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,

#2101

Mamoru Oshii

#19146

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

is a Japanese filmmaker, television director and writer. Famous for his philosophy-oriented storytelling, Oshii has directed a number of acclaimed anime films, including Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer , Angel's Egg , Patlabor 2: The Movie , and Ghost in the Shell . He also holds the distinction of having created the first ever OVA, Dallos . As a writer, Oshii has worked as a screenwriter, and occasionally as a manga writer and novelist. His most notable works as a writer include the manga Kerberos Panzer Cop and its feature film adaptation Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade .

#2102

Caryl Churchill

#29073

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Caryl Lesley Churchill is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes. Celebrated for works such as Cloud 9 , Top Girls , Serious Money , Blue Heart , Far Away , and A Number , she has been described as "one of Britain's greatest poets and innovators for the contemporary stage". In a 2011 dramatists' poll by The Village Voice, five out of the 20 polled writers listed Churchill as the greatest living playwright.

#2103

Elaine Fantham

#51838

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian, German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, and Australia.

#2104

Emmett L. Bennett Jr.

#63149

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

Emmett Leslie Bennett Jr. was an American classicist and philologist whose systematic catalog of its symbols led to the solution of reading Linear B, a 3,300-year-old syllabary used for writing Mycenaean Greek hundreds of years before the Greek alphabet was developed. Archaeologist Arthur Evans had discovered Linear B in 1900 during his excavations at Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and spent decades trying to comprehend its writings until his death in 1941. Bennett and Alice Kober cataloged the 80 symbols used in the script in his 1951 work The Pylos Tablets, which provided linguist Joh...

#2105

Jan Best

#63412

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Jan Gijsbert Pieter Best is a Dutch pre- and protohistorian, comparative linguist, archaeologist, and author. For about 30 years, he was Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he taught ancient history, and Mediterranean prehistory and protohistory.

#2106

Molly Mahood

#14675

Overall Influence

1919 - 2017 (98 years)

Molly Maureen Mahood was a British literary scholar, whose interests ranged from Shakespeare to postcolonial African literature. She taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford , the University of Ibadan in Nigeria , the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania , and the University of Kent at Canterbury .

#2107

Larry Benson

#43002

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Larry Dean Benson was a professor of medieval literature at Harvard University. After an undergraduate degree at Arizona State University and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught at Harvard for 45 years, retiring in 1998. A scholar of Old and Middle English literature, he is best known as the general editor of the Riverside Chaucer, the authoritative modern edition of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

#2108

Valerie Sayers

#54765

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Valerie Sayers is an American writer and the author of six novels: The Powers ; Brain Fever ; The Distance Between Us ; Who Do You Love ; How I Got Him Back, or, Under the Cold Moon’s Shine ; and Due East . Brain Fever and Who Do You Love were named New York Times "Notable Books of the Year", and the 2002 film Due East is based on her first two novels. Reviewing Who Do You Love, The Chicago Tribune declared: "To say that Valerie Sayers is a natural-born writer wildly underestimates the facts…. She has carved out for herself a corner of the South as clearly delineated as Faulkner’s famous Yokn...

#2109

Joan Hambidge

#45205

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Joan Helene Hambidge , is an Afrikaans poet, literary theorist and academic. She is a prolific poet in Afrikaans, controversial as a public figure and critic and notorious for her out-of-the-closet style of writing. Her theoretic contributions deal mainly with Roland Barthes, deconstruction, postmodernism, psychoanalysis and metaphysics.

#2110

Naim Araidi

#48565

Overall Influence

1950 - 2015 (65 years)

Naim Araidi was an Israelii Druze academic and writer known for his poems in both Hebrew and Arabic. Education Araidi was born in Maghar, Israel and completed his elementary school in his village, then moved to Haifa to complete his secondary education. He went on to gain B.A in Hebrew language and Political Science and another B.A in Hebrew Literature and Comparative Literature. Then he gained a M.A in Hebrew Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. This was followed with a Ph.D in Hebrew Literature from Bar-Ilan University. His doctoral thesis was on the poetry of U...

