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,
#2151
Emory Elliott
#56075
Overall Influence
1942 - 2009 (67 years)
Emory Bernard Elliott was an American professor of American literature at UC Riverside. Elliott was known in particular for advocating the expansion of the literary canon to include a more diverse range of voices.
Go to Profile#2152
Russell Berman
#41582
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Russell A. Berman is an American academic and professor specializing in German studies and Comparative literature. He serves as the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the director of Stanford's Thinking Matters program. He previously served as associate dean and director of Stanford's Overseas Studies Program.
Go to Profile#2153
Albert Casuga
#61906
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Albert B. Casuga, is a Philippines-born Canadian writer. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he continues to write poetry, fiction, and criticism after his retirement from teaching. He served as an elected member of his region's school board.
Go to Profile#2154
Robert Gray
#50522
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert William Geoffrey Gray is an Australian poet, freelance writer, and critic. He has been described as "an Imagist without a rival in the English-speaking world" and "one of the contemporary masters of poetry in English".
Go to Profile#2155
Michiel van Kempen
#58745
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michaël Henricus Gertrudis van Kempen is a Dutch writer, art historian and literary critic. He has written novels, short stories, essays, travel literature and scenarios. He was the compiler of a huge range of anthologies of Dutch-Caribbean literature and wrote an extensive history of the literature of Suriname, in two volumes.
Go to Profile#2156
Víctor García de la Concha
#13973
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Víctor García de la Concha is a Spanish philologist. He is a past director of the Cervantes Institute and a past director of the Royal Spanish Academy. He served three four-year terms in that position, from 1998 to 2010. Directors usually serve no more than two terms.
Go to Profile#2157
Aisha Abd al-Rahman
#36510
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Aisha Abd al-Rahman was an Egyptian author and professor of literature who published under the pen name Bint al-Shaṭiʾ . Life and career She was born on 18 November 1913 in Damietta in the governorate of Domyat, Egypt, where her father taught at the Domyat Religious Institute. When she was ten, her mother, though illiterate, enrolled her in school while her father was traveling. Though her father objected, her mother later sent Aisha to El Mansurah for further education. Later, Aisha studied Arabic at Cairo University earning her undergraduate degree in 1939, and an M.A. degree in 1941.
Go to Profile#2158
David Harsent
#34891
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Harsent is an English poet who for some time earned his living as a TV scriptwriter and crime novelist. Background During his early career he was part of a circle of poets centred on Ian Hamilton and forming something of a school, promoting conciseness and imagist-like clarity in verse, though his work has changed and developed a good deal since then.
Go to Profile#2159
Frederick Ahl
#50033
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Frederick M. Ahl is a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University. He is known for his work in Greek and Roman epic and drama, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, as well as for translations of tragedy and Latin epic.
Go to Profile#2160
Bonnie Zimmerman
#53296
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bonnie Zimmerman is an American literary critic and women's studies scholar. Her works explore women's roles, lesbian history and criticism, and women's literature. She has received numerous prestigious awards. Zimmerman retired from teaching in 2010. Her contributions to academia include classes, articles, and several books.
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Hattie Gossett
#23504
Overall Influence
Hattie Gossett is an African-American feminist playwright, poet, and magazine editor. Her work focuses on bolstering the self-esteem of young black women. Biography Born in New Jersey, Gossett gained a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University in 1993, where she was a Yip Harburg Fellow. She was a David Randolph Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at The New School in 2001.
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Stephen Henighan
#39193
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Patrick Glanvill Henighan is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist, translator and academic. Early life Born in Hamburg, Germany, Henighan arrived in Canada at the age of five and grew up in rural eastern Ontario.
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Ernesto Cardenal
#24012
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Ernesto Cardenal Martínez was a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years . A former member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. He was prohibited from administering the sacraments in 1984 by Pope John Paul II, but rehabilitated by Pope Francis in 2019.
Go to Profile#2164
George Pelecanos
#42711
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
George P. Pelecanos is an American author. Many of his 20 books are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. On television, he frequently collaborates with David Simon, writing multiple episodes of Simon's HBO series The Wire and Treme, and is also the co-creator of the HBO series The Deuce and We Own This City.
