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,

#1951

Odhise Grillo

#51699

Overall Influence

1932 - 2003 (71 years)

Odhise Kristo Grillo was an Albanian writer of children's books. Biography Grillo was born in 1932 in Vuno, where he went to elementary school. He completed middle school in the capital of Albania, Tirana. In 1962 he graduated in Faculty of Philology as well as Faculty of Law at the University of Tirana.

#1952

David Milch

#41465

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

David Sanford Milch is an American writer and producer of television series. He has created several television shows, including ABC's NYPD Blue , co-created with Steven Bochco, and HBO's Deadwood . Early life and education Milch graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University, where he won the Tinker Prize in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter, along with future US President George W. Bush. Milch earned a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

#1953

Chuck Hogan

#35193

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Charles Patrick Hogan is an American novelist, screenwriter, and television producer. He is best known as the author of Prince of Thieves, and as the co-author of The Strain trilogy with Guillermo del Toro. Alongside del Toro, Hogan created the television series The Strain , adapting their trilogy of vampire novels.

#1954

Jerry Spinelli

#27947

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Jerry Spinelli is an American writer of children's novels that feature adolescence and early adulthood. His novels include Maniac Magee, Stargirl, and Wringer. Biography Spinelli was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and currently lives in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. At the age of 16, his love of sports inspired him to compose a poem about a recent football victory, which his father published in the local newspaper without his knowledge. It was at this time he realized that he would not become a major league baseball player, so he decided to become a writer.

#1955

Jean Valentine

#40832

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

Jean Valentine was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

#1956

Ronald D. Moore

Ronald D. Moore

#35140

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Ronald Dowl Moore is an American screenwriter and television producer. He is best known for his work on Star Trek, as well as on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series, for which he won a Peabody Award, and on Outlander, based on the novels of the same name by Diana Gabaldon. In 2019, he created and wrote the series For All Mankind for Apple TV+.

#1957

Angie Cruz

#47335

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Angie Cruz is an American novelist and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches in the M.F.A. program. Early life and education Cruz was born on February 24, 1972, in Washington Heights, New York City. She is of Dominican descent, and regularly travelled from New York City to the Dominican Republic as a child.

#1958

Selim Al Deen

#20640

Overall Influence

1949 - 2008 (59 years)

Mohammad Mainuddin Ahmed was a Bangladeshi playwright and theatre artist. He was the founder chairperson of the Department of Drama and Dramatics at Jahangirnagar University. He was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1984 and Ekushey Padak in 2007 by the Government of Bangladesh for his contribution to theatre and won the Independence Award in 2023 for his contribution to the field of literature.

#1959

Jeffrey N. Cox

#36827

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jeffrey N. Cox is Arts and Sciences Professor of Distinction in English Literature and Humanities and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than forty scholarly articles. Cox specializes in English and European Romanticism, cultural theory, and cultural studies. He is a leading scholar of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century drama and theater; of the Cockney School of poets, which included, among others, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Leigh Hunt; and of the poetry of William Wordsworth.

#1960

Mary Ruefle

#42826

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce , was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow .

#1961

Fernando Alegría

#40860

Overall Influence

1918 - 2005 (87 years)

Fernando Alegría was a Chilean poet, writer, literary critic and scholar. Biography He grew up in the Independencia barrio of the city. Poets from this barrio include Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra and Volodia Teitelboim.

#1962

Marita Mathijsen

Marita Mathijsen

#71843

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Marita Theodora Catharina Mathijsen-Verkooijen is professor of modern Dutch literature at the University of Amsterdam, with her speciality as the literature of the nineteenth century in the Netherlands.

#1963

Mike Walker

#20078

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Mike Walker is a radio dramatist and feature and documentary writer. His radio work includes both original plays and adaptations of novels, classical and modern. He has won Sony Radio Awards for his play Alpha and for his script for Different States , and a Silver Community Award for Oxford Road on BBC Radio Berkshire, as well the British Writers' Guild award for best dramatisation for his 1996 adaptation of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. He was also part of the writing team for BBC Radio 4's The Dark House, which won a BAFTA Interactive Award.

#1964

Jon Jefferson

#9941

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Jon Jefferson is a contemporary American author and television documentary maker. Jefferson has written ten novels in the Body Farm series under the pen name Jefferson Bass, in consultation with renowned forensic anthropologist William M. Bass, as well as two non-fiction books about Bass's life and forensic cases.

