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,

#1301

Daphne Marlatt

#32359

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Daphne Marlatt, born Buckle, CM , is a Canadian poet and novelist who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. At a young age, her family moved to Malaysia and at age nine, they moved to British Columbia, where she later attended the University of British Columbia. There she developed her poetry style and her strong feminist views. In 1968, she received an MA in comparative literature from Indiana University.

#1302

Bian Zhilin

#33065

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Bian Zhilin was a 20th-century Chinese poet, translator and literature researcher. Bian was born in Haimen, Jiangsu on December 8, 1910, and liked to read classical and modern Chinese poems when he was very young. In 1929, he entered the English department of Beijing University to study. During this time he was greatly influenced by the English romantic poems and French symbolic poems, and began to write poems by himself. The poetry anthology The Han Garden Collection co-written by Bian, Li Guangtian and He Qifang, was published in 1936.

#1303

A. Walton Litz

#26001

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Arthur Walton Litz, Jr. was an American literary historian and critic who served as professor of English Literature at Princeton University from 1956 to 1993. He was the author or editor of over twenty collections of literary criticism, including various editions of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot.

#1304

Janet Brennan Croft

#34005

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Janet Brennan Croft is an American librarian and Tolkien scholar, known for her authored and edited books and journals on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy. Academic career Croft earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Classical Civilization from Indiana University in 1982 and graduated as a Master of Library Science in 1983 at the Indiana University School of Library and Information. She has worked at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and has been director and associate professor at Warden Memorial Library, Martin Methodist College. She became the Head of Access Services at Bizzell Memorial Library, University of Oklahoma, in 2001 and was given associate professorship in 2007.

#1305

Margaret Mahy

#30890

Overall Influence

1936 - 2012 (76 years)

Margaret Mahy was a New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. Many of her story plots have strong supernatural elements but her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. She wrote more than 100 picture books, 40 novels and 20 collections of short stories. At her death she was one of thirty writers to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her "lasting contribution to children's literature".

#1306

John Kinsella

#24998

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

John Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an 'international regionalism' in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians.

#1307

Andrew Miller

#20657

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Andrew Brooke Miller FRSL is an English novelist. Life and career Miller was born in Bristol. He grew up in the West Country and has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland and France. He was educated at Dauntsey's School, and after gaining a first-class degree in English at Middlesex Polytechnic, completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1991. In 1995 he wrote a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. For his first book Ingenious Pain he received three awards, the James Tait Black Memorial Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award; and the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy.

#1308

Gershon Shaked

#22139

Overall Influence

1929 - 2006 (77 years)

Gershon Shaked was an Israeli scholar and critic of Hebrew literature. Biography Gerhard Mandel was born in Vienna, Austria. He immigrated to Mandate Palestine alone in 1939, and was later followed by his parents. He attended Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. He hebraicized his surname to "Shaked". He was married to Malka, and had two daughters.

#1309

Eric Kripke

#35394

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Eric Kripke is an American writer and television producer. He came to prominence as the creator of the fantasy drama series Supernatural which aired on The CW. He served as the showrunner during the first five seasons of the series. Since then he has created and/or produced a number of television series including the post-apocalyptic drama series Revolution , the science fiction series Timeless , the superhero series The Boys and its spin-off Gen V .

#1310

James S. Shapiro

#15774

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture.

#1311

John Piper

#3357

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Stephen Piper is an American Reformed Baptist theologian, pastor, and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Piper taught biblical studies at Bethel University for six years , before serving as pastor for preaching and vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis for 33 years .

#1312

Hervé Bazin

#16659

Overall Influence

1911 - 1996 (85 years)

Hervé Bazin was a French writer, whose best-known novels covered semi-autobiographical topics of teenage rebellion and dysfunctional families. Biography Bazin, born Jean-Pierre Hervé-Bazin in Angers, Maine-et-Loire, France came from a high-bourgeois Catholic family. He was the great-nephew of the writer René Bazin. His father was a magistrate who with his wife had been sent to China to take up a diplomatic post. Hervé and his brother were brought up in the ancestral home, the chateau of Le Patys, by their grandmother. When she died, his mother returned from Hanoi with reluctance. She sent Baz...

#1313

Yeleazar Meletinsky

#41579

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Eleazar Moiseevich Meletinskii was a Russian scholar famous for his seminal studies of folklore, literature, philology and the history and theory of narrative; he was one of the major figures of Russian academia in those fields.

#1314

Elleke Boehmer

#16700

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Ka...

#1315

John Heath-Stubbs

John Heath-Stubbs

#19530

Overall Influence

1918 - 2006 (88 years)

John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs was an English poet and translator. He is known for verse influenced by classical myths, and for a long Arthurian poem, "Artorius" . Biography and works Heath-Stubbs was born in Streatham, London. The family later lived in Hampstead. His parents were Francis Heath-Stubbs, a non-practising, independently wealthy solicitor, and his wife Edith Louise Sara, a concert pianist under her maiden name, Edie Marr. His boyhood was largely spent near the New Forest.

