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,

#1451

Tony Kushner

#17739

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Anthony Robert Kushner is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter. Lauded for his work on stage, he is most known for his seminal work Angels in America, which earned a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, as well as its subsequent acclaimed HBO miniseries of the same name. At the turn of the 21st century, he became known for his numerous film collaborations with Steven Spielberg. He received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013. Kushner is among the few playwrights in history nominated for an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award.

#1452

James Crumley

#27407

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

James Arthur Crumley was an American author. He was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as "one of modern crime writing's best practitioners", who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel" and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as "the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years."

#1453

Nazik Al-Malaika

#32843

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Nazik al-Malaika was an Iraqi poet. Al-Malaika is noted for being among the first Arabic poets to use free verse. Early life and career Al-Malaika was born in Baghdad to a cultured family. Her mother Salma al-Malaika was also a poet, and her father was a teacher. She wrote her first poem at the age of 10. During her life, she studied English and French literature, Latin, and Greek poetry. Al-Malaika graduated in 1944 from the College of Arts in Baghdad and later completed a master's degree in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a Degree of Excellence. She entered the Institute of Fine Arts and graduated from the Department of Music in 1949.

#1454

Mary Helen Washington

#30785

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mary Helen Washington is an African-American literary scholar who is the author of numerous books on the African-American female experience. She is best known for her influence on increasing representation of Black authors in education and in literary schools of thought. Washington is a past president of the American Studies Association, and an experienced English professor.

#1455

Jane Hamilton

#40601

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jane Hamilton is an American novelist. Early life Jane Hamilton was born and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois , the youngest of five children. She won prizes for poetry and short stories throughout high school and college but was always told that being a writer would not be a viable career. Because she was not a good speller, she did not believe she could be a copy editor or editor either. She graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1975.

#1456

Viktor Rozov

#24437

Overall Influence

1913 - 2004 (91 years)

Viktor Sergeyevich Rozov was a Soviet and Russian dramatist and screenwriter. He wrote more than 20 dramatic pieces and 6 film scripts, including Вечно живые/Life Eternal, the basis for his film script The Cranes Are Flying. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Letters, and was the president of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts and a member of the Union of Soviet Writers.

#1457

Kazim Ali

#36358

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Kazim Ali is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and professor. His most recent books are Inquisition and All One's Blue . His honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His poetry and essays have been featured in many literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, Jubilat, The Iowa Review, West Branch and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2007.

#1458

Jeremy Tambling

#45315

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jeremy Tambling is a British writer and critic. He was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013. His most recent position is Professor of English at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw .

#1459

Hisaki Matsuura

#24356

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Hisaki Matsuura is a noted Japanese professor, poet, and novelist. Life Matsuura was born in Tokyo. In 1981 he obtained his Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and 1982 became an assistant professor in the French Department at the University of Tokyo where he is now a professor of culture and representation. He was supported by a 1997–98 Japan Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University.

#1460

Janet Fitch

#13710

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Janet Fitch is an American author. She wrote the novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College. Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night ...

#1461

Murray Krieger

#29688

Overall Influence

1923 - 2000 (77 years)

Murray Krieger was an American literary critic and theorist. He was a professor at the University of Minnesota, the University of Iowa from 1963, and then the University of California, Irvine. In 1999, the University of California, Irvine dedicated a building, Murray Krieger Hall, to Krieger in recognition of his contributions to the school.

#1462

Tony Hoagland

#51741

Overall Influence

1953 - 2018 (65 years)

Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.

#1463

Leland Ryken

#23183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Leland Ryken is professor emeritus of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He has contributed a number of works to the study of classic literature from the Christian perspective, including editing the comprehensive volume on Christian writing on literature The Christian Imagination. He was the literary stylist for the English Standard Version of the Bible, published by Crossway Bibles in 2001. He is the author of How to Read the Bible as Literature and Words of Delight: A Literary Introduction to the Bible, as well as co-editor of Ryken's Bible Handbook and the ESV Literary Study Bible .

#1464

Benjamin Taylor

#32918

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of P...

#1465

Tino Villanueva

#36343

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Tino Villanueva is an American poet and writer. His early work was associated with the Chicano literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, and Villanueva is considered to be a primary figure in that literary movement. More recently, Villanueva's work has treated themes from Greek mythology.

#1466

Sean O'Brien

#28524

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Sean O'Brien FRSL is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award , the Somerset Maugham Award , the Cholmondeley Award , the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize . He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems .

#1467

Awn Alsharif Qasim

#21188

Overall Influence

1933 - 2006 (73 years)

Awn Al-Sharif Qasim was a prolific Sudanese writer, encyclopedist, scholar, community leader, and one of Sudan's leading experts on Arabic language and literature. He was a strong advocate of Arabic/Islamic culture and its interweaving with Sudanese culture. Qasim authored more than 70 books in the area of Islamic history and civilization, Arabic literature, studies in the Sudanese dialect languages.

#1468

Rabia Djelti

#49415

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Rabia Djelti is an Algerian writer, fluent in both Arabic and French. In 2002, for her poetry and novels, she was awarded the prize for Arabic literature in Abu-Dhabi. In addition to her writing, Djelti teaches literature at the University of Algiers.

#1469

Léopold Sédar Senghor

#8706

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist who was the first president of Senegal . Ideologically an African socialist, he was one of the major theoreticians of Négritude. Senghor was a proponent of African culture, black identity and African empowerment within the framework of French-African ties. He advocated for the extension of full civil and political rights for France's African territories while arguing that French Africans would be better off within a federal French structure than as independent nation-states.

#1470

Ferdinand Dennis

#31010

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Ferdinand Dennis is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s. Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background , Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots. This is foregrounded in much of his fictional work, notably his most recent and ambitious novel to date, Duppy Conqueror , a novel which moves from 1930s Jamaica to postwar London and Liverpool, to Africa. Similarly, Dennis' non-fiction centres on journeying rather tha...

#1471

Bob Haney

#14905

Overall Influence

1926 - 2004 (78 years)

Robert Gilbert Haney, Jr. was an American comic book writer, best known for his work for DC Comics. He co-created the Teen Titans as well as characters such as Metamorpho, Eclipso, Cain, and the Super-Sons.

#1472

David Antin

#27855

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

David Abram Antin was an American poet, art critic, performance artist, and university professor. Education and early career Antin was born in New York City in 1932. After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he earned his B.A. from City College of New York in 1955 and his M.A. from New York University in 1966. He spent the first ten years of his career as a translator of both scientific texts and fiction, including multiple scientific text translations for Pergamon Press where he interacted frequently with the company's flamboyant founder, British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell.

#1473

Antonine Maillet

Antonine Maillet

#12256

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Antonine Maillet, is an Acadian novelist, playwright, and scholar. She was born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada. Education Following high school, Maillet received her BA from the Collège Notre-Dame d'Acadie in 1950, followed by an MA from the Université de Moncton in 1959. She then received her PhD in literature in 1971 from the Université Laval. Her thesis is entitled Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie.

#1474

Nancy Willard

#23231

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Nancy Willard was an American writer: novelist, poet, author and occasional illustrator of children's books. She won the 1982 Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Biography Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she later received the B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and won five Hopwood Awards for creative writing. She also studied at Stanford University, where she received her M.A.

#1475

Richard Bean

#13308

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Richard Anthony Bean is an English playwright. Early years Born in East Hull, Bean was educated at Hull Grammar School, and then studied social psychology at Loughborough University, graduating with a 2:1 BSc Hons. He then worked as an occupational psychologist, having previously worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.

#1476

Susan Cheever

#21356

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Susan Cheever is an American author and a prize-winning best-selling writer well known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at The New School in New York City.

#1477

Peter Balakian

#9362

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Peter Balakian is an Armenian-American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller . Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Dir...

#1478

Ed Dorn

#22701

Overall Influence

1929 - 1999 (70 years)

Edward Merton Dorn was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger. Overview Dorn was born in Villa Grove, Illinois. He grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. He attended a one-room schoolhouse for his first eight grades. He later studied at the University of Illinois and at Black Mountain College . At Black Mountain he came into contact with Charles Olson, who greatly influenced his literary worldview and his sense of himself as poet.

#1479

John Arlott

#11656

Overall Influence

1914 - 1991 (77 years)

Leslie Thomas John Arlott, was an English journalist, author and cricket commentator for the BBC's Test Match Special. He was also a poet and wine connoisseur. With his poetic phraseology, he became a cricket commentator noted for his "wonderful gift for evoking cricketing moments" by the BBC.

#1480

Willis Barnstone

#30523

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Willis Barnstone is an American poet, religious scholar, and translator. He was born in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Oakland, California. He has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus .

#1481

Maria Velho da Costa

Maria Velho da Costa

#24823

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Maria de Fátima de Bivar Velho da Costa was a Portuguese writer who was awarded the Camões Prize in 2002. She took part in the Portuguese Feminist Movement, and became one of the authors of the book Novas Cartas Portugesas , together with Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Isabel Barreno. The authors, known as the "Three Marias," were arrested, jailed and prosecuted under Portuguese censorship laws in 1972, during the last years of the Estado Novo dictatorship. The book and their trial inspired protests in Portugal and attracted international attention from European and American women's liberation ...

#1482

Fred Van Lente

#16125

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Fred Van Lente from Chagrin Falls, Ohio is an American writer, primarily of comic books and graphic novels. Career Van Lente is the co-founder, along with artist Ryan Dunlavey, of Evil Twin Comics, which produces his and Dunlavey’s non-fiction comic books, the first and most famous of which is Action Philosophers.

#1483

Matti Kuusi

#26763

Overall Influence

1914 - 1998 (84 years)

Matti Akseli Kuusi was a Finnish folklorist, paremiographer and paremiologist. He wrote several books and a number of articles on Finnish folklore. He was the first to have introduced the type system of proverbs similar to the Aarne–Thompson classification system of folklore, the Matti Kuusi international type system of proverbs. With encouragement from Archer Taylor he founded the journal Proverbium: Bulletin d'Information sur les Recherches Parémiologiques, published from 1965 to 1975 by the Society for Finnish Literature, which was later restarted as Proverbium: International Yearbook of Proverb Scholarship.

#1484

Ron Carlson

#24970

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ron Carlson is an American novelist, short story writer and professor. Life and career Carlson was born in Logan, Utah, and grew up in Salt Lake City. He received a master's degree in English from the University of Utah. He then taught at The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, where he began his first novel. He became a professor of English at Arizona State University in 1985, teaching creative writing to undergraduates and graduates, and ultimately becoming director of its Creative Writing program. Carlson then moved to the University of California, Irvine. Carlson was the director of UCI's ...

#1485

Judith Simmer-Brown

#10972

Overall Influence

Judith Simmer-Brown is a Distinguished Professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies Emerita at Naropa University. She has expertise in Tibetan Buddhism, Women and Buddhism, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, Western Buddhism and Contemplative Education. She is an acharya — a senior Buddhist teacher — in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and was a senior student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She serves on the board of the Society of Buddhist-Christian Studies, and is on the steering committee of the Contemplative Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion. Previously she was a member of th...

#1486

Oliver Taplin

#27813

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Oliver Taplin, FBA is a retired British academic and classicist. He was a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil from Oxford University.

#1487

Tomás Eloy Martínez

Tomás Eloy Martínez

#7757

Overall Influence

1934 - 2010 (76 years)

Tomás Eloy Martínez was an Argentine journalist and writer. Life and work He was born on July 16, 1934 in San Miguel de Tucumán and is generally considered an influential and innovative figure in Latin America both as journalist and a novelist. Eloy Martínez obtained a degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Tucumán, and an Masters of Art at the University of Paris.

#1488

Charles Causley

Charles Causley

#24637

Overall Influence

1917 - 2003 (86 years)

Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL was a British poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.

#1489

Anisuzzaman

#12819

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Anisuzzaman was a Bangladeshi academic of Bengali literature. He was an activist who took part in the Language Movement , participated in the Mass Uprising , and took part in the Bangladesh Liberation War .

#1490

T. P. Wiseman

#30219

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Timothy Peter Wiseman , who usually publishes as T. P. Wiseman and is named as Peter Wiseman in other sources, is a classical scholar and professor emeritus of the University of Exeter. He has published numerous books and articles, primarily on the literature and the social and political history of the late Roman Republic, but also the mythography of early Rome and Roman theatre.

#1491

Richard L. Hunter

#34256

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Richard Lawrence Hunter FBA is an Australian classical scholar. From 2001 to 2021, he was the 37th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. Early life and education Hunter was born on 30 October 1953. He grew up in Australia, and was educated at Cranbrook School, an independent school in Sydney. He studied at the University of Sydney, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974. He then moved to England, where he studied for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Cambridge; he was a member of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His doctoral thesis was titled "A c...

#1492

Joseph Vogl

#20332

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Joseph Vogl is a German philosopher who has written on literature, culture and media. He is professor of modern German literature, literary, media and cultural studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

#1493

Alan Dugan

#36852

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

Alan Dugan was an American poet. His first volume Poems published in 1961 was a chosen by the Yale Series of Younger Poets and went on to win the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His last volume, entitled Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, was published in 2001 by Seven Stories Press in New York City and won Dugan a second National Book Award.

#1494

Jeremy Adler

#26287

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jeremy Adler is a British scholar and poet, and emeritus professor and senior research fellow at King's College London. As a poet he is known especially for his concrete poetry and artist's books. As an academic he is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka.

#1495

Chuck Wendig

#29134

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Charles David Wendig is an American author, comic book writer, screenwriter, and blogger. He is best known for his online blog Terribleminds, for his 2015 Star Wars novel trilogy Aftermath, the first book of which debuted at No. 4 on The New York Times Best Seller list and No. 4 on USA Today best seller list, for which series he created the characters of Gallius Rax and marshal Cobb Vanth, the latter of whom would subsequently appear in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Wendig has additionally written comics for Dark Circle Comics, Dynamite Entertainment, Marvel Co...

#1496

Ishmael Reed

#30940

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, novelist, essayist, songwriter, composer, playwright, editor and publisher known for his satirical works challenging American political culture. Perhaps his best-known work is Mumbo Jumbo , a sprawling and unorthodox novel set in 1920s New York.

#1497

Nilima Ibrahim

#22738

Overall Influence

1921 - 2002 (81 years)

Neelima Ibrahim was a Bangladeshi educationist, littérateur and social worker. She is well known for her scholarship on Bengali literature but even more so for her depiction of raped and tortured women in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War in her book Ami Birangana Bolchi. She was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1969, Begum Rokeya Padak in 1996 and Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh for her contributions to Bangla literature.

#1498

Louis Markos

#24114

Overall Influence

Louis Markos is Professor in English at Houston Baptist University, where he holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. Education Markos earned his B.A. in English and History from Colgate University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan. While at the University of Michigan, he specialized in British Romantic Poetry , Literary Theory, and the Classics.

#1499

José Ángel Valente

José Ángel Valente

#37483

Overall Influence

1929 - 2000 (71 years)

José Ángel Valente Docasar was a Spanish poet of the Generation of '50, an essayist, and a translator, who wrote in Spanish and Galician. He studied at the Faculty of Law at the University of Santiago de Compostela, at the Faculty of Romance Philology at the University Complutense, taught Spanish philology at Oxford. From 1958 he lived in Switzerland, after 1980 he divided his time between Spain, Switzerland and France. In 1972, in 1972, he was accused by the Franco government of insulting the honor of the Spanish army.

#1500

Warren Ellis

#17633

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Warren Girard Ellis is a British comic book writer, novelist, and screenwriter. He is best known as the co-creator of several original comics series, including Transmetropolitan , Global Frequency and Red , which was adapted into the feature films Red and Red 2 . Ellis is the author of the novels Crooked Little Vein and Gun Machine and the novella Normal .

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