#1965

Jennifer Chang

#53453

Overall Influence

Jennifer Chang is an American poet and scholar. Life and career Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago in 1998, and an MFA from University of Virginia in 2002, where she returned to pursue a PhD and received her degree in 2017.

#1966

Stanley Corngold

#29765

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Stanley Alan Corngold is an American literary scholar. He is an emeritus professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University. Biography Corngold was born in Brooklyn in 1934. In 1957, he received his B.A. from Columbia University, which was interrupted by two years of military service. He then studied Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies and German at Columbia's graduate school. Having taught at the University of Maryland, Corngold entered Cornell University for his Ph.D. program, receiving his doctorate on Rousseau and Kant under the guidance of Paul de Man, Robert M.

#1967

Margit Frenk

#56762

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Margit Frenk Freund , sometimes known by her married name, Margit Frenk Alatorre , is a German-Mexican philologist, folklorist and translator. She has been an Academic Numerary of the Mexican Language Academy since 1993. She is also a Doctor Honoris Causa at the National Autonomous University of Mexico .

#1968

Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Valerio Massimo Manfredi

#10423

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Valerio Massimo Manfredi is an Italian historian, writer, essayist, archaeologist and journalist. Biography He was born in Piumazzo di Castelfranco Emilia province of Modena and, after getting a degree in Classical Arts at the University of Bologna, he became an archaeologist at the Catholic University of Milan, specialising in the topography of the Ancient World.

#1969

James Matthews

#33334

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

James Matthews is a South African poet, writer and publisher. During the Apartheid era his poetry was banned, and Matthews was detained by the government in 1976 and for 13 years was denied a passport.

#1970

Nitza Ben-Dov

#38428

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Nitza Ben-Dov is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. Winner of the 2021 Israel Prize Biography Nitza Ben-Dov was born in Tel Aviv to parents who were Holocaust survivors. Her father, Dov Fruchtman, was a teacher of literature and wrote a series of research studies on the oeuvre of S.Y. Agnon. Ben-Dov completed her secondary studies at the New High School in Tel Aviv in 1968. She served in the Israel Defense Forces in the Nahal Brigade, at Nahal Golan.

#1971

Sheri Reynolds

#41998

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Sheri Reynolds is an author of contemporary Southern fiction. She was born and raised in rural South Carolina and lives on Virginia's eastern shore. She graduated from Conway High School in 1985, Davidson College in 1989, and Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992.

#1972

Mohja Kahf

#38076

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Mohja Kahf is a Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor. She authored Hagar Poems which won honorable mention in the 2017 Book Awards of the Arab American National Museum. She is the recipient of Pushcart Prize for her creative nonfiction essay, "The Caul of Inshallah" and the Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2002 for poetry. Her poetry has been featured in the installments of American neo-conceptual artist Jenny Holzer.

#1973

Ghagh

#41030

Overall Influence

Ghagh was a 17th-century poet, philosopher and Brahmin astrologer from Northern India. He is known for writing poetry and proverbs on farmers and agriculture. His proverbs are popular among folks in the Hindi-speaking regions like Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh to the eastern boundaries of Bihar.

#1974

Leonie Kramer

#22622

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Dame Leonie Judith Kramer, was an Australian academic, educator and professor. She is notable as the first female professor of English in Australia, first woman to chair the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the first female chancellor of the University of Sydney. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Companion of the Order of Australia.

#1975

Supriya Chaudhuri

Supriya Chaudhuri

#40422

Overall Influence

Supriya Chaudhuri is an Indian scholar of English literature. She is Professor Emerita at Kolkata's Jadavpur University. Biography She was born in Delhi, India and grew up in Europe and India. She was educated at South Point High School, Presidency College, Calcutta and then University of Oxford, where she was a State Scholar from 1973 to 1975, taking a First in English. After serving a few years at Presidency as Assistant Professor of English, she returned to Oxford on an Inlaks Scholarship for doctoral research in Renaissance Studies. She was awarded D.Phil. in 1981. She joined the faculty of Jadavpur University after having taught at Presidency College and Calcutta University.