Go to Profile#2165
Paul Lisicky
#50990
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Paul Lisicky is an American novelist and memoirist. He is an associate professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, and the author of several books. Early life Paul Lisicky was born on July 9, 1959. He grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, earned an MA from Rutgers University-Camden and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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Albert Gelpi
#52978
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Albert Gelpi is the Coe Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. He taught literature, particularly poetry, there between 1968 and 2002. Gelpi also wrote a trilogy of literary criticism involving American poetry:The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American PoetA Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the WordGelpi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 for his work in American literature. His books are held in libraries worldwide.
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Larissa Lai
#40683
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Larissa Lai is an American-born Canadian novelist and literary critic. She is a recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and Lambda Literary Foundation's 2020 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
Go to Profile#2168
Goli Taraghi
#36353
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Zohreh Taraghi-Moghadam, better known as Goli Taraghi is an Iranian novelist and short story writer. Life Goli Taraghi's father Lotfollah Taraghi was a member of parliament, publisher and journalist, and her mother was from a widely cultured family. Born and raised in Tehran, she attended Drake University in the United States, gaining an undergraduate degree in philosophy. Returning to Iran, she obtained a master's degree from Tehran University in 1967 and worked throughout the 1960s as a specialist in international relations for the Plan Organization. In the 1970s she taught courses in philosophy, mythology and symbolism at Tehran University.
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Cyrus Patell
#45796
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Cyrus R. K. Patell is a literary and cultural critic who writes and teaches on World literature with a focus on US literature. He is currently Professor of English at New York University and Global Network Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he previously served as Associate Dean of Humanities.
Go to Profile#2170
Michael Echeruo
#34939
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Michael Joseph Chukwudalu Echeruo is a Nigerian academic, professor and literary critic from Umunumo, Ehime-Mbano LGA, Imo State. He is the William Safire Professor of Modern Letters in the English Department at Syracuse University since 1990.
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Dick Davis
#41925
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Dick Davis is an English–American Persophile and Iranologist, poet, university professor, and translator of verse, who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry.
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Misty Copeland
#13714
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre , one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history.
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Georg Wöhrle
#45660
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Georg Wöhrle is a German Classical philologist and medical historian. Life Wöhrle studied classical philology from 1974 to 1983 at the University of Freiburg under , , and Hermann Strasburger. In 1983 he received his doctorate in Greek from Wolfgang Kullmann for his thesis on "Theophrasts Methode in seinen botanischen Schriften" . In 1988 he achieved his habilitation from the University of Bamberg with his work, "Studien zur Theorie der antiken Gesundheitslehre" . Subsequently, he was the of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and held teaching chairs at the University of Würzburg and the U...
Go to Profile#2174
Lionel Ray
#42862
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Lionel Ray is a French poet and essayist. Biography Born of a Breton father and a Walloon mother, he spent his childhood in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie. He published several collections under his real name, Robert Lorho, Associate of French language and literature professor at the Lycee Chaptal Khâgne. In 1970, he took the pseudonym of Lionel Ray. Lionel Ray is president of the Mallarmé Academy and a member of committees of the journal la revue Europe, and Aujourd'hui.
Go to Profile#2175
Christopher Hampton
#24716
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Christopher James Hampton is a British playwright, screenwriter, translator and film director. He is best known for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses based on the novel of the same name and the film adaptation. He has thrice received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: for Dangerous Liaisons , Atonement and The Father ; winning for the former and latter.
Go to Profile#2176
Alice Adams
#27966
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Alice Adams was an American short story writer and novelist. In 1982 she became the third author of only four to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories .
Go to Profile#2177
Walther Killy
#33158
Overall Influence
1917 - 1995 (78 years)
Walther Killy was a German literary scholar who specialised in poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl. He taught at the Free University of Berlin, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, as founding rector of the University of Bremen, as visiting scholar at the University of California and Harvard University, and at the University of Bern. He became known as editor of literary encyclopedias, the Killy Literaturlexikon and the Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie.
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Elizabeth Willis
#38374
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Willis is an American poet and literary critic. She currently serves as Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Willis has won several awards for her poetry including the National Poetry Series and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Susan Howe has called Elizabeth Willis "an exceptional poet, one of the most outstanding of her generation."
