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.

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1751

James Emanuel

#36483

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

James Emanuel was a poet and scholar from Alliance, Nebraska. Emanuel, who is ranked by some critics as one of the best and most neglected poets of the 20th century, published more than 300 poems, 13 individual books, an influential anthology of African-American literature, an autobiography, and more. He is also credited with creating a new literary genre, jazz-and-blues haiku, often read with musical accompaniment.

#1752

Wilfred Watson

#17468

Overall Influence

1911 - 1998 (87 years)

Wilfred Watson was professor emeritus of English at Canada's University of Alberta for many years. He was also an experimental Canadian poet and dramatist, whose innovative plays had a considerable influence in the 1960s. The Dictionary of Literary Biography says that "Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theater years before the rear guard had fully emerged."

#1753

Jonah Raskin

#26208

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jonah Raskin is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a freelance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.

#1754

Elana Dykewomon

#38992

Overall Influence

1949 - 2022 (73 years)

Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Early life and education Dykewomon was born Elana Michelle Nachman in Manhattan to middle class Jewish parents; her mother was a researcher and librarian, and her father was a lawyer. She was raised in a Zionist household, and her father fought in Israel's War of Independence. She and her family moved from Long Island, New York to Puerto Rico when she was eight.

#1755

Doris Betts

#34835

Overall Influence

1932 - 2012 (80 years)

Doris Betts was a short story writer, novelist, essayist and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the author of three short story collections and six novels.

#1756

Farzaneh Milani

Farzaneh Milani

#14912

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Farzaneh Milani is an Iranian-born American scholar, author, poet, translator, and educator. Milani teaches Persian literature and women's studies at the University of Virginia; and serves as the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. She is also a poet, award-winning translator, and a recipient of the Carnegie Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Milani's 1992 book Veils and Words: the Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers , has seen its sixteenth printing.

#1757

Emyr Humphreys

#29402

Overall Influence

1919 - 2020 (101 years)

Emyr Humphreys was a Welsh novelist, poet, and author. His career spanned from the 1940s until his retirement in 2009. He published in both English and Welsh. Early life and career Humphreys was born on 15 April 1919 at Prestatyn in Denbighshire. He was educated at Rhyl High School, where, as E. O. Humphreys, he started composing poetry and wrote for The Welsh Nationalist, the monthly English-language newspaper of the Welsh Nationalist Party, later called by Plaid Cymru. He went on to study history and English at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, after winning a scholarship to study there.

#1758

Josephine Donovan

#13889

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Josephine Donovan is an American scholar of comparative literature who is a professor emerita of English in the Department of English at the University of Maine, Orono. Her research and expertise has covered feminist theory, feminist criticism, animal ethics, and both early modern and American literature with a special focus on American writer Sarah Orne Jewett and the local colorists. She recently extended her study of local color literature to the European tradition. Along with Marti Kheel, Carol J. Adams, and others, Donovan introduced ecofeminist care theory, rooted in cultural feminism, to the field of animal ethics.

#1759

Dominique Fernandez

Dominique Fernandez

#28960

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Dominique Fernandez is a French writer of novels, essays and travel books. Much of his writing explores homosexual experience and creativity. In 1982 he won the Prix Goncourt for his novel about Pier Paolo Pasolini; and in 2007 he was elected a member of the Académie Française.

#1760

William Logan

#45890

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

William Logan is an American poet, critic and scholar. Life Logan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to W. Donald Logan, Jr. and Nancy Damon Logan. He lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, England with his wife, the poet and artist, Debora Greger. Educated at Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa , he has authored eight books of poetry as well as five books of criticism.

#1761

Ronald Hingley

#26032

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Ronald Francis Hingley was an English scholar, translator and historian of Russia, specializing in Russian history and literature. Hingley was the translator and editor of the nine-volume collection of Chekhov's works published by Oxford University Press between 1974 and 1980 . He also wrote numerous books including biographies of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Stalin and Boris Pasternak. He won the James Tait Black Award for his 1976 biography A New Life of Anton Chekhov. He also translated several works of Russian literature, among them Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic One Day in the Life of Ivan De...

#1762

Yona Harvey

#33805

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Yona Harvey is an American poet and assistant professor at University of Pittsburgh. She won the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also an author of Marvel Comics' World of Wakanda, becoming one of the first two black women writing for Marvel.

