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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Literature,
#10251
James Runcieman Sutherland
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Sir James Runcieman Sutherland, FBA was an English literary scholar, Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern Literature at London University. Life Sutherland was born on 26 April 1900 in Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University before studying at Merton College, Oxford. From 1930 to 1936 he was Senior Lecturer at University College London. He married Helen Dircks in 1931. From 1936 to 1944 he was Professor of English Literature, and from 1944 to 1951 Professor of English Language and Literature at Queen Mary College. In 1951 he was appointed Lord Northcliffe P...
Go to Profile#10252
J. Seelye Bixler
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Julius Seelye Bixler was the 16th President of Colby College, Maine, United States, from 1942–1960. Early life Born Julius Seelye Bixler in New London, CT, to James William Bixler and Elizabeth J. Seelye Bixler. His father was a clergyman who was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives and Senate. His maternal grandfather was Julius Hawley Seelye, president of Amherst College from 1876–90, and his grand-uncle was Laurenus Clark Seelye, the first president of Smith College.
Go to Profile#10253
Lawrance Thompson
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Lawrance Roger Thompson 3 April 1906 — 15 April 1973 Early life and education Thompson was born on 3 April 1906 in Franklin, New Hampshire. For his post-secondary education, Thompson received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in 1928 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University in 1939.
Go to Profile#10254
Wolfgang Schadewaldt
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Wolfgang Schadewaldt was a German classical philologist working mostly in the field of Greek philology and a translator. He also was a professor of University of Tübingen and University of Freiburg.
Go to Profile#10255
Lewis Thorpe
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
Lewis Guy Melville Thorpe FRSA FRHistS was a British philologist and translator. He was married to the Italian scholar and lexicographer Barbara Reynolds. After service in Italy in the Second World War, Lewis Thorpe joined the staff of the University of Nottingham in 1946. He was Professor of French there from 1958 to 1977. He served as President of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society and was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club.
Go to Profile#10256
Ivan Mortimer Linforth
1879 - 1976 (97 years)
Ivan Mortimer Linforth was an American scholar, Professor of Greek at University of California, Berkeley. According to the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists he was "one of the great Hellenists of his time". He is best known for his book The Arts of Orpheus , in which he analysed a large number of sources for Orphism and Orphic literature. His work is noted for its thoroughly sceptical approach to the evidence, attempting to the repudiate the notions of a coherent Orphism put forward by earlier scholars. His conclusion was that there was no exclusively "Orphic" system of belief in Ancient Greece.
Go to Profile#10257
Theodore Spencer
1902 - 1949 (47 years)
Theodore Spencer was an American poet and academic. Life He graduated from Princeton University in 1923, and a Ph.D from Harvard University in 1928. He then taught there, from 1927 to 1949. He was appointed lecturer in English literature at Cambridge University, England, in 1939. In 1942, Spencer gave the Lowell lectures on Shakespeare, published as Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, his most important work. Spencer also published essays, short stories, and poetry.
Go to Profile#10258
E. Talbot Donaldson
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was a scholar of medieval English literature, known for his 1966 translation of Beowulf and his writings on Chaucer's poetry. Biography Ethelbert Talbot Donaldson was born on 18 March 1910 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Harvard University, gaining his BA in 1932. He began his career by teaching languages at the Kent School in Connecticut. He was awarded a fellowship at Yale University in 1942, rising to become the George E. Bodman Professor of English there. During the Second World War he served in the United States Air Force, rising through the ranks from private to captain.
Go to Profile#10259
Frederick Rees
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Sir James Frederick Rees , known as Frederick Rees, was a Welsh historian and academic born in Milford Haven, who specialised in economic history and the history of Wales. From 1929 to 1949, he was Principal of University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire. He was additionally Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1935 to 1937 and also from 1944 to 1946. He had previously lectured at University College, Bangor, Queen's University Belfast, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Birmingham. He served as High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire for 1955.
Go to Profile#10260
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#10261
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#10262
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#10263
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.
Go to Profile#10264
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#10265
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.
Go to Profile#10266
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.
Go to Profile#10267
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#10268
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#10269
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.
Go to Profile#10270
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#10271
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.
Go to Profile#10272
Vernon Watkins
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Vernon Phillips Watkins was a Welsh poet and translator. He was a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English".
Go to Profile#10273
Frederic Ewen
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Frederic Ewen was an English professor at Brooklyn College from 1930 to 1952. During the height of the McCarthy period Ewen was forced to resign his teaching position after refusing to cooperate with a Senate Internal Security Committee investigation of communism and higher education.
Go to Profile#10274
Walter de Haas
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Walter de Haas , who wrote under the pseudonym Hanns Günther, was a prolific German author, translator, and editor of popular science books. He began to publish books in 1912, including introductions to topics in electrical engineering under the Franckh'schen Verlagshandlung imprint and popular science works in the same publisher's Kosmos series. His books remain exemplary for their combination of exactness and ease of understanding.
