The Most Influential People Across History
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).
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#2001
Shirish Panchal
#66181
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Shirish Jagjivandas Panchal is a Gujarati critic, fiction writer, translator and editor. He won the 2009 Sahitya Akademi Award for Gujarati language for his criticism Vaat Aapanaa Vivechan-ni. He refused the award.
Go to Profile#2002
Tomás Segovia
#59448
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Tomás Segovia was a Mexican author, translator and poet of Spanish origin. He was born in Valencia, Spain, and studied in France and Morocco. He went into exile to Mexico, where he taught at the Colegio de México and other universities. Segovia founded the publication Presencia , was director of La Revista Mexicana de Literatura , formed part of the magazine Plural, and collaborated in Vuelta. He was married to the writer Inés Arredondo from 1953 to 1965.
Go to Profile#2003
Cleonice Berardinelli
#70502
Overall Influence
1916 - 2023 (107 years)
Cleonice Serôa da Motta Berardinelli was a Brazilian academic. Berardinelli was born in Rio de Janeiro on 28 August 1916, to Emídio Serôa da Motta and Rosina Coutinho Serôa da Motta. Her father was in the Army and was frequently transferred around the country. As a result, Cleonice lived in many parts of Brazil, including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In Rio, she studied at the National Institute of Music under the guidance of Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, who was also her piano teacher. She interrupted her studies to move to Sao Paulo, where she finished her secondary school. She attended the University of Sao Paulo, where she studied literature under Fidelino de Figueiredo, among others.
Go to Profile#2004
Anne Boyer
#48102
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Anne Boyer is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers , The 2000s , My Common Heart , Garments Against Women , and The Handbook of Disappointed Fate . In 2016, she was a featured blogger at the Poetry Foundation, where she wrote an ongoing series of posts about her diagnosis and treatment for a highly aggressive form of breast cancer, as well as the lives and near deaths of poets. Her essays about illness have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute with the poets Cyrus Console and Jordan Stempleman.
Go to Profile#2005
Nicanor Tiongson
#35530
Overall Influence
Nicanor G. Tiongson is a critic, creative writer and academic from the Philippines. He holds a Bachelor of Humanities degree from the Ateneo de Manila University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines. A founding member of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, Tiongson is currently Professor Emeritus of Film and Audio-visual Communication at the College of Mass Communication in U.P. Diliman.
Go to Profile#2006
Elsa Cross
#52986
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Elsa Cross , is a contemporary Spanish-language Mexican writer perhaps best known for her poetry. She has also published translations, philosophical essays and is known as an authority on Indian philosophy.
Go to Profile#2007
Sarah Mkhonza
#30622
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sarah Mkhonza is a Swazi writer, educator and women's rights activist living in the United States. Mkhonza received a PhD from Michigan State University. She worked as a journalist for the Times of Swaziland and The Swazi Observer and taught English and Linguistics at the University of Swaziland. Because her writing was critical of the authorities in Swaziland, she was ordered to stop writing. Subsequent threats and assaults led her to seek political asylum in the United States in 2005.
Go to Profile#2008
Robert Pogue Harrison
#43573
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Pogue Harrison is a professor of literature at Stanford University, where he is Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature in the Department of French & Italian. Biography Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984. In 1985, he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992, and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997, Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian, which he continued to be until 2010.
Go to Profile#2009
Lars Lönnroth
#51635
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Lars Lönnroth is a Swedish literary scholar. He was born in Gothenburg to Erik Lönnroth and Ebba Lagercrantz. His academic career includes professorships at the University of California Berkeley, University of Aalborg and the University of Gothenburg.
Go to Profile#2010
Sean Kelly
#17447
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Seán Kelly was a Canadian humorist and writer. Biography Sean was born on a farm in Cushing, Quebec on July 22, 1940. After graduating from Loyola College he worked as a radio actor, advertising copywriter, schoolteacher and on a quiz show.
Go to Profile#2011
Issei Tanaka
#50536
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Issei Tanaka is a Japanese writer and professor at the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo. Tanaka is notable for writing about Chinese literature, publishing books that include, among others, The Social and Historical Content of Ming-Ch'ing Local Drama, and Development of Local Plays in the 17th and 18th Centuries,.
Go to Profile#2012
Meg Cabot
#19333
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Meggin Patricia Cabot is an American novelist. She has written and published over 50 novels of young adult and adult fiction and is best known for her young adult series The Princess Diaries, which was later adapted by Walt Disney Pictures into two feature films. Cabot has been the recipient of numerous book awards, including the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, the American Library Association Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, the Tennessee Volunteer State TASL Book Award, the Book Sense Pick, the Evergreen Young Adult Book Award, the IRA/CBC Young Adult Choice, and many others.
Go to Profile#2013
Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu
#58254
Overall Influence
1921 - 2000 (79 years)
Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu was a Romanian literary critic and science fiction writer. Biography After graduating from high school in his home town, he began to study, in 1939, at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, but had to interrupt his studies in 1940. In 1944, he resumed his studies, and got a diploma in construction engineering in 1947.
Go to Profile#2014
Pulamaipithan
#45094
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Pulavar Pulamaipithan was an Indian scholar, poet and lyricist who got recognition through the song "Naan yaar nee yaar" which was featured in the Tamil film Kudiyirundha Koyil in 1968. He briefly served as the presidium chairman of AIADMK from 2002 to 2003, when he resigned citing ill-health.
Go to Profile#2015
Sherley Anne Williams
#56885
Overall Influence
1944 - 1999 (55 years)
Sherley Anne Williams was an American poet, novelist, professor, vocalist, jazz poet, playwright and social critic. Many of her works tell stories about her life in the African-American community. Biography Sherley Anne Williams was born in Bakersfield, California, to Lena Leila Marie Siler and Jessee Winston Williams, who were migrant farm workers. She was the oldest of three sisters: Ruby, Lois, and Jesmarie. The family suffered from poverty and struggled to make ends meet most their lives. The kids would often have to help out with farming in order to get by.
Go to Profile#2016
Ernie Wise
#15778
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Ernest Wiseman, , known by his stage name Ernie Wise, was an English comedian, best known as one half of the comedy duo Morecambe and Wise, who became a national institution on British television, especially for their Christmas specials.
Go to Profile#2017
Carlo Ossola
#69306
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Carlo Ossola is an Italian philologist, literary critic and literature historian. Since 2000, he holds the chair of modern literature of Neo-Latin Europe at the Collège de France. He has previously taught at the University of Geneva, University of Padua and University of Turin, and from 2007 to 2017 has directed the Institute of Italian studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana. He is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile#2018
David Punter
#40802
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He is the author of many critical studies, and has been internationally recognised as an expert on Gothic culture. Career Punter's academic career commenced as a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia. He left in 1986 to take up the post of Professor of English and Head of Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1989 he was appointed Head of Department at the University of Stirling in Scotland. In 2000 he moved to the University of Bristol, where has been Graduate Dean and Research Director of the Facul...
Go to Profile#2019
Hilary Knight
#29449
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Hilary Knight is an American writer and artist. He is the illustrator of more than 50 books and the author of nine books. He is best known as the illustrator and co-creator of Kay Thompson's Eloise and others in the Eloise series.
Go to Profile#2020
Elisabeth Bronfen
#30880
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Elisabeth Bronfen is a Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic and academic. She is a professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich as well as a global distinguished professor at New York University. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century American and British literature, gender studies, psychoanalysis as well as the intersection and interaction between different cultural media.
Go to Profile#2021
M. M. Basheer
#67983
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
M. M. Basheer is a Malayalam literary critic who has written more than forty critical works on Malayalam poetry, short stories and novels. He has also been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award Fellowship of 2022.
Go to Profile#2022
Ross King
#55796
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ross King is a Canadian novelist and non-fiction writer. He began his career by writing two works of historical fiction in the 1990s, later turning to non-fiction, and has since written several critically acclaimed and best-selling historical works.
Go to Profile#2023
Nicholasa Mohr
#40556
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Nicholasa Mohr is one of the best known Nuyorican writers, born in the United States to Puerto Rican parents. In 1973, she became the first Nuyorican woman in the 20th century to have her literary works published by the major commercial publishing houses, and has had the longest creative writing career of any Nuyorican female writer for these publishing houses. She centers her works on the female experience as a child and adult in Puerto Rican communities in New York City, with much of writing containing semi-autobiographical content. In addition to her prominent novels and short stories, she...
Go to Profile#2024
Jasmine Guillory
#41685
Overall Influence
Jasmine Guillory is an American romance novelist. Her works' protagonists are often African-American professionals. In February 2019, her book, The Proposal, was ranked on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback trade fiction.
