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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#901

Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster

#12613

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Alan Dean Foster is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction. He has written several book series, more than 20 standalone novels, and many novelizations of film scripts. Career Star Wars Foster was the ghostwriter of the original novelization of Star Wars, which was credited solely to George Lucas. When asked if it was difficult for him to see Lucas get all the credit for Star Wars, Foster said, "Not at all. It was George's story idea. I was merely expanding upon it. Not having my name on the cover didn't bother me in the least. It would be akin to a contractor demanding to have his...

#902

Lewis Nkosi

#21047

Overall Influence

1936 - 2010 (74 years)

Lewis Nkosi was a South African writer, who spent 30 years in exile as a consequence of restrictions placed on him and his writing by the Suppression of Communism Act and the Publications and Entertainment Act passed in the 1950s and 1960s. A multifaceted personality, he attempted multiple genre for his writing, including literary criticism, poetry, drama, novels, short stories, essays, as well as journalism.

#903

R. S. Thomas

#12683

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Ronald Stuart Thomas , published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest noted for nationalism, spirituality and dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. John Betjeman, introducing Song at the Year's Turning , the first collection of Thomas's poetry from a major publisher, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after he himself was forgotten. M. Wynn Thomas said: "He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience. He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century."

#904

Genichiro Takahashi

#18754

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Genichiro Takahashi is a Japanese novelist. Life and career Takahashi was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima prefecture and attended the Economics Department of Yokohama National University without graduating. As a radical student, he was arrested and spent half a year in prison, which caused Takahashi to develop a form of aphasia. As part of his rehabilitation, his doctors encouraged him to start writing. Critics have compared him to Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino.

#905

Donald Justice

#16127

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Donald Rodney Justice was an American teacher of writing and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr wrote, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his poems weren't just good; they were great. They were great in the way that Elizabeth Bishop's poems were great, or Thom Gunn's or Philip Larkin's. They were great in the way that tells us what poetry used to be, and is, and will be."

#906

Tony Ross

#10285

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Anthony Lee Ross is a British author and illustrator of children's picture books. In Britain, he is best known for writing and illustrating his Little Princess books and for illustrating the Horrid Henry series by Francesca Simon, both of which have become TV series for Milkshake! and CITV respectively based on his artwork. He also illustrates the works of David Walliams. He has also illustrated the Amber Brown series by Paula Danziger, the Dr. Xargle series by Jeanne Willis, and the Harry The Poisonous Centipede series by Lynne Reid Banks.

#907

John Sinclair

#5438

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

John Sinclair is an American poet, writer, and political activist from Flint, Michigan. Sinclair's defining style is jazz poetry, and he has released most of his works in audio formats. Most of his pieces include musical accompaniment, usually by a varying group of collaborators dubbed Blues Scholars.

#908

Tim O'Brien

#15821

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his later work often explores the postwar lives of its veterans. O’Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried , a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by O'Brien's wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described the latter as “ a classic of contemporary war fiction.” In addition, O’Brien is acclaimed for his war novel, Going After Cacciato , which received the National Book Award.

#909

Alain Viala

#25888

Overall Influence

1947 - 2021 (74 years)

Alain Viala was a sociologist and literature scholar, and a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford and at the University of Paris III and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He worked mainly on the French literature of the 17th century.

#910

Aimee Bender

#14691

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal stories and characters. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Biography Born to a Jewish family, Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the creative writing MFA program at University of California at Irvine. While at UCI she studied with Judith Grossman and Geoffrey Wolff. She received ArtsBridge scholarships and worked with mentor Keith Fowler to create writing programs for K-12 students in Orange County, California. She cu...

#911

Abdelwahab Meddeb

Abdelwahab Meddeb

#10671

Overall Influence

1946 - 2014 (68 years)

Abdelwahab Meddeb was a French-language writer and cultural critic, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. Biography and career Meddeb was born in Tunis, French Tunisia, in 1946, into a learned and patrician milieu. His family's origins stretch from Tripoli and Yemen on his mother's side, to Spain and Morocco on his father's side. Raised in a traditionally observant Maghrebi Muslim family, Meddeb began learning the Qur'an at the age of four from his father, Sheik Mustapha Meddeb, a scholar of Islamic law at the Zitouna, the great mosque and university of Tunis.

#912

John Carey

#17006

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

John Carey, is a British literary critic, and post-retirement emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, as expounded in several books. He has twice chaired the Booker Prize committee, in 1982 and 2003, and chaired the judging panel for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

#913

Oakley Hall

#15104

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Oakley Maxwell Hall was an American novelist. He was born in San Diego, California, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and served in the Marines during World War II. Some of his mysteries were published under the pen names "O.M. Hall" and "Jason Manor." Hall received his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

#914

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson

#19255

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.