Go to Profile#10275
Margaret Ashmun
1875 - 1940 (65 years)
Margaret Eliza Ashmun was an American writer from Rural, Wisconsin. She trained as a teacher and taught for a few years then concentrated on her writing. She edited collections of short stories and writing textbooks, and wrote dozens of poems, essays, and stories that were published in the popular magazines and newspapers of her day. She was the author of more than 18 novels for both adults and young readers, especially girls.
Go to Profile#10276
James Taft Hatfield
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
James Taft Hatfield was an American philologist and professor at Northwestern University where for many years he was the head of the German Department. Although he also published works on comparative linguistics, Sanskrit, church music, and American folklore, he was primarily known for his contributions to German studies, and in particular his studies on the writings of Goethe and Wilhelm Müller and on the influence of German culture in the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Go to Profile#10277
Richard von Kienle
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Richard von Kienle was a German linguist who specialized in Germanic and Indo-European linguistics. Biography Richard von Kienle was born in Freiburg, Germany on 9 February 1908. He gained his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg in 1931 under the supervision of Hermann Güntert. von Kienle subsequently served as an assistant at the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch under . Since the summer of 1938 he was an acting professor at the University of Heidelberg, having stepped in for Güntert, who was in poor health at the time. He was later an acting professor at the University of Jena under . Since 1940...
Go to Profile#10278
Randall V. Mills
1907 - 1952 (45 years)
Randall V. Mills was a professor of literature with a variety of interests related to the Pacific Northwest, including steamboats, railroads and folklore. Early life and education Randall was born in Wisconsin in 1907. In 1929 Mills received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles . His master's degree was received from University of California, Berkeley in 1932.
Go to Profile#10279
Juho August Hollo
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Juho August Hollo , also known as J. A. Hollo, was a Finnish scholar and professor of education at the University of Helsinki from 1930 to 1954. He was one of the most prolific translators into Finnish, translating a range of genres and from several languages. He himself said in 1953 that he had translated 170 books; some sources list over 300. Among the authors he translated were Miguel de Cervantes, Anatole France, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was als...
Go to Profile#10280
Arna Bontemps
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites. As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz. His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher. The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. They w...
Go to Profile#10281
Dorothy Burr Thompson
1900 - 2001 (101 years)
Dorothy Burr Thompson was an American classical archaeologist and art historian at Bryn Mawr College and a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Early life Thompson was the elder of two daughters of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father was attorney Charles Henry Burr Jr. and her mother was novelist and biographer Anna Robeson Brown. Her grandfather was noted orator and lawyer Henry Armitt Brown. Early in life Thompson studied the Classics, attending Miss Hill's School in Center City, Pa., and The Latin School in Philadelphia. She began her study of Latin at age 9 and a...
Go to Profile#10282
Friedrich Münzer
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Friedrich Münzer was a German classical scholar noted for the development of prosopography, particularly for his demonstrations of how family relationships in ancient Rome connected to political struggles. He died in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Go to Profile#10283
Natalino Sapegno
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Natalino Sapégno was a literary critic and Italian academician. He came to prominence as a leading scholar of fourteenth century Italian literature. Biography Provenance and early years Natalino Sapégno was born in Aosta, which was the city from where his mother's family came. However, he spent his first sixteen years growing up in Turin, where his father was employed as a senior official with the government tax office. In 1917, along with his older sister Giuliana, he was entrusted, for a year, to the care of his maternal grandparents in Aosta. Here, for a year, he completed his sc...
Go to Profile#10284
Enrica Malcovati
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Enrica Malcovati was an Italian Classical philologist. Career In 1927, she was the general editor of Athenaeum, following the death of her mentor Carlo Pascal. She became a private teacher at the University of Pavia in 1930, the same year as her magnum opus - the three volumes of Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta - was published.
Go to Profile#10285
Clive Carruthers
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Clive Harcourt Carruthers was a Canadian classicist. Carruthers attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1916. He served in the Canadian Army, briefly taught at the University of Alberta, and, in 1921, started teaching at McGill University in Montreal. From 1929–1950 he served as professor of classical philology; in 1950 he became department chairman; and from 1950–1961 he was Hiram Mills professor of classics.
Go to Profile#10286
Viggo Brøndal
1887 - 1942 (55 years)
Rasmus Viggo Brøndal was a Danish philologist and professor of Romance languages and literature at Copenhagen University. He was also a founder of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. Background Danish linguist and language philosopher. Brøndal received a traditional education in philology but showed an early concern for theoretical problems. The Danish philosopher Harald Høffding introduced him to the theory and history of philosophical categories, which was to be the basis of his theory of structural linguistics. This background made him receptive to the ideas of the prestructuralists during his studies in Paris .