#1976

Fatou Diome

#30990

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Fatou Diome is a French-Senegalese writer known for her best-selling novel The Belly of the Atlantic, which was published in 2001. Her work explores immigrant life in France, and the relationship between France and Africa. Fatou Diome lives in Strasbourg, France.

#1977

Sergey Zalygin

#27426

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Sergey Pavlovich Zalygin was a Soviet writer and environmentalist, the first non-Communist Party editor-in-chief of the monthly literary magazine . Life and literary work He was born on December 6, 1913, in Durasovka village . His father, Pavel Ivanovich Zalygin, came from a peasant family of the Tambov Province, studied at the University of Kiev, from which he was expelled and exiled to the Ufa Province for revolutionary activity. Zalygin's mother, Lyubov Timofeevna Zalygina , was a daughter of a bank employee from the town of Krasny Kholm, Tver Province. She studied at the Women's Higher C...

#1978

Matthew Bourne

#14418

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Sir Matthew Christopher Bourne is a British choreographer. His productions contain many classic cinema and popular culture references and draw thematic inspiration from musicals, film noir and popular culture

#1979

Jill McCorkle

#52337

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Jill Collins McCorkle is an American short story writer and novelist. She graduated from University of North Carolina, in 1980, where she studied with Max Steele, Lee Smith, and Louis D. Rubin. She also attended Hollins College now Hollins University with Lee Smith where she received her MA. She taught at Tufts University, University of North Carolina, Duke University, Harvard University and Bennington College. She teaches at North Carolina State University.

#1980

Marilyn Nelson

#28499

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former poet laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994 she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of over twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Be...

#1981

Eugene Ostashevsky

Eugene Ostashevsky

#45160

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University. Early life and education Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad. He immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 years old. They settled in New York City.

#1982

Gertrud Höhler

#25886

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Gertrud Höhler is a German literary scholar, management consultant and political consultant. Early life Höhler was born in Wuppertal, Germany, and is the second of four children of parish priest Heinrich Höhler and his wife Helene, daughter of the theologian Fritz Horn. The German cardiologist Mia Helene Höhler was her sister; the German architect Ernst Höhler was her brother.

#1983

John Figueroa

#30621

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

John Joseph Maria Figueroa was a Jamaican poet and educator. He played a significant role in the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature both as a poet and an anthologist. He contributed to the development of the University College of the West Indies as an early member of staff, and had a parallel career as a broadcaster, working for various media organizations including the BBC. He also taught in Jamaica, Britain, the United States, Nigeria and Puerto Rico.

#1984

Gabriel Ruhumbika

#17964

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Gabriel Ruhumbika is a Tanzanian born novelist, short story writer, translator and academic. His first novel, Village in Uhuru, was published in 1969. He has written several subsequent novels in Swahili. He has also taught literature at a number of universities, and, until his retirement in 2016, he was a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in the USA.

#1985

John Doyle

#24221

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

John Doyle is a Canadian writer who is a television critic at The Globe and Mail. Early life John Doyle was born in 1957 in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland, and came to Canada in 1980. Career Doyle was first hired by The Globe and Mail to write for Broadcast Week, the paper's weekly television listings, as a columnist. In 2000, he was appointed the newspaper's daily television critic. Doyle also covers soccer for the paper. His writing on soccer has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the ECW Press anthology Best Canadian Sports Writing, and the soccer magazine Eight by Eight.

#1986

Jean Bessière

#42585

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Jean Bessière is professor of Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne , and was educated at the École Normale Supérieure and holds a PhD from the Sorbonne as well as being agrégé in Modern Letters. He is the author of numerous books on Comparative Literature and is the president emeritus of the International Comparative Literature Association. His most recent works include La littérature et sa rhétorique , Quel statut pour la littérature ? , Principes de la theorie littéraire and Le roman contemporain ou la problématicité du monde . Jean Bessière has been on the faculty of numerous universities including Indiana University, Stanford, McGill and several French universities.

#1987

Diana Abu-Jaber

#32538

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Diana Abu-Jaber is an American author and a professor at Portland State University. Early life and education Abu-Jaber was born in Syracuse, New York. Her father was Jordanian with a Palestinian Jerusalemite mother; Diana's mother was American, descended from Irish and German roots. At the age of seven, she moved with her family for two years to Jordan. She received a BA in English and Creative Writing from the State University of New York at Oswego, an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. She ...

#1988

Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson

#23493

Overall Influence

1957 - 2014 (57 years)

Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008. Early life Emerson was born on January 13, 1957, in Chatham, Virginia, and graduated from Chatham Hall preparatory school in 1975. She received her BA in English from the University of Virginia in 1979 and her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991.

#1989

Ellen McLaughlin

#27760

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Ellen McLaughlin is an American playwright and actress. Early years McLaughlin attended The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia for elementary school . She subsequently attended Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1976. She graduated from Yale University in 1980, summa cum laude.

#1990

Kim Seungok

#25159

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Kim Seungok is a South Korean novelist and screenwriter. Biography Born in Osaka, Japan, Kim Seungok returned to Korea after its liberation in 1945. There, he was raised in Suncheon in Jeollanam-do where he graduated from Suncheon High School. In 1960, he studied French Literature at Seoul National University at a time that department and University were the center of intellectual discontent in Seoul. While at Seoul National University, Kim was a cartoonist for a Seoul newspaper and published his first major story at age 19 . While a junior in 1962, Kim founded a literary Journal, The Age of Prose, and some of his first works were published there.

#1991

Lisel Mueller

#17828

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Lisel Mueller was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.

#1992

Per Seyersted

#60164

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Per Eynert Seyersted was a Professor of American Literature at the American Institute at the University of Oslo. Seyersted was born in Oslo, Norway. He earned his master's degree at Harvard University in 1959 and earned his doctoral degree in 1969 at the University of Oslo. He was internationally renowned for his monograph on 19th century novelist Kate Chopin. His last monograph was a study of the works of Robert Cantwell. According to Professor of American Literature Per Winther, Seyersted’s book on Chopin became an important reference for the emergence of feminist literary criticism in the...

#1993

Lawrence Sargent Hall

#50102

Overall Influence

1915 - 1993 (78 years)

Lawrence Sargent Hall was an American author. Career In 1936, Hall received his BA from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. In 1941, he received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University. In 1942, he was chief of an Office of Strategic Services censorship unit. He taught at several educational institutions, including Deerfield Academy and Yale. In 1946, he retired as a US Navy Reserve lieutenant commander. From 1946 to 1986, he taught English at Bowdoin. In 1956, he was a Carnegie visiting professor at Columbia University. From 1964, he was chairman of the Bowdoin Department of English. In 1986, he retired as Henry Leland Chapman professor.

#1994

Manoj Muntashir

#21476

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Manoj Shukla , better known by his stage name Manoj Shukla Muntashir, is an Indian lyricist, poet, dialogue writer and screenwriter. He wrote several Hindi songs for films, including "Teri Mitti", "Galliyan", "Tere Sang Yaara", "Kaun Tujhe", "Dil Meri Na Sune", "Kaise Hua" and "Phir Bhi Tumko Chaahunga".

#1995

Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham

#45536

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a professor in the practice of creative writing at Yale University.

#1996

Kevin Dettmar

#35219

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Kevin J. H. Dettmar is an American cultural critic who specializes in British and Irish modern literature and contemporary popular music. He is the W.M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College and the director of the college's humanities studio.

#1997

Paul Bailey

#20936

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Paul Bailey FRSL is a British novelist and critic, as well as a biographer of Cynthia Payne and Quentin Crisp. Biography Paul Bailey attended Sir Walter St John's Grammar School For Boys in Battersea, London. He won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1953 and worked as an actor between 1956 and 1964. He became a freelance writer in 1967.

#1998

Artem Harutyunyan

Artem Harutyunyan

#62533

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Artem Harutyunyan is an Armenian writer, translator, critic, Doctor of Philology, Professor, member of Writers Union of Armenia, Biography Artem Harutyunyan was born in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, in 1945. After graduating from Yerevan State University, he earned his PhD in American and English Literature from Moscow's Maxsim Gorky Institute of World Literature, Professor .

#1999

Ellen Bryant Voigt

#33227

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont. Biography Voigt was born May 9, 1943, in Danville, Virginia. She grew up in Chatham, Virginia, graduated from Converse College, and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has taught at M.I.T. and Goddard College where in 1976 she developed and directed the nation's first low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Since 1981 she has taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

#2000

David Wevill

#39263

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

David Anthony Wevill is a Japanese-born Canadian poet and translator. He became a dual citizen in 1994. Wevill is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin.

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