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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1351

Sarah Schulman

#8270

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

#1352

Eli Amir

#21734

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Eli Amir is an Iraqi-born Israeli writer and civil servant. He served as director general of the Youth Aliyah Department of the Jewish Agency. Biography Amir was born Fuad Elias Nasah Halschi in Baghdad, Iraq. He immigrated to Israel with his family in 1950, and went to school in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. He is now living in Gilo, Jerusalem. Amir studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

#1353

Frederic Tuten

#30458

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He has written five novels – The Adventures of Mao on the Long March , Tallien: A Brief Romance , Tintin in the New World: A Romance , Van Gogh's Bad Café and The Green Hour – as well as one book of inter-related short stories, Self-Portraits: Fictions , and essays, many of the latter being about contemporary art. His memoir My Young Life was published by Simon & Schuster. In 2022, he published a collection of short stories, The Bar at Twilight, and On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of Tuten's drawings, each drawing accompanied by a short story.

#1354

George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown

#19024

Overall Influence

1921 - 1996 (75 years)

George Mackay Brown was a Scottish poet, author and dramatist with a distinctly Orcadian character. He is widely regarded as one of the great Scottish poets of the 20th century. Biography Early life and career George Mackay Brown was born on 17 October 1921, the youngest of six children. His parents were John Brown, a tailor and postman, and Mhairi Mackay, a descendant of Clan Mackay who had been brought up in Braal, a hamlet near Strathy, Sutherland, as a native speaker of the Reay Country dialect of Scottish Gaelic.

#1355

Maria Corti

#39758

Overall Influence

1915 - 2002 (87 years)

Maria Corti was an Italian philologist, literary critic, and novelist. Considered one of the leading literary scholars of post-World War II Italy, she was awarded numerous prizes including the Premio Campiello for the entire body of her work. Her works of fiction were informed by her literary scholarship but also had a distinctly autobiographical vein, particularly her Voci del nord-est and II canto delle sirene . For most of her career she was based at the University of Pavia where she established the Fondo Manoscritti di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei, an extensive curated archive of mater...

#1356

William C. Dowling

#18594

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

William Courtney Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.

#1357

Aaron Allston

#13961

Overall Influence

1960 - 2014 (54 years)

Aaron Dale Allston was an American game designer and author of many science fiction books, notably Star Wars novels. His works as a game designer include game supplements for role-playing games, several of which served to establish the basis for products and subsequent development of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons game setting Mystara. His later works as a novelist include those of the X-Wing series: Wraith Squadron, Iron Fist, Solo Command, Starfighters of Adumar, and Mercy Kill. He wrote two entries in the New Jedi Order series: Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream and Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand. Allston ...

#1358

Chuck Kinder

#35633

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Charles Alfonso Kinder II was an American novelist. Biography Kinder was born October 8 in Montgomery, West Virginia to Charles Alfonso and Eileen Reba Kinder. He was educated at West Virginia University and Stanford University . After teaching at Stanford and Waynesburg College, Kinder was a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2014.

#1359

Jim Grimsley

#48302

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Jim Grimsley is an American novelist and playwright. Biography Born to a rural family in Grifton, North Carolina, Grimsley said of his childhood that "for us in the South, the family is a field where craziness grows like weeds".

#1360

Gonçalo M. Tavares

Gonçalo M. Tavares

#33262

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Gonçalo Manuel de Albuquerque Tavares, known professionally as Gonçalo M. Tavares, was born in August, 1970 in Luanda, Angola and is a Portuguese writer and professor of Theory of Science in Lisbon. He published his first work in 2001 and since then has been awarded several prizes. His books have been published in more than 30 countries and the book Jerusalem has been included in the European edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.

#1361

Monika Fludernik

#36322

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Monika Fludernik , a native Austrian, is professor of English literature and culture at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany. Fludernik earned her doctorate at the University of Graz, Austria, where she studied with professor Franz Karl Stanzel. In 1984, she took up an associate professorship at the University of Vienna, and since 1994 she has been a full professor at Freiburg. Fludernik has held several temporary fellowships, at the Universities of Oxford, and Harvard, among other places, and she is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Since 2008 she is al...

#1362

John M. Dillon

#5548

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Myles Dillon is an Irish classicist and philosopher who was Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin between 1980 and 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens on 15 June 2010. Dillon's area of research lies in the history of Platonism from the Old Academy to the Renaissance, and also Early Christianity.

#1363

Norma Field

#22301

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Norma M. Field is an author and emeritus professor of East Asian studies at the University of Chicago. She has taught Premodern Japanese Poetry and Prose, Premodern Japanese Language, and Gender Studies as relating to Japanese women.

#1364

Georg Luck

#31535

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Georg Hans Bhawani Luck was a Swiss classicist known for his studies of magical beliefs and practices in the Classical world. For over twenty years he was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

#1365

David Javerbaum

#31264

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

David Adam Javerbaum is an American comedy writer and lyricist. Javerbaum has won 13 Emmy Awards in his career, 11 of them for his work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He runs the popular Twitter account @TheTweetOfGod, which at its peak had 6.2 million followers. The account was the basis for his play An Act of God, which opened on Broadway in the spring of 2015 starring Jim Parsons, and again in the spring of 2016 starring Sean Hayes. The play has gone on to receive over 100 productions in 20 countries and 11 languages.

#1366

Bruce Thornton

#16224

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Bruce S. Thornton is an American classicist at California State University, Fresno, and research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Biography Thornton received a Bachelor of Arts in Latin from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1975, and a PhD in Comparative Literature in 1983. He had studied Greek, Latin, and English literature for his doctorate.

#1367

Midge Decter

#11594

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Midge Decter was an American journalist and author. Originally a liberal, she was one of the pioneers of the neoconservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Early life Decter was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on July 25, 1927. She was the youngest of three daughters of Rose and Harry Rosenthal, a sporting goods merchant. Her family was Jewish. She attended the University of Minnesota for one year, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1946 to 1948, and New York University, but did not graduate from any of them. She initially identified as a liberal on the political spectrum.

#1368

Ahmad Kamyabi Mask

Ahmad Kamyabi Mask

#16683

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ahmad Kamyabi Mask is a writer, translator, publisher, and current Professor Emeritus of Modern Drama and Theater of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran. He is a prominent scholar of French Avant-garde theater and influential in the study of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

#1369

Lee Hall

#17625

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Lee Hall is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for writing the screenplay for the film Billy Elliot and the book and lyrics for its adaptation as a stage musical of the same name. In addition, he wrote the play The Pitmen Painters , and the screenplays for the films War Horse and Rocketman .

#1370

Toni Cade Bambara

Toni Cade Bambara

#15354

Overall Influence

1939 - 1995 (56 years)

Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade , was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Biography Early life and education Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York, to parents Walter and Helen Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant , Queens, and New Jersey. At the age of six, she changed her name from Miltona to Toni, and then in 1970, changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group, Bambara, after finding the name written as part of a signature on a sketchbook discovered in a trunk among her great-grandmother's other belongings.

#1371

George Starbuck

#38600

Overall Influence

1931 - 1996 (65 years)

George Edwin Starbuck was an American poet of the neo-formalist school. Life Starbuck studied at Chadwick School, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He also studied under Robert Lowell in the Boston University workshop with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Boston University, and the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was fired by SUNY-Buffalo for not taking a loyalty oath, but was vindicated by the Supreme Court. His student...

#1372

John W. Aldridge

#41553

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

John W. Aldridge was an American writer, literary critic, teacher and scholar. He was a professor of English at the University of Michigan, director of the Hopwood Program, and USIA Special Ambassador to Germany.

#1373

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#25556

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Kevin John William Crossley-Holland is an English translator, children's author and poet. His best known work is probably the Arthur trilogy , for which he won the Guardian Prize and other recognition.

#1374

Terrance Hayes

#18413

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.

#1375

Feridun Zaimoğlu

Feridun Zaimoğlu

#33112

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Feridun Zaimoğlu is a German author and visual artist of Turkish descent. Since 1995 Zaimoğlu has become one of the important poets of contemporary German language. His central themes are the problems of the second and third generation of Turkish immigrants to Germany.

#1376

Doris Lessing

#24600

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia , where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing , the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence , The Golden Notebook , The Good Terrorist , and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives .

#1377

Percival Everett

#21859

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Personal life Everett was born in Georgia. He then moved to South Carolina and then Wyoming. Everett now lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna.

#1378

Mamoni Raisom Goswami

Mamoni Raisom Goswami

#25187

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Indira Goswami , known by her pen name Mamoni Raisom Goswami and popularly as Mamoni Baideo, was an Indian writer, poet, professor, scholar and editor. She was the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award , the Jnanpith Award and Principal Prince Claus Laureate . A celebrated writer of contemporary Indian literature, many of her works have been translated into English from her native Assamese which include The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, Pages Stained With Blood and The Man from Chinnamasta.

#1379

Edward Mendelson

#15734

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden and Later Auden . He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life , about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers .

#1380

Joseph Epstein

#10561

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Joseph Epstein is an American writer who was the editor of the magazine The American Scholar from 1975 to 1997. His essays and stories have appeared in books and other publications. Early life Epstein was born to Maurice and Belle Epstein in Chicago, Illinois on January 9, 1937. He graduated from Senn High School and attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960, and received a bachelor of arts in absentia from the University of Chicago in 1959.

#1381

Blakey Vermeule

#29957

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Emily Dickinson Blake "Blakey" Vermeule is an American scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and theory of mind. She is a Professor of English at Stanford University. Biography Vermeule is the daughter of classicist Emily Vermeule and former Museum of Fine Arts curator Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III. Her brother, Adrian Vermeule, is a professor at Harvard Law School. Her wife is Terry Castle, also a professor of English at Stanford.

#1382

Harry Hill

#6538

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Matthew Keith Hall , known professionally as Harry Hill, is an English comedian, presenter and writer. He pursued a career in stand-up following years working as a medical doctor, developing an off-beat, energetic performance style that fused elements of surrealism, observational comedy, slapstick, satire and music. When performing, he usually wears browline glasses and a dress shirt with a distinctive oversized collar and cuffs.

#1383

Marie Gil

#39639

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Marie Gil is a French writer and Professor of French Literature in Paris. She studied at HEC Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure and Paris-Sorbonne University, was a Fellow of the Fondation Thiers and taught French Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and at the University of Franche-Comté, and is currently vice-president of the Collège international de philosophie. She is also director of the Roland Barthes research group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

#1384

J. Michael Lennon

J. Michael Lennon

#19707

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

J. Michael Lennon is an American academic and writer who is the Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and the late Norman Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer. He published Mailer's official biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life in 2013. He edited Mailer's selected letters in 2014 and the Library of America's two-volume set Norman Mailer: The Sixties in 2018.

#1385

Daniel Kehlmann

Daniel Kehlmann

#25792

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Daniel Kehlmann is a German-language novelist and playwright of both Austrian and German nationality. His novel Die Vermessung der Welt is the best selling book in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985. In an ironic way, it deals with Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world's best-known naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Humboldt's relationship with the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. According to The New York Times, it was the world's second-best selling novel in 2006.

#1386

Hollis Robbins

#18853

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Hollis Robbins is an American academic and essayist; Robbins currently serves as dean of humanities at University of Utah. Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature. Education and early career Robbins was born and raised in New Hampshire. She entered Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16 and received her B.A. in 1983. From 1986 to 1988 Robbins worked at The New Yorker magazine in the marketing and promotions department. She received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1990, and subsequently enrolled as a doctoral student in the de...

#1387

Florian Zeller

#11485

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Florian Zeller is a French novelist, playwright, theatre director, screenwriter, and film director. He wrote a dozen of plays, that have been staged worldwide and have made him one of the most famous contemporary playwrights. He is, according to The Times, "the most exciting playwright of our time". He wrote and directed his first film, 2020's The Father, based on his play of the same name, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. The film received six nominations at the 93rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, with Zeller winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Hopkins winning Best Actor....

#1388

John Leland

#16910

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

John Leland is an author and has been a journalist for The New York Times since 2000. he began covering retirement and religion in January 2004. During 1994, Leland was for a stint editor-in-chief of Details magazine. He was also a senior editor at Newsweek, an editor and columnist at Spin magazine, and a reviewer for Trouser Press.