#1316

David Gates

#28812

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His works have been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Education Gates obtained his B.A. from the University of Connecticut in 1972.

#1317

Peter Schjeldahl

#14436

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Peter Charles Schjeldahl was an American art critic, poet, and educator. He was noted for being the head art critic at The New Yorker, having earlier written for The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The New York Times.

#1318

Wlad Godzich

#22435

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Wlad Godzich is a literary critic, literary theorist, translator, and scholar. He is attributed with influencing the conceptualization of modern literary critical theory. He currently serves as Professor of general and comparative literature, and critical studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

#1319

Imani Perry

#13417

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

#1320

Günther Zuntz

#30792

Overall Influence

1902 - 1992 (90 years)

Günther Zuntz , German-English classical philologist, professor of Hellenistic Greek and Bible scholar. He obtained a D.Phil. from the University of Marburg in 1928 and was later a professor at the University of Manchester.

#1321

Ethan Canin

#23428

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ethan Andrew Canin is an American author, educator, and physician. He is a member of the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Canin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while his parents were vacationing from Iowa City, where his father, Stuart Canin, taught violin at the University of Iowa. He and his family moved around the midwestern and northeastern United States, and eventually settled in San Francisco, California, where he attended Town School and later graduated from San Francisco University High School. He attended Stanford University and earned an undergraduate degree in English.

#1322

Friedrich Achleitner

Friedrich Achleitner

#19691

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Friedrich Achleitner was an Austrian poet and architecture critic. As a member of the Wiener Gruppe, he wrote concrete poems and experimental literature. His magnum opus is a multi-volume documentation of 20th-century Austrian architecture. Written over several decades, Achleitner made a personal visit to each building described. He was a professor of the history and theory of architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

#1323

Carme Riera

#37811

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Carme Riera Guilera is a novelist and essayist. She has also written short stories, scripts for radio and television and literary criticism. She holds a doctorate in Hispanic Philology and is a professor of Spanish literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

#1324

Nick Montfort

#15364

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.

#1325

Jenny Offill

#41957

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Jenny Offill is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review. Early life Jenny Offill is the only child of two private-school English teachers. She spent her childhood years in various American states, including Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and North Carolina, where she attended high school and received a BA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and later, at Stanford University, was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction. After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs: wai...

#1326

Benedict Kiely

#20541

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Benedict "Ben" Kiely was an Irish writer and broadcaster from Omagh, County Tyrone. Early life Kiely was born near Dromore, County Tyrone and was a student at the Christian Brothers School in Omagh. In 1937, he went to County Laois to take up a Jesuit novitiate, but went down with a tubercular spinal complaint in 1938. Lacking by then a vocation to the priesthood, he went on to University College Dublin. In 1943, he graduated B.A. from the National University.

#1327

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Judith Ortiz Cofer

#21659

Overall Influence

1952 - 2016 (64 years)

Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.

#1328

Diedrich Diederichsen

Diedrich Diederichsen

#20953

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Diedrich Diederichsen is a German author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is an intellectual writer at the crossroads of the arts, politics, and pop culture. Diedrich Diederichsen was born and grew up in Hamburg where he worked as a music journalist and editor of the German Sounds magazine in the heyday of punk and new wave from 1979 to 1983. Until the 1990s he was then the editor-in-chief of the influential subculture magazine Spex in Cologne. Diederichsen worked as visiting professor in Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Pasadena, Offenbach am Main, Gießen, Weimar, Bremen, Vienna, St. Louis, Cologne, Los Angeles and Gainesville.

#1329

Guillermo Sheridan

#18596

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Guillermo Humberto Sheridan Prieto is a Mexican literary critic, scholar and public commentator. Life and work Sheridan was born in Mexico City. He was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia in 1986. He was awarded a doctorate in Mexican literature by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, a government agency established in 1984 to promote both the quantity and quality of research.

#1330

Clayton Eshleman

#30253

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets , a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.

#1331

Shadi Bartsch

#18101

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is an American academic and is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She has previously held professorships at the University of California, Berkeley and Brown University where she was the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics in 2008-2009.

#1332

Ramón Xirau

#17658

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Ramón Xirau Subías was a Spanish-born Mexican poet, philosopher and literary critic. In 1939, as the Spanish civil war was coming to an end, Xirau emigrated to Mexico where he obtained Mexican citizenship in 1955. He obtained a Master's Degree in philosophy at the UNAM and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de las Américas. He was a research faculty member of the UNAM y and the National System of Researchers. At the UNAM he taught at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and did research at the Institute of Philosophy Research. He was a member of the Colegio Nacional since 1973.

#1333

Eduardo Lago

#31334

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Eduardo Lago is a Spanish novelist, translator, and literary critic, born in Madrid and currently living in Manhattan, New York, United States. In 2002, he was the recipient of the Bartolomé March Award for Excellence in Literary Criticism for his critical comparison of three Spanish translations of James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. In 2006, he won the Premio Nadal, Spain's oldest and most prestigious literary award, for his first novel, Llámame Brooklyn . For many years, he interviewed North American writers for the literary supplement Babelia in the Spanish newspaper El País. He returned to te...