#915

Morton N. Cohen

#16763

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Morton Norton Cohen was a Canadian-born American author and scholar who was a professor at City University of New York. He is best known for his studies of children's author Lewis Carroll including the 1995 biography Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

#916

Lisa Zunshine

#19631

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Lisa Zunshine is an American scholar of literature and cognitive science, who publishes in eighteenth-century British literature, comparative literature, film/media studies, and cognitive psychology. She came to the United States as a refugee, from Latvia, when she was twenty-one, and became a U.S. citizen in 1998. She is professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington; a Guggenheim fellow ; and author or editor of twelve books, including Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture ,The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies , and The...

#917

Walter A. Davis

#11039

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Walter A. "Mac" Davis is an American philosopher, critic, and playwright. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio State University and the author of eight books. Davis has also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His theoretical work engages critically with psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, Hegelian dialectics and postmodernism. For a more general audience, he has written plays and two volumes of essays in cultural criticism.

#918

Andrew Hurley

#18491

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Andrew Hurley is primarily known as an English translator of Spanish literature, having translated a variety of authors, most notably the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He has published over 30 book-length translations.

#919

Carla Harryman

#22142

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. She is married to the poet Barrett Watten.

#920

Andrew Salkey

#23137

Overall Influence

1928 - 1995 (67 years)

Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin. He was born in Panama but was raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1952 to pursue a job in the literary world, combining a job in a South London comprehensive school teaching English with a job working on the door of a West End night club. The 1960s and 1970s saw Salkey working as a broadcaster for the BBC World Service, Caribbean section.

#921

Elif Batuman

#17847

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

#922

Etel Adnan

#8192

Overall Influence

1925 - 2021 (96 years)

Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

#923

Stuart Dybek

#10368

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Stuart Dybek is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Biography Dybek, a second-generation Polish American, was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. He graduated from St. Rita of Cascia High School in 1959 and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has an MA in literature from Loyola University Chicago.

#924

Miranda Seymour

#13557

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Miranda Jane Seymour is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer. The lives she has described have included those of Robert Graves and Mary Shelley. Seymour, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has in recent years been a visiting Professor of English Studies at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

#925

Julia Serano

#1486

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Julia Michelle Serano is an American writer, musician, spoken-word performer, transgender and bisexual activist, and biologist. She is known for her transfeminist books, such as Whipping Girl , Excluded , and Outspoken . She is also a public speaker who has given many talks at universities and conferences. Her writing is frequently featured in queer, feminist, and popular culture magazines.

#926

Leslie Norris

#21049

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

George Leslie Norris , was a prize-winning Welsh poet and short story writer. He taught at academic institutions in Britain and the United States, including Brigham Young University. Norris is considered one of the most important Welsh writers of the post-war period, and his literary publications have won many prizes.

#927

Luis García Montero

Luis García Montero

#18545

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Luis García Montero is a Spanish poet and literary critic, as well as a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada. Biography Descended from a granadina family that was very active in the community, Luis García Montero was born in Granada in 1958 as the son of Luis García López and Elisa Montero Peña, and studied at the Colegio Dulce Nombre de María- PP.Escolapios in Granada. As a teenager, he was a fan of equestrian sports and had the opportunity to meet Blas de Otero.

#928

Lev Loseff

#18528

Overall Influence

1937 - 2009 (72 years)

Lev Loseff was a Russian poet, literary critic, essayist and educator. Early life and education The son of poet Vladimir Lifshitz, Loseff was born in Leningrad. He attended Leningrad's famous Saint Peter's School and graduated from the journalism department of the Leningrad State University.

#929

Eric Schlosser

#3017

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Eric Matthew Schlosser is an American journalist and author known for his investigative journalism, such as in his books Fast Food Nation , Reefer Madness , and Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety .

#930

Matthew J. Bruccoli

#19647

Overall Influence

1931 - 2008 (77 years)

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about other writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

#931

Rey Chow

#12328

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Rey Chow is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.

#932

Sergio Aragonés

Sergio Aragonés

#6224

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Sergio Aragonés Domenech is a Spanish/Mexican cartoonist and writer best known for his contributions to Mad magazine and creating the comic book Groo the Wanderer. Among his peers and fans, Aragonés is widely regarded as "the world's fastest cartoonist". The Comics Journal has described Aragonés as "one of the most prolific and brilliant cartoonists of his generation". Mad editor Al Feldstein said, "He could have drawn the whole magazine if we'd let him."

#933

Edwin Morgan

#10088

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Edwin George Morgan was a Scottish poet and translator associated with the Scottish Renaissance. He is widely recognised as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century. In 1999, Morgan was made the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. In 2004, he was named as the first Makar or National Poet for Scotland.

#934

Anita Silvey

#22472

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Anita Silvey is an American author, editor, and literary critic in the genre of children’s literature. Born in 1947 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Silvey has served as Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book Magazine and as vice-president at Houghton Mifflin where she oversaw children’s and young adult book publishing. She has also authored a number of critical books about children's literature, including 500 Great Books for Teens and The Essential Guide to Children's Books and Their Creators. In October 2010, she began publishing the Children's Book-A-Day Almanac online, a daily essay on classic and co...

