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,

#1201

Fred Wah

#29939

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Frederick James Wah, OC, is a Canadian poet, novelist, scholar and former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Life Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, but grew up in the interior of British Columbia. His father was born in Canada and raised in China, the son of a Chinese father and a Scots-Irish mother. Wah's mother was a Swedish-born Canadian who came to Canada at age 6. His diverse ethnic makeup figures significantly in his writings.

#1202

Helen Dunmore

#20757

Overall Influence

1952 - 2017 (65 years)

Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer. Her best known works include the novels Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege, and her last book of poetry Inside the Wave. She won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction, the National Poetry Competition, and posthumously the Costa Book Award.

#1203

Ge Fei

#29519

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Ge Fei is the pen-name for Liu Yong , a Chinese novelist who is considered one of the preeminent experimental writers during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Biography Ge Fei was born in Dantu, Jiangsu, in 1964. He graduated from East China Normal University in 1985. He received his PhD in 2000.

#1204

Liz Smith

#5424

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Mary Elizabeth Smith was an American gossip columnist. She was known as "The Grand Dame of Dish". In the 1960s and early 1970s, she was the entertainment editor for the magazines Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated. Between 1976 and 2009, she wrote a self-titled gossip column for newspapers including New York Newsday, the New York Daily News and the New York Post that was syndicated in 60 to 70 other newspapers. On television, she appeared on Fox, E!, and WNBC.

#1205

Junji Kinoshita

#23184

Overall Influence

1914 - 2006 (92 years)

Junji Kinoshita was the foremost playwright of modern drama in postwar Japan. He was also a translator and scholar of Shakespeare's plays. Kinoshita’s achievements were not limited to Japan. He helped to promote theatrical exchanges between Japan and the People’s Republic of China, and he traveled broadly in Europe and Asia. In addition to his international work, Kinoshita joined various societies that focused on the study of folktales and the Japanese language.

#1206

Clare Cavanagh

#21642

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Clare Cavanagh is an American literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator. She is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz. She holds a B.A from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University . Before coming to Northwestern University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been transla...

#1207

Lindy West

#20183

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Lindy West is an American writer, comedian and activist. She is the author of the essay collection Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. The topics she writes about include feminism, popular culture, and the fat acceptance movement.

#1208

Margret Rey

#16117

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

Margret Elizabeth Rey was a German-born American writer and illustrator, known best for the Curious George series of children's picture books that she and her husband H. A. Rey created from 1939 to 1966.

#1209

Thomas Pavel

#12421

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Thomas Pavel is a literary theorist, critic, and novelist, who currently is Emeritus professor at the University of Chicago. Biography Thomas Pavel received an MA in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest in 1962 and a Doctorat 3e cycle from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, in 1971, after defecting to France in 1969. He taught at the University of Ottawa from 1971 to 1981, the University of Québec at Montréal from 1981 to 1986, the University of California Santa Cruz from 1986 to 1990, and Princeton University from 1990 to 1998. He was a visiting professor at...

#1210

Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein

#9943

Overall Influence

1950 - 2006 (56 years)

Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright. She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles.

#1211

Ed McClanahan

#30747

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Edward Poage McClanahan was an American novelist, essayist, and professor. Biography McClanahan was born in Brooksville, Kentucky on October 5, 1932, to Edward Leroy and Jessie McClanahan. He attended school there and later in nearby Maysville, Kentucky, where the family relocated in 1948. McClanahan attended Washington and Lee University for one year before leaving for Miami University, where he received a B.A. in English in 1955. He briefly attended Stanford University's graduate English program during the 1955–1956 academic year, where he studied under Richard Scowcroft and Malcolm Cowley; after failing to acclimate to the program, he received an M.A.

#1212

Martin Day

#16813

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Martin Day is a screenwriter and novelist best known for his work on various spin-offs related to the BBC Television series Doctor Who, and many episodes of the soaps Fair City, Doctors and Family Affairs. Having worked previously at Bath Spa University, he is now visiting lecturer in creative writing at the University of Winchester and the Wessex regional representative of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain.

#1213

Klaus Theweleit

Klaus Theweleit

#17831

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Klaus Theweleit is a German sociologist and writer. Life Theweleit was born in Ebenrode, East Prussia , the son of a railway company worker and a Jewish mother. He wrote the following about his father: "Above all he was a railroader, wholeheartedly, as he used to say, and then a human being. He was a rather good human being and a good fascist. His beatingss which he gave away abundantly and brutally as it was usual in his time and with the best of intentions were the first lessons I received on fascism, a fact I only later fully discovered."