Go to Profile#2179
Shu Fujisawa
#53055
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Shu Fujisawa is a Japanese writer active during the late Shōwa and early Heisei period periods of Japan. Biography Fujisawa was born in the former Uchino-machi , and a graduate of the Literature Department of Hosei University.
Go to Profile#2180
Cyrus Cassells
#63178
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor. Life and work Cassells was born in Dover, Delaware, grew up in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, and began writing poetry in high school. He graduated in 1979 from Stanford University with a degree in film and broadcasting, and landed a job creating poetry filmstrips in the film division of a publishing house, where he was working when poet Al Young called to tell him that his manuscript had been selected for publication from the 1981 National Poetry Series competition. He then went on to win the 1981 National Poetry Series competition. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor, and teacher.
Go to Profile#2181
François Ricard
#31813
Overall Influence
1947 - 2022 (75 years)
François Ricard was a Canadian writer and academic from Quebec. He was a professor of French literature at McGill University since 1980, including a special but not exclusive focus on the work of Milan Kundera and Gabrielle Roy, and has published numerous works of non-fiction.
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A. Van Jordan
#38412
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
A. Van Jordan is an American poet. He is a professor at Stanford University and was previously a college professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan and distinguished visiting professor at Ithaca College. He previously served as the first Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at the Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of four collections: Rise , M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A , Quantum Lyrics , and The Cineaste . Jordan's awards include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Go to Profile#2183
Alicia Erian
#52804
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Alicia Erian is an American novelist. She was born to an Egyptian father and American mother of Polish descent. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Binghamton University and a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Vermont College. A writer of short stories, some of her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All Story and the Iowa Review. She has published one collection of short stories and one novel. Erian lived in Brooklyn, New York, for a time with ex-husband David Franklin, but now lives in Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Wellesley College . She has worked as a film ...
Go to Profile#2184
Jonathan Aaron
#63462
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jonathan Aaron is an American poet, the author of the poetry collection Journey to the Lost City. Life He graduated from the University of Chicago and Yale University Ph.D. His work has been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of books, The Boston Globe , and The Times Literary Supplement.
Go to Profile#2185
Sylvan Barnet
#50668
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Sylvan Saul Barnet was an American literary critic and Shakespearean scholar. He was a Fletcher Professor of English Emeritus at Tufts University and the general editor of the Signet Classics Shakespeare.
Go to Profile#2186
Else Mundal
#75366
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Else Olaug Mundal is a Norwegian philologist. She was born in Vanylven and graduated with the cand.philol. degree in 1971. She was appointed as a docent in Norse philology at the University of Oslo in 1977. Being promoted to professor in 1985, she was a professor at the University of Bergen from 1994. She is a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2017 she was appointed a knight of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon in connection with the state visit of Iceland's president to Norway.
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Mariusz Szczygieł
#34195
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mariusz Adam Szczygieł is a Polish journalist and writer. He is the winner of the 2009 European Book Prize for Gottland and the 2019 Nike Award, the most important prize in Polish literature, for his reportage Nie ma.
Go to Profile#2188
Elia Barceló
#57423
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Elia Barceló or Elia Eisterer-Barceló is a Spanish academic and author who lives in Austria. Life Barceló was born in Elda in 1957. She became an academic and earned her doctorate in Innsbruck, Austria in 1995. She remained in Austria, working as a professor of Spanish literature. She also writes science fiction novels and works for children. She has won a number of awards.
Go to Profile#2189
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
#13734
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Meshullam Zalman Schachter-Shalomi , commonly called "Reb Zalman" , was one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement and an innovator in ecumenical dialogue. Early life Born Meshullam Zalman Schachter in 1924 to Shlomo and Hayyah Gittel Schachter in Żółkiew, Poland , Schachter was raised in Vienna, Austria. His father was a liberal Belzer hasid and had Zalman educated at both a Zionist high school and an Orthodox yeshiva. Schachter was interned in detention camps under the Vichy French and fled the Nazi advance by fleeing to the United States in 1941. He was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi...
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James Mathias Fennelly
#55616
Overall Influence
1929 - 2000 (71 years)
James M. Fennelly was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Professor of History of Religions at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. For several years prior to his death, Fennelly was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Maywood, New Jersey.