#1389

Sakyo Komatsu

#23237

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Sakyo Komatsu was a Japanese science fiction writer and screenwriter. He was one of the most well known and highly regarded science fiction writers in Japan. Early life Born Minoru "Sakyo" Komatsu in Osaka, he was a graduate of Kyoto University where he studied Italian literature. After graduating, he worked at various jobs, including as a magazine reporter and a writer for stand-up comedy acts.

#1390

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

#32329

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized. Early life DuPlessis was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941 to Joseph L. and Eleanor Blau; her father was a professor, and her mother was a librarian. She received her BA from Barnard College in 1963, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University in 1964 and 1970 respectively. Her dissertation project was titled The Endless Poem: Paterson of William Carlos Williams and The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.

#1391

Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler

#22319

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation. She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name.

#1392

Alicia Markova

#7589

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

Dame Alicia Markova DBE was a British ballerina and a choreographer, director and teacher of classical ballet. Most noted for her career with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and touring internationally, she was widely considered to be one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of the twentieth century. She was the first British dancer to become the principal dancer of a ballet company and, with Dame Margot Fonteyn, is one of only two English dancers to be recognised as a prima ballerina assoluta. Markova was a founder dancer of the Rambert Dance Company, The Royal Ballet and American Ball...

#1393

Don Webb

#29079

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Don Webb is an American science fiction and mystery writer, as well as an author of several books on Left Hand Path occult philosophy. He is also a former High Priest of the Temple of Set. Writing career Webb's first professional fiction sale was the short story "Rhinestone Manifesto", published in Interzone 13, Autumn 1985. He is best known for weird, experimental, and offbeat fiction, as well as works inspired by H. P. Lovecraft and according to Locus Magazine, he has published many stories, essays, interviews and other writing materials. His short stories have appeared or been referenced ...

#1394

Agustín García Calvo

Agustín García Calvo

#19928

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Agustín García Calvo was a Spanish philologist, philosopher, poet and playwright. Biography García Calvo was born and died in Zamora. He read Classical Philology at Salamanca University, being one of the first students of Spanish philologist Antonio Tovar. He concluded his doctoral dissertation on Ancient prosody and metrics in Madrid at the age of 22. In 1951 he worked as a grammar-school teacher. In 1953 he was appointed to a university chair of Classical Languages in Seville, and he occupied a second chair at Madrid's Universidad Complutense from 1964 to 1965. In 1965 the Franco administ...

#1395

Noel Perrin

#26915

Overall Influence

1927 - 2004 (77 years)

Edwin Noel Perrin was an American essayist and a professor at Dartmouth College, known for writing about rural life. Early years Perrin was born on September 18, 1927, in Manhattan and grew up in Pelham Manor, New York. His parents both worked as advertising copywriters at the J. Walter Thompson Agency. His mother Blanche was a career writer and the author of several novels, and she was his inspiration to become a writer.

#1396

Siegbert Salomon Prawer

#29427

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Siegbert Salomon Prawer was Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Life and works Prawer was born on 15 February 1925 in Cologne, Germany, to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. His sister Ruth was born in 1927. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain.

#1397

Norman N. Holland

Norman N. Holland

#20217

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Norman N. Holland was an American literary critic and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida. Holland's scholarship focused largely on psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive poetics, subjects on which he wrote fifteen books and nearly 250 scholarly articles. He is widely recognized for his scholarship specifically related to psychoanalytic applications in literary study. He was known as a major scholar of literary theory, primarily for having been one of the pioneers of reader-response criticism. Holland's writings have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Pers...

#1398

Peter Milward

#25655

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Father Peter Milward, SJ was a Jesuit priest and literary scholar. He was emeritus professor of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo and a leading figure in scholarship on English Renaissance literature. He was chair of the Renaissance Institute at Sophia University from its inception in 1974 until it was closed down in 2014 and director of the Renaissance Centre from its start in 1984 until it was closed down in 2002. He primarily published on the works of William Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

#1399

Sarah Churchwell

#19713

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless P...

#1400

José Manuel Losada

José Manuel Losada

#34344

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

José Manuel Losada is a university professor and literary theorist with a specialization in the fields of myth criticism and comparative literature. Within these fields he has published several books in Spanish, French and English.

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