#2111

Peter France

#28007

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Peter France, FBA, FRSE , is a British academic and scholar of French literature, who served as Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh from 1980 to 1990. Life The son of Edgar France, he attended Bradford Grammar School before going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated as BA and DPhil. He was appointed a Lecturer in French at the University of Sussex in 1963, later being promoted as Reader. In 1980 he transferred to the University of Edinburgh where he took up the professorial chair in French, which he relinquished in 1990, becoming a University Endowment Fellow bef...

#2112

Milivoj Solar

#37083

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Milivoj Solar is a Croatian literary theorist and literary historian. Solar was born in Koprivnica. At the University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences he earned a degree in philosophy and Yugoslav studies in 1959. At the same faculty he received his PhD in 1964 with a thesis on Fran Galović.

#2113

Vikram Chandra

#32879

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Vikram Chandra is an Indian-American writer. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. Early life Chandra was born in New Delhi in 1961. His father Navin Chandra was a business executive. His mother Kamna Chandra has written several Hindi films and plays. His sister Tanuja Chandra is a filmmaker and screenwriter who has also directed several films. His other sister Anupama Chopra is a film critic.

#2114

Peter Sinfield

#27650

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Peter John Sinfield is an English poet and songwriter. He is best known as the co-founder and former lyricist of King Crimson. Their debut album In the Court of the Crimson King is considered one of the first and most influential progressive rock albums ever released.

#2115

Peeter Torop

#14195

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Peeter Torop is an Estonian semiotician. Following Roman Jakobson, he expanded the scope of the semiotic study of translation to include intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual translation and stressing the productivity of the notion of translation in general semiotics. He is a co-editor of the journal Sign Systems Studies, the oldest international semiotic periodical, the chairman of the Estonian Semiotics Association and professor of semiotics of culture at Tartu University.

#2116

Anna Mitgutsch

#51903

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Anna Mitgutsch is an Austrian writer and educator. Her name also appears as Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch. Biography She was born in Linz and studied German and English literature at the University of Salzburg. Originally a Roman Catholic, Mitgutsch converted to Judaism and worked on a kibbutz in Israel. She taught at the Institute for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck and, after going to England, at the University of Hull and University of East Anglia. Next, She taught for a year in Seoul, South Korea and then at colleges and universities in the United States from 1979 until 1985, when Mitgutsch returned to Austria.

#2117

Jack Cady

#68914

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Jack Cady was an American author, born in Kentucky. He is known mostly as an award winning writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award.

#2118

Ronald Verlin Cassill

#54953

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

R. V. Cassill, full name Ronald Verlin Cassill, was a writer, reviewer, editor, painter and lithographer. He is most notable for his novels and short stories, for which he won several awards and grants.

#2119

Katharine Weber

#32624

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.

#2120

M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan

#21558

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Manoj Nelliyattu M. Night Shyamalan is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for making original films with contemporary supernatural plots and twist endings. The cumulative gross of his films exceeds $3.3 billion globally.

#2121

Vesna Goldsworthy

#30427

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Vesna Goldsworthy FRSL , is a Serbian writer and poet. She is from Belgrade and obtained her BA in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from Belgrade University in 1985. She has lived in England since 1986. Goldsworthy became a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter in 2017. She previously worked at Kingston University where she was Director of the Centre for Suburban Studies. Goldsworthy is a Professor Emeritus of the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

#2122

Bell hooks

#63124

Overall Influence

1952 - 2021 (69 years)

Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures.

#2123

Francesco Orlando

#48453

Overall Influence

1934 - 2010 (76 years)

Francesco Orlando was an Italian literary critic, essayist and university professor specialized in French literature. Life Childhood and adolescence Francesco Orlando was born in Palermo to a wealthy family: his father, Camille Orlando, was a lawyer and the grandson of Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, President of the Italian Council. Following the onset of WWII, the Orlando family was forced to move to a country home near Terrasini, where Orlando began his studies. In 1943, following the American arrival in Sicily, his family returned to Palermo where the young Orlando attended Jesuit secondary school before ultimately studying at the public secondary school.

#2124

Eric Santner

#27131

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Eric L. Santner is an American scholar. He is Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, and Chair, in the Department of Germanic Studies, at the University of Chicago, where he has been based since 1996. A graduate of Oberlin College in 1977, Santner received his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, in 1984, then going on to teach at Princeton University.

