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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1701

Eiko Kadono

#32722

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Eiko Kadono, real name Eiko Watanabe, born January 1, 1935, is a Japanese author of children's literature, picture books, non-fiction, and essays in Shōwa and Heisei period in Japan. Her most famous work Kiki's Delivery Service, released in 1985, was made into an anime film by Hayao Miyazaki, and spawned a series of sequel novels. In 2018, she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Currently, she serves as a guest professor at the Nihon Fukushi University in Aichi Prefecture.

#1702

Gianfranco Folena

#33276

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

Gianfranco Folena was an Italian linguist, philologist, and academic. Biography Born in Savigliano in Piedmont in 1920, from a Tuscan family. He attended the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa along with Giorgio Pasquali. After his involvement in the war and imprisonment in India, he graduated in Florence, with Bruno Migliorini. He had held the chair of Romance Philology and then of History of the Italian Language at the University of Padua until the end of his teaching activity in 1990.

#1703

Rudy Wiebe

#17310

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Rudy Henry Wiebe is a Canadian author and professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Alberta since 1992. Rudy Wiebe was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in the year 2000.

#1704

Linh Dinh

#29187

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Linh Dinh is a Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer. He was a 1993 Pew Fellow. He writes a column for The Unz Review. Biography Dinh came to the US in 1975, lived in Philadelphia and in 2018 is moving back to Vietnam.

#1705

Sue Miller

#41190

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Sue Miller is an American novelist and short story writer who has written a number of best-selling novels. She graduated from Radcliffe College. Biography Born in Chicago, Miller was preoccupied with her duties as a single mother, leaving little time to write for many years. As a result, she did not publish her first novel until 1986, after spending almost a decade in various fellowships and teaching positions.

#1706

Ioannis Kakridis

#30633

Overall Influence

1901 - 1992 (91 years)

Ioannis Kakridis was a Greek classical scholar and was one of the leading scholars of Homeric Poetry in the twentieth century. He was born in Athens in 1901 and received his PhD at the University of Athens. He went on to become a professor at the universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, Tübingen, Stockholm, Lund and Uppsala. Kakridis was a Homer scholar and one of the most important classicists of twentieth-century Greece. He was also an early and staunch advocate of the adoption of the monotonic system in the Greek language. In 1941, he was denounced by the faculty of the University of Athens ...

#1707

Judith Mossman

#52906

Overall Influence

Judith Mossman is Pro-Vice Chancellor for Arts and Humanities and Professor of Classics at Coventry University. She was the President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies . Career Mossman was educated at Woldingham School, before reading Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She received a D.Phil from Oxford University for a thesis entitled Euripides' Hecuba: A Re-evaluation, With Special Reference to Dramatic Technique. She held a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church and taught at Trinity College Dublin before moving to the University of Nottingham in 2004. Mossman was appointed to Coventry University in 2017.

#1708

Brent Hayes Edwards

#26368

Overall Influence

Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Early life Edwards attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed an MA and PhD at Columbia. Career

#1709

H. L. Hix

#35969

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Harvey Lee Hix , is an American poet and academic. Hix is an author of books of poetry, criticism and essays and has been awarded a fellowship from the NEA. He has also won the KCAI Teaching Excellence Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, which was a publication award from Truman State University Press for his volume Rational Numbers . In 2006 he was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.

#1710

Francine du Plessix Gray

#20784

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Francine du Plessix Gray , was a French-American Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer and literary critic. Early life and education She was born on September 25, 1930, in Warsaw, Poland, where her father, Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a French diplomat – the commercial attaché. She spent her early years in Paris, where a milieu of mixed cultures and a multilingual family influenced her. Her father, then a sub-lieutenant in the Free French Air Force died in 1940, shot down near Gibraltar.

#1711

Warren Montag

#7629

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Warren Montag is a professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosophers Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes.

#1712

Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon

#27433

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Antoine Compagnon is a Professor of French Literature at Collège de France, Paris , and the Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York City . Education Compagnon studied at École Polytechnique and École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées , and holds a Doctorate of Paris Diderot University .

#1713

Robert Laxalt

#23667

Overall Influence

1923 - 2001 (78 years)

Robert Laxalt was a Basque-American writer from Nevada. Biography Robert Laxalt was born in 1923, a decade and a half after his father Dominique Laxalt and his mother Theresa Laxalt had emigrated to the United States in 1906 to herd sheep. His brother Paul Laxalt later became Governor of Nevada and then a United States senator . After graduating from Carson City High School, Robert Laxalt attended Santa Clara University and then the University of Nevada at Reno.

#1714

Ralph Hexter

#20590

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Ralph Jay Hexter is a distinguished professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis. Previously, he served as the fifth president of Hampshire College. Education Hexter received an A.B. in English literature from Harvard College in 1974. He then studied in England, where he earned a B.A. and M.A. in classics and modern languages at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1977 and 1982, respectively. He also earned an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University in 1979 and 1982, respectively. Hexter subsequently taught in the classics d...

#1715

Mona Simpson

#7778

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Mona Simpson is an American novelist. She has written six novels and studied English at University of California, Berkeley, and languages and literature at Columbia University. She won a Whiting Award for her first novel, Anywhere but Here . It was a popular success and adapted as a film by the same name, released in 1999. She wrote a sequel, The Lost Father . Critical recognition has included the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and making the shortlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Off Keck Road .

#1716

Mary Biddinger

#40501

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Mary Biddinger is an American poet, editor, and academic. Biography Mary Biddinger received an Honors B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Subconcentration from the University of Michigan. She also holds an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University, and a Ph.D. in English with Creative Dissertation from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

#1717

Latif Nazemi

#59756

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Latif Nazemi is a Persian poet and literary critic from Afghanistan. He currently lives in Frankfurt and works for Radio Deutsche Welle in Germany. Nazemi was born in Herat, Afghanistan and graduated from Kabul University, where he later taught. He is a student of "Persian literature" and has published a number of works in the field, including: Modern Dari Literature in Afghanistan.

#1718

George Pérez

#23487

Overall Influence

1954 - 2022 (68 years)

George Pérez was an American comic book artist and writer, who worked primarily as a penciller. He came to prominence in the 1970s penciling Fantastic Four and The Avengers for Marvel Comics. In the 1980s he penciled The New Teen Titans, which became one of DC Comics' top-selling series. He penciled DC's landmark limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, followed by relaunching Wonder Woman as both writer and penciller for the rebooted series. In the meantime, he worked on other comics published by Marvel, DC, and other companies into the 2010s. He was known for his detailed and realistic ren...

#1719

Bruce Jones

#23716

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Bruce Eliot Jones whose pen names include Philip Roland and Bruce Elliot, is an American comic book writer, novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter whose work included writing Marvel Comics' The Incredible Hulk from 2001 to 2005.

#1720

John Tytell

#38902

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

John Tytell is an American writer and academic. He is professor emeritus of modern American literature at Queens College, City University of New York. Tytell's works on literary figures such as Jack Kerouac, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs have made him a leading scholar of the Beat Generation. He has written for the American Scholar, Partisan Review, New York Times, and Vanity Fair.

#1721

J. Thomas Rimer

#45044

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

J. Thomas Rimer is an American scholar of Japanese literature and drama. He is a Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature, Theatre, and Art at the University of Pittsburgh. He has served as the chief of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress.

#1722

Carl Phillips

#27630

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.

#1723

Michael Livingston

Michael Livingston

#34399

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Michael Livingston is a historian, a professor of medieval literature, and a historical fantasy novelist. His 2015 debut novel, The Shards of Heaven, was followed by two sequels. Early life, education and career Originally from Colorado, Livingston has a B.A. in history from Baylor University, an M.A. in medieval studies from Western Michigan University, and both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester. He has been a professor at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina since 2006. In his academic life he wrote numerous articles on the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf,...

#1724

Dan Chiasson

#24933

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.

#1725

Robin Blaser

#36414

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada. Personal background Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University; after taking early retirement in the 1980s, he held the position of professor emeritus. He lived in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia.

#1726

X. J. Kennedy

#29681

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

X. J. Kennedy is an American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. He was long known as Joe Kennedy; but, wishing to distinguish himself from Joseph P. Kennedy, he added an "X" as his first initial.

#1727

Abdulaziz Al-Maqaleh

#35336

Overall Influence

1937 - 2022 (85 years)

Abdul Aziz Al-Maqaleh was a Yemeni poet and writer. Primarily writing in free verse, Al-Maqaleh has been described as Yemen's "best-known and most-laureled twentieth-century poet." Life and career Al-Maqaleh was born in 1937 in the village of Maqaleh in Ibb Governorate.

#1728

David Greig

#16583

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

David Greig is a Scottish playwright and theatre director. His work has been performed at many of the major theatres in Britain, including the Traverse Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and been produced around the world.

#1729

Marilyn Chin

#40454

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Marilyn Chin is a prominent Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.

#1730

Mike Bartlett

#18269

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Michael Bartlett is an English playwright and screenwriter for film and TV series. His 2015 psychological thriller TV series, Doctor Foster, starring Suranne Jones, won the New Drama award from National Television Awards. Bartlett also won Best Writer from the Broadcast Press Guild Awards. A BBC TV Film of Bartlett's play King Charles III was broadcast in May 2017 and while critically acclaimed, generated some controversy.

#1731

Jorge Camacho

#32995

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Jorge Camacho Cordón is a writer in Esperanto and Spanish. Camacho was born in Zafra, Spain and learned Esperanto in 1980. He was a member of the Academy of Esperanto from 1992 until 2001. Since 1995 he has worked in Brussels as an interpreter for the European Union from English and Finnish into Spanish.

#1732

Hitoshi Igarashi

Hitoshi Igarashi

#21076

Overall Influence

1947 - 1991 (44 years)

Hitoshi Igarashi was a Japanese scholar of Arabic and Persian literature and history and the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. He was murdered in the wake of fatwas issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran – who, by the time of Igarashi's murder, had died – calling for the death of the book's author and "those involved in its publication." His murder remains unsolved.

#1733

Robert Dessaix

#24103

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Robert Dessaix, also known as Robert Jones, is an Australian novelist, essayist and journalist. Early life and education Robert Dessaix was born in Sydney, and adopted at an early age by Tom and Jean Jones, after which he was known as Robert Jones. Tom Jones, a merchant seaman, was already 55 when Robert was adopted.

#1734

Laura Mancinelli

Laura Mancinelli

#39934

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Laura Mancinelli was an Italian writer, germanist, medievalist and university professor. Mancinelli also wrote academic texts, children's books, essays , and historical novels. Life Laura Mancinelli was born in Udine in 1933, then, after a period of short stays between Rovereto and Mantua where she spent her early childhood, in 1937 the family moved permanently to Turin.

#1735

Amanda Boyden

#28067

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Amanda Boyden is an American novelist. Born in Northern Minnesota and raised in Chicago and St. Louis, she studied creative writing at the University of New Orleans, where she and her ex-husband, Canadian writer Joseph Boyden, were faculty members until 2012. In addition to writing, Amanda Boyden is a trapeze artist who founded Aerialists, Inc., her own all-female troupe, and performed as Lady Hummingbird.

#1736

Bentley Layton

#12895

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Bentley Layton , is Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University . He is a Harvard-educated scholar who has been central to the late 20th-century Rediscovery of Gnosticism, which was the title of the international conference he hosted at Yale in 1980 and the volume that came of it. His interests lie in the History of Christianity from its origins until the rise of Islam, Gnostic studies and Coptic.

#1737

Lotta Lotass

#33339

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Britt Inger Liselott "Lotta" Lotass Hagström is a Swedish writer. She holds a PhD of Comparative literature from the University of Gothenburg, and lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. Lotass made her literary debut in 2000, and two years later published her doctoral dissertation on Swedish writer Stig Dagerman. On 6 March 2009, Lotass was officially announced to succeed late Sten Rudholm at Seat No.1 at the Swedish Academy. Lotass took her seat on the 18-member assembly on 20 December 2009.

#1738

Lee Edelman

#16095

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Lee Edelman is an American literary critic and academic. He is a professor of English at Tufts University. He is the author of four books. Early life Lee Edelman was born in 1953. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University, and he received an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University.

#1739

Miguel Syjuco

#48153

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer from Manila and the grand prize winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for his first novel Ilustrado. Early life and education Miguel Augusto Gabriel Jalbuena Syjuco, the son of Representative Augusto Syjuco Jr. of the second district of Iloilo in the Philippine House of Representatives, and Judy Jalbuena.

#1740

Joshua Landy

#24978

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor in French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford University. He is also a Professor of Comparative Literature and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford.

#1741

Tina Darragh

#49778

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Tina Darragh is an American poet who was one of the original members of the Language group of poets. Biography Darragh was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in the south suburb of McDonald, Pennsylvania. She began writing in 1968 and studied poetry in Washington, D.C. at Trinity University from 1970 to 1972. Between 1974 and 1976, she worked with Some of Us Press and at the Mass Transit community bookstore and writing workshop.

#1742

Mary Gordon

#23647

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mary Catherine Gordon is an American writer from Queens and Valley Stream, New York. She is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author of New York.

#1743

Jaime Manrique

#35111

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jaime Manrique is a bilingual Colombian American novelist, poet, essayist, educator, and translator. His work is a representation of his cultural upbringing and heritage mixed with the flavors of his education in English. A primary distinction of his work comes from his bilingualism, and his choice to write in both English and Spanish. Many of his novels are published in English whereas his poetry is often printed and shared in Spanish. Manrique's writing covers a variety of themes and topics with some of his more notable works ranging from talking about his father's corpse and the adventures of a young gay Colombian immigrant.

#1744

Elzbieta Ettinger

#22946

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Elżbieta Ettinger was a Polish-American Jewish writer. Early life and education The daughter of Emmanuel Ettinger and Regina Stahl, she was born in Łódź. Along with her family, she was transferred to the Warsaw Ghetto but in 1942, she was able to escape the ghetto with the help of her mother and, using forged identity papers, adopted the name Elżbieta Chodakowska. She worked with the Polish resistance during World War II. In 1946, she received a degree in English and German philology from Jagellonian University and, in 1949, a MA in English philology from Warsaw University. In 1966, she earne...

#1745

Frederick Turner

#18531

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Frederick Turner is an English–American poet affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism. He is the author of two full-length science fiction epic poems, The New World and Genesis; several books of his poetry and literary translations; and a number of other works. He has been called "a major poet of our time".

#1746

John Yau

#30082

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

#1747

Eduardo Lourenço

Eduardo Lourenço

#31309

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Eduardo Lourenço de Faria , best known as Eduardo Lourenço, was a Portuguese essayist, professor, critic, philosopher and writer. Early life Coming from a small village in Beira Interior, he is the eldest of the seven children of Abílio de Faria, Captain of Infantry, and Maria de Jesus Lourenço. He moved to Guarda in 1932 and entered the Military College in 1934, one year after his father left for Nampula, Mozambique.

#1748

Erdağ Göknar

#26076

Overall Influence

Erdağ Göknar is a Turkish-American scholar, literary translator, and poet. He is an Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and Director of the Duke University Middle East Studies Center.

#1749

Igor Kaczurowskyj

Igor Kaczurowskyj

#33433

Overall Influence

1918 - 2013 (95 years)

Ihor Kaczurowskyj was a Ukrainian poet, translator, novelist and short story writer, literary scholar, university lecturer, journalist. Life Ihor Kaczurowskyj was born on 1 September 1918 in Nizhyn in a family of graduated of the Kyiv University. His father practised law, afterwards specialized in economy as well, for some time the held the rank of a state secretary assistant in the Central Council of Ukraine .

#1750

Reinhard Lettau

#51912

Overall Influence

1929 - 1996 (67 years)

Reinhard Lettau was a German-American writer. Career He was a professor of German Literature first at Smith College and then, from 1967 to 1991, at the University of California, San Diego. He was an active member of the Group 47. He gave incendiary speeches at the Free University of Berlin denouncing the Springer Press. He was thereupon expelled from East Germany because he was a foreigner—by that time, he carried an American passport. His provocative behavior continued in the US: In 1972, he was suspended from teaching, without pay, at UC San Diego after hitting a Marine Corps officer on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

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