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,

#1401

Subodh Sarkar

#34663

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Subodh Sarkar is a Bengali poet, writer and editor, and a reader in English literature at City College, Kolkata. He is a recipient of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. Biography Subodh Sarkar, born in 1958, is a noted Indian Bengali poet, editor, translator and Associate Professor in English at City College, Calcutta University. His first book of poems was published in the late 70s. He received the West Bengal Bangla Academy Award for poetry in 2000. His PhD is on the hyphenated identities of Indian American women writers writing in English. He visited Russia and Turkey as a member of the Indian Writers’ delegation organized by Sahitya Academy in 2010.

#1402

Idea Vilariño

#19908

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Idea Vilariño Romani was a Uruguayan poet, essayist and literary critic. She belonged to the group of intellectuals known as "Generación del 45". In this generation, there are several writers such as Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Sarandy Cabrera, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Ángel Rama, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Maggi, Alfredo Gravina, Mario Arregui, Amanda Berenguer, Humberto Megget, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Gladys Castelvecchi and José Pedro Díaz among others.

#1403

Robert Brustein

Robert Brustein

#13580

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Robert Sanford Brustein was an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre while serving as dean of the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the American Repertory Theater and Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a creative consultant until his death, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He commented on politics for the HuffPost.

#1404

Diane Wakoski

#30777

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Diane Wakoski is an American poet. Wakoski is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism.

#1405

Naomi Wallace

#11823

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work. Biography Naomi Wallace was born in Prospect, Kentucky, to Henry F. Wallace, a photo journalist and correspondent for Time and Life magazines, and Sonja de Vries, a Dutch justice and human rights worker.

#1406

Patrick Parrinder

#29292

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Patrick Parrinder is an academic, formerly professor of English at the University of Reading who retired in 2008. Parringer was educated at Leighton Park School and King's College, Cambridge. He has written books of literary criticism on James Joyce and H. G. Wells, and was associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, focusing on literary authors in the period 1890–1920. He also edited texts of H. G. Wells published by Penguin Classics.

#1407

Jay Macpherson

#36599

Overall Influence

1931 - 2012 (81 years)

Jean Jay Macpherson was a Canadian lyric poet and scholar. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls her "a member of 'the mythopoeic school of poetry,' who expressed serious religious and philosophical themes in symbolic verse that was often lyrical or comic."

#1408

Leela Majumdar

#20909

Overall Influence

1908 - 2007 (99 years)

Leela Majumdar was an Indian Bengali-language writer. Early life Born to Surama Devi and Pramada Ranjan Ray , Leela spent her childhood days at Shillong, where she studied at the Loreto Convent. Surama Devi had been adopted by Upendra Kishor Ray Choudhuri . Lila's grandfather had left his younger two daughters in care of his friends after his wife died. The eldest daughter was sent to a boarding house. Her maternal grandfather was Ramkumar Bhattacharya, who later became a sannyasi and was christened Ramananda Bharati. He was the first among Indians to visit Kailash and Mansarovar and wrote a travelogue Himaranya.

#1409

Kofi Anyidoho

#30011

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Kofi Anyidoho is a Ghanaian poet and academic who comes from a family tradition of Ewe poets and oral artists. He is currently Professor of Literature at the University of Ghana. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Valco Fund Literary Award, the Langston Hughes Prize, the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, the Fania Kruger Fellowship for Poetry of Social Vision, Poet of the Year , and the Ghana Book Award.

#1410

James Blaylock

#19523

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

James Paul Blaylock is an American fantasy author. He is noted for a distinctive, humorous style, as well as being one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre of science fiction. Blaylock has cited Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens as his inspirations.

#1411

Margot Fonteyn

#4731

Overall Influence

1919 - 1991 (72 years)

Dame Margaret Evelyn de Arias DBE , known by the stage name Margot Fonteyn, was an English ballerina. She spent her entire career as a dancer with the Royal Ballet , eventually being appointed prima ballerina assoluta of the company by Queen Elizabeth II. Beginning ballet lessons at the age of four, she studied in England and China, where her father was transferred for his work. Her training in Shanghai was with Russian expatriate dancer Georgy Goncharov, contributing to her continuing interest in Russian ballet. Returning to London at the age of 14, she was invited to join the Vic-Wells Ballet School by Ninette de Valois.