Go to Profile#10287
Michael de la Bédoyère
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Count Michael Anthony Maurice de la Bédoyère was an English writer, editor and journalist. Life He was educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and took a first in "Modern Greats" at Campion Hall, Oxford University. His initial plans to become a Jesuit priest were abandoned. In 1930-1931 he lectured at the University of Minnesota. In 1934 he became editor of the Catholic Herald, a post he held until 1962. During this time he transformed it from one of limited regional appeal into a more challenging and intellectual newspaper, which often brought it into conflict with the more conservative members of the Roman Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#10288
G. M. Hirst
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
Gertrude Mary Hirst , better known as G. M. Hirst, was an English-American classicist. Her most influential publication was her 1926 proposal that Livy was born in 64 BC, rather than the traditional date of 59 BC; this claim would later also be advocated by academics including Ronald Syme.
Go to Profile#10289
William K. Wimsatt
1907 - 1975 (68 years)
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to question the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.
Go to Profile#10290
Thomas Parry
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Sir Thomas Parry FBA was a Welsh writer and academic. He was Professor of Welsh at the University College of North Wales, Bangor from 1947 to 1953, Librarian of the National Library of Wales from 1953 to 1958, Principal of the University College of Wales Aberystwyth from 1958 to 1969 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales from 1961 to 1963 and 1967 to 1969.
Go to Profile#10291
Péter Szondi
1929 - 1971 (42 years)
Péter Szondi was a celebrated literary scholar and philologist, originally from Hungary. Biography Szondi's father was the Hungarian-Jewish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Léopold Szondi, who settled in Switzerland after his 1944 release after five months in Bergen-Belsen.
Go to Profile#10292
Bertha Harmer
1885 - 1934 (49 years)
Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, writer and educator, known for writing the textbook Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing. Harmer was born in Port Hope, Ontario, the daughter of a railway carpenter. After finishing high school and working for several years, she earned a nursing degree from the Toronto General Hospital in 1913, and a bachelor's degree in administration and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in 1915.
Go to Profile#10293
Joseph Edward Harry
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
Joseph Edward Harry briefly served an interim term as president of the University of Cincinnati between Presidents Howard Ayers and Charles W. Dabney in 1904. Harry was dean of the college of Arts and Sciences from 1901 to 1906 and was dean of the Graduate School in 1916.
Go to Profile#10294
Nurul Momen
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Nurul Momen was a Bangladeshi playwright, educator, director, broadcast personality, orator, academician, satirist, essayist, translator and poet. He served as a faculty member in the capacities of professor and dean at the faculty of Law in the University of Dhaka. He also served as a lawyer. He is called "Father of Bangladeshi theatre" and "Natyaguru" of Bangladesh . He was awarded the Bangla Academy Award in 1961, merely a year after its inception. He was also honoured by the People's Republic of Bangladesh with the Ekushey Padak in 1978, only a couple of years after this State honor was ...
Go to Profile#10295
Charles S. Singleton
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Charles Southward Singleton was an American scholar, writer, and critic of literature. He was an expert on the work of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio. He wrote An Essay on the Vita Nuova and Dante Studies . He studied, as did the German critic Erich Auerbach, the allegorical interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy, a work which he also translated into English in six volumes. Irma Brandeis was one of his disciples.
Go to Profile#10296
Herbert Arntson
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Herbert Edward Arntson was a writer of juvenile historical fiction from Tacoma, Washington. Arntson attended the University of Puget Sound for his undergraduate and master's degrees, both as an English major. For his doctoral degree he went to the University of Washington. He was married to Dorothy Arntson.
Go to Profile#10297
Amy Clarke
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Amy Key Clarke was an English mystical poet and writer, and a teacher at The Cheltenham Ladies' College. Early life and education Clarke was born at 121 Elgin Crescent, Kensington, London, England to Henry Clarke, a lecturer and tutor, and his wife Amy , a writer and first headmistress of Truro High School.
Go to Profile#10298
Henry Bellamann
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Heinrich Hauer Bellamann was an American author, whose bestselling 1940 novel Kings Row exposed the hypocrisy of small-town life in the midwest, addressing many social taboos. Research suggested that Bellamann was working off resentment of his upbringing in Fulton, Missouri, where he had been ostracised for his German extraction and rumoured illegitimacy. The 1942 film version gave Ronald Reagan a starring role, regarded as his most memorable performance.
Go to Profile#10299
Marion Vera Cuthbert
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Marion Vera Cuthbert was an American writer and intellectual associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Cuthbert was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1920. She subsequently became principal of Burrel Normal School, then Dean of Women at Talladega College. In 1933, she delivered an address at the NAACP national convention entitled "Honesty in Race Relations." Cuthbert later received her master's degree and Doctorate from Columbia University. Her dissertation, titled "Education and Marginality: A Study of the Negro College Graduate," was a sociological study of the effects of education on the lives of African-American women.
Go to Profile#10300
Edward Collingwood
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Sir Edward Foyle Collingwood LLD was an English mathematician and scientist. He was a member of the Eglingham branch of a prominent Northumbriann family, the son of Col. Cuthbert Collingwood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose family seat was at Lilburn Tower, near Wooler, Northumberland. His great grandfather was a brother of Admiral Lord Collingwood.
Go to Profile