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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#2301
William Gibson
#15939
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
William Gibson was an American playwright and novelist. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for The Miracle Worker in 1959, which he later adapted for the film version in 1962. Early life and education Gibson graduated from the City College of New York in 1938, and he was of Irish, French, German, Dutch, Russian, and Greek ancestry.
Go to Profile#2302
Peter Shaffer
#22464
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Sir Peter Levin Shaffer was an English playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He wrote numerous award-winning plays, of which several were adapted into films. Early life Shaffer was born to a Jewish family in Liverpool, the son of Reka and estate agent Jack Shaffer. He grew up in London and was the identical twin brother of fellow playwright Anthony Shaffer.
Go to Profile#2303
Nikky Finney
#39275
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nikky Finney is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short-story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split.
Go to Profile#2304
Luciano Anceschi
#33275
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Luciano Anceschi was an Italian literary critic and essayist. A pupil of Antonio Banfi, with whom he graduated in philosophy in 1933, he taught aesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Bologna from 1952 to 1981. His interest in literature and the arts was always accompanied by that for the modern anti-dogmatic philosophy: after the publication of his graduation thesis "Autonomy and Heteronomy of art" published by Sansoni in 1936, his research on anti-idealistic literary figures and models found voice in comments published in Orpheus from 1932 and in Corrent...
Go to Profile#2305
Alain Renoir
#45074
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Alain Renoir was a French-American writer and literature professor, son of filmmaker Jean Renoir and actress Catherine Hessling, and grandson of impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir was born in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the only son of Jean Renoir. As a teenager Renoir worked in a few of his father's films, including House Party , as assistant cameraman on The Human Beast and The Rules of the Game . In 1942 he joined his father in the United States, enlisted in the American Army and served in combat in the Pacific.
Go to Profile#2306
Lee Gutkind
#22033
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lee Gutkind is an American writer, speaker, and founder of the literary journal called Creative Nonfiction. Gutkind has written or edited more than 30 books, covering a wide range of subjects from motorcycle subculture to child and adolescent mental illness and organ transplantation.
Go to Profile#2307
Leela Gandhi
#21394
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Leela Gandhi is an Indian-born literary and cultural theorist who is noted for her work in postcolonial theory. She is currently the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English and director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.
Go to Profile#2308
Robin Coste Lewis
#67064
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection “A masterpiece…” “Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle…” “remarkable hopefulness…in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse...” “formally polished,...
Go to Profile#2309
Victor A. Pogadaev
#49064
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Victor A. Pogadaev is a Russian historian, orientalist, and translator. He specializes in the history and culture of South-East Asia and translates literary works from Malay and Indonesian into Russian and vice versa. He is also a noted lexicographer.
Go to Profile#2310
Benedetta Craveri
#48402
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Adele Benedetta Craveri is an Italian literary critic, academic and writer. She was born in Rome, the daughter of the historian and political activist Raimondo Craveri and the writer and translator Elena Croce . She studied literature at the University of Rome, graduating in 1969, and went on to teach at Tuscia University in Viterbo. Since 2005 she has taught at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples.
Go to Profile#2311
Robert S. Levine
#14284
Overall Influence
Robert S. Levine is a scholar of American and African American literature. He is currently Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Go to Profile#2312
Naoki Urasawa
#27396
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Naoki Urasawa is a Japanese manga artist and musician. He has been drawing manga since he was four years old, and for most of his professional career has created two series simultaneously. The stories to many of these were co-written in collaboration with his former editor, Takashi Nagasaki. Urasawa has been called one of the artists that changed the history of manga and has won numerous awards, including the Shogakukan Manga Award three times, the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize twice, and the Kodansha Manga Award once. South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho called him "the greatest storyteller of o...
Go to Profile#2313
Konrad Paul Liessmann
#24025
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Konrad Paul Liessmann is an Austrian philosopher, essayist and cultural publicist. He is a university professor for "Methods of Teaching Philosophy and Ethics" at the University of Vienna. He officially retired in 2018, but continued his professorial activities at the University of Vienna on a special contract basis until the end of 2020.
Go to Profile#2314
Anthony Corbeill
#64726
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Anthony Philip Corbeill is an American professor of Classics. He is currently the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He was formerly a professor at the University of Kansas.
Go to Profile#2315
Jericho Brown
#49208
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Jericho Brown is an American poet and writer. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown has worked as an educator at institutions such as University of Houston, University of San Diego, and Emory University. His poems have been published in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New Yorker, among others. He released his first book of prose and poetry, Please, in 2008. His second book, The New Testament, was released in 2014. His 2019 collection of poems, The Tradition, garnered widespread critical acclaim.
Go to Profile#2316
John Godber
#17862
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
John Harry Godber is known mainly for observational comedies. The Plays and Players Yearbook of 1993 rated him the third most performed playwright in the UK after William Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. He has been creative director of the Theatre Royal Wakefield since 2011.
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Mark Danner
#8601
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mark David Danner is an American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written books and articles on Haiti, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East, as well as on American politics, covering every presidential election since 2000. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#2318
Louise Cowan
#50420
Overall Influence
1916 - 2015 (99 years)
Mary Louise Cowan was an American critic and teacher, and wife of the physicist and University of Dallas president Donald Cowan . She taught at Texas Christian University and Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Cowan lived in Dallas, where she taught at both at the University of Dallas and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She was a prominent figure in Dallas society as a mentor and friend to many Dallas dignitaries and as one of the city's leading intellectuals.
Go to Profile#2319
Euphrase Kezilahabi
#21009
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Euphrase Kezilahabi was a Tanzanian novelist, poet, and scholar. Born in Ukerewe, Tanganyika , he last worked at the University of Botswana, as an associate professor at the Department of African Languages .
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Lennard J. Davis
#13841
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lennard J. Davis, a nationally and internationally known American specialist in disability studies, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Arts and Sciences, and also Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences and Professor of Medical Education in the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
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Jun Kubota
#74420
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Jun Kubota is a scholar of Japanese literature. He is best-known for his work on medieval waka. Life Jun Kubota was born on 13 June 1933 in Tokyo. After working as an assistant professor at Shirayuri Women's University, in 1984 he became a professor at the University of Tokyo, before returning to Shirayuri as a professor in 1994. In 2005 he joined the Japan Academy.
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Donald Ault
#22091
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Donald D. Ault was a professor at the University of Florida and is primarily known for his work on British Romantic poet William Blake, British physicist Sir Isaac Newton and American comics artist Carl Barks. He is also known as a foundational figure in the development of American comics studies, and was the General Editor of the academic journal devoted to comics called ImageTexT.
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Jean-Michel Maulpoix
#41313
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jean-Michel Maulpoix was born on November 11, 1952, in Montbéliard, Doubs. The author of more than twenty volumes of French poetry and of several volumes of essays and criticism, he teaches modern French literature at the University Paris X Nanterre and is the director of the quarterly literary journal Le Nouveau Recueil. He is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud.
Go to Profile#2324
Dara Horn
#44857
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Dara Horn is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature. She has written five novels and in 2021, released a nonfiction essay collection titled People Love Dead Jews, which was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. She won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 2002, the National Jewish Book Award in 2003 and 2006, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize in 2007.
Go to Profile#2325
Anthony Veasna So
#50724
Overall Influence
1992 - 2020 (28 years)
Anthony Veasna So was an American writer. His short stories were described by The New York Times as "crackling, kinetic and darkly comedic" and often drew from his upbringing as a child of Cambodian immigrants. So died from an accidental drug overdose in 2020, and his debut book, a short story collection entitled Afterparties, was published in 2021.
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Benjamin Harshav
#33437
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Benjamin Harshav , born Hrushovski ; June 26, 1928 – April 23, 2015 was a literary theorist specialising in comparative literature, a Yiddish and Hebrew poet , and an Israeli translator and editor. He served as professor of literature at the University of Tel Aviv and as a professor of comparative literature, Hebrew language and literature, and Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. He was the founding editor of the Duke University Press publication Poetics Today. He received the EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture in 2005 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and S...
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Elmore Leonard
#40582
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Elmore John Leonard Jr. was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillerss, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are Hombre, Swag, City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky, Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of Sight and Tishomingo Blues.
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Tōta Kaneko
#39259
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Tōta Kaneko, was a Japanese writer. Kaneko was born in Chichibu. He studied at the University of Tokyo and worked for the Bank of Japan. Kaneko died in Kumagaya on February 20, 2018, of Acute respiratory distress syndrome in Kumagaya, Saitama at the age of 98.
Go to Profile#2329
Haun Saussy
#27853
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Caleb Powell Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago. His primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care.
Go to Profile#2330
Norma Fox Mazer
#52712
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Norma Fox Mazer was an American author and teacher, best known for her books for children and young adults. Her novels featured credible young characters confronting difficult situations such as family separation and death.
Go to Profile#2331
David Madden
#45607
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
David Madden is an American writer of many novels, short stories, poems, playss, and works of nonfiction and literary criticism. Biography Madden was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, to James Helvy and Emile Merritt Madden. He was named after David Madden, president of the East Tennessee Packing Co., where many of Madden’s family worked. At the age of 16, he was a radio announcer for WKGN in Knoxville. His first success was winning second place in a statewide one-act play competition with “Call Herman in to Supper” when he was 16. He graduated from Knox High School in 1951.
Go to Profile#2332
Dennis Howard Green
#62857
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Dennis Howard Green was an English philologist who was Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. He specialized in Germanic philology, particularly the study of Medieval German literature, Germanic languages and Germanic antiquity. Green was considered one of the world's leading authorities in these subjects, on which he was the author of numerous influential works.
Go to Profile#2333
Pierre Grimal
#25032
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Pierre Grimal was a French historian, classicist and Latinist. Fascinated by the Greek and Roman civilizations, he did much to promote the cultural inheritance of the classical world, both among specialists and the general public.
Go to Profile#2334
Kaiser Haq
#44097
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kaiser Hamidul Haq is a Bangladeshi translator, critic and academic. Known for his translations from Bengali into English, Haq is a recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award in the category of translation. He is a former professor of English at the University of Dhaka. In the liberation war of Bangladesh, he fought against Pakistani Army "as a freshly commissioned subaltern in command of a company".
Go to Profile#2335
Nidhi Eoseewong
#22248
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Nidhi Eoseewong was a Thai historian, writer, and political commentator. Biography Nidhi Eoseewong was born on 23 May 1940, to an ethnic Chinese family in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He studied at Assumption College Sriracha in Chonburi Province, and went on to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Upon graduation, he accepted a position teaching history at Chiang Mai University, where he would go on to spend the majority of his professional career. He took temporary leave to continue his studies, completing a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1976.
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Michael Bishop
#32778
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael Lawson Bishop was an American author. Over five decades and in more than thirty books, he created what has been called a "body of work that stands among the most admired and influential in modern science fiction and fantasy literature."
Go to Profile#2337
Roberto Pazzi
#32371
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Roberto Pazzi is an Italian novelist and poet. His works have been translated into twenty six languages. Pazzi graduated in classics in Bologna with a thesis on Luciano Anceschi and aesthetics on the poetry of Umberto Saba. He taught cultural anthropology and the philosophy of history and sociology of art and literature in high school and a college in Ferrara.
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Timothy Steele
#52579
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Timothy Steele is an American poet, who generally writes in meter and rhyme. His early poems, which began appearing in the 1970s in such magazines as Poetry, The Southern Review, and X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures, are said to have anticipated and contributed to the revival of traditional verse associated with the New Formalism. He, however, has objected to being called a New Formalist, saying that he doesn't claim to be doing anything technically novel and that Formalism "suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutuall...
Go to Profile#2339
Tahar Bekri
#70394
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Tahar Bekri is a Paris-based Tunisian poet and literary critic. Early life Tahar Bekri was born on July 7, 1951, in Gabès, Tunisia. Career Bekri has taught Literature of the Maghreb at Paris 13 University since 1985. He has published several books of literary criticism, including one about Algerian poet Malek Haddad. He defines Maghreb Literature as literary texts published by authors from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco who use colloquialisms in French, Arabic and Berber.
