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,

#2051

Maria Tymoczko

#46219

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Maria Fleming Tymoczko is a scholar of comparative literature who has written about translation, medieval Celtic literature, and modern Irish literature including the works of James Joyce. She is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the former president of the Celtic Studies Association of North America. She is known for her calls for a more international and multicultural perspective on translation.

#2052

Kelly Cherry

#21138

Overall Influence

1940 - 2022 (82 years)

Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia . She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.

#2053

Mircea Zaciu

#49819

Overall Influence

1928 - 2000 (72 years)

Mircea Zaciu was a Romanian critic, literary historian and prose writer. Biography Born into a Greek-Catholic family in Oradea, his parents were Adrian Zaciu, a lawyer, and his wife Otilia , a high school secretary. The family had peasant origins in the Coaș area, and was possibly Aromanian at its roots. He attended primary school in Satu Mare from 1935 to 1939, followed by one year at Mihai Eminescu High School in the same city. Following the Second Vienna Award, when the area was ceded to Hungary, the family took refuge in Arad. There, he took years two through six at Moise Nicoară High School.

#2054

Silvia Bovenschen

Silvia Bovenschen

#51665

Overall Influence

1946 - 2017 (71 years)

Silvia Bovenschen was a German feminist literary critic, author and essayist. History Bovenschen was the daughter of a public limited company director. She grew up in Frankfurt am Main, where she later studied literature, sociology and philosophy. In the course of the protests of 1968, she co-founded the women's council of the Socialist German Student Union. In 1979, she earned a doctorate from the Goethe University Frankfurt with her work Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit . This essay is regarded as a standard work of feminism.

#2055

Susan Neville

#38373

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Susan Neville is a short story writer, essayist and professor, known for her work exploring Indiana and the Midwest. Life She graduated from DePauw University in 1973. In 1976, she graduated from Bowling Green State University with an M.F.A. She taught at St. Petersburg Junior College, Ball State University, and Indiana University East. She teaches at Butler University and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in North Caroline.

#2056

Edna Longley

#57444

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Edna Longley is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry. Early life and education Born in Cork in 1940, the daughter of mathematics professor T.S. Broderick and a Scottish Presbyterian mother, she was baptised a Catholic but brought up in "the Anglican compromise" . She went up to Trinity College Dublin in 1958 where her contemporaries included the poets Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland.

#2057

Alessandro Piperno

Alessandro Piperno

#38466

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Alessandro Piperno is an Italian writer and literary critic of Jewish descent, having a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He graduated in French Literature at the University of Rome, where he currently teaches and researches. In 2000, he published the controversial critical essay on Marcel Proust, inflammatorily entitled "Proust antiebreo ".

#2058

Carolyn Collette

#27850

Overall Influence

Carolyn P. Collette is an American literary critic and a specialist in medieval literature, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. She is Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College, and a research associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, in England.

#2059

Danzy Senna

#48120

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Danzy Senna is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of five books and numerous essays about gender, race and motherhood, including her first novel, Caucasia , and her most recent novel, New People . Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

#2060

Rebecca Gould

#38020

Overall Influence

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer, translator, and Distinguished Professor, Comparative Poetics & Global Politics at SOAS University of London. Her interests range across the Caucasus, Comparative Literature, Islam, Islamic Law, Islamic Studies, Persian literature, poetry, and poetics. Her PhD dissertation focused on Persian prison poetry, and was published in revised form as The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination . Her articles and translations have received awards from English PEN, the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize, the Mode...

#2061

Brian Vickers

#29808

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Sir Brian William Vickers is a British academic, now Emeritus Professor at ETH Zurich. He is known for his work on the history of rhetoric, Shakespeare, John Ford, and Francis Bacon. He joined the English department at University College London as a visiting professor in 2012.

#2062

Peter Meinke

#49895

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Peter Meinke is an American poet and author. He has published 18 books of poems and short stories. The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His poetry has received many awards, including two NEA Fellowshipss and three prizes from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Kalliope, A journal of women's art and literature and other magazines. He is the current poet laureate of Florida and was appointed on June 15, 2015.

#2063

Paul Maar

#40555

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Paul Maar is a German novelist, playwright, translator, and illustrator notable for his contributions to children's literature. Life Maar was born in Schweinfurt. After the early death of his mother he lived with his grandfather in the rural area of Theres in northern Bavaria. He went to school at the Gymnasium in Schweinfurt, and later studied at the State Academy of Arts in Stuttgart. He then worked as a stage designer and stage photographer for the Franconian castle theatre Massbach. After that he spent ten years as an art teacher. Since 1976, he has worked as a freelance writer. He lives...

#2064

Bernard Schweizer

#36474

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Bernard Schweizer is a Professor Emeritus of English at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He has published several books and essay collections on topics in British and European literatures. He is a leading Rebecca West scholar and has edited or co-edited a number of Rebecca West’s previously unpublished and uncollected works. In 2003, he founded the International Rebecca West Society in New York and was the second president of the Society.

#2065

Milton Kessler

#43531

Overall Influence

1930 - 2000 (70 years)

Milton Kessler was a poet and academic who spent most of his career at Binghamton University. He was one of the founders of the institution's creative writing program. Life Born in Brooklyn, New York, Kessler grew up in New York City in a Jewish family. He was a volunteer spear carrier and prop boy at the New York Metropolitan Opera as a teenager, and he had classical training as a singer. He worked selling cloth at The Sample in Buffalo, New York as a young adult, and he married his wife, Sonia, while working a range of modest jobs.

#2066

Robyn Creswell

#22920

Overall Influence

Robyn Creswell is an American critic, scholar and translator. He graduated from Brown University in 1999 and gained a doctorate in comparative literature from New York University in 2011. In addition to teaching comparative literature at Brown University, he also serves as poetry editor of the Paris Review. Creswell's specialization is contemporary Arabic literature.

#2067

Ian Edginton

#20022

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Ian Edginton is a British comic book writer, known for his work on such titles as X-Force, Scarlet Traces, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and Leviathan. Career Ian Edginton is known for his steampunk/alternate history work and is the co-creator of Scarlet Traces, a sequel to H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which they later went on to adapt in turn, and The Great Game, a sequel to Scarlet Traces. For 2000 AD he has written Leviathan, Stickleback and, with art by Steve Yeowell, The Red Seas as well as one-off serials such as American Gothic .

#2068

Stephen Rodefer

Stephen Rodefer

#56259

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Stephen Rodefer was an American poet and painter who lived in Paris and London. Born in Bellaire, Ohio, he knew many of the early beat and Black Mountain poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Rodefer was one of the original Language poets and taught widely, including: UNM, SUNY Buffalo, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State, and the American University of Paris. Rodefer was the first American poet to be offered a Fellowship at Cambridge University.

#2069

M. C. Bradbrook

#50077

Overall Influence

1909 - 1993 (84 years)

Muriel Clara Bradbrook , usually cited as M. C. Bradbrook, was a British literary scholar and authority on Shakespeare. She was Professor of English at Cambridge University, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge.

#2070

Léonora Miano

#53182

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Léonora Miano is a Cameroonian author. Biography Léonora Miano was born in Douala in Cameroon. She moved to France in 1991, where she first settled in Valenciennes and then in Nanterre to study American Literature. She published her first novel, Dark Heart of the Night, which was well received by French critics, receiving six prizes: Les Lauriers Verts de la Forêt des Livres, Révélation , the Louis Guilloux prize , the Prix du Premier Roman de Femme , the René-Fallet prize , the Bernard-Palissy prize ,and the Cameroonian Excellence prize . The Lire magazine awarded it with the title of the b...

#2071

Alejandro Morales

#41382

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Alejandro Morales is a Mexican-American writer of fiction and poetry. He is an Emeritus Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has published seven novels, three novellas, and one collection of poetry.

#2072

Giulio Angioni

#13685

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Giulio Angioni was an Italian writer and anthropologist. Biography Angioni was a leading Italian anthropologist, professor at the University of Cagliari and fellow of St Antony's College of the University of Oxford. He is the author of about twenty books of fiction and a dozen volumes of essays in anthropology.

#2073

Adam Johnson

#25389

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.

#2074

Abolhassan Najafi

#36400

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Abolhassan Najafi was an Iranian writer and translator. Najafi was born in Najaf, Iraq, into a family from Isfahan. He began his literary activities in the 1960s and translated several books from French into Persian. He co-published a successful literary periodical entitled Jong-e Isfahan . After the Iranian revolution, he published a controversial book on Persian usage entitled Let's Avoid Mistakes .

#2075

Jan Twardowski

#34955

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Jan Jakub Twardowski was a Polish poet and Catholic priest. He was a chief Polish representative of contemporary religious lyrics. He wrote short, simple poems, humorous, which often included colloquialisms. He joined observations of nature with philosophical reflections.

#2076

Joe Keenan

#54099

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Joe Keenan is an American screenwriter, television producer and novelist. Known for his television work on series like Frasier and Desperate Housewives, Keenan has been referred to as the "gay P.G. Wodehouse" for his three successful novels.

#2077

Karen Russell

#35987

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.

#2078

Igor Volgin

#37168

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Igor Leonidovich Volgin is a Soviet and Russian writer and historian, poet, specialist in literature. Biography Igor Volgin was born in March 1942 in Molotov, where his parents were in the evacuation. Father Leonid Samuilovich Volgin a journalist. His mother, Rakhil Lvovna Volgina corrector.

#2079

Javier Ocampo López

#53810

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Javier Ocampo López is a Colombian historian, writer, folklorist and professor. He has been important in the fields of Colombian folklore and history of Latin America and Colombia, especially contributing on the department of Boyacá, the homeland of the Muisca and their religion and mythology. He wrote exclusively in Spanish.

#2080

Omar Tyree

#39022

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Omar Rashad Tyree is an African-American novelist. He is known for his best-selling book For the Love of Money and Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. he co-authored with Marion Barry.

#2081

David Mikics

#33516

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

David Mikics is the Moores Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Honors College, University of Houston. His book on Stanley Kubrick in the Yale Jewish Lives series was published in 2020. His book about Saul Bellow entitled Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art was published in 2016. Mikics, a Guggenheim Fellow for 2017, is a regular columnist for Tablet magazine. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn and Houston.

#2082

Brian Keene

#41956

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Brian Keene is an American author and podcaster, primarily known for his work in horror, dark fantasy, crime fiction, and comic books. He has won the 2014 World Horror Grandmaster Award and two Bram Stoker Awards. In addition to his own original work, Keene has written for media properties such as Doctor Who, Thor, Hellboy, Alien, Masters of the Universe, and The X-Files.

#2083

Jenny Strauss Clay

#21333

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Jenny Strauss Clay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. After completing studies at Reed College and the University of Chicago, Strauss Clay completed her doctorate at the University of Washington. She taught at the University of California at Irvine and Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a member of the Nominating Committee of the Society for Classical Studies , until 2018.

#2084

Donald Mitchell

#29421

Overall Influence

1925 - 2017 (92 years)

Donald Charles Peter Mitchell CBE was a British writer on music, particularly known for his books on Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten and for the book The Language of Modern Music, published in 1963.

#2085

Nicholas Delbanco

Nicholas Delbanco

#45086

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Nicholas Delbanco is an American writer. Life and career Delbanco was born in London, England, the son of German Jewish parents Barbara and Kurt Delbanco, a businessman, art dealer, and sculptor. He was educated at Harvard University, graduating with a B.A. in 1963; and at Columbia University, with an M.A. in 1966. He taught at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1966–1984, and at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1984–85. He was a visiting professor at such institutions also as Trinity College, Williams College, Columbia University and the University of Iowa. He was directo...

#2086

Sigrid Weigel

#36093

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sigrid Weigel is a German scholar of literary studies, critical theory, a specialist of cross-disciplinary research, and a leading scholar of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and the cultural science around 1900. She held professorships at Hamburg, Zürich, and Berlin and established the internationally noted Advanced Studies “Center for Literary and Cultural Research” in Berlin. In 2016, she received the renowned Aby Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg.

#2087

Roy Williams

#35525

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Roy Samuel Williams is a British playwright. Early life Williams was born in Fulham, London, and brought up in Notting Hill, the youngest of four siblings in a single-parent home, with his mother working as a nurse after his father moved to the United States. Williams decided to work in theatre after being tutored by the writer Don Kinch when he was failing in school and attended some rehearsals in a black theatrical company that Kinch ran. After leaving school at the age of 18, Williams did various jobs, including working in McDonald's and in a props warehouse. In 1992, he took a theatre-wri...

#2088

Philip Gross

#32742

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Philip Gross is a poet, novelist, playwright, children's writer and academic based in England and Wales. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales. Biography Philip Gross was born in 1952 at Delabole in north Cornwall, near the sea, as the only child of Juhan Karl Gross, an Estonian wartime refugee, and Jessie, daughter of the local village schoolmaster. He grew up and was educated in Plymouth. In junior school he began writing stories and in his teens he took to poetry as well. He is a Quaker. He went on to the University of Sussex, where he gained his BA in English.

#2089

Clarence Major

#53046

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Clarence Major is an American poet, painter, and novelist; winner of the 2015 "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts", presented by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He was awarded the 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.

#2090

David Wagoner

#32239

Overall Influence

1926 - 2021 (95 years)

David Russell Wagoner was an American poet, novelist, and educator. Biography David Russell Wagoner was born on June 5, 1926, in Massillon, Ohio. Raised in Whiting, Indiana, from the age of seven, Wagoner attended Pennsylvania State University where he was a member of Naval ROTC and graduated in three years. He received an M.A. in English from the Indiana University in 1949 and had a long association with the University of Washington where he taught, beginning in 1954, on the suggestion of friend and fellow poet Theodore Roethke.

#2091

Chinmoy Guha

#25733

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Chinmoy Guha is Professor Emeritus at the University of Calcutta, a Bengali essayist and translator, and a scholar of French language and literature. He has served as the Vice-Chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University and Director of Publications, Embassy of France, New Delhi. Earlier he taught English at Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College in Kolkata for more than two decades, and French at the Alliance Française and the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture for eleven and five years respectively.

#2092

Les Standiford

#39750

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Les Standiford is an author and, since 1985, the Founding Director of the Florida International University Creative Writing Program in Miami, Florida. He also holds the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

#2093

Vincenzo Di Benedetto

#53965

Overall Influence

1934 - 2013 (79 years)

Vincenzo Di Benedetto was an Italian classical philologist. Life Born to the tailor Saverio Di Benedetto and his wife Maria Gaetana he grew up in Saracena and acquired a sound knowledge of Latin and Classical Greek at the Liceo Classico in Castrovillari. Having received a scholarship from the Scuola Normale Superiore, he went on to study from 1952 to 1958 in Pisa and Oxford . Apart from his academic mentors, he also acknowledged the influence of his friend, Latinist Sebastiano Timpanaro and his mother, historian of philosophy Maria Timpanaro Cardini. From 1969 onwards until his retirement i...

#2094

Françoise Gaillard

#31212

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Françoise Gaillard is a French literary critic, philosopher and professor at University of Paris VII specializing in fin-de-siècle French literature, aesthetics and art and is a regular visiting professor at New York University.

#2095

Terry Dowling

#45464

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Terence William Dowling , is an Australian writer and journalist. He writes primarily speculative fiction though he considers himself an "imagier" – one who imagines, a term which liberates his writing from the constraints of specific genres. He has been called "among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia, a writer who stubbornly hews his own path ."

#2096

Mario Fratti

#74932

Overall Influence

1927 - 2023 (96 years)

Mario Fratti was an Italian playwright and drama critic. In his lifetime, he produced over 70 works, which were translated into over 20 languages and shown worldwide. He was best known for writing the first script for the musical Nine.

#2097

Derick Thomson

#35766

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Derick Smith Thomson was a Scottish poet, publisher, lexicographer, academic and writer. He was originally from Lewis, but spent much of his life in Glasgow, where he was Professor of Celtic at the University of Glasgow from 1963 to 1991. He is best known for setting up the publishing house Gairm, along with its magazine, which was the longest-running periodical ever to be written entirely in Gaelic, running for over fifty years under his editorship. Gairm has since ceased, and was replaced by Gath and then STEALL. He was an Honorary President of the Scottish Poetry Library, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy.

#2098

John Wieners

#51522

Overall Influence

1934 - 2002 (68 years)

John Joseph Wieners was an American poet. Early life Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Wieners attended St. Gregory Elementary School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Boston College High School. From 1950 to 1954, he studied at Boston College, where he earned his A.B. On September 11, 1954, he heard Charles Olson read at the Charles Street Meeting House on Beacon Hill during Hurricane Edna. He decided to enroll at Black Mountain College where he studied under Olson and Robert Duncan from 1955 to 1956. In 1957 he took a job sweeping floors at a popular Beat hangout in North Beach, where he joined the artistic community in the city.

#2099

Yu Kwang-chung

#39901

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Yu Kwang-chung, also romanised as Yu Guangzhong was a Taiwanese writer, poet, educator and critic. Life Yu was born in 1928 in Nanking to Yu Chaoying and Sun Xiujun, but fled with his family during the Japanese invasion. After returning to Nanjing many years later, he again was forced to flee due to the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. Yu and his family fled to Taiwan via British Hong Kong in 1950 with the Kuomintang-led Government. Yu entered the University of Nanking for English Major in 1947, and then transferred to Amoy University. He enrolled at National Taiwan University and was one of the first students to graduate with a degree in foreign languages.

#2100

Dan Rebellato

#44268

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Dan Rebellato is an English dramatist and academic born in South London. He is Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London and has written extensively for radio and the stage. He has twice been nominated for a Sony Award, and writes regularly for The Guardian Theatre Blog.

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