#1763

Martin Charnin

#16222

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Martin Charnin was an American lyricist, writer, and theatre director. Charnin's best-known work is as conceiver, director, and lyricist of the musical Annie. Life and career Charnin was born in New York City, the son of Birdie and William Charnin, an opera singer. His family was Jewish. Charnin graduated from The High School of Music & Art and then from The Cooper Union, where he earned a BFA. Charnin began his theatrical career as a performer, appearing as "Big Deal", one of the Jets in the original production of West Side Story. He played the role for 1,000 performances on Broadway and on...

#1764

Hua Hsu

#18188

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Hua Hsu is an American writer and academic, based in New York City. He is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work includes investigations of immigrant culture in the United States, as well as public perceptions of diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. His second book, Stay True: A Memoir, was published in September 2022.

#1765

Dorothy Hewett

#25510

Overall Influence

1923 - 2002 (79 years)

Dorothy Coade Hewett was an Australian playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: modernism, socialist realism, expressionism and avant garde. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period.

#1766

Enrique Anderson Imbert

Enrique Anderson Imbert

#55493

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Enrique Anderson-Imbert was an Argentine novelist, short-story writer and literary critic. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, the son of Jose Enrique Anderson and Honorina Imbert, Anderson-Imbert graduated from the University of Buenos Aires with a Ph.D. in 1946. From 1940 until 1947 he taught at the University of Tucumán. In 1947, he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. He became the first Victor S. Thomas Professor of Hispanic Literature at Harvard University in 1965. Anderson-Imbert remained at Harvard until his retirement in 1980. He w...

#1767

Pericles Lewis

#16448

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Pericles Lewis is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of comparative literature at Yale University and the Dean of Yale College. Previously at Yale, he was the founding president of Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college in Singapore that is jointly governed by Yale and the National University of Singapore, as well as vice president for global strategy and vice provost for academic initiatives.

#1768

Wai-lim Yip

#29654

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Wai-lim Yip , is a Chinese poet, translator, critic, editor, and professor of Chinese and comparative literature at UC San Diego. He received his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University. He is also a visiting teacher at China's Peking University and Tsinghua University.

#1769

Angus Calder

#23235

Overall Influence

1942 - 2008 (66 years)

Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder was a Scottish writer, historian, and poet. Initially studying English literature, he became increasingly interested in political history and wrote a landmark study on Britain during the Second World War in 1969 entitled The People's War. He subsequently wrote several other historical works but became increasingly interested in literature and poetry and worked primarily as a writer, though often holding a number of university teaching positions. A socialist, he was a prominent Scottish public intellectual during the 1970s and 1980s.

#1770

Syed Manzoorul Islam

Syed Manzoorul Islam

#24714

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Syed Manzoorul Islam is a Bangladeshi critic, writer and a former professor of Dhaka University. As a literary critic, he has written criticism on writers including Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sudhindranath Dutta, Samar Sen, and Shamsur Rahman. He received a Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1996, and his 2005 short stories collection Prem o Prarthanar Galpo was Prothom Alo's book of the year. He became the president of PEN Bangladesh in January 2018.

#1771

Marina Carr

#34217

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Marina Carr is an Irish playwright, known for By the Bog of Cats . Early life and education Carr was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1964, but spent most of her childhood in Pallas Lake, County Offaly, adjacent to the town of Tullamore. Carr's father, Hugh Carr, was a playwright and her mother, Maura Eibhlín Breathnach, was an Irish poet. As a child, Carr and her siblings, John and Deirdre, built a theater in their shed.

#1772

Karl Galinsky

#44819

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Karl Galinsky is an American academic best known for his research on Ancient Rome. Early life Galinsky was born 1942 in Strasbourg. He finished high school in Germany and then moved to the U.S., where he went to Bowdoin College. He received his B.A. from Bowdoin College in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1966. In 2011, he received an honorary Doctor of Philology from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Galinsky is the Floyd A. Cailloux Centennial Professor of Classics and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

#1773

Tom Leonard

#24511

Overall Influence

1944 - 2018 (74 years)

Tom Leonard was a Scottish poet, writer and critic. He was best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect, particularly his Six Glasgow Poems and The Six O'Clock News. His work frequently dealt with the relationship between language, class and culture.

#1774

Rush Rehm

#28464

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Rush Rehm is professor of drama and classics at Stanford University in California, in the United States. He also works professionally as an actor and director. He has published many works on classical theatre. Rehm is the artistic director of Stanford Repertory Theater , a professional theater company that presents a dramatic festival based on a major playwright each summer. SRT's 2016 summer festival, Theater Takes a Stand, celebrates the struggle for workers' rights. A political activist, Rehm has been involved in Central American and Cuban solidarity, supporting East Timorese resistance to ...

#1775

Heiko Uecker

#67558

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Heiko Uecker was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. He was Professor of Nordic Philology at the University of Bonn and a known expert on Scandinavian literature. Biography Heiko Uecker was born in Nuremberg, Germany on 5 September 1939. After graduating from , Uecker studied Nordic and German philology at the universities of Munich and Oslo. He received his Ph.D. in 1966 with the thesis Die altnordischen Bestattungssitten in der literarischen Überlieferung, which examined descriptions of Norse funerals in Old Norse literature.

#1776

Alan M. Wald

#41706

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Alan Maynard Wald is an American professor emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and writer of 20th-century American literature who focuses on Communist writers; he is an expert on the American 20th-Century "Literary Left."

#1777

Askia M. Touré

#34817

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Askia Muhammad Touré is an African-American poet, essayist, political editor, and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement. Toure helped to define a new generation of black consciousness by creating a triumphal identity for the purpose of uplifting the African heritage beyond the oppressive ideas that dominated the time.

#1778

Jonathan Arac

#39594

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jonathan Arac is an American literary scholar. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at University of Pittsburgh, visiting professor at Columbia University and Director of Pitt's Humanities Center. He is also an editor of the literary journal Boundary 2.

#1779

David Staines

#40279

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

David McKenzie Staines, is a Canadian literary critic, university professor, writer, and editor. Staines was born in Toronto, Ontario, and studied at the University of Toronto, where he obtained a BA in 1967, and at Harvard University, where he obtained an MA in 1968 and a PhD in 1973.

#1780

Olga Sedakova

#41851

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Olga Alexandrovna Sedakova is a Russian poet and translator. She has been described as "one of the best confessional Christian poets writing in Russian today". Sedakova is also recognized as a philosopher and humanist.

#1781

Valerie Taylor

#28873

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Valerie Taylor was an American author of books published in the lesbian pulp fiction genre, as well as poetry and novels after the "golden age" of lesbian pulp fiction. She also published as Nacella Young , Francine Davenport , and Velma Tate. Her publishers included Naiad Press, Banned Books, Universal, Gold Medal Books, Womanpress, Ace and Midwood-Tower.

#1782

Mempo Giardinelli

Mempo Giardinelli

#18374

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Mempo Giardinelli is an Argentine novelist and academic, author of numerous books, including novels, essay collections, and short story collections. Biography Giardinelli was born in Resistencia, Chaco Province. He enrolled at the National University of the Northeast, in neighboring Corrientes, in 1964. He enrolled in Law School, but left his law studies in 1969 to pursue writing and journalism. Giardinelli emigrated to Mexico following the March 1976 coup in Argentina; there, he taught journalism at the Ibero-American University from 1978 to 1984, and contributed to Mexico City-based business magazines Expansión and Forum.

#1783

Vasyl Makhno

#44330

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Winter Letters and Other Poems, translated by Orest Popovych and, most recently, I want to be Jazz and Rock’n’Roll . He has also published two books of essays, The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park and Horn of Plenty . Makhno has translated Zbigniew Herbert’s and Janusz Szuber’s poetry from Polish into Ukrainian. His poems and essays have been translated into 25 languages, and he is the 2013 recipient of Serbia’s Povele Morave Prize in Poetry. Makhno curre...

#1784

William Joyce

#27416

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

William Edward Joyce is an American writer, illustrator, and filmmaker. He has achieved worldwide recognition as an author, artist and pioneer in the digital and animation industry. He has written and illustrated over 50 children’s books and novels which have been translated into over 40 languages.

#1785

Hamish Henderson

#17475

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Hamish Scott Henderson was a Scottish poet, songwriter, communist, intellectual and soldier. He was a catalyst for the folk revival in Scotland. He was also an accomplished folk song collector and discovered such notable performers as Jeannie Robertson, Flora MacNeil and Calum Johnston.

#1786

Andrey Venediktovich Fyodorov

#51234

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Andrey Venediktovich Fyodorov was a Soviet philologist, translator, literary translation theorist, one of the founders of Soviet translation theory, and professor. For 15 years , he was the chairman of the Department of German Philology at Saint Petersburg State University .

#1787

Joshua Clover

#24287

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Joshua Clover is a writer and a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Davis. He is a published scholar, poet, critic, and journalist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages; his scholarship on the political economy of riots has been widely influential in political theory. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry and two times in Best Music Writing, and has received an individual grant from the NEA as well as fellowships from the Cornell Society for the Humanities, The University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.

#1788

Nancy Farmer

#33195

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Nancy Farmer is an American writer of children's and young adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.

#1789

Margherita Guidacci

Margherita Guidacci

#35882

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Margherita Guidacci , was an Italian poet born in Florence, Italy. She graduated from the University of Florence in 1943 and traveled to England and Ireland in 1947. Guidacci married the sociologist Lucca Pinna in 1949, and they moved to Rome in 1957. The poet taught English language and literature at the Liceo Scientifico Cavour for ten years, from 1965 to 1975.

#1790

Mark Wunderlich

#43289

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Mark Wunderlich , is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City he attended Columbia University, where he received an MFA degree.

#1791

Cairns Craig

#39104

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Robert Cairns Craig is a Scottish literary scholar, specialising in Scottish and modernist literature. He has been Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen since 2005. Before that, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, serving as head of the English literature department from 1997 to 2003. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005.

#1792

Laurence Plazenet

#53782

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Laurence Plazenet is a French novelist. She was born in Paris and studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A literature PhD, she taught at Sorbonne, and studied at Princeton University. She has written three novels:L’amour seulLa Blessure et la soifDisproportion de l’hommeShe won the European Union Prize for Literature for L’amour seul.

#1793

Liam Callanan

#51702

Overall Influence

Liam Callanan is an American author and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His novels include The Cloud Atlas and All Saints . Background Callanan earned his Bachelor of Arts at Yale and his Master of Arts at Georgetown University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at George Mason University.

#1794

Fernanda Melchor

Fernanda Melchor

#38843

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican writer best known for her novel Hurricane Season for which she won the 2019 Anna Seghers Prize and a place on the shortlist for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Life and career Melchor graduated with a degree in Journalism from the Universidad Veracruzana where she was Coordinator of Communication of the Veracruz-Del Río campus.

#1795

Sofia Samatar

#42039

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Sofia Samatar is an American scholar, novelist and educator from Indiana. Early life Samatar was born in 1971 in northern Indiana, United States. Her father was the Somali scholar, historian and writer Said Sheikh Samatar. Her mother is a Swiss-German Mennonite from North Dakota. Sofia's parents met in 1970 in Mogadishu, Somalia, while her mother was teaching English.

#1796

Amy Clampitt

#42327

Overall Influence

1920 - 1994 (74 years)

Amy Clampitt was an American poet and author. Life Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920, of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. Clampitt graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor.

#1797

Inuhiko Yomota

#42850

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Inuhiko Yomota is a Japanese author, cultural essayist, translator and film historian. His real name is Goki Yomota. Biography Inuhiko Yomota was born on February 20, 1953, in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, but grew up in Tokyo. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in religious studies, and continued in graduate school there to study comparative literature and culture. After finishing graduate school, he traveled the world as a guest professor and researcher at Konkuk University in South Korea, Columbia University in the United States, the University of Bologna in Italy, Tel Aviv University in Israel and Pristina University in Kosovo.

#1798

Evan S. Connell

#29403

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Evan Shelby Connell Jr. was a U.S. novelist, short-story writer, essayist and author of epic historical works. He also published under the name Evan S. Connell Jr. In 2009, Connell was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for lifetime achievement. On April 23, 2010, he was awarded a Los Angeles Times Book Prize: the Robert Kirsch Award, for "a living author with a substantial connection to the American West, whose contribution to American letters deserves special recognition."

#1799

Tamara Hundorova

Tamara Hundorova

#33747

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Tamara Ivanivna Hundorova is a Ukrainian literary critic, culturologist and writer. She is a professor and head of the Theory of Literature Department at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and a professor and dean at the Ukrainian Free University.

#1800

Bruno Tolentino

#25769

Overall Influence

1940 - 2007 (67 years)

Bruno Lúcio de Carvalho Tolentino was a Brazilian poet and intellectual, known for his opposition towards the more blatant avant-garde elements of Brazilian modernism, his advocacy of classical forms and subjects in poetry, his loathing of popular culture and concrete poetry, and by his being hailed as one of the most important and influential intellectuals of his generation. His work was awarded the Prêmio Jabuti three times, in 1994, 2000 and 2007.

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