#1412

Thomas Meehan

#16936

Overall Influence

1929 - 2017 (88 years)

Thomas Edward Meehan was an American playwright. He wrote the books for the musicals Annie, The Producers, Hairspray, Young Frankenstein and Cry-Baby. He co-wrote the books for Elf: The Musical and Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin.

#1413

Aleida Assmann

#16677

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, who studied Egyptology and whose work has focused on cultural anthropology and Cultural and Communicative Memory. Life Born Aleida Bornkamm in , North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, she is the daughter of the New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm and his wife, Elisabeth. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen from 1966 to 1972. In 1977 she wrote her dissertation in Heidelberg about The Legitimacy of Fiction . She had to take her minor field examination in Egyptology in Tübingen becaus...

#1414

Nam Le

#36186

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Nam Le is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer, who won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his book The Boat, a collection of short stories. His stories have been published in many places including Best Australian Stories 2007, Best New American Voices, Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space and One Story. In 2008 he was named a 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation.

#1415

Ichirō Hariu

#38229

Overall Influence

1925 - 2010 (85 years)

Ichirō Hariu, was a Japanese art critic and literary critic, remembered as one of the "Big Three" art critics of postwar Japan . Early life and education Ichirō Hariu was born on December 1, 1925, in the city of Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture. Hariu graduated from Tohoku University with a degree in literature in 1948, before going on to attend graduate school at Tokyo University. While in graduate school, he participated in the Yoru no Kai literary society alongside Tarō Okamoto, Kiyoteru Hanada, Kōbō Abe, and others. In 1953, Hariu followed the majority of other writers and artists in Japan in ...

#1416

Douglas Dunn

#15183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn, OBE is a Scottish poet, academic, and critic. He is Professor of English and Director of St Andrew's Scottish Studies Institute at St Andrew's University. Background Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire. He was educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship, and worked as a librarian before he started his studies in Hull. After graduating with a First Class Honours degree from the University of Hull, he worked in the university's Brynmor Jones Library under Philip Larkin. He was friendly with Larkin and admired his poetry, but did not share his political opinions...

#1417

Terry Teachout

#15642

Overall Influence

1956 - 2022 (66 years)

Terrance Alan Teachout was an American author, critic, biographer, playwright, stage director, and librettist. He was the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings", a column about the arts in the U.S. that was published biweekly in The Wall Street Journal. He weblogged at About Last Night and wrote about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times and National Review. He was a co-host on Three on the Aisle, a monthly podcast about theater in the United States, hosted by American Theatre magazine...

#1418

Siddalingaiah

#40576

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Siddalingaiah , was an Indian poet, playwright, and Dalit activist, writing in the Kannada language. He is credited with starting the Dalit-Bandaya movement in Kannada and with starting the genre of Dalit writing. He is one of the founders of the Dalita Sangharsh Samiti along with B. Krishnappa.

#1419

Louis Montrose

#34991

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Louis Adrian Montrose was an American literary theorist and academic scholar who retired from the academy in 2010 to pursue a career as a photographer. His scholarship addressed a wide variety of literary, historical, and theoretical topics and issues, and significantly shaped contemporary studies of Renaissance poetics, English Renaissance theatre, and Elizabeth I. Montrose was an influential early proponent of New Historicism, especially as it applied to the study of early modern English literature and culture. He was a professor of English Literature at the University of California, San ...

#1420

Richard Yates

#29603

Overall Influence

1926 - 1992 (66 years)

Richard Yates was an American fiction writer identified with the mid-century "Age of Anxiety". His first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award, while his first short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, brought comparisons to James Joyce. Critical acclaim for his writing, however, was not reflected in commercial success during his lifetime.

#1421

Aminatta Forna

#22908

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones , The Memory of Love , The Hired Man and Happiness . Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lann...

#1422

Minnie Bruce Pratt

#28553

Overall Influence

1946 - 2023 (77 years)

Minnie Bruce Pratt was an American poet, educator, activist, and essayist. She retired in 2015 from her position as Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university's first LGBT studies program.

