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,
#8151
Clara Beranger
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Clara Beranger was an American screenwriter of the silent film era and a member of the original faculty of the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Biography Beranger was born Clara Strouse in Baltimore, Maryland, to Benjamin and Fannie Strouse. Her family was of German Jewish descent. Benjamin and his brothers had emigrated and opened a dry-goods store in Indiana.
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Nicol Stenhouse
1806 - 1873 (67 years)
Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse was a Scottish-born lawyer, writer and literary patron in colonial Australia. Stenhouse was born in Coldstream, Berwickshire, Scotland and was a writer of taste and a great lover of literature. He was clerk to Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet when the latter was practising as an advocate in Edinburgh. He was also a friend of Thomas De Quincey. Having embraced the legal profession, he emigrated to New South Wales, and practised for many years as an attorney and solicitor in Sydney. He was a veritable Mæcenas to many needy and struggling literary men in Sydney. Not long before his death he was, on the motion of that great scholar, Dr.
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Julius Petersen
1878 - 1941 (63 years)
Julius Petersen was a German literary scholar and university professor, principally at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He did much to rediscover the works of Theodor Fontane for twentieth century readers. Petersen himself has been described as one of the most influential academics in the field of German studies during the interwar period, but after 1945 he disappeared from university reading lists. During the 1960s interest in his life and works resurfaced, though it has frequently been on account of evident contradictions in his attitude to National Socialism during the fin...
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Richard Davies
1833 - 1877 (44 years)
Richard Davies was a popular Welsh-language poet, singer, and Eisteddfod conductor. The original source of the name Mynyddog is from Newydd Fynyddog, a hill near his home. Another submission is the name comes from Mynyddog Mwynfawr, a character in an early Welsh poem. Use of an adopted Welsh-language pseudonym or bardic name is common among Welsh poets.
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William Hamilton
1665 - 1751 (86 years)
William Hamilton was a Scottish poet. He wrote comic, mock-tragic poetry such as "The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck" - a once-champion hare coursing greyhound in the East Neuk of Fife who was about to be hanged, for growing too slow. It is written in anglified Scots, with a sprightly narrative and wry comic touches.
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David Richards
1751 - 1827 (76 years)
David Richards , better-known by his bardic name Dafydd Ionawr, was a Welsh-language poet, born at Glanyrafon near Bryn-crug in the parish of Tywyn in Merionethshire , north-west Wales. He took an interest in poetry as a result of his acquaintance with Evan Evans , who was curate of St Cadfan's Church, Tywyn, and was later sent to a school at Ystradmeurig to obtain a better education than was available locally. After a period as a junior schoolmaster in Wrexham, he spent one term at Jesus College, Oxford, before going to teach at Oswestry grammar school. He then taught at the grammar school in Carmarthen before being appointed head of a free school in his native area.
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David R. Jones
1832 - 1915 (83 years)
David Richard Jones was a Welsh-American architect and poet. Early life Jones was born October 24, 1832, in Dolwyddelan, North Wales, the son of Richard James Jones and Ann Jones. On September 2, 1845, Richard, Ann and family immigrated to the United States. Richard purchased 480 acres of government land east of the village of Cambria, Wisconsin. He built a log house and moved there in the spring of 1846. The farm was named Oakland. In May 1852, David R. left Oakland for the city of Racine, Wisconsin, where he apprenticed with architect Lucas Bradley. His brother, Evan O. Jones, remained in...
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John Garrett Underhill
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
John Garrett Underhill was an American author and stage producer who translated the works of Jacinto Benavente, a Spanish dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a number of other Spanish authors.
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James Allen
1806 - 1886 (80 years)
James Allen , nicknamed "Dismal Jemmy", was an English-born writer, journalist and newspaper owner in Australia and New Zealand. Biography Allen was born in Birmingham and educated at Horton College. He was for some time a reporter on the London Morning Post, and was an associate of Charles Dickens.
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Arnaud d'Usseau
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Arnaud d'Usseau was a playwright and B-movie screenwriter who is perhaps best remembered today for his collaboration with Dorothy Parker on the play The Ladies of the Corridor. Career D'Usseau was born in Los Angeles and was the son of Leon d'Usseau, also a screenwriter and director of some repute during the silent era. His mother, Ottola “Tola” Smith D’Usseau, was a character actress. He first came to notice as the co-writer of Tomorrow, the World!, a 1943 drama about a German boy adopted by an American couple who then have to struggle with his Nazi upbringing. In 1945, another controversia...
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Thomas Platter
1499 - 1582 (83 years)
Thomas Platter the Elder was a Swiss humanist scholar and writer. Biography Thomas Platter was a master of several languages, knowing Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, among others. He grew up in poverty and, as a student, made a prolonged tour through Germany. After his return he first lived in Zürich, where he was an assistant to reformator Huldrych Zwingli. In 1531 he was an eye-witness of the Battle of Kappel, when Huldrych Zwingli was killed. Considering the political situation in Zürich after this war, he left for Basel, together with his paternal friend and mentor, the Protestant theologian Oswald Myconius.
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Abu Sayeed Ayyub
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Abu Sayeed Ayyub was an Indian philosopher, teacher, literary critic and writer in both Bengali and English. Though born into a traditional, Urdu-speaking, Muslim family in Calcutta , he was so deeply captivated in his early teenage by the poems of the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore that he taught himself Bengali so as to appreciate Tagore better. Later, when he started to write, it was mostly in his adopted language, Bengali. During the initial part of his writing career, Ayyub wrote on aesthetics, religion and socialism. However, it was his philosophical and scientific analysis ...
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Jennifer Clarvoe
1900 - Present (126 years)
Jennifer S. Clarvoe is an American poet and English professor at Kenyon College. She has published two books of poetry, Invisible Tender and Counter-Amores. She won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2001.
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Langdon Elwyn Mitchell
1862 - 1935 (73 years)
Langdon Elwyn Mitchell was an American playwright who was popular on Broadway during the early twentieth century. Early life Mitchell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 17, 1862. He was the son of a noted writer and neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell , and, his first wife, Mary Middleton Elwyn, a daughter of Dr. Elwyn of Philadelphia. His elder brother was John Kearsley Mitchell, a neurologist who married Anne Keppele Williams. After his mother died in 1862, his father married Mary Cadwalader.
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Cornelis van Eck
1662 - 1732 (70 years)
Cornelis van Eck was a Dutch jurist and poet. Born in Arnhem, he studied literature in Utrecht and law in Leiden, attaining his doctorate under Johannes Voet in 1682. His dissertation, De septem damnatis legibus, saw seven re-editions. He was called upon to teach in Franeker in 1686 and was appointed to a professorship in Utrecht in 1693.
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Ruth Bellamy
1906 - 1969 (63 years)
Ruth Bellamy , also known as Ruth Bellamy Brownwood, was an American writer, a journalist, dramatist, songwriter, actress, and poet, based in North Carolina and Japan. Early life and education Ruth Elizabeth Bellamy was born in Enfield, North Carolina, the daughter of Phesington Sugg Bellamy and Lula Spruill Bellamy. Her father was a businessman. Her mother, known as "Mamee", was a well-known social figure in Rocky Mount in her later years.
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Paolo Costa
1771 - 1836 (65 years)
Paolo Costa was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. The son of Domenico Costa and Lucrezia Ricciarelli, he began his studies in 1780 in Ravenna under modest teachers. He then moved to Padua and studied there under Melchiorre Cesarotti and Simone Stratico. His studies were interrupted by the French invasion and occupation in 1797, during which he held government roles in both Ravenna and Bologna.
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Fanny Brice
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Fania Borach , known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedian, illustrated song model, singer, and actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.
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Viola Brothers Shore
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Viola Brothers Shore was an American author who worked in a variety of mediums from the 1910s through the 1930s. Married three times, she began her writing career as a poet and a writer of short stories and articles or magazines. Toward the end of the silent film era, she began writing screenplays, and eventually expanded into theatrical plays and novels. Her daughter, Wilma Shore, was also a successful writer.
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Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg
1818 - 1901 (83 years)
Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg was an American educator and Lutheran clergyman who served as president of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and as a Greek language and literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
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Levko Borovykovsky
1806 - 1889 (83 years)
Levko Borovykovsky After graduating in 1830 from Kharkiv University, Borovykovsky taught in a Kursk gymnasium and from 1839 in the Poltava Institute for Daughters of the Nobility. In 1852 he became a gymnasium inspector in Poltava gubernia and retired a few years later. His works were first published in 1828, and he was one of the first poets of the Kharkiv Romantic School.
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Robert Howard
1626 - 1698 (72 years)
Sir Robert Howard was an English playwright and politician. He fought for the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. Life He was born the 6th son of Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Berkshire and his wife Elizabeth. As the 18-year-old son of a Royalist family, he fought at the battle of Cropredy Bridge and was knighted for the bravery he showed there. In the years after the English Civil War his royalist sympathies led to his imprisonment at Windsor Castle in 1658.
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William Drummond of Logiealmond
1770 - 1828 (58 years)
Sir William James Charles Maria Drummond of Logiealmond FRS FRSE DCL was a Scottish diplomat and Member of Parliament, poet and philosopher. His book Academical Questions is arguably important in the development of the ideas of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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Frederik Christian von Haven
1727 - 1763 (36 years)
Frederik Christian von Haven was a Danish philologist and theologian who took part in the Danish expedition to Yemen. Biography Background and early life Frederik von Haven was born on 26 June 1728 in the rectory of Vester Skerninge on the Danish island of Funen, where his father Lambert von Haven was a priest, and christened on 3 July in the Church of Our Lady in Odense. His mother was Maren, née Wielandt. He had three sisters; he was especially close to Pernille Elisabeth von Haven, who never married.
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James Clarke Welling
1825 - 1894 (69 years)
James Clarke Welling was the President of Columbian University, now the George Washington University, Washington, DC, from 1871 to 1894. He was a cofounder of the National Geographic Society. Biography James Clarke Welling was born in Trenton, New Jersey on July 14, 1825. He graduated from Princeton University in 1844. During the Civil War, he wrote for the National Intelligencer. Welling was a professor at Princeton when in 1871 he accepted the presidency of Columbian College. He became the sixth president of the university.
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Eusebiu Popovici
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
Eusebiu Popovici was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian Orthodox cleric and professor. Born in Cernăuți, capital of the Duchy of Bukovina, his father Constantin Popoviciu was a professor. After attending high school and the theological institute , he studied church history and canon law at the University of Vienna . Returning to the institute, he was a substitute professor teaching the Old Testament from 1862 to 1866. He then taught in the church history and law department . From 1875 to 1908, he taught in the same department at the new Czernowitz University. During his lengthy teaching caree...
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Domingo Patricio Meagher
1703 - 1772 (69 years)
Domingo Patricio Meagher , known as the Father Meagher was a Spanish Jesuit priest, university professor and writer of Irish descent. He was born in San Sebastian, Spain on 17 March 1703 and died in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany on 21 September 1772. His father was an Irish merchant, who had settled in the Basque city.
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Frank Jevons
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Frank Byron Jevons was a polymath, academic and administrator of Durham University. Early life He was educated at Nottingham High School and Wadham College, Oxford and appointed a lecturer in Classics at Durham in 1882.
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Diego Pérez de Valdivia
1510 - 1589 (79 years)
Diego Pérez de Valdivia was a Spanish disciple of John of Ávila who wrote on lay spirituality. Life Born in Baeza, Pérez de Valdivia was sent by John of Ávila to study at Salamanca. He taught philosophy at Granada for three years before becoming Professor of Holy Scripture at the University of Baeza from 1549 to 1577. He was archdeacon of Jaén from 1569 to 1574, but subjected to the Inquisition from 1574 to 1577 on suspicion of alumbradismo. From 1578 to 1589 he was Professor of Scripture at the University of Barcelona. He died on 28 February 1589.
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Dominicus Baudius
1561 - 1613 (52 years)
Dominicus Baudius, a Latinised form of Dominique Baudier, was a French Neo-Latin poet, scholar and historian. From 1603 to 1613 he was a teacher at the University of Leiden. Life Baudius was born in a calvinistic family in the Southern Netherlands in Lille. His original name was probably Dominique Baudier, though sources only show his Latinised name Dominicus Baudius. As a result of the arrival of the new regent of the low countries, the Duke of Alba in 1568, Baudius moved to Aachen along with his parents and sister. After finishing at the local school he proceeded to study theology first in Leiden from 1578 to 1579 and then in Geneva in 1581.
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William Wallace
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
William Wallace was notable as a Scottish classical composer and writer. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Music in the University of London. Early life and education Born at Greenock, Wallace studied ophthalmology at the University of Glasgow, and in Vienna and Paris. He became a qualified ophthalmic surgeon, but was also a poet, dramatist, writer on music and a painter.
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William S. Willis
1921 - 1983 (62 years)
William Shedrick Willis Jr. was born July 11, 1921, in Waco, Texas. He was an ethnohistorian, and an early pioneer in African American anthropology. He is best known for his publication of "Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet". He was the first Black scholar to the faculty of Southern Methodist University. While at SMU he was instrumental in the establishing of the African American Studies Program.
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Johann Nestroy
1801 - 1862 (61 years)
Johann Nepomuk Eduard Ambrosius Nestroy was a singer, actor and playwright in the popular Austrian tradition of the Biedermeier period and its immediate aftermath. He participated in the 1848 revolutions and his work reflects the new liberal spirit then spreading throughout Europe.
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H. B. Goodwin
1827 - 1893 (66 years)
Hannah Elizabeth Bradbury Goodwin Talcott was an American novelist, poet and educator from Maine who resided in Boston for many years. She wrote under various pen names, including H. B., H. E. B., H. B. G., Mrs. H. B. Goodwin, and Mrs. Goodwin-Talcott.
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Robert Lowry
1826 - 1899 (73 years)
Robert Lowry was an American preacher who became a popular writer of gospel music in the mid- to late-19th century. His best-known hymns include "Shall We Gather at the River", "Christ Arose!", "How Can I Keep from Singing?" and "Nothing But The Blood Of Jesus".
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Ainsworth O'Brien-Moore
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore was an American classical philologist. Biography The brother of actress Erin O'Brien-Moore, Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore attended Harvard School in Los Angeles and studied classics at Princeton University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1916, his master's degree in 1918 and his Ph.D. in 1922. He worked as instructor in Latin at Princeton and in 1923 at Brown University. From 1925 he was assistant professor of classics at Yale, and was appointed associate professor in 1936.
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Ewan MacColl
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
James Henry Miller , better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a British folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Dirty Old Town".
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Hans Herter
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Hans Herter was a German Classical philologist who was for many years Director of the Rheinischen Museum für Philologie, Bonn. His main interests lay in the works of Thucydides and Plato. Among his prominent students is Heinz-Günther Nesselrath.
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Lu Kanru
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Lu Kanru was a scholar of classical Chinese literature and a lifelong collaborator of his wife Feng Yuanjun. Like his wife, he worked at Shandong University for most of his career.
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John Fleming
1785 - 1857 (72 years)
John Fleming FRSE FRS FSA was a Scottish Free Church minister, naturalist, zoologist and geologist. He named and described a number of species of molluscs. During his life he tried to reconcile theology with science.
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Josef Augusta
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Josef Augusta was a Czech paleontologist, geologist, and science popularizer. From 1921 to 1925 Augusta studied at the Masaryk University in Brno. Between 1933 and 1968 he held posts at the Charles University in Prague as lecturer, professor, and dean of the faculty.
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Arnold Wall
1869 - 1966 (97 years)
Arnold Wall was a New Zealand university professor, philologist, poet, mountaineer, botanist, writer and radio broadcaster. Early life and education He was born in Nuwara Eliya, Ceylon in 1869; his father was George Wall. His daughter Hilary married the adult educator Norman Richmond in 1926. He is the brother of Rowena Seymour, Duchess of Somerset and the uncle of Evelyn Seymour, 17th Duke of Somerset.
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John Lundie Michie
1882 - 1946 (64 years)
John Lundie Michie was the first professor of Classics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Early life John Lundie Michie was born on 4 June 1882 in Lochnalair, Crathie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He attended Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, Scotland winning a Classics Gold Medal in 1899. He graduated with an M.A. and first class honours in classics in 1904 from the University of Aberdeen. He was awarded the Ferguson classical scholarship in his final year at Aberdeen. He was an equally enthusiastic athlete as he was a scholar, with skills in the hammer and sh...
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Cecco d'Ascoli
1269 - 1327 (58 years)
Cecco d'Ascoli is the popular name of Francesco degli Stabili , an Italian encyclopaedist, physician and poet. Cecco is the diminutive of Francesco, Ascoli was the place of his birth. The lunar crater Cichus is named after him.
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Edward Maturin
1812 - 1881 (69 years)
Edward Maturin was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 18 June 1812 and died in New York City on 25 May 1881. He was naturalised as an American and worked as a professor of Greek. His fiction and poetry generally dealt with historical themes, while his work as a Gothic novelist often had an Irish background.
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Rita Felski
#8197
Konrad Nielsen
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Konrad Hartvig Isak Rosenvinge Nielsen was a Norwegian philologist. He spent most of his career as a professor at the Royal Frederick University as a lecturer, textbook writer, lexicographer and translator. His specialty was Sami languages, also called Lapp languages in his day.
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Sam Thompson
1916 - 1965 (49 years)
Sam Thompson was a Northern Irish playwright best known for his controversial plays Over the Bridge, which exposes sectarianism, and Cemented with Love, which focuses on political corruption. His works fall into the social realist genre but are distinct in their dramatisation of Northern Irish issues; they were ground-breaking in documenting sectarian violence before the eruption of the Troubles.
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Robert Lester Stallman
1930 - 1980 (50 years)
Robert Lester Stallman was an American literary critic, English professor and science fiction writer, author of the Book of the Beast trilogy. He wrote under the name of Robert L. Stallman in his academic writings, and Robert Stallman for his fiction.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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