#1214

John Beer

#27442

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

John Bernard Beer was a British literary critic. He was emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Best known as a scholar and critic of Romantic poets – especially William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth – he also published on E. M. Forster. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

#1215

Hugh Lloyd-Jones

#22683

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Sir Peter Hugh Jefferd Lloyd-Jones FBA was a British classical scholar and Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. Early life and education Lloyd-Jones was educated at Westminster School where he developed an interest in Modern History before being converted to Classics by his Headmaster, J. T. Christie. He pursued undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Christ Church, Oxford, but his studies were interrupted by the Second World War. In February 1942, he was one of a group consisting mostly of classicists from Oxford and Cambridge who were assigned to study Japanese at the secret Bedford Japanese School run by Captain Oswald Tuck RN.

#1216

Barbara Hambly

#16800

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Barbara Hambly is an American novelist and screenwriter within the genres of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction. She is the author of the bestselling Benjamin January mystery series featuring a free man of color, a musician and physician, in New Orleans in the antebellum years. She also wrote a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln.

#1217

Georgios Babiniotis

#21820

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Georgios Babiniotis is a Greek linguist and philologist and former Minister of Education and Religious Affairs of Greece. He previously served as rector of Athens University. As a linguist, he is best known as the author of a Dictionary of Modern Greek , which was published in 1998.

#1218

Sam Abrams

#42073

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Sam Abrams is an American poet. He was a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Athens and is a Professor Emeritus of Language and Literature in the College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology. He traveled extensively. He resides in Rochester, New York.

#1219

Charles R. Johnson

Charles R. Johnson

#12902

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Charles Richard Johnson is a scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.

#1220

Gina Berriault

#33683

Overall Influence

1926 - 1999 (73 years)

Gina Berriault , was an American novelist and short story writer. Biography Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.

#1221

Jaime Siles

#38426

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jaime Siles is a Spanish poet, translator and literary critic. He was born in Valencia in 1951, and studied Philosophy and Literature at Salamanca University. He continued his studies at Tubingen University, aided by a scholarship from the Fundación Juan March. He taught at the University of La Laguna, before moving to Vienna in 1983 where he became the director of the Spanish Cultural Institute.

#1222

Mark McGurl

#33423

Overall Influence

Mark McGurl is an American literary critic specializing in 20th-century American literature. He is the Albert L. Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. Background McGurl received his B.A. from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins University. He has also worked as a journalist for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2011, McGurl received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.

#1223

Mark Winegardner

#23965

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Mark Winegardner is an American writer born and raised in Bryan, Ohio. His novels include The Godfather Returns, Crooked River Burning, and The Veracruz Blues. He published a collection of short stories, That's True of Everybody, in 2002. His newest novel, The Godfather's Revenge, was published in November 2006 by Putnam. His Godfather novels continue the story of the Corleone family depicted in Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

#1224

Nobuo Kojima

#25923

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Nobuo Kojima was a Japanese writer prominent in the postwar era. He is most readily associated with other writers of his generation, such as Shōtarō Yasuoka, who describe the effects of Japan's defeat in World War II on the country's psyche.

#1225

Abbas Zaryab

#21700

Overall Influence

1919 - 1995 (76 years)

Abbas Zaryab or 'Abbās Zaryāb was a historian, translator, literature Professor and Iranologist. He was the author of several books, including a life of Muhammad, and articles in The Persian Encyclopedia , Western peer reviewed Journals as well as Iranica.

#1226

Jack Collom

#20874

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

John Aldridge "Jack" Collom was an American poet, essayist, and creative writing pedagogue. Included among the twenty-five books he published during his lifetime were Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955–2000; Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community; and Second Nature, which won the 2013 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. In the fields of education and creative writing, he was involved in eco-literature, ecopoetics, and writing instruction for children.

#1227

David Edgar

#9700

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David Edgar is a British playwright and writer who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain. He was resident playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974–5 and has been a board member there since 1985. Awarded a Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic, he was made a Bicentennial Arts Fellow .

#1228

Ed Bullins

#21001

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Edward Artie Bullins , sometimes publishing as Kingsley B. Bass Jr, was an American playwright. He won awards including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obie Awards. Bullins was associated with the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party, for which he was the minister of culture in the 1960s.

#1229

Miller Williams

Miller Williams

#17688

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Stanley Miller Williams was an American contemporary poet, as well as a university professor, translator and editor. He produced over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments were chronicled in Arkansas Biography. Williams was chosen to read a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton. One of his best-known poems is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina." He was the father of American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.

#1230

David Shapiro

#14825

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David Shapiro is an American poet, literary critic, and art historian. He has written some twenty volumes of poetry, literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of thirteen, and his first book was published when he was eighteen.

#1231

Mat Johnson

#31863

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Mat Johnson is an American fiction writer who works in both prose and the comics format. In 2007, he was named the first USA James Baldwin Fellow by United States Artists. Life and career Johnson was born and raised in the Germantown and Mount Airy communities in Philadelphia.