#1423

Niyi Osundare

#9568

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Niyi Osundare is a leading African poet, dramatist, linguist, and literary critic. Born on March 12, 1947, in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria, his poetry is influenced by the oral poetry of his Yoruba culture, which he capaciously hybridizes with other poetic traditions of the world, including African-American, Latin American, Asian, and European.

#1424

Mary Lee Settle

#22669

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Mary Lee Settle was an American writer. She won the 1978 National Book Award for her novel Blood Tie. She was a founder of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. "Settle has gone so unnoticed by the academic community that the most recurrent subject among those few who have written about her is the fact that she has gone so unnoticed." Hurting Settle's reputation is that she does not fit clearly into any type of writer, and wrote on a wide variety of fields; this detracts from a writer's authority.

#1425

Mary Anne Mohanraj

Mary Anne Mohanraj

#33480

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Mary Anne Amirthi Mohanraj is an American writer, editor, and academic of Sri Lankan birth. Background Mohanraj was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka but moved to the United States at the age of two and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut.

#1426

Scott Wittman

#26559

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Scott Wittman is an American director, lyricist, composer and writer for Broadway, concerts, and television. Life and career Wittman was raised in Nanuet, New York, graduated from Nanuet Senior High School in 1972 and attended Emerson College in Boston for two years before leaving to pursue a career in musical theatre in New York City. While directing a show for a Greenwich Village club he met songwriter and composer Marc Shaiman, and the two became collaborators and professional partners. While Shaiman wrote for television shows, including Saturday Night Live, Wittman directed concerts for su...

#1427

Robert Lax

#24614

Overall Influence

1915 - 2000 (85 years)

Robert Lax was an American poet, known in particular for his association with Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. Another friend of his youth was the painter Ad Reinhardt. After a long period of drifting from job to job about the world, Lax settled on the island of Patmos during the latter part of his life. Considered by some to be a self-exiled hermit, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.

#1428

Roberto Saviano

Roberto Saviano

#7767

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Roberto Saviano is an Italian writer, essayist, journalist, and screenwriter. In his writings, including articles and his book Gomorrah, he uses literature and investigative reporting to tell of the economic reality of the territory and business of organized crime in Italy, in particular the Camorra crime syndicate, and of organized crime more generally.

#1429

Frances Mayes

#30821

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Frances Mayes is an American writer. Her 1996 memoir Under the Tuscan Sun was on the New York Times Best Seller list for over two years and was the basis for the film Under the Tuscan Sun. Biography Frances Mayes was born on March 23, 1940 in Fitzgerald, Georgia to Garbert Mayes, a cotton mill manager, and Frankye Mayes. Mayes was the youngest of three sisters. Garbert Mayes died of cancer at age 47, when Frances was 14.

#1430

Gregory Woods

#27402

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Gregory Woods is a British poet. He was the Chair in Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University from 1998 to 2013. He is the author of five books of literary and LGBT studies criticism, and seven poetry collections.

#1431

Jan Carew

#22357

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Jan Rynveld Carew was a Guyana-born novelist, playwright, poet and educator, who lived at various times in The Netherlands, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.

#1432

Olivier Weber

#7192

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Olivier Weber is a French writer, novelist and reporter at large, known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been a war correspondent for twenty-five years, especially in Central Asia, Africa, Middle-East and Iraq. He is an assistant professor at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, president of the Prize Joseph Kessel and today ambassador of France at large. Weber has won several national and international awards of literature and journalism, in particular for his stories on Afghanistan and for his books on wars. His novels, travels writing books and e...

#1433

Olga Broumas

#19525

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Olga Broumas is a Greek poet, resident in the United States. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. Biography Born and raised on the island of Syros, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she earned her bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Oregon.

#1434

Daniel Aaron

#31168

Overall Influence

1912 - 2016 (104 years)

Daniel Aaron was an American writer and academic who helped found the Library of America. Education Daniel Baruch Aaron, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was born in 1912. Aaron received a BA from the University of Michigan, and later went on to do graduate studies at Harvard University. In 1937, Aaron became the first to graduate with a degree in "American Civilization" from Harvard University.

#1435

Sam Shepard

#16235

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Samuel Shepard Rogers III was an American actor, playwright, author, director and screenwriter whose career spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any writer or director. He wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009.

