Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

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To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#201

Christopher Ricks

#3938

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University , co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous .

#202

Graeme Gibson

#6649

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Thomas Graeme Cameron Gibson was a Canadian novelist. He was a Member of the Order of Canada , a Senior Fellow of Massey College and one of the organizers of the Writers Union of Canada . He was also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.

#203

Orhan Pamuk

#2036

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.

#204

Tillie Olsen

#7440

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer who was associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists. Biography Olsen was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents Samuel and Ida Lerner in Wahoo, Nebraska; the family moved to Omaha while she was a young child. There she attended Lake School in the Near North Side through the eighth grade, living among the city's Jewish community. At age 15, she dropped out of Omaha High School to enter the work force. Over the years Olsen worked as a waitress, domestic worker, and meat trimmer. She was also a union organizer and political activist in the Socialist community.

#205

Zadie Smith

#3447

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth , immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.

#206

Nikki Giovanni

#2004

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends".

#207

Joe Boyd

#1503

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Joe Boyd is an American record producer and writer. He formerly owned Hannibal Records. Boyd has worked on recordings of Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, R.E.M., Vashti Bunyan, John and Beverley Martyn, Maria Muldaur, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Billy Bragg, James Booker, 10,000 Maniacs, and Muzsikás. He was also one of the founders of the highly influential nightclub venue UFO.

#208

Hugh Kenner

#3297

Overall Influence

1923 - 2003 (80 years)

William Hugh Kenner was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. He published widely on Modernist literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His major study of the period, The Pound Era, argued for Pound as the central figure of Modernism, and is considered one of the most important works on the topic.

#209

Geoffrey Hill

#3862

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the "greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings, and the publication of Broken Hierarchies , Hill is recogni...

#210

Richard Wilbur

#2645

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.

#211

Jane Yolen

#5836

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Jane Hyatt Yolen is an American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children's books. She is the author or editor of more than 350 books, of which the best known is The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella. Her other works include the Nebula Award−winning short story "Sister Emily's Lightship", the novelette "Lost Girls", Owl Moon, The Emperor and the Kite, and the Commander Toad series. She has collaborated on works with all three of her children, most extensively with Adam Stemple.

#212

Jon Fosse

#5031

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jon Olav Fosse is a Norwegian author, translator, and playwright. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable." Fosse's work spans over seventy novels, poems, children's books, essays, and theatre plays, which have been translated into over fifty languages. The most performed Norwegian playwright after Henrik Ibsen, Fosse is currently—with productions presented on over a thousand stages worldwide—one of the most performed contemporary playwrights globally. His minimalist and deeply introspective plays, with langua...

#213

Daisaku Ikeda

#190

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher, educator, author, and nuclear disarmament advocate. He served as the third president and then honorary president of the Soka Gakkai, the largest of Japan's new religious movementss. Ikeda is the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International , the world's largest Buddhist lay organization, which claims to have approximately 12 million practitioners in 192 countries and territories, more than 1.5 million of whom reside outside of Japan as of 2012.

#214

Kitty Empire

#2500

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Kitty Empire is the pen name of a British writer and music critic, currently writing for The Observer. Early life Empire says that she was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1970 and brought up in Canada, Italy and Egypt before arriving in Britain in 1988. She studied at Wadham College, Oxford and Thames Valley University before working as a stage door-keeper for the Royal Shakespeare Company and London's Barbican Theatre. Empire describes herself as a feminist.

#215

Rita Dove

#2913

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position . Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.

#216

Geoffrey Hartman

#3375

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Geoffrey H. Hartman was a German-born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, although he cannot be categorised by a single school or method. Hartman spent most of his career in the comparative literature department at Yale University, where he also founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.

#217

Michael Witzel

#1933

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Michael Witzel is a German-American philologist, comparative mythologist and Indologist. Witzel is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series .

#218

Roger Zelazny

#3244

Overall Influence

1937 - 1995 (58 years)

Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American poet and writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for The Chronicles of Amber. He won the Nebula Award three times and the Hugo Award six times , including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad , subsequently published under the title This Immortal and then the novel Lord of Light .

#219

Eric Ambler

#2892

Overall Influence

1909 - 1998 (89 years)

Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an English author of thrillers, in particular spy novelss, who introduced a new realism to the genre. Also working as a screenwriter, Ambler used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.

#220

Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren

#2984

Overall Influence

1907 - 2002 (95 years)

Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren was a Swedish writer of fiction and screenplays. She is best known for several children's book series, featuring Pippi Longstocking, Emil of Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and the Six Bullerby Children , and for the children's fantasy novels Mio, My Son, Ronia the Robber's Daughter, and The Brothers Lionheart. Lindgren worked on the Children's Literature Editorial Board at the Rabén & Sjögren publishing house in Stockholm and wrote more than 30 books for children. In 2017, she was calculated to be the world's 18th most translated author. Lindgren had by 2010 sold roughly 167 million books worldwide.

#221

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

#3231

Overall Influence

1941 - 2008 (67 years)

Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as Palestine's national poet. He won numerous awards for his works. Darwish used Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting "the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry." He also served as an editor for several literary magazines in Palestine.

#222

Robert Faurisson

Robert Faurisson

#537

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Robert Faurisson was a British-born French academic who became best known for Holocaust denial. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, and by letters to French newspapers, especially Le Monde, which contradicted the history of the Holocaust by denying the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps, the systematic killing of European Jews using gas during the Second World War, and the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank. After the passing of the Gayssot Act against Holocaust denial in 1990, Faurisson wa...

#223

Jon Krakauer

#987

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of bestselling non-fiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.

#224

José Donoso

#5812

Overall Influence

1924 - 1996 (72 years)

José Manuel Donoso Yáñez , known as José Donoso, was a Chilean writer, journalist and professor. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States and Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he said his exile was also a form of protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He returned to Chile in 1981 and lived there until his death.

#225

John Berger

#1083

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, was influential. He lived in France for over fifty years.

#226

Hermione Lee

#5507

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.

#227

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

#1612

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.

#228

Hans Robert Jauss

#6261

Overall Influence

1921 - 1997 (76 years)

Hans Robert Jauss was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory and medieval and modern French literature. His approach was derived from the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Early years and education Jauss was born in Göppingen, Württemberg, Germany, and died on 1 March 1997 in Constance, Germany. His family came from a long line of teachers. His religious background was pietism. Jauss’s Gymnasium studies took place in Esslingen and Geislingen between 1932 and 1939. As a young soldier in the Second World War, Jauss spent two winters on the Russian Front in the SS and the Waffen-SS.

#229

Russell Banks

#5737

Overall Influence

1940 - 2023 (83 years)

Russell Earl Banks was an American writer of fiction and poetry. His novels are known for "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships".

#230

Brian Friel

#1875

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Brian Patrick Friel was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov" and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.

#231

W. S. Merwin

#2942

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

#232

Kim Newman

#2412

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Kim James Newman is an English journalist, film critic and fiction writer. He is interested in film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternative history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the BSFA award.

#233

Athol Fugard

#1912

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Athol Fugard OIS HonFRSL is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright. He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Oscar-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood.

#234

Marilyn Hacker

#8282

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York. Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece , which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons , and Going Back to the River . In 2003, Hacker won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. In 2009, she subsequently won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

#235

Kazuo Ishiguro

#3439

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

#236

Charles Simic

#4341

Overall Influence

1938 - 2023 (85 years)

Dušan Simić , known as Charles Simic, was a Serbian American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.

#237

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

#1399

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Martin Charles Scorsese is an American filmmaker and actor who holds both American and Italian citizenship. He emerged as one of the major figures of the New Hollywood era. Scorsese has received many accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Directors Guild of America Awards. He has been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Five of his fil...

#238

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros

#5459

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Sandra Cisneros is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street , and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories . Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2...

#239

Rudolfo Anaya

#4972

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Rudolfo Anaya was an American author. Noted for his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, Anaya was considered one of the founders of the canon of contemporary Chicano and New Mexican literature. The themes and cultural references of the novel, which were uncommon at the time of its publication, had a lasting impression on fellow Latino writers. It was subsequently adapted into a film and an opera.

#240

Marina Warner

#2992

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.

#241

Annie Proulx

#4876

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. Her second novel, The Shipping News , won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted as a 2001 film of the same name. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture released in 2005.

#242

Alan Ayckbourn

#1098

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a prolific British playwright and director. He has written and produced as of 2023, 89 full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.

#243

Shoshana Felman

#3701

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.

#244

Leon Edel

#7405

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Joseph Leon Edel was an American/Canadian literary critic and biographer. He was the elder brother of North American philosopher Abraham Edel. The Encyclopædia Britannica calls Edel "the foremost 20th-century authority on the life and works of Henry James." His work on James won him both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

#245

Robert Pinsky

#3304

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. His first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism—and such national enthusiasm in response—that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry's place in the world. Known worldwide, Pinsky's work has earned him the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy's Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, among other accolades.

#246

Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell

#5331

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films.

#247

Thomas M. Disch

Thomas M. Disch

#4509

Overall Influence

1940 - 2008 (68 years)

Thomas Michael Disch was an American science fiction writer and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Rhysling Award, and two Seiun Awards, among others.

#248

Terrance Dicks

#3494

Overall Influence

1935 - 2019 (84 years)

Terrance William Dicks was an English author and television screenwriter, script editor and producer. In television, he had a long association with the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who, working as a writer and also serving as the programme's script editor from 1968 to 1974. The Doctor Who News Page described him as "arguably the most prolific contributor to Doctor Who". He later became a script editor and producer of classic serials for the BBC.

#249

Wayne C. Booth

#2463

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Wayne Clayson Booth was an American literary critic and rhetorician. He was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language & Literature and the College at the University of Chicago. His work followed largely from the Chicago school of literary criticism.

#250

Jay McInerney

#5360

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

John Barrett "Jay" McInerney Jr. is an American novelist, screenwriter, editor, and columnist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me and A Hedonist in the Cellar . His most recent novel is titled Bright, Precious Days, published in 2016.

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