#1232

Allen Curnow

#21147

Overall Influence

1911 - 2001 (90 years)

Thomas Allen Monro Curnow was a New Zealand poet and journalist. Life Curnow was born in Timaru, New Zealand, the son of a fourth generation New Zealander, an Anglican clergyman, and he grew up in a religious family. The family was of Cornish origin. During his early childhood they often moved, living in Canterbury, Belfast, Malvern, Lyttelton and New Brighton. He was educated at Christchurch Boys' High School, Canterbury University, and obtained a PhD from Auckland University in 1964.

#1233

James Purdy

#20870

Overall Influence

1914 - 2009 (95 years)

James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.

#1234

Julia Glass

#32240

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Julia Glass is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002. Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.

#1235

Lorna Goodison

#24564

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017 , serving in the role until 2020.

#1236

Anne Lamott

#21462

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Anne Lamott is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical. Lamott's writings, marked by their self-deprecating humor and openness, cover such subjects as alcoholism, single-motherhood, depression, and Christianity.

#1237

Nahoko Uehashi

#34773

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese writer, primarily of fantasy books, for which she has won many awards. Uehashi is also Professor of Ethnology at Kawamura Gakuen Women's University, having completed a PhD focusing on the Yamatji, an indigenous Australian people.

#1238

Lucinda Roy

#4440

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lucinda Roy is an American-based British novelist, educator and poet. Biography She was born in Battersea, South London, England, to Jamaican writer and artist Namba Roy and Yvonne Roy , an English actor and teacher. Lucinda Roy grew up in England and received her Bachelor of Arts in English from King's College London before moving to the United States, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Arkansas.

#1239

Heidi Julavits

#26766

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and was a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace , The Effect of Living Backwards , The Uses of Enchantment , and The Vanishers . She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.

#1240

Leslie Scalapino

#31360

Overall Influence

1944 - 2010 (66 years)

Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way , a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.

#1241

Murat Belge

#9412

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Murat Belge is a Turkish academic, translator, literary critic, columnist, civil rights activist, and occasional tour guide. Career Belge was a member of the organizing committee for a two-day academic conference that started on 24 September 2005, held at Istanbul Bilgi University in Istanbul, titled "Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy". The conference offered an open dispute of the official Turkish account of the Armenian genocide, and was denounced by nationalists as treacherous.

#1242

Stewart Brown

#20492

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stewart Brown is an English poet, university lecturer and scholar of African and Caribbean Literature. Life and study Brown is an English-born lecturer in Caribbean and African culture, particularly Literature, at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, since 1988, and has also spent periods teaching in schools and universities in Jamaica, Nigeria, Wales and Barbados.

#1243

Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh

#8661

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system.

#1244

Peter Hunt

#34728

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Peter Hunt is a British scholar who is Professor Emeritus in English and children's literature at Cardiff University, UK. Hunt was a pioneer of the academic study of children's literature as a literary, rather than educational, discipline at university level, and 'he has been instrumental in creating a world network of those whose research concerns are located in this domain'. The courses that he ran at Cardiff from 1985 were the first of their kind in the UK. He has lectured on children's literature at over 150 universities, colleges and to learned societies in 23 countries, and over the pas...

#1245

Lucy Chao

#33325

Overall Influence

1912 - 1998 (86 years)

Lucy Chao or Zhao Luorui was a Chinese poet and translator. Biography Chao was born on May 9, 1912, in Xinshi, Deqing County, Zhejiang, China. She married Chen Mengjia, an anthropologist and expert on oracle bones, in 1932. In 1944 Chao and Chen were awarded a joint fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study at the University of Chicago in the United States. Chao earned her PhD from the institution in 1948, for a dissertation on Henry James. Afterwards, she returned to China to teach English and North American literature at Yenching University, Beijing.

#1246

Kristin Ross

#9773

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Kristin Ross is a professor emeritus of comparative literature at New York University. She is primarily known for her work on French literature and culture of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Life and work Ross received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1981 and since then has written a number of books, including The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune , Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May '68 and its Afterlives . She edited Anti-Americanism with Andrew Ross . In 2015, her book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary...

#1247

NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo

#25529

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele , a Zimbabwean author. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. She was named one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2014. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, and her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her "the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker list twice".

#1248

Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi

Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi

#42278

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Mohammad-Jafar Yahaghi is a celebrated Persian writer, literary critic, editor and translator and distinguished professor of literature at Ferdowsi University of Mashad. He is currently the head of Center of Excellence in Researches about Ferdowsi and Khorasan literature.

#1249

Gianni Celati

#27896

Overall Influence

1937 - 2022 (85 years)

Gianni Celati was an Italian writer, translator, and literary critic. Biography Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio, Italy, but spent his infancy and adolescence in the province of Ferrara. He graduated in English literature with a degree on James Joyce by the teacher Carlo Izzo of the University of Bologna, where he would later teach .

#1250

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester

#17996

Overall Influence

1910 - 1999 (89 years)

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was a Spanish writer associated with the Generation of '36 movement. Life He was born in Serantes, Ferrol, Galicia, and received his first education there, subsequently attending the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Oviedo.

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