#1436

Henri Cole

#29911

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Henri Cole is an American poet, who has published many collections of poetry and a memoir. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Arabic. Biography Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to an American father and French-Armenian mother, and raised in Virginia, United States. His father, a North Carolinian, enlisted in the service after graduating from high school and, while stationed in Marseilles, met Cole's mother, who worked at the PX. Together they lived in Japan, Germany, Illinois, California, Nevada, Missouri and Virginia, where Cole attended public schools and the College of William and Mary.

#1437

Helon Habila

#30692

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

#1438

Bob Holman

#19882

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferli...

#1439

Visu

#20036

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Meenakshisundaram Ramasamy Viswanathan , best known by his stage name Visu, was an Indian writer, director, stage, film and television actor and talk-show host. Visu initially worked as an assistant to director K. Balachander until becoming a director himself. He later began acting, with his first film being Kudumbam Oru Kadambam , directed by S. P. Muthuraman.

#1440

Es'kia Mphahlele

Es'kia Mphahlele

#17921

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Es'kia Mphahlele was a South African writer, educationist, artist and activist celebrated as the Father of African Humanism and one of the founding figures of modern African literature. He was given the name Ezekiel Mphahlele at birth but changed his name to Es'kia in 1977. His journey from a childhood in the slums of Pretoria to a literary icon was an odyssey both intellectually and politically. As a writer, he brought his own experiences in and outside South Africa to bear on his short stories, fiction, autobiography and history, developing the concept of African humanism. He skilfully evoked the black experience under apartheid in Down Second Avenue .

#1441

Manil Suri

#33878

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Manil Suri is an Indian-American mathematician and writer of a trilogy of novels all named for Hindu gods. His first novel, The Death of Vishnu , which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize, short-listed for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize that year. Since then, he has published two more novels, The Age of Shiva and The City of Devi , completing the trilogy.

#1442

Colum McCann

#23367

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is the co-founder and President of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit. He is also a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. He is known as an international writer who believes in the "democracy of storytelling." Among his numerous honors are the U.S National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Prize, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination.

#1443

Washington Benavides

Washington Benavides

#46929

Overall Influence

1930 - 2017 (87 years)

Washington Benavides was a Uruguayan poet, profesor and musician. Writing career Benavides was born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay. During the 1950s, Benavides contributed to the magazine Asir. In 1955, he published his first book , a satire of various personalities in his native city. After that he devoted himself heavily to poetry, eventually earning himself a place among the most important Uruguayan poets of his generation. During the dictatorship of Juan María Bordaberry, he promoted the revolutionary possibilities of popular music.

#1444

Taslima Nasrin

#15241

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Taslima Nasrin is a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist. She is known for her writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion; some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. She has also been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region, both from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.

#1445

Wang Anyi

#39464

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Wang Anyi is a Chinese writer, vice-chair of the China Writers Association since 2006, and professor in Chinese Literature at Fudan University since 2004. Wang widely write novels, novellas, short stories and essays with diverse themes and topics. The majority of her works are set in Shanghai, where she lived and worked for the majority of her life. Wang also regularly writes about the countryside in Anhui, where she was "sent down" during the Cultural Revolution. Her works have been translated into English, German and French, and studied as zhiqing , xungen , Haipai , and dushi literature.

#1446

Ann Hood

#41652

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ann Hood is an American novelist and short story writer; she has also written nonfiction. The author of fourteen novels, four memoirs, a short story collection, a ten book series for middle readers and one young adult novel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares,, and Tin House. Hood is a regular contributor to The New York Times' Op-Ed page, Home Economics column. Her most recent work is "Fly Girl: A Memoir," published with W.W. Norton and Company in 2022.

#1447

Peter von Matt

#33181

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Peter von Matt is a Swiss philologist and author. Life Born in Lucerne, Peter von Matt grew up in Stans in the canton of Nidwalden. He studied Art History as well as German and English studies in Zurich and received a doctorate with Emil Staiger on Franz Grillparzer. In 1970, he received his post doctorate lecturing qualifications with a work on E. T. A. Hoffmann.

#1448

Camille Paglia

#18669

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Camille Anna Paglia is an American academic and social critic and feminist. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.

#1449

Allan Gurganus

#30929

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.

#1450

Adrienne Kennedy

#28564

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

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