Seattle for 41 years. He chaired the English Department and served as dean of the graduate school. The Orbis Cascade Alliance has a collection of his papers.
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Edward Surtz
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Edward L. Surtz, SJ was a professor at Loyola University Chicago and, at the time of his death, rector of the Jesuit house at the university. Life Surtz was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 5, 1909. After graduating B.A. from John Carrol University in 1931, Surtz joined the Society of Jesus and went on to study at Xavier University, graduating M.A. in 1934. "The Religious Aspect of the Poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins" was his master thesis. He was ordained as a priest in 1942, and obtained a doctorate in English from Harvard University in 1948.
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Ignacio Bolívar
1850 - 1944 (94 years)
Ignacio Bolívar y Urrutia was a Spanish naturalist and entomologist, and one of the founding fathers of Spanish entomology. He helped found the Real Sociedad Española de Historia Natural in 1871, and was the author of several books and of over 1000 species.
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Henry Seidel Canby
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Henry Seidel Canby was a critic, editor, and Yale University professor. A scion of a Quaker family that arrived in Wilmington, Delaware, around 1740 and grew to regional prominence through milling and business affairs, Henry Seidel Canby was a son of Edward T. Canby. Canby was born in Wilmington, and attended Wilmington Friends School. He graduated from Yale in 1899, then taught at the university until becoming a professor in 1922.
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Otto Brendel
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Otto Johannes Brendel was a German art historian and scholar of Etruscan art and archaeology. Biography In 1928, he received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius on the topic of Roman iconography of the Augustan period. While at Heidelberg, Brendel studied with many notable scholars, including Franz Boll, E. Wayne Craven, Alfred von Domaszewski, Friedrich Karl von Duhn, Richard Carl Meister, Eugen Täubler, the literary theorist Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Jaspers, and the classical art historians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Zimmer. ...
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Charlton Hinman
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman was the editor of the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles and The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare. He is well known as the inventor of the Hinman Collator. Hinman attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, receiving both his bachelor's and master's degrees there. He later received his doctoral degree in 1941 from the University of Virginia, as Fredson Bowers' first Ph.D. candidate. He was associated with the Folger Shakespeare Library and was professor of English at the University of Kansas from 1960 to 1976.
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Marguerite Yourcenar
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980.
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Alfred Paul Dorjahn
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Alfred Paul Dorjahn was an American classicist. In 1924 he completed his PhD at the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation was The Athenian Political Amnesty of 403 BC. External links Review of Forgiveness in old Athens. The Amnesty of 403BCby Dorjahn , Cloché Paul, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 1949, Volume 27, Numéro 1, pp. 221–223
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A. Y. Campbell
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Archibald Young Campbell was a classical scholar, translator, and published poet of the 1920s and 1930s. Life Campbell was born at Blantyre, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1885, and received his education at Hamilton Academy and Fettes College, in Edinburgh.
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Charles Christopher Mierow
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Charles Christopher Mierow was an American academic and classical scholar. He had a Princeton Ph.D. in classical languages and literature, and was known as a translator. In years the 1923-1924 and 1925-1934 he was president of Colorado College. He was appointed professor of biography at Carleton College, a position he held from 1935 to 1951.
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Thomas Marc Parrott
1866 - 1960 (94 years)
Thomas Marc Parrott was a prominent twentieth-century American literary scholar, long a member of the faculty of Princeton University in New Jersey. Life and work T. M. Parrott was born and raised in Ohio, the son of Col. Edwin A. Parrott, Civil War veteran, politician , and centenarian. The younger Parrott graduated from the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton, in 1888, and was head of the preparatory department of Miami University from 1888-1890. At Miami, he was considered part of the "dude faculty" of young eastern professors brought to the school upon its reopening after a twelve-year hiatus.
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Arno Schirokauer
1899 - 1954 (55 years)
Arno Fritz Kurt Schirokauer was a German-Jewish literary scholar, best known for his biography of Ferdinand Lassalle. In 1939, Schirokauer managed to travel to Havana, Cuba and on to Memphis. There he taught at Southwestern College as a Visiting Lecturer in Medieval Studies - his salary provided by other Jews in Memphis, since college rules prohibited non-Christian faculty - until he moved on to the Carl Schurz Foundation of Philadelphia. He taught at Yale University from 1941 to 1943, at Kenyon College from 1943 to 1944, at Yale again 1944 to 1945, and at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 u...