#935

Jan Kott

#10830

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Jan Kott was a Polish political activist, critic and theoretician of the theatre. A leading proponent of Stalinism in Poland for nearly a decade after the Soviet takeover, Kott renounced his Communist Party membership in 1957 following the anti-Stalinist Polish October of 1956. He defected to the United States in 1965. He is regarded as having considerable influence upon Western productions of Shakespeare in the second half of the 20th century.

#936

Sayed Kashua

#14519

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian author and journalist born in Tira, Israel, known for his books and humorous columns in Hebrew and English. Biography Kashua was born in Tira in the Triangle region of Israel to Palestinian Muslim-Arab parents. In 1990, he was accepted to a prestigious boarding school in Jerusalem – Israel Arts and Science Academy. He studied sociology and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kashua was a resident of Beit Safafa before moving to a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem with his wife and children.

#937

Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston

#22995

Overall Influence

Bret Anthony Johnston is an American author. He wrote the novel Remember Me Like This and the story collection, Corpus Christi: Stories. He is also the editor of the non-fiction work, Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. He won the 2017 Sunday Times Short Story Award.

#938

Ihor Pavlyuk

#22375

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Ihor Pavlyuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator and research worker. Named People's Poet of Ukraine in 2020. He is the winner of a 2013 English PEN Award, and the winner of the Switzerland Literary Prize 2021. He also holds a doctorate in Social Communication.

#939

Jeff Grubb

#7655

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jeff Grubb is an author of novels, short stories, and comics, as well as a computer and role-playing game designer in the fantasy genre. Grubb worked on the Dragonlance campaign setting under Tracy Hickman, and the Forgotten Realms setting with Ed Greenwood. His written works include The Finder's Stone Trilogy, the Spelljammer and Jakandor campaign settings, and contributions to Dragonlance and the computer game Guild Wars Nightfall .

#940

Marge Piercy

#8881

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Marge Piercy is an American progressive activist, feminist, and writer. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller and a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, Communist social and political activism, and feminist ideals.

#941

Ricardo Piglia

#17165

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Ricardo Piglia was an Argentine author, critic, and scholar best known for introducing hard-boiled fiction to the Argentine public. Biography Born in Adrogué, Piglia was raised in Mar del Plata. He studied history in 1961-1962 at the National University of La Plata.

#942

Walidah Imarisha

Walidah Imarisha

#18999

Overall Influence

Walidah Imarisha is an American writer, activist, educator and spoken word artist. Career Writing Imarisha is co-editor, with adrienne maree brown, of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, named after the legendary science fiction writer Octavia Butler. She also co-edited Another World Is Possible, the first anthology out in response to the 9/11 attacks.

#943

Ama Ata Aidoo

#12546

Overall Influence

1942 - 2023 (81 years)

Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.

#944

Shōichi Watanabe

#12269

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Shōichi Watanabe was a Japanese scholar of English and one of Japan’s cultural critics. He is known for ultranationalist historical negationism. He was born in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture. A graduate of Sophia University, where he obtained his Master’s degree, he completed his doctorate at University of Münster in 1958. Two volumes of autobiography on his years in Germany narrate his varied experiences during this period. Returning to his alma mater, he became successively lecturer, assistant professor and full professor, until his retirement. He served as emeritus professor at the same university until his death.

#945

Bruce Andrews

#20410

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Bruce Andrews is an American poet who is one of the key figures associated with the Language poets . Life and work Andrews was born in Chicago and studied international relations at Johns Hopkins University and political science at Harvard. His first book, Edge, was published in 1973.

#946

Nargiz Pashayeva

#30215

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Nargiz Arif gizi Pashayeva is an Honored Scientist of Azerbaijan, Honorary member of ANAS , vice-president of ANAS , Doctor of Philology, rector of the Lomonosov Moscow State University's Baku branch, head of the Nizami Ganjavi Scientific Center of the University of Oxford, from the Azerbaijani side, chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the British Foundation for the Study of Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, permanent member of Chancellor's Court of Benefactors of University of Oxford., co-chairman of the Anglo-Azerbaijani Society.

#947

Edith Hall

#13390

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department.

#948

Denis Donoghue

#16357

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Denis Donoghue was an Irish literary critic. He was the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University. Life and career Donoghue was born at Tullow, County Carlow, into a Roman Catholic family, the youngest of four surviving children. He was brought up in Warrenpoint, County Down, Northern Ireland, where his father, Denis, was sergeant-in-charge of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. His mother was Johanna Donoghue.

#949

Mark Haddon

#13207

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.

#950

Jorie Graham

#14066

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jorie Graham is an American poet. The Poetry Foundation called Graham "one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation." She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 and was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She won the 2013 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions