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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1801

Brian Morton

#32051

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Brian Morton is a Scottish writer, journalist and former broadcaster, specialising in jazz and modern literature. Early life and education Born in Paisley, near Glasgow and raised in Dunoon, Morton was educated at the University of Edinburgh and taught in the late 1970s at the University of East Anglia and the University of Tromsø in Norway.

#1802

Roy Fuller

#26170

Overall Influence

1912 - 1991 (79 years)

Roy Broadbent Fuller CBE was an English writer, known mostly as a poet. He was born at Failsworth, Lancashire to lower-middle-class parents Leopold Charles Fuller and his wife Nellie , whose father was clerk to a workhouse master. His father, born at Fulham in 1884, was the illegitimate son of Minnie Augusta Fuller , daughter of a Soham police constable, Richard Fuller. Orphaned and subsequently raised with his elder sister, Minnie at Caithness, Leopold worked his way up to the position of works manager of a rubber-proofing mill at Hollinwood, Greater Manchester, dying in 1920.

#1803

Martin Puchner

#23007

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair at Columbia University, where he also served as co-chair of the Theater Ph.D. program. He now holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.

#1804

Valery Durov

#28888

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Valery Semenovich Durov is a Russian antiquarian, philologist, and academic . From 1992 until 2013, he was head of the Department of Classical Philology at St. Petersburg State University. Career Durov graduated from the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University in 1968, was in graduate school at the Department of Classical Philology and in 1974 he defended his thesis "The Tenth Satire of Juvenal".

#1805

Ghulam Mustafa Khan

#20260

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Ghulam Mustafa Khan, SI was a Pakistani researcher, literary critic, linguist, author, scholar of Urdu literature and linguistics, educationist and religious and spiritual leader belonging to Naqshbandi order of Sufism.

#1806

Davey Holmes

#31513

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Davey Holmes is an American screenwriter, producer and director. He is the creator and executive producer of the television show Get Shorty on Epix. Career Holmes began his writing career in New York City with a production of his original play More Lies About Jerzy at the Vineyard Theatre starring Jared Harris, and later productions of the play in London at the New End Theatre and in Los Angeles at the Hayworth Theatre.

#1807

Rosamunde Pilcher

#22421

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Rosamunde Pilcher, OBE was a British novelist, best known for her sweeping novels set in Cornwall. Her books have sold over 60 million copies worldwide. Early in her career she was published under the pen name Jane Fraser. In 2001, she received the Corine Literature Prize's Weltbild Readers' Prize for Winter Solstice.

#1808

Tatyana Tolstaya

Tatyana Tolstaya

#40429

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family. Family Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into a family of writers. Her paternal grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was a pioneering science fiction writer, and the son of Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy and Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva , a relative of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and the writer Ivan Turgenev. Tolstaya's paternal grandmother was the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky , her maternal grandfather, was a literary translator renowned for his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy.

#1809

Patience Agbabi

Patience Agbabi

#45644

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Patience Agbabi FRSL is a British poet and performer who emphasizes the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

#1810

Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya

#6550

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Maya Mikhailovna Plisetskaya was a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer, choreographer, ballet director, and actress. In post-Soviet times, she held both Lithuanian and Spanish citizenship. She danced during the Soviet era at the Bolshoi Theatre under the directorships of Leonid Lavrovsky, then of Yury Grigorovich; later she moved into direct confrontation with him. In 1960, when famed Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova retired, Plisetskaya became prima ballerina assoluta of the company.

#1811

Yehoshua Sobol

#13863

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Yehoshua Sobol, sometimes written Joshua Sobol , is an Israeli playwright, writer, and theatre director. Biography Yehoshua Sobol was born in Tel Mond. His mother's family fled the pogroms in Europe in 1922 and his father's family immigrated from Poland in 1934 to escape the Nazis. Sobol is married to Edna, set and costume designer. They have a daughter, Neta, and a son, Yahli Sobol, a singer and writer. Sobol studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, and graduated with a diploma in philosophy. Born to a secular Jewish family, he identifies as an atheist.

#1812

Shun Akiyama

#54685

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

Shun Akiyama was a Japanese literary critic and member of the Japan Art Academy. He was born in Tokyo, and graduated from Waseda University in 1953 with a degree in French literature. Between 1979 and 1993 he was a professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and from 1997 at Musashino University. He died, aged 83, in Tokyo.

#1813

Kwame Alexander

Kwame Alexander

#20876

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kwame Alexander is an American writer of poetry and children's fiction. Personal life and education Alexander was born in Manhattan, New York, and grew up in Virginia. His father was a scholar and book publisher and his mother was an educator so he was always surrounded by books.

#1814

Leon Forrest

#50259

Overall Influence

1937 - 1997 (60 years)

Leon Richard Forrest was an African-American novelist who taught at Northwestern University from 1973 until his death. His four major novels used mythology, history, and humor to explore "Forest County," a fictional world that resembled the south side of Chicago where Forrest grew up. After his death, the Washington Post called Forrest "one of the best-kept secrets of contemporary African-American fiction -- and an acquired taste."

#1815

Peter Pouncey

#14289

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Peter R. Pouncey was a British-American author, classicist, and president of Amherst College. He was known for his wit, his erudition, and his sophisticated works of both academic analysis and fiction.

#1816

Sudesh Mishra

#33356

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sudesh Mishra is a contemporary Fijian-Australian poet and academic. Career Sudesh Mishra was born in Fiji into an Indo-Fijian family in Suva and educated at Shri Vivekananda High School in Nadi. Coming to Australia to study he studied at The University of Wollongong and went on to complete a Ph.D. in English literature at Flinders University. He has published several volumes of poetry, the first of which, Rahu , received the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry in 1988. His writing commonly treats events in his home country, such as the 1987 coup, from an ironic perspective.

#1817

Bárbara Jacobs

#26219

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Bárbara Jacobs is a Mexican writer, poet, essayist and translator. Life Born in Mexico City in 1947, Jacobs grew up in a home where five languages were spoken. Her grandparents were Lebanese Jewish and Lebanese Maronites. After attending school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, she returned to Mexico and received a degree in psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

#1818

Major Jackson

#47844

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Major Jackson is an American poet and professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022 , The Absurd Man , Roll Deep , Holding Company , Hoops , finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn , winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. His prose is published in A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson .

#1819

Dirk Obbink

#11251

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dirk D. Obbink is an American papyrologist and classicist. He was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016. Obbink was also a fellow and tutor in Greek at Christ Church Oxford, from which role he was suspended in October 2019, as a result of allegations that he had stolen some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and sold them to the Museum of the Bible.

#1820

Jack Gelber

#27467

Overall Influence

1932 - 2003 (71 years)

Jack Gelber was an American playwright best known for his 1959 drama The Connection, depicting the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The first great success of the Living Theatre, the play was translated into five languages and produced in ten nations. Gelber continued to work and write in New York, where he also taught writing, directing and drama as a professor, chiefly at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he created the MFA program in playwriting. In 1999 he received the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievements in t...

#1821

Jacques Brault

#35896

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Jacques Brault was a French Canadian poet and translator who lived in Cowansville, Quebec, Canada. He was born to a poor family, but received an excellent education at the Université de Montréal and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He became a professor at the Université de Montréal, in the Département d'études françaises and the Institut des sciences médiévales, and made frequent appearances as a cultural commentator on Radio-Canada.

#1822

Jógvan Isaksen

#39109

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jógvan Isaksen is a Faroese writer and literary historian. He is best known for his crime novels and for his book about Faroese literature . He is leader of the Faroese publication house which has its address in the Faroe Islands, though its committee is located in Copenhagen. It publishes Faroese books and is the oldest Faroese publishing house, having been founded in 1910.

#1823

Aleksandar Prokopiev

Aleksandar Prokopiev

#56824

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Aleksandar Prokopiev is a Macedonian PhD in comparative literature and literary theory working in the Institute of Macedonian Literature at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, the Republic of North Macedonia. He is also notable as a writer, essayist and a former member of the eminent Yugoslav rock band Idoli.

#1824

Robert Morgan

#24367

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Robert Morgan is an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. Life He studied at North Carolina State University as an engineering and mathematics major, transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an English major, graduating in 1965, and completed an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1968.

#1825

Heinrich Beck

#61462

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Heinrich Beck was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. A Professor of Ancient German and Nordic Studies at Saarland University and later the University of Bonn, Beck was a co-editor of the second edition of Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde and one of the world's leading experts on early Germanic culture.

#1826

Kevin Vennemann

#54848

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Kevin Vennemann is a German author. Vennemann was born in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia, in 1977. He began writing short fiction while studying comparative literature at Cologne University. However, he made no effort to publish his stories until he had enough for a collection, which he then took to the small Cologne publisher Tropen Verlag, which immediately published the collection as Wolfskinderringe. It got little attention, and Vennemann went on to study history and American and Scandinavian Studies at colleges and universities in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Berlin before completing his first novel, Close to Jedenew.

#1827

Norman MacCaig

#28440

Overall Influence

1910 - 1996 (86 years)

Norman Alexander MacCaig DLitt was a Scottish poet and teacher. His poetry, in modern English, is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity. Life Norman Alexander MacCaig was born at 15 East London Street, Edinburgh, to Robert McCaig , a chemist from Dumfriesshire, and Joan née MacLeod , from Scalpay in the Outer Hebrides. He was their fourth child and only son. He attended the Royal High School and in 1928 went to the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1932 with a degree in classics. He divided his time, for the rest of his life, between his native city and Assyn...

#1828

Paul Auster

#33154

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Paul Benjamin Auster is an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions , The Brooklyn Follies , Invisible , Sunset Park , Winter Journal , and 4 3 2 1 . His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

#1829

Lionel Gossman

#26454

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Lionel Gossman was a Scottish-American scholar of French literature. He taught Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University, and wrote extensively on the history, theory and practice of historiography, and on aspects of German cultural history.

#1830

Toshiyuki Horie

#46274

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

is a Japanese author, translator, and scholar of French literature. Biography Horie was born in Gifu Prefecture, and studied at Waseda University, where he is now a professor of creative writing. He studied for three years at the University of Paris III on a French government scholarship. Horie, who is also a member of many literary prize selection committees, is a critic and translator of authors including Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert, Michel Rio, and Jacques Réda. His books have been translated into French, Korean, and English.

#1831

Sarah Treem

#41404

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Sarah Treem is an American TV writer-producer and playwright. She is the co-creator and showrunner of the Showtime drama The Affair, which won the Golden Globe Award for Outstanding Drama Series, and was a writer and co-executive producer on the inaugural season of House of Cards, which was nominated for nine Golden Globes, including Outstanding Drama Series. She also wrote on all three seasons of the HBO series In Treatment.

#1832

Goran Tribuson

#56116

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Goran Tribuson is a Croatian prose and screenplay writer. Tribuson received his B.A. in literature from the Philosophical Faculty in Zagreb and his M.A. in filmology at the University of Zagreb. He worked for the Vjesnik Marketing Agency, and was a coeditor and revisor of the Croatian Lexicon. He teaches screen-writing at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts.

#1833

Cornelius Eady

#47521

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Cornelius Eady is an American writer focusing largely on matters of race and society. His poetry often centers on jazz and blues, family life, violence, and societal problems stemming from questions of race and class. His poetry is often praised for its simple and approachable language.

#1834

Carolina Schutti

Carolina Schutti

#63527

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Carolina Schutti is an Austrian writer. Born in Innsbruck, she studied an eclectic range of subjects: German philology, English and American Studies, and music. She obtained her PhD on the work of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti. She then taught at the University of Florence, before joining Literaturhaus am Inn as a researcher. She has published widely on literary matters. Schutti received the 2015 EU Prize for Literature for her novel Einmal muss ich über weiches Gras gelaufen sein .

#1835

Efua Sutherland

Efua Sutherland

#32368

Overall Influence

1924 - 1996 (72 years)

Efua Theodora Sutherland was a Ghanaian playwright, director, dramatist, children's author, poet, educationalist, researcher, child advocate, and cultural activist. Her works include the plays Foriwa , Edufa , and The Marriage of Anansewa . She founded the Ghana Drama Studio, the Ghana Society of Writers, the Ghana Experimental Theatre, and a community project called the Kodzidan . As Ghana's earliest playwright-director, she was an influential figure in the development of modern Ghanaian theatre, and helped to introduce the study of African performance traditions at university level. She was...

#1836

Zsófia Bán

#55994

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Zsófia Bán is a writer, literary historian, essayist and art and literature critic. Personal life Zsófia Bán grew up in Rio de Janeiro as the child of Jewish parents. In 1969, she and her family returned to Hungary where she studied English language and Literature as well as Romance Studies in Budapest , Lisbon, Minneapolis and New Brunswick. She has worked in film studios, curated art exhibitions, was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut in Berlin, a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University, as well as a writer-in-residence in Zug, Switzerland, among other residencies.

#1837

Dodie Bellamy

#49738

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist, educator and editor. Her book, Cunt-Ups won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award. Her work is frequently associated with that of the New Narrative movement in San Francisco and fellow writers Robert Glück, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Kevin Killian, and Eileen Myles.

#1838

R. V. Young

#35559

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Robert V. Young, Jr. is a professor of Renaissance Literature and Literary Criticism in the English Department of North Carolina State University, co-founder and co-editor of the John Donne Journal, and author of multiple books and articles primarily related to the study of literature. He became the editor of the conservative quarterly Modern Age in 2007.

#1839

C. M. Naim

#18122

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Choudhri Mohammed Naim is an American scholar of Urdu language and literature. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. Naim is the founding editor of both Annual of Urdu Studies and Mahfil , as well as the author of the definitive textbook for Urdu pedagogy in English.

#1840

Jo Shapcott

#29092

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jo Shapcott FRSL is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award.

#1841

August Coppola

#25899

Overall Influence

1934 - 2009 (75 years)

August Floyd Coppola was an American academic, author, film executive, and advocate for the arts. He was the brother of director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, and the father of actor Nicolas Cage, radio DJ Marc Coppola and director Christopher Coppola.

#1842

Christian Wiman

#37169

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Christian Wiman is an American poet, translator and editor. Biography Raised in the small West Texas town of Snyder, he graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman is now on the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches courses on Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

#1843

Henrik Edoyan

#39483

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Henrik Edoyan is an Armenian poet, translator, university professor and academician. Biography Henrik Edoyan was born in Yerevan, Soviet Armenia to the family of Anton and Atlas Yedoyans as the 5th out of 6 children that survived to adulthood. Anton was originally from Erzerum, Ottoman Empire and had moved to Russian Armenia after losing the first wife and children to the Armenian genocide.

#1844

R. H. W. Dillard

#37045

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Richard Henry Wilde Dillard was an American poet, author, critic, and translator. Life and career Richard Henry Wilde Dillard was born in Roanoke, Virginia, Dillard was best known as a poet. He is also highly regarded as a writer of fiction and critical essays, as well as one of the screenwriters for the cult classic Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Roanoke College and went on to receive of a Master of Arts and the Ph. D. from the University of Virginia. While at the University of Virginia he was both a Woodrow Wilson and a DuPont Fellow. He...

#1845

Reed Farrel Coleman

Reed Farrel Coleman

#37982

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Reed Farrel Coleman is an American writer of crime fiction and a poet. Life and career Reed Farrel Coleman, the youngest of three boys, was born and raised in the Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. As a teenager, he heard a shot while walking to work, and saw a man lying in the street with a fatal stomach wound. That is when he realized, "People do get hurt." He started writing in high school. He has worked at an ice cream store, in air freight at Kennedy Airport, as a car leasing agent, in baby food sales, cooking at a restaurant, as a cab driver, and delivering home heating oil.

#1846

Eric Lott

#25231

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Eric Lott is an American cultural historian and Distinguished Professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City. Previously, he was a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Virginia.

#1847

Frank Chipasula

Frank Chipasula

#15060

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Frank Mkalawile Chipasula is a Malawian writer, editor and university professor, "easily one of the best of the known writers in the discourse of Malawian letters". Life Born in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia, Frank Chipasula attended St. Peter's Primary School on Likoma Island, Soche Hill Day Secondary School, Malosa Secondary School, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, and, finally, the Great East Road Campus of the University of Zambia, Lusaka, where he graduated B.A., in exile, in 1976. Before leaving Malawi, Chipasula had worked as a freelance broadcaster for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation while studying English and French at the university.

#1848

Imre Szeman

#31918

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Imre Szeman is a Canadian cultural theorist, professor, and public intellectual. He is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Szeman was previously University Research Chair of Environmental Communication at the University of Waterloo, Canada Research Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta , and Senator William McMaster Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. In 2020, Szeman was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2022, he was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

#1849

Arthur Dale Trendall

#58488

Overall Influence

1909 - 1995 (86 years)

Arthur Dale Trendall, was a New Zealand art historian and classical archaeologist whose work on identifying the work of individual artists on Greek ceramic vessels at Apulia and other sites earned him international prizes and a papal knighthood.

#1850

Samuel John Hazo

#19287

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Samuel John Hazo is a poet, playwright, fiction novelist, and the founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University, where he taught for forty-three years.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions