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).

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1051

W. D. Snodgrass

W. D. Snodgrass

#20777

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

William De Witt Snodgrass was an American poet who also wrote under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons. He won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Life Snodgrass was born on January 5, 1926, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to Bruce De Witt, an accountant, and Jesse Helen Snodgrass. The family lived in Wilkinsburg, but drove to Beaver Falls for his birth since his grandfather was a doctor in the town. Eventually the family moved to Beaver Falls and Snodgrass graduated from the local high school in 1943. He then attended Geneva College until 1944 when he was drafted into the United States Navy. After ...

#1052

Edward Baugh

#28685

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Edward Alston Cecil Baugh is a Jamaican poet and scholar, recognised as an authority on the work of Derek Walcott, whose Selected Poems Baugh edited, having in 1978 authored the first book-length study of the Nobel-winning poet's work, Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision.

#1053

Ken Dowden

#32475

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Ken Dowden is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Birmingham. Dowden is from Newcastle upon Tyne and studied at Worcester College, Oxford University. He came to Birmingham in 1988, acting as Head of the School of Humanities from 2000 to 2003, as Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity from 2005 to 2012, and as Head of the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion from 2012 to 2016.

#1054

Meir Sternberg

#27536

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Meir Sternberg is an Israeli literary critic and biblical scholar. He is Artzt Professor of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. Along with Robert Alter and Adele Berlin, Sternberg is one of the most prominent practitioners of a literary approach to the Bible.

#1055

Molly Gloss

#30102

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Molly Gloss is an American writer of historical fiction and science fiction. Life Gloss grew up in rural Oregon and began writing seriously when she became a mother. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, and was close friends with fellow science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. She has taught writing and literature of the American West at Portland State University, and currently is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA program.

#1056

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

#25826

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of the Humanities and a professor of English at Stanford University. Fishkin received her B.A. and M.Phil. in English, and her Ph.D. in American studies, all from Yale University. Before teaching at Stanford University, she served as director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University and professor of American studies at the University of Texas, Austin.

#1057

Joyce Johnson

#15792

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.

#1058

Fred Bronson

#9837

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Fredric M. "Fred" Bronson is an American journalist, author and writer. He is the author of books related to number one songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and other books related to various music charts as well. He is also known for his appearances on American Idol and the weekly "Chart Beat" column in Billboard magazine.

#1059

Fred D'Aguiar

#23497

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright of Portuguese descent. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles . Life Fred D'Aguiar was born in London, England, in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana, living there with his grandmother until 1972, when he returned to England at the age of 12.

#1060

Frank Bidart

#13410

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Frank Bidart is an American academic and poet, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Biography Bidart is a native of California and considered a career in acting or directing when he was young. In 1957, he began to study at the University of California at Riverside, where he was introduced to writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and started to look at poetry as a career path. He then went on to Harvard, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He began studying with Lowell and Reuben Brower in 1962.

#1061

Poppy Z. Brite

#19577

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

William Joseph Martin , formerly Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author. He initially achieved fame in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s by publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. He is best known for his novels Lost Souls , Drawing Blood , and Exquisite Corpse . His later work moved into the genre of dark comedy, with many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Martin's novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of his work features openly bisexual and gay...

#1062

Abiola Irele

#12155

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Francis Abiola Irele was a Nigerian academic best known as the doyen of Africanist literary scholars worldwide. He was Provost at Kwara State University, founded in 2009 in Ilorin, Nigeria. Before moving back to Nigeria, Irele was Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

#1063

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein

#16455

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Early life Born in Bootle, Lancashire, England, Feinstein grew up in Leicester. Her father had left school at 12 and had little time for books, but he was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She wrote, "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never ...

#1064

ZZ Packer

#27295

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Zuwena "ZZ" Packer is an American writer. She is primarily known for her works of short fiction. Early life and education Born in Chicago, Illinois, Packer grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and Louisville, Kentucky. "ZZ" was a childhood nickname; her given name is Zuwena. She was recognized as a talented writer at an early age, publishing in Seventeen at the age of 19. Packer is a 1990 graduate of Seneca High School, in Louisville, Kentucky.

#1065

Marie Howe

#17546

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Marie Howe is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Magdalene . In August 2012 she was named the State Poet for New York. Early life Howe is the second eldest of nine children. She attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Rochester and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Windsor.

#1066

Mona Van Duyn

#20455

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Mona Jane Van Duyn was an American poet. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1992. Biography Early years Van Duyn was born May 9, 1921, in Waterloo, Iowa. She grew up in the small town of Eldora where she read voraciously in the town library and wrote poems secretly in notebooks from her grade school years to her high school years. Van Duyn earned a B.A. from Iowa State Teachers College in 1942, and an M.A. from the State University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. She and Thurston studied in the Ph.D. program at Iowa. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor at the University of Louisville when her husband became an assistant professor there.