#1334

David Dean Shulman

David Dean Shulman

#15954

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David Dean Shulman is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the now defunct Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies. Presently he holds a chair as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

#1335

Radwa Ashour

#31479

Overall Influence

1946 - 2014 (68 years)

Radwa Ashour was an Egyptian novelist. Life Ashour was born in El-Manial to Mustafa Ashour, a lawyer and literature enthusiast, and Mai Azzam, a poet and an artist. She graduated from Cairo University with a BA degree in 1967. In 1972, she received her MA in Comparative Literature from the same university. In 1975, Ashour graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a PhD in African American Literature. Her dissertation was entitled The search for a Black poetics: a study of Afro-American critical writings. While preparing for her PhD, Ashour was remarked as the first doctoral candidate in English who studied the literature of the African-American.

#1336

John Fuller

#25640

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

John Fuller FRSL is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford. Biography Fuller was born at Ashford, Kent, United Kingdom, the son of poet and Oxford Professor Roy Fuller, and educated at St Paul's School and New College, Oxford.

#1337

Marc Fumaroli

#9968

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Marc Fumaroli was a French historian and essayist who was widely respected as an advocate for French literature and culture. While born in Marseille, Fumaroli grew up in the Moroccan city of Fez, and served in the French army during the Algerian War.

#1338

Na Huideok

#52985

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Na Huideok is a South Korean poet. Life Na Huideok was born in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province. She was raised in an orphanage in which her parents - Christians who sought to carry out the teachings of their religion through communal living - served on the administrative staff. Na has confessed that the experience of living with orphans had made her a precocious child, and that the recognition of the difference between herself and her playmates early on gave her a unique perspective on the world.

#1339

Vance Bourjaily

#27935

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Vance Nye Bourjaily was an American novelist, playwright, journalist, creative writing teacher, and essayist. Life Bourjaily was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Monte Ferris Bourjaily, a Lebanese immigrant who was a journalist and later became editor of the United Features Syndicate, and Barbara Webb, an American-born features author and novelist. Bourjaily moved several times during his youth. His childhood was spent in Connecticut, Virginia, and New York. Bourjaily graduated from Handley High School in Winchester, Virginia in 1939. After graduating, Bourjaily enrolled in Bowdoin College. With the coming of World War II, Bourjaily became a volunteer ambulance driver from 1942 to 1944.

#1340

Aimé Césaire

#15892

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.

#1341

Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell

#6707

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.

#1342

Fred Chappell

#17884

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Fred Davis Chappell is an author and poet. He was an English professor for 40 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997 to 2002. He attended Duke University.

#1343

Tracie Morris

#23961

Overall Influence

Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#1344

Amal El-Mohtar

#32133

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction. She has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, and has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly magazine Goblin Fruit since 2006.

#1345

Carolivia Herron

Carolivia Herron

#33057

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Carolivia Herron is an American writer of children's and adult literature, and a scholar of African-American Judaica. Personal life She was born to Oscar Smith Herron and Georgia Carol Herron, in Washington, D.C.

#1346

Kathleen Jamie

#26145

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kathleen Jamie FRSL is a Scottish poet and essayist. In 2021 she became Scotland's fourth Makar. Life and work Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Raised in Currie, near Edinburgh, she studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, publishing her first poems as an undergraduate. Her writing is rooted in Scottish landscape and culture, and ranges through travel, women's issues, archaeology and visual art. She writes in English and occasionally in Scots. Jamie's collections include The Queen of Sheba . Her 2004 collection The Tree House revealed an increasing interest in the natural world.

#1347

Louis Dudek

#19839

Overall Influence

1918 - 2001 (83 years)

Louis Dudek, was a Canadian poet, academic, and publisher known for his role in defining Modernism in poetry, and for his literary criticism. He was the author of over two dozen books. In A Digital History of Canadian Poetry, writer Heather Prycz said that "As a critic, teacher and theoretician, Dudek influenced the teaching of Canadian poetry in most [Canadian] schools and universities".

#1348

Rachel Cusk

#24603

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer. Childhood and education Cusk was born in Saskatoon to British parents in 1967, the second of four children with an older sister and two younger brothers, and spent much of her early childhood in Los Angeles. She moved to her parents' native Britain in 1974, settling in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, and was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge. She studied English at New College, Oxford.

#1349

Mary Ann Caws

#21904

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Mary Ann Caws is an American author, translator, art historian and literary critic. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and on the film faculty. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell.

#1350

Wanda Coleman

#30292

Overall Influence

1946 - 2013 (67 years)

Wanda Coleman was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles". Biography Wanda Evans was born in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s. She is the eldest of four children. Her parents were George and Lewana Evans, who were introduced to one another at church by his aunt. In 1931, her father had relocated to Los Angeles from Little Rock, Arkansas, after the lynching of a young man who was hung from a church steeple. He was an ex-boxer and long-time friend and sparring partner of Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore.

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