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Martin Hägglund
#28287
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Martin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher and scholar of modernist literature. He is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, serving as a Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2012. Hägglund is the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom , Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov , Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life , and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet . He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and won the René Wellek Prize in 2020.
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Bradford Morrow
#54090
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine.
Go to Profile#2193
Katsusuke Miyauchi
#76791
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Katsusuke Miyauchi is a noted Japanese author and peace activist. Miyauchi was born in Harbin to a family originating from Ibusuki. He graduated from Kagoshima Prefectural Konan High School. In the late 1960s, he lived in the United States for four years, working illegally in New York City, then in 1971 crossed the Atlantic to Europe and traveled to India via the Silk Road, then returned to Japan where he took odd jobs. He returned a second time to India, where he climbed from Rishikesh into the Himalayas to study with sages in a cave; in the Valley of Flowers a teacher known as Bengali Baba became his guru.
Go to Profile#2194
Joh Sasaki
#48170
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
is a Japanese writer and journalist; chiefly known for his historical fiction and mystery novels. Biography Joh Sasaki was born in Yubari, Hokkaido, Japan. He spent his early youth in Nakashibetsu City and later ventured to Sapporo where Sasaki attended Tsukisamu High School. He released his first novel, , in 1979. Sasaki quickly established himself as a writer after winning the All Yomimono New Writers Prize for Tekkihei, tonda which was also later adapted for the big screen. Today Sasaki is known as a household author with numerous works in genres stretching from historical fiction, young ad...
Go to Profile#2195
Julie Rivkin
#62182
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Julie H. Rivkin is an American literary critic and professor of English at Connecticut College since 1982. She is best known for her publications on literary theory and Henry James, and has published several works on both subjects. Rivkin received her B.A. and PhD from Yale University and is currently the Associate Dean of Faculty at Connecticut College, a member of the Modern Language Association, and Vice President of the Henry James Society. Her other specializations include American literature and gender studies .
Go to Profile#2196
Kim Kirim
#47093
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Kim Kirim was a Korean poet and literary critic who represented Korean modernist literature in the 1930s. Kim wrote monumental poems such as “The Weather Chart” , “Wind Speed of the Sun” , and “The Sea and the Butterfly” during the Japanese colonial period. In pursuing a new spirit of poetry, he criticized sentimental romanticism in the 1920s and the movement of the Korean Artists’ Proletarian Federation , which based its literary theory and practice on left-wing ideologies. Kim was one of the first intellectualists who introduced modernism to the Korean literary circle and emphasized rationality by means of the compressibility of poetry.
Go to Profile#2197
Anne Edwards
#36687
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Anne Edwards is an American writer best known for her biographies of celebrities that include Princess Diana, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Mitchell, Ronald Reagan, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Temple and Countess Sonya Tolstoy.
Go to Profile#2198
Mineke Schipper
#40179
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Mineke Schipper is a Dutch author of non-fiction and fiction. As a scholar she is best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies. Description of the author Thanks to her critical global perspective, Schipper has given an important impulse to the field of intercultural literary studies. Making her views accessible to both academic and non-academic audiences, she lectures not only at universities and scientific institutes , but also to audiences outside the academy, such as policy makers in The Hague or Brussels.
Go to Profile#2199
Martin Lüdke
#42598
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Martin Lüdke is a German literary critic. Life After graduating from the Frankfurt Goethe-Gymnasium he initially began an apprenticeship in a shipping firm, but left to study philosophy, sociology, German studies and politics at the University of Frankfurt. He earned his doctorate with a dissertation on "Die Differenz von Kunstschönem und Naturschönem bei Kant, Hegel und Adorno" .
Go to Profile#2200
Masao Miyoshi
#50236
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
was a scholar of literature and culture and Hajime Mori Endowed Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Career Born in Tokyo, he graduated from the University of Tokyo, majoring in English, and earned a Fulbright Fellowship to gain advanced degrees at New York University. Specializing in Victorian literature, he first taught at the University of California Berkeley, where he started working on Japanese literature as well. Eventually moving to the University of California, San Diego, he increasingly focused his writings on the relations between Japa...
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