#2125

Maria Irene Ramalho

#32893

Overall Influence

Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, usually known as Maria Irene Ramalho, is a Portuguese professor emerita of American Studies and Feminist Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra , in Portugal, as well as a former Assistant Professor International in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the USA. In 2008, she was the first non-American to be awarded the Mary C. Turpie Prize by the American Studies Association for outstanding abilities and achievement in American studies teaching, advising, and program development, and in 201...

#2126

Timothy Barnes

#28631

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Timothy David Barnes, is a British classicist. Biography Barnes was born in Yorkshire on 13 March 1942. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, until 1960, going up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Literae Humaniores, taking his BA in 1964 and MA in 1967. He was Harmsworth Senior Scholar of Merton College, Oxford, 1964–66 and Junior Research Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford 1966–70. He was awarded his DPhil in 1970. In 1974 the University of Oxford conferred upon him the Conington prize.

#2127

Jay Cantor

#28278

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jay Cantor is an American novelist and essayist. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.

#2128

Graeme Wood

#15116

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Graeme Charles Arthur Wood is an American staff writer for The Atlantic and a lecturer in political science at Yale University since 2014. Prior to his staff writer position he was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, and he has also written for The Cambodia Daily, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The New Republic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Culture+Travel, The Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune. He served as books editor of Pacific Standard. He was awarded the 2015-2016 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship of the Council on Foreign Relations and a 2009 Reporting Fell...

#2129

Glenn Patterson

Glenn Patterson

#32454

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Glenn Patterson FRSL is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland, best known as a novelist. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Early life Patterson was born in Belfast, where he attended Methodist College Belfast. He graduated from the University of East Anglia , where he was a product of the UEA creative writing course under Malcolm Bradbury.

#2130

Richard G. Stern

Richard G. Stern

#34892

Overall Influence

1928 - 2013 (85 years)

Richard Gustave Stern was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. Stern was born in New York City on February 25, 1928. He attended the University of North Carolina from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in 1947. After a year working in Indiana, Florida and New York City, he went to Harvard University where he received an MA in English Literature.

#2131

Miguel Méndez

#52775

Overall Influence

1930 - 2013 (83 years)

Miguel Méndez was the pen name for Miguel Méndez Morales, a Mexican American author best known for his novel Peregrinos de Aztlán . He was a leading figure in the field of Chicano literature. Biography

#2132

George Woodcock

George Woodcock

#22409

Overall Influence

1912 - 1995 (83 years)

George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, a philosopher, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements .

#2133

Jacqueline Risset

#48831

Overall Influence

1936 - 2014 (78 years)

Jacqueline Risset was a French poet noted for her work on the board of the literary journal Tel Quel along with Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, and for her translations of Italian poetry into French. Risset's books include Sleep's Powers and The Translation Begins.

#2134

Sol Liptzin

#51032

Overall Influence

1901 - 1995 (94 years)

Sol Liptzin was a scholar, writer, and educator in Yiddish and German literature. Life Liptzin was born in Sataniv, Russian Empire, and moved to New York at the age of nine. He graduated from City College of New York and did postgraduate work at the University of Berlin. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. at Columbia University. His doctoral advisor was Robert Herndon Fife.

#2135

Jenny Sharpe

#41308

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA . Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, theories of allegory, the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the effect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.

#2136

William Stafford

William Stafford

#27746

Overall Influence

1914 - 1993 (79 years)

William Edgar Stafford was an American poet and pacifist. He was the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.

#2137

Nina Auerbach

#28541

Overall Influence

1943 - 2017 (74 years)

Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Her special area of concentration was nineteenth-century England. She published, lectured, and reviewed widely in the fields of Victorian literature, theater, cultural history, and horror fiction and film.

#2138

Cesare G. De Michelis

Cesare G. De Michelis

#25612

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Cesare G. De Michelis is a scholar and professor of Russian literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. Biography He is also an authority on the notorious plagiarism, hoax, and literary forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to de Michelis, "twenty-odd editions had appeared in Russia between 1903 and 1912". He gives the text the acronymous name, "PSM", from its Russian title Protocoly sionskikh mudretsov . He also informs us that in 1919 PSM entered the "world at large" in "German, Swedish, Polish, English, Hungarian, and French editions." The first edition in Italian appeared in 1921.