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Reetika Vazirani
#56169
Overall Influence
1962 - 2003 (41 years)
Reetika Gina Vazirani was an Indian-American immigrant poet and educator. Life Vazirani was born in Patiala, India in 1962. She was six-years-old when her family left Punjab in 1968 as part of a wave of Indians coming to the United States after its immigration laws loosened in 1965. The family settled, after a few interim stops, in White Oak, Illinois. Her father, Sunder Vazirani, was an oral surgeon who received his graduate education at the University of Illinois, later to become the assistant dean at Howard University’s dental school. Reetika graduated from Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland and continued her education at Wellesley College, graduating in 1984.
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Javier de Hoz
#59591
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Jesús Javier de Hoz Bravo was a Spanish philologist and Catedrático . His main areas of research were Paleohispanic languages, historical linguistics, ancient Celtic languages, history of writing, preclassical Greek literature, Greek epigraphy, and ancient Greek theatre.
Go to Profile#2342
Elinor Shaffer
#45518
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Elinor Shaffer FBA is a professor at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, honorary professor at University College, London, editor of the Comparative Literature series of Legenda , and editor of Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, a book series published by Continuum Books.
Go to Profile#2343
John Matteson
#20671
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
John Matteson is an American professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.
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Tom McCarthy
#26884
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Tom McCarthy is an English writer and artist. His debut novel, Remainder, was published in 2005 by Metronome. McCarthy has twice been nominated for the Man Booker, and was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University in 2013. He won a Believer Book Award for Remainder in 2008.
Go to Profile#2345
Anders Olsson
#49148
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Anders Olsson is a Swedish writer, professor of literature at Stockholm University, literary critic and member of the Swedish Academy. Olsson has written some 15 books on poetry and the history of literature; together with his friend and ally Horace Engdahl he was a key introducer of the work of Jacques Derrida and other post-structuralist thinkers into Swedish literary research and criticism. His doctoral dissertation on Swedish poet and essayist Gunnar Ekelöf was published in 1983 and met with mostly favourable reviews. He was appointed professor of literature at Stockholm University in 20...
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Charles McNulty
#26751
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Charles McNulty is the chief theatre critic for the Los Angeles Times newspaper and a recipient of Cornell University's prestigious Nathan Award for dramatic criticism, who, himself, served as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize drama jury. McNulty was engaged in the year 2005 as the Times newspaper's chief theater critic after an exhaustive 4-year search.
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Lucas Hnath
#39686
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Lucas Hnath is an American playwright. He won the 2016 Obie Award for excellence in playwriting for his plays Red Speedo and The Christians. He also won a Whiting Award. Biography Hnath grew up in Orlando, Florida. He moved to New York City in 1997 to study pre-med, and then changed to dramatic writing at the Tisch School of the Arts, at New York University, earning a BFA in 2001, and an MFA in 2002. He teaches at New York University.
Go to Profile#2348
Hwang Sun-won
#42508
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Hwang Sun-wŏn was a Korean short story writer, novelist, and poet. Life Hwang was born while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule in Taedong, South Pyongan, in modern-day North Korea. Hwang Sunwon made his literary debut as a middle school student with the publication in 1931 of his poems “My Dream” and “Fear Not, My Son” in Eastern Light . Hwang graduated from Waseda University in Japan with a degree in English. During his time at Waseda he founded a theater group called Tokyo Students’ Group for the Arts , along with fellow students Lee Haerang and Kim Dongwon. In November 1934, Hwang Sunwon published his first poetry collection, Wayward Songs .
Go to Profile#2349
David Wojahn
#41823
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David Wojahn is a contemporary American poet who teaches poetry in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been the director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Creative Writing Program.
Go to Profile#2350
Maja Haderlap
#28819
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Maja Haderlap Life Her grandmother who was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. At ten years old, Haderlap's father was tortured by the Nazis to disclose where his father, who joined Slovene Partisans, was hiding. Her father often wanted to kill himself because of the way Austrian majority treated him. The family waited until he passed out, then pried his fingers from the gun. After reading her grandmother’s diary, she was “afraid of being overrun by the past, of being crushed by its weight.” She made a conscious decision to write about her family’s history in a novel.
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