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Vivian Mercier
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born at Clara in County Offaly and educated, first, at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and then, at Trinity College Dublin. He was elected a Scholar of the college in 1938, and edited the student magazine T.C.D. Miscellany.
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Walker Percy
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
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Roger Burlingame
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
William Roger Burlingame was a prolific author, writer, and biographer. Burlingame served as the book editor at Scribner's Magazine . After leaving his job at Scribner's, Burlingame authored 25 books, including biographies and works of historical non-fiction. He also wrote for The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.
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Hutton Webster
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
David Hutton Webster was an American sociologist, economist and anthropologist. He was Lecturer Emeritus of Sociology at Stanford University. Biography David Hutton Webster was born in Malone, New York on March 24, 1875. He went to California in 1893, receiving a A. B. from Stanford University in 1896, where he subsequently served as an assistant in economics from 1899 to 1900. From 1902 he was a teaching fellow in economics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1904. For the next three years Webster was Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
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Julio Jiménez Rueda
1896 - 1960 (64 years)
Julio Jiménez Rueda was a Mexican lawyer, writer, playwright and diplomat. Biography Jiménez Rueda studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and graduated in law at the Universidad Nacional de México in 1919. Later on, he was appointed as the director of the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of UNAM. He completed a doctoral degree of philosophy and literature in 1935. As a diplomat, he served in Montevideo in 1920, and afterwards in Buenos Aires until 1922. Back in Mexico he was the director of the General Archive of the Nation, and later president of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In...
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Dorothea Krook-Gilead
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Dorothea Krook-Gilead was an Israeli literary scholar, translator, and professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. Biography Krook was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. She earned a degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 1946 she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her Ph.D. and spent 14 years as a research fellow and assistant lecturer. Among her students there was the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote that Krook was her ideal of a successful career woman and wonderful human being.
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Newton Phelps Stallknecht
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Newton Phelps Stallknecht was an American philosopher and a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Indiana University. In addition, he was the Director of the School of Letters at Indiana University from 1953-1972. He also served as a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Stallknecht was educated at Princeton University, achieving his A.B. in 1927, A.M. in 1928, and Ph.D. in 1930. During World War II, he was attached to the United States Army Security Agency in Washington. His publications cover both philosophy and comparative literature, with a philosophical fo...
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Rosemary Woolf
1925 - 1978 (53 years)
Rosemary Estelle Woolf was an English scholar of medieval literature, known especially for her work on medieval English religious lyrics, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Biography Woolf was the daughter of British film executive C. M. Woolf. She was the first woman in her family to attend university, receiving a B.Litt. from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1949. She became a lecturer at the University College of Hull in 1948. She became a lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford University in 1961, teaching Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English...
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Hans Krahe
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born in Gelsenkirchen. Work Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.
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Alexander Gray
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Sir Alexander Gray was a Scottish civil servant, economist, academic, translator, writer and poet. Life and work He was born at 1 Marshall Street in Lochee near Dundee the son of John Young Gray, an art teacher at the High School of Dundee, and his wife, Mary Young.
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Robert Kaske
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. He spent most of his career at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and where he founded one of the preeminent medieval studies graduate programs in North America. His published output included lengthy interpretations of Beowulf, and of poems and passages by Dante and Chaucer, and frequently constituted leading studies. Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, with articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, the Divine Comedy, "Th...
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Gianfranco Contini
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Gianfranco Contini was an Italian academic and philologist. He studied at the Collegio Mellerio Rosmini in Domodossola, then at the University of Pavia, where he graduated in 1933. Later, he studied also in Turin, where he met Giulio Einaudi, Massimo Mila, and Leone Ginzburg, who shortly after started the Einaudi's publishing company. From 1934 to 1936, he lived in Paris, following Joseph Bédier's lessons, then he was called to teach in Florence and Pisa, where he became a contributor to "Letteratura", a literary magazine where he shared his views, among others, with Eugenio Montale, and where he began to collaborate with the Accademia della Crusca.
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Carroll Vincent Newsom
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Carroll Vincent Newsom was an American educator who served as the eleventh NYU president and president of Prentice Hall. Newsom was born February 23, 1904, in Buckley, Illinois. He received a B.A. from the College of Emporia in 1924, a M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1927 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1931.
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