#1067

Farley Mowat

#8709

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Farley McGill Mowat, was a Canadian writer and environmentalist. His works were translated into 52 languages, and he sold more than 17 million books. He achieved fame with the publication of his books on the Canadian north, such as People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf . The latter, an account of his experiences with wolves in the Arctic, was made into a film of the same name released in 1983. For his body of work as a writer he won the annual Vicky Metcalf Award for Children's Literature in 1970.

#1068

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine

#11693

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays. Her book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry , the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award in poetry, the 2015 PEN Open Book Award, the 2015 PEN American Center USA Literary Award, the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2015 VIDA Literary Award.

#1069

Roger Lewis

#16618

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Roger Lewis is a Welsh academic, biographer and journalist. Biography Lewis was raised in Bedwas, Monmouthshire, and educated at Bassaleg School in Newport. He then attended the University of St Andrews, graduating MA, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained the MLitt degree, both with first class honours. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1984.

#1070

Ivan Svitlichny

#26936

Overall Influence

1929 - 1992 (63 years)

Ivan Oleksiyovych Svitlichny was a Ukrainian poet, literary critic, and Soviet dissident. Biography Ivan Svitlichny was born on 20 September 1929 in Polovykino, Luhansk Oblast to a family of farmers.

#1071

Paul Cernat

#25431

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Paul Cernat is a Romanian essayist and literary critic. He has a Ph.D. summa cum laude in philology. Cernat has been a member of the Writers' Union of Romania since 2009. As of 2013, he is lecturer of Romanian literature in the Department of History of the University of Bucharest.

#1072

Ihsan Abbas

#12172

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

Ihsan Abbas was a Palestinian professor at the American University of Beirut, and was considered a premier figure of Arabic and Islamic studies in the East and West during the 20th century. The "author of over one hundred books", during his career, Abbas was renowned as one of the foremost scholars of Arabic language and literature and was a respected literary critic. Upon his death, Abbas was eulogized by University College London historian Lawrence Conrad as a custodian of Arabic heritage and culture, and a figure whose scholarship had dominated the Middle East's intellectual and cultural l...

#1073

Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips

#27269

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jayne Anne Phillips is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. Education Phillips graduated from West Virginia University, earning a B.A. in 1974, and later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

#1074

C. K. Williams

#16853

Overall Influence

1936 - 2015 (79 years)

Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.

#1075

Judith Fetterley

#30374

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Judith Fetterley is a literary scholar known for her work in feminism and women's studies. She was influential in leading a reappraisal of women's literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the contributions of women writing about women's experience, including their perspectives on men in the world.

#1076

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively

#19944

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books . Children's fiction Lively first achieved success with children's fiction. Her first book, Astercote, was published by Heinemann in 1970. It is a low fantasy novel set in a Cotswolds village and the neighbouring woodland site of a medieval village wiped out by Plague.

#1077

Chevy Chase

#8887

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase is an American comedian, actor, and writer. He became the breakout cast member in the first season of Saturday Night Live , where his recurring Weekend Update segment became a staple of the show. As both a performer and a writer on the series, he earned two Primetime Emmy Awards out of four nominations.

#1078

Tison Pugh

#24300

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Tison Pugh is a literary scholar. He has been a professor of English at the University of Central Florida since 2006. Before coming to UCF, Pugh was a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, in the 2000–2001 academic year.

#1079

Terry Castle

#16191

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Terry Castle is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award. She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to World War I-era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe."

#1080

Elizabeth Solopova

#26678

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.

#1081

Lucy Mangan

#16560

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Lucy Katherine Mangan is a British journalist and author. She is a columnist, features writer and TV critic for The Guardian and an opinion writer for i news. A major part of her writing is related to feminism.

#1082

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler

#23496

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993. Early life Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, to Robert Olen Butler Sr., an actor and theater professor who became the chairman of the theater department of Saint Louis University, and his wife, the former Lucille Frances Hall, an executive secretary.

#1083

Nanos Valaoritis

#13061

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Ioannis Valaoritis was a Greek writer, widely published as a poet, novelist and playwright since 1939; his correspondence with George Seferis was a bestseller. Raised within a cosmopolitan family with roots in the Greek War of Independence but twice driven into exile by events, Valaoritis lived in Greece, the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and as a writer and academic he played a significant role in introducing the literary idioms of each country to the rest. The quality, the international appeal, and the influence of his work led Valaoritis to be described as the most imp...

#1084

Ivor Cutler

#9906

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Ivor Cutler was a Scottish poet, singer, musician, songwriter, artist and humorist. He became known for his regular performances on BBC radio, and in particular his numerous sessions recorded for John Peel's influential eponymous late night radio programme , and later for Andy Kershaw's programme. He appeared in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film in 1967 and on Neil Innes' television programmes. Cutler also wrote books for children and adults and was a teacher at A. S. Neill's Summerhill School and for 30 years in inner-city schools in London.

#1085

Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott

#6560

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Peter Dale Scott is a Canadian-born poet, academic, and former diplomat. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he is best known for his critiques of deep politics and American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Notably, he was a signatory in 1968 of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Although trained as a political scientist, Scott holds an atypical academic appointment as a poet-scholar in an English department.

#1086

Kim Stafford

#23054

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Kim Robert Stafford is an American poet and essayist who lives in Portland, Oregon. Early life and education Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Stafford is the son of poet William Stafford. He earned a Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts in English, and Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Oregon.

#1087

Beverly Donofrio

#28202

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Beverly Ann Donofrio is an American memoirist, children's author, and creative writing teacher known for her 1992 best selling memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys. The memoir was adapted into the 2001 film Riding in Cars with Boys, directed by Penny Marshall, with Drew Barrymore portraying Donofrio.

#1088

Merve Emre

#19434

Overall Influence

Merve Emre is a Turkish-American author, academic, and literary critic. She is the author of nonfiction books The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing and Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

#1089

Wallace Fowlie

#13433

Overall Influence

1908 - 1998 (90 years)

Wallace Fowlie was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University where he taught from 1964 to the end of his career. Although he published more than twenty books, he was devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature. He took his A.B. at Harvard College in 1930 followed by a Master's in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1936, also at Harvard. Before coming to Duke in 1964, he taught at Bennington College, University of Chicago, and Yale University.

#1090

Thomas McFarland

#25962

Overall Influence

1926 - 2011 (85 years)

Professor Thomas A. McFarland was a literary critic who specialised in the literature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was Murray Professor of Romantic English Literature at Princeton University. McFarland established his reputation with Coleridge and Pantheist Tradition , where he argued that Coleridge was struggling to reconcile two types of philosophy; the philosophy of the 'it is' and the philosophy of the 'I am'.

#1091

Carolyn Kizer

#17581

Overall Influence

1925 - 2014 (89 years)

Carolyn Ashley Kizer was an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. According to an article at the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, "Kizer reach[ed] into mythology in poems like Semele Recycled; into politics, into feminism, especially in her series of poems called "Pro Femina"; into science, the natural world, music, and translations and commentaries on Japanese and Chinese literatures".

#1092

Anne Michaels

#25149

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction.

#1093

David Croft

#8910

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Major David John Croft, was an English television comedy screenwriter, producer and director. He produced and wrote a string of BBC sitcoms with partners Jimmy Perry and Jeremy Lloyd, including Dad's Army, Are You Being Served?, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and 'Allo 'Allo!

#1094

Gerald Stern

#16787

Overall Influence

1925 - 2022 (97 years)

Gerald Daniel Stern was an American poet, essayist, and educator. The author of twenty collections of poetry and four books of essays, he taught literature and creative writing at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Raritan Valley Community College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. From 2009 until his death, he was a distinguished poet-in-residence and faculty member of Drew University's graduate program for a Master of Fine Arts in poetry.

#1095

Malcolm Bowie

#8326

Overall Influence

1943 - 2007 (64 years)

Malcolm McNaughtan Bowie FBA was a British academic, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 2002 to 2006. An acclaimed scholar of French literature, Bowie wrote several books on Marcel Proust, as well as books on Mallarmé, Lacan, and psychoanalysis.

#1096

Amin Maalouf

#9427

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born French author who has lived in France since 1976. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into over 40 languages.

#1097

Enda Walsh

#16884

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright. Biography Enda Walsh was born in Kilbarrack, North Dublin on 7 February 1967. His father ran a furniture shop and his mother had been an actress. He is the second youngest of six children. Walsh states that he saw his father, a salesman, as the 'lead actor' in the business, but as Ireland's economy fluctuated, so did furniture sales. Notably during the recession in the 1980s, when profits were low, Walsh says that he was earning more money managing his own newspaper round enterprise than his father was bringing home from the shop. Life in the large family...

#1098

Shankha Ghosh

#20539

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Sankha Ghosh was an Indian poet and literary critic. He was born in Chandpur District of the then Bengal Presidency, present day Bangladesh. His ancestral home was at Banaripara Upazila in Barisal District. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Ishwardi Upazila of Pabna District, which was his father's workplace.

#1099

Francisco Goldman

Francisco Goldman

#15927

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College. His most recent novel, Monkey Boy , was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

#1100

Peter Levi

#19556

Overall Influence

1931 - 2000 (69 years)

Peter Chad Tigar Levi, FSA, FRSL was a British poet, archaeologist, Jesuit priest, travel writer, biographer, academic and prolific reviewer and critic. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford .

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