Go to Profile#2025
Horia-Roman Patapievici
#30228
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Horia-Roman Patapievici is a Romanian physicist and essayist who served as the head of the Romanian Cultural Institute from 2005 until August 2012. Between 2000 and 2005, he was a member of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, supporting more openness regarding the files of the Securitate.
Go to Profile#2026
Dieter Borchmeyer
#46748
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Dieter Borchmeyer is a German literary critic. Borchmeyer is Professor Emeritus of Modern German Literature and Dramatic Theory at the University of Heidelberg, where he is currently Seniorprofessor. Borchmeyer is president of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. His principal fields are German literature from the 18th to the 20th century and music theatre. He has published on Goethe, Schiller, Mozart and Richard Wagner.
Go to Profile#2027
Douglas A. Martin
#52553
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Douglas A. Martin is an American poet, a novelist and a short story writer. Biography He was raised in Warner Robins, Georgia and moved to New York City in 1998. Beginning as a performance poet and dramatist, Martin then shifted to the novel form and has concentrated creative energies here since his first full-length prose work, Outline of My Lover.
Go to Profile#2028
George Stade
#55170
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
George Stade was an American literary scholar, critic, novelist and professor at Columbia University. According to Stade's obituary in The Washington Post, he was "probably best known for helping to spearhead the study of popular fiction in the classroom, and for his frequent — and frequently acerbic — reviews and essays on contemporary literature."
Go to Profile#2029
Sarah Moss
#63871
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Sarah Moss is an English writer and academic. She has published six novels, as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin's School of English, Drama and Film in the Republic of Ireland with effect from September 2020.
Go to Profile#2030
Moto Hagio
#34047
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Moto Hagio is a Japanese manga artist. Regarded for her contributions to shōjo manga , Hagio is considered the most significant artist in the demographic and among the most influential manga artists of all time, being referred to as the "god of shōjo manga" by critics.
Go to Profile#2031
Justin Clemens
#8720
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet. Background Clemens studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining his PhD on "Institution, aesthetics, nihilism : the Romanticism of contemporary theory" in 1999.
Go to Profile#2032
Jeremy Robinson
#39116
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Jeremy Robinson , also known as Jeremy Bishop, Jeremiah Knight, and other pen names, is an author of sixty novels and novellas. He is known for mixing elements of science, history, and mythology. Many of his novels have been adapted into comic books, optioned for film and TV, and translated into thirteen languages. He is the author of the Nemesis Saga, the Chess Team series, and the non-fiction title, The Screenplay Workbook .
Go to Profile#2033
Earl Miner
#48326
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Earl Roy Miner was a professor at Princeton University, and a noted scholar of Japanese literature and especially Japanese poetry; he was also active in early modern English literature .He was a major critical authority on John Dryden. He earned his bachelor's degree in Japanese studies and master's and doctoral degrees in English from the University of Minnesota; with this PhD, he joined the English faculty at Williams College and at UCLA , whereupon he joined Princeton in 1972.
Go to Profile#2034
Kunio Tsuji
#37783
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Kunio Tsuji was a Japanese author, novelist, and scholar of French literature. Tsuji was born in Tokyo, attended Matsumoto High School with Kita Morio, and studied French literature at the University of Tokyo. After graduation, he became an instructor at Gakushūin University and a literary critic. He spent the years 1957-1960 in France, which strongly influenced his development as a novelist. In 1963 he published his first mature work, Kairō nite , which was awarded the Prize for Modern Literature. Some of his more celebrated later novels include Azuchi ōkanki , winner of a Ministry of Educati...
Go to Profile#2035
Mark Wigley
#7154
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark Antony Wigley is a New Zealand-born architect and author based in the United States. From 2004 to 2014, he was the Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Go to Profile#2036
Ralph Russell
#42315
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Ralph Russell SI was a British scholar of Urdu literature and a Communist. Biography Russell was born in Hammerton, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and grew up in Loughton, Essex. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, where he read classics and geography, graduating in 1940 with an ordinary degree. He learnt Urdu while serving in India on attachment to the Indian Army during World War II, achieving "considerable fluency at the level of everyday communication with my sepoys." During the war he had "no opportunity of making the acquaintance of Urdu literature", but following demo...
Go to Profile#2037
Susan Rubin Suleiman
#29242
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Susan Rubin Suleiman is a Hungarian-born American literary scholar. She is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2038
Jeong Ji-yong
#40106
Overall Influence
1902 - Present (124 years)
Jeong Ji-yong, often romanized in literature as Cheong Chi-yong , was a Korean poet and translator of English poetry who "opened a new horizon of poetic possibilities through chiselled expression, tempered sentiments, and precise visual imagery" according to the scholar of Korean poetry, Brother Anthony.
Go to Profile#2039
Margot Livesey
#45300
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Margot Livesey is a Scottish-born writer. She is the author of nine novels, a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on writing and the co-author, with Lynn Klamkin, of a textbook. Among other awards, she has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the PEN New England Award, and the Massachusetts Book Award.
Go to Profile#2040
Naoko Takeuchi
#27224
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Naoko Takeuchi is a Japanese manga artist. She is best known as the author of Sailor Moon, one of the most popular manga series of all time. She has won several awards, including the 1993 Kodansha Manga Award for Sailor Moon.
Go to Profile#2041
José Luis González
#44228
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
José Luis González was a Puerto Rican essayist, novelist, short story writer, university professor, and journalist who lived most of his life in exile in Mexico due to his pro-independence political views. He is considered to be one of the most important Puerto Rican authors of the 20th century, particularly for his book Puerto Rico: The Four-Storeyed Country and Other Essays, which was first published in Spanish in 1980.
Go to Profile#2042
Maureen Howard
#32665
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.
Go to Profile#2043
Phyllis Eisenstein
#28637
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Phyllis Eisenstein was an American author of science fiction and fantasy short stories as well as novels. Her work was nominated for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. Early life Eisenstein was born Phyllis Leah Kleinstein in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, and lived there most of her life. While studying psychology at the University of Chicago in 1963, she met her future husband Alex at a weekly gathering of Chicago's science fiction fandom. In 1966, shortly after attending Tricon, the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, they were married. She continued college until Alex entered the U. S....
Go to Profile#2044
Dennis O'Neil
#21921
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Dennis Joseph O'Neil was an American comic book writer and editor, principally for Marvel Comics and DC Comics from the 1960s through the 1990s, and Group Editor for the Batman family of titles until his retirement.
Go to Profile#2045
Vijay Seshadri
#27015
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Vijay Seshadri is an American poet, essayist and literary critic based in Brooklyn. Vijay won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for 3 Sections. Early life Vijay's parents immigrated to the United States from Bangalore, India when he was five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#2046
Wolfgang Speyer
#53280
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Wolfgang Speyer is a German classical philologist and historian of religion. He is a professor at the University of Salzburg. Biography Speyer was born in 1933 in Cologne, Germany. He graduated from a Catholic boarding school in Ettal and the Dreikönigsgymnasium, a gymnasium preparatory school in Cologne. Speyer attended the University of Cologne from 1954–1958 and studied classical philology, ancient history, and philosophy. In 1958, he received his doctorate under . From 1959 to 1962 he was a research assistant at the at the University of Cologne, and in 1963 and 1965–76 he worked at ...
Go to Profile#2047
Kees Fens
#34154
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Kees Fens was a Dutch writer, essayist and literary critic. Fens received the P. C. Hooft Award in 1990. In 1999 he received the Laurens Janszoon Costerprijs. Awards 1986: Frans Erens Award1990: The P. C. Hooft Award
Go to Profile#2048
Rory McTurk
#50091
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rory W. McTurk is a British philologist. McTurk graduated from Oxford University in 1963. He took a further degree at the University of Iceland in 1965, and subsequently taught at Lund University, the University of Copenhagen, and University College Dublin. He took up a post at the University of Leeds in 1978, where he has gained the position of Professor Emeritus of Icelandic Studies. McTurk has authored, edited and translated many works on Icelandic literature, including the works of Steinnun Sigurðardóttir. He is a recipient of the Order of the Falcon.
Go to Profile#2049
Gerald Prince
#45106
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gerald J. Prince is an American academic and literary theoretician. He is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also affiliated with department of Linguistics and the Program in Comparative Literature, and with the Annenberg School for Communication.
Go to Profile#2050
Zoran Živković
#48122
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Zoran Živković is a Serbian writer, university professor, essayist, researcher, publisher and translator. Žiković's works have been translated to 20 languages and he was awarded World Fantasy Award.
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