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.

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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,

#10701

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.

#10702

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.

#10703

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.

#10704

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.

#10705

John Lundie Michie

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...

#10706

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.

#10707

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.

#10708

Rita Felski

#10709

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.

#10710

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.

#10711

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.

#10712

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...

#10713

Lyubomir Nikolov Vladikin

1891 - 1948 (57 years)

Lubomir N. Vladikin a jurist, writer, and Bulgarian nationalist of the 20th century. Biography Early life Vladikin was born on September 3, 1891, in the village of Golyamo Belovo, Pazardzhik area. His mother, Maria Morfova, sister of the opera singer Hristina Morfova and the composer Aleksandar Morfov, studied French Philology in Geneva. His father, Nikola Yonkov Vladikin, was a well-known journalist, scholar, writer, publicist, historian and political activist. Over the period from 1890 to 1912 he was an MP for three consecutive terms. He was a nephew of the Bishop of South Bulgaria , known...

#10714

William Leroy Broun

William Leroy Broun

1827 - 1902 (75 years)

William Leroy Broun was the President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, then known as the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University, from 1882 to 1902, with a one-year hiatus in 1883.

#10715

Alexander Petrie

1881 - 1979 (98 years)

Alexander Petrie was the first Professor of Classics at the University of Natal . Academic career Petrie graduated with an MA from Aberdeen University in 1903, where he received the Liddle Prize for Latin Verse . He won the Ferguson Scholarship in 1904. He also attended Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA from the University of Cambridge in 1907. He was appointed lecturer in Greek at Aberdeen in 1908, but in 1910 moved to South Africa to take up the position of Professor of Classics at the recently formed Natal University College, where he stayed until his retirement in 1946. He...

#10716

Frank Frost Abbott

1860 - 1924 (64 years)

Frank Frost Abbott was an American classical scholar. Life Born in Redding, Connecticut, he taught at the University of Chicago, then moved to Princeton University in 1907. He died in Montreux, Switzerland.

#10717

John Bright

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

John Milton Bright was an American journalist, screenwriter and political activist. Bright was born in Baltimore and worked with Ben Hecht as a newspaper journalist in Chicago. With fellow journalist Kubec Glasmon, Bright co-wrote a series of stories adapted as screenplays. The most notable of these, Beer and Blood, became the 1931 film The Public Enemy starring James Cagney. The two were nominated for a 1931 Academy Award for Best Story.

#10718

Nicolas-Hubert de Mongault

Nicolas-Hubert de Mongault

1674 - 1746 (72 years)

Nicolas-Hubert Mongault was a French ecclesiastic and translator of the classics. He was an illegitimate son of Gilbert Colbert, Marquis de Saint-Pouange, a cousin of Louis XIV's powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

#10719

Warren Miller

1921 - 1966 (45 years)

Warren Miller was an American writer. He gained fame for his books dealing with issues of race, as in The Cool World and The Siege of Harlem , and for his more political books such as Looking for The General and Flush Times .

#10720

Khachik Dashtents

1910 - 1974 (64 years)

Khachik Dashtents was an ethnic Armenian Soviet writer, poet and translator. Biography Khachik Dashtents was born in a shepherd's family on May 25, 1910 in Dashtadem, Sasun, Western Armenia . After the Armenian genocide, he moved to Yerevan and graduated from the Yerevan State University in 1932, and later studied at the Moscow State Linguistic University .

#10721

Walter Bagehot

1826 - 1877 (51 years)

Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market .

#10722

Barbara P. McCarthy

Barbara P. McCarthy

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire. Education McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A.

#10723

Wilhelm Gnapheus

1493 - 1568 (75 years)

Wilhelm Gnapheus was a Dutch-born Protestant religious figure and writer. After studying at the University of Cologne, in 1520 Gnapheus became dean of a Latin school in The Hague, where he encountered Reformation ideas. When in 1523 he and Cornelis Hoen were arrested, he met Jan de Bakker , the first Protestant martyr in the Netherlands. Gnapheus had been incarcerated together with de Bakker, but was released, then had to flee the inquisition.

#10724

Pasquale Festa Campanile

1927 - 1986 (59 years)

Pasquale Festa Campanile was an Italian screenwriter, film director and novelist, best known as a prominent exponent of the commedia all'italiana genre. Life and career Born at Melfi, in the province of Potenza, he moved to Rome at young age. He started as a writer and literary critic. La nonna Sabella, one of his novels, was later adapted by Dino Risi into the movie of the same name, internationally known as Oh! Sabella .

#10725

Johann Andreas Michael Nagel

1710 - 1788 (78 years)

Johann Andreas Michael Nagel was a German Hebrew scholar and Orientalist. Life Nagel was born in Sulzbach, to the east of Nuremberg. He was taught by the local Cantor who later moved on to teach at the St. Lawrence School in Nuremberg. Additionally, he received his early instruction in Latin and Religion from his father. Other tutors also came to the house, in the first instance with the intention of preparing him for a life in business. In the end, however, he was redirected to a theological career. Now taught not in the vernacular but in Latin, by a deacon who covered the middle eastern languages, he moved on to the Gymnasium in Nuremberg.

#10726

Alexander William Mair

1875 - 1928 (53 years)

Alexander William Mair was a 20th century Scottish scholar who was a professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. He was an authority on the works of the Greek poet Hesiod. Life Mair was born in Edinburgh on 9 June 1875, the son of Rev Alexander Mair of the United Presbyterian Church. The family lived at 7 Abbotsford Park in the Morningside district. He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge.

#10727

Harry Hayden Clark

1901 - 1971 (70 years)

Harry Hayden Clark was a professor of English, specializing in American literature. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1931–1932. Clark graduated in 1923 with A.B. from Connecticut's Trinity College and in 1924 from Harvard University. At Yale University he was an instructor in English for the academic year 1924–1925. In the English department of Vermont's Middlebury College, he was from 1925 to 1926 an instructor and from 1926 to 1928 an assistant professor. From 1928 until his death in 1971 he was a faculty member of the English department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

#10728

Alexander Gray

1882 - 1968 (86 years)

Sir Alexander Gray was a Scottish civil servant, economist, academic, translator, writer and poet. Life and work He was born at 1 Marshall Street in Lochee near Dundee the son of John Young Gray, an art teacher at the High School of Dundee, and his wife, Mary Young.

#10729

Ézsaiás Budai

1760 - 1841 (81 years)

Ézsaiás Budai was a Hungarian Protestant theologian and philologue. Life His family was noble and his uncle, Budai Ferenc , was also a Protestant priest and the author of a scientific-historic lexicon published by his nephew after his death. Ézsaiás Budai studied at the Reformed University, which became later the University of Debrecen. From 1792 to 1794, he followed classes with Christian Gottlob Heyne, Christoph Meiners, August Ludwig von Schlözer und Ludwig Timotheus Spittler. After a journey to the Netherlands and England and a short period as a philosophy professor at the University of G...

#10730

Hans Krahe

1898 - 1965 (67 years)

Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born in Gelsenkirchen. Work Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.

#10731

Rosemary Woolf

1925 - 1978 (53 years)

Rosemary Estelle Woolf was an English scholar of medieval literature, known especially for her work on medieval English religious lyrics, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Biography Woolf was the daughter of British film executive C. M. Woolf. She was the first woman in her family to attend university, receiving a B.Litt. from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1949. She became a lecturer at the University College of Hull in 1948. She became a lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford University in 1961, teaching Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English...

#10732

Newton Phelps Stallknecht

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

Newton Phelps Stallknecht was an American philosopher and a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Indiana University. In addition, he was the Director of the School of Letters at Indiana University from 1953-1972. He also served as a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Stallknecht was educated at Princeton University, achieving his A.B. in 1927, A.M. in 1928, and Ph.D. in 1930. During World War II, he was attached to the United States Army Security Agency in Washington. His publications cover both philosophy and comparative literature, with a philosophical fo...

#10733

Dorothea Krook-Gilead

1920 - 1989 (69 years)

Dorothea Krook-Gilead was an Israeli literary scholar, translator, and professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. Biography Krook was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. She earned a degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 1946 she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her Ph.D. and spent 14 years as a research fellow and assistant lecturer. Among her students there was the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote that Krook was her ideal of a successful career woman and wonderful human being.

#10734

Robert Kaske

1921 - 1989 (68 years)

Robert Earl Kaske was an American professor of medieval literature. He spent most of his career at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and where he founded one of the preeminent medieval studies graduate programs in North America. His published output included lengthy interpretations of Beowulf, and of poems and passages by Dante and Chaucer, and frequently constituted leading studies. Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, with articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, the Divine Comedy, "Th...

#10735

Julio Jiménez Rueda

1896 - 1960 (64 years)

Julio Jiménez Rueda was a Mexican lawyer, writer, playwright and diplomat. Biography Jiménez Rueda studied at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and graduated in law at the Universidad Nacional de México in 1919. Later on, he was appointed as the director of the Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral of UNAM. He completed a doctoral degree of philosophy and literature in 1935. As a diplomat, he served in Montevideo in 1920, and afterwards in Buenos Aires until 1922. Back in Mexico he was the director of the General Archive of the Nation, and later president of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores. In...

#10736

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.

#10737

Gianfranco Contini

Gianfranco Contini

1912 - 1990 (78 years)

Gianfranco Contini was an Italian academic and philologist. He studied at the Collegio Mellerio Rosmini in Domodossola, then at the University of Pavia, where he graduated in 1933. Later, he studied also in Turin, where he met Giulio Einaudi, Massimo Mila, and Leone Ginzburg, who shortly after started the Einaudi's publishing company. From 1934 to 1936, he lived in Paris, following Joseph Bédier's lessons, then he was called to teach in Florence and Pisa, where he became a contributor to "Letteratura", a literary magazine where he shared his views, among others, with Eugenio Montale, and where he began to collaborate with the Accademia della Crusca.

#10738

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.

#10739

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.

#10740

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.

#10741

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.

#10742

Carroll Vincent Newsom

Carroll Vincent Newsom

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Carroll Vincent Newsom was an American educator who served as the eleventh NYU president and president of Prentice Hall. Newsom was born February 23, 1904, in Buckley, Illinois. He received a B.A. from the College of Emporia in 1924, a M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1927 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1931.

#10743

Clyde Pharr

1885 - 1972 (87 years)

Clyde Pharr was an American classics professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, Southwestern Presbyterian University , Vanderbilt University , and, finally, at the University of Texas at Austin. Early life Pharr was born in Saltillo, Texas, the son of Samuel Milton Pharr and Josephine Fleming Pharr. He attended Saltillo High School and earned B.S. and A.B. degrees from East Texas Normal College in 1903 and 1905, respectively. He continued his education at Yale University, earning another A.B. there in 1906. He was named an Abernathy Fellow at Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1910. From 1...

#10744

Donald Alfred Stauffer

1902 - 1952 (50 years)

Donald Alfred Stauffer was an American literary critic, novelist and Professor of English who spent the majority of his career at Princeton University. Biography Stauffer studied at Princeton University, where he completed his A.B. degree in 1923 and A.M. degree in 1924. He received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. degree in 1928. After completing his doctorate he returned to Princeton, where he spent most of his career as Professor of English and English Department Chairman.

#10745

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.

#10746

Caroline Spurgeon

Caroline Spurgeon

1869 - 1942 (73 years)

Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon was an English literary critic. In 1913, she was appointed Hildred Carlisle Professor of English at the University of London and became head of the Department of English at Bedford College, London. She was the first woman to be awarded a chair at the University of London, and only the third in Britain . She co-founded the International Federation of University Women with Virginia Gildersleeve.

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