#2139

Kim Barnes

#52558

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Kim Barnes is a contemporary American author of fiction, memoir, and personal essays. She served as Poet Laureate of Idaho. Life She returned with her mother to their logging camp on Orofino Creek in the Clearwater National Forest, where her father worked as a lumberjack. For the next twelve years, she and her family lived in small communities and cedar camps in northern IdahoPierce, Headquarters, and a number of places along the North Fork of the Clearwater River. In 1970, her family moved to Lewiston, Idaho, where Barnes graduated from Lewiston High School in 1976.

#2140

Peter Gizzi

#29889

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Life Gizzi was born in Alma, Michigan to an Italian American family. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Gizzi has said that he "internalized the hierarchy of music over words as a kid at Catholic mass, where the liturgy was often in Latin". After graduating from high school, the poet delayed going to college and took a job in a factory winding resin tubes and in a residential treatment center working with emotionally disturbed adolescents.

#2141

Ander Monson

#51537

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Ander Monson is an American novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer. Life He was raised in Houghton, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula. His mother's death when he was seven years old is reflected in the themes of his later fiction. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He went on to earn an MA from Iowa State University and an MFA from the University of Alabama.

#2142

Chinelo Okparanta

Chinelo Okparanta

#36798

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.

#2143

Andrew Gurr

#25124

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Andrew John Gurr is a contemporary literary scholar who specializes in William Shakespeare and English Renaissance theatre. Life and work Born in Leicester, Gurr was raised in New Zealand, and educated at the University of Auckland and at Cambridge University. He has taught at the Universities of Wellington, Leeds, and Nairobi ; at the latter institution he was also head of his department.

#2144

Lee O-young

#22321

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Lee O-young was a South Korean critic and novelist. Although the romanized spelling of the hangul name "이어령" might be Yi O-ryŏng or Lee Eo-ryeong, Lee O-young is the author's preferred romanization according to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

#2145

Sidney Wade

#33367

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Sidney Wade is an American poet. She currently holds the position of Professor of creative writing at the University of Florida, where she has taught since 1993. Biography Wade was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1951. She attended the University of Vermont, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 1974 and an M.Ed. in counseling in 1978. She earned a Ph.D in English from the University of Houston in 1994.

#2146

Steven Bochco

#21156

Overall Influence

1943 - 2018 (75 years)

Steven Ronald Bochco was an American television writer and producer. He developed a number of television series, including Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, M.D., Cop Rock, and NYPD Blue. Early life Bochco was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Mimi, a painter, and Rudolph Bochco, a concert violinist and Polish immigrant. He was educated in Manhattan at the High School of Music and Art. His elder sister is actress Joanna Frank.

#2147

Bani Basu

#36086

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Bani Basu is a prolific Bengali Indian author, essayist, critic, poet, translator and professor. Life She received her formal education from the well-known Lady Brabourne College, Scottish Church College and at the University of Calcutta where she received M.A. in English.

#2148

Eliáš Galajda

#58305

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

Eliáš Galajda was a Slovak writer, translator, sculptor and folk singer of Ukrainian ethnicity. Background He attended primary school in his native village of Čertižné. Eliáš studied eight years at National Russian Gymnasium in Humenné, graduating in 1951. After graduation, he taught at the gymnasium for the next year and then proceeded study Russian and Ukraine language at Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University in Prague . After one year, he was chosen to attend The Faculty of Philology of the Saratov Chernyshevsky State University and Faculty of Philology of Lomonosov Moscow State Unive...

#2149

Selina Tusitala Marsh

Selina Tusitala Marsh

#51612

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Selina Tusitala Marsh is a New Zealand poet, academic and illustrator, and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2017–2019. Early life Marsh was born in 1971 in Auckland, New Zealand. Through her mother, Sailigi Tusitala, Marsh is of Samoan and Tuvaluan ancestry and through her father James Crosbie she is of English, Scottish and French descent.

#2150

Franciszek Ziejka

#53773

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Franciszek Ziejka was a Polish scholar who specialized in Polish literature. Biography Ziejka was born into a peasant family of eight children. He studied Polish literature at Jagiellonian University under the guidance of Wacław Kubacki. In 1971, he defended his doctoral thesis on symbolism of Stanisław Wyspiański's The Wedding. In 1982, he supported accreditation in his essay The Golden Legend of Polish Peasants. In 1991, he became a university professor.

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