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.

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,

#2401

Madison Jones

#48187

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Madison Percy Jones was a novelist born in Nashville, Tennessee. He published almost a dozen novels, and was considered "one of the major figures of contemporary southern letters". Biography Madison Jones was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 21, 1925. He was the son of a Presbyterian businessman, and spent his early years living in suburban Nashville. When Jones was 14, his father purchased Sycamore Farm in hill country 25 miles north of the city. At 17, Jones dropped out of Vanderbilt University to become a farmer, moving to Sycamore Farm where he lived for a year and a half. He becam...

#2402

Maria Campbell

#30581

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Maria Campbell is a Métis author, playwright, broadcaster, filmmaker, and Elder. Campbell is a fluent speaker of four languages: Cree, Michif, Western Ojibwa, and English. Four of her published works have been published in eight countries and translated into four other languages . Campbell has had great influence in her community as she is very politically involved in activism and social movements. Campbell is well known for being the author of Halfbreed, a memoir describing her own experiences as a Métis woman in society and the difficulties she has faced, which are commonly faced by many o...

#2403

George Garrett

#57175

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

George Palmer Garrett was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.

#2404

Yoriko Shono

#45435

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Yoriko Shono, born 16 March 1956, is a Japanese writer who describes her writing as 'avant-pop'. Biography Yoriko Shono was born in Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, grew up in Ise and studied in the Law Department at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. She started writing while she was at university, and made her debut with the story "Gokuraku" in 1981, but was not published again until her 1991 collection Nani mo Shitenai, which won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers. She really began to draw attention in 1994 when her story "Ni Hyaku Kaiki" won the Yukio Mishima Prize, and another story, "Time Slip Kombinat" won the Akutagawa Prize in the same year.

#2405

George B. Hutchinson

#36794

Overall Influence

George B. Hutchinson is a noted American scholar, Professor of Literatures in English and Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture at Cornell University, where he is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He is well known for his transformative work on 19th- and 20th-century American and African American literature and culture, focusing especially on the racial mores, materialistic addictions, and ecological errors of the United States. A recipient of both the NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships, he is the author of several foundational books.

#2406

Ed Ochester

#58748

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Edwin Frank Ochester is an American poet and editor. He was educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. For nearly twenty years, Ochester served as director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and he was twice elected president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. From 1967 to 1970, he was assistant professor of English at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

#2407

Elissa Schappell

#68223

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Elissa Schappell is an American novelist, short-story writer, editor and essayist. She was a co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Tin House. Writing career Schappell graduated from New York University with an MFA in creative writing. Her first job in publishing was with Spy magazine in the 1980s.

#2408

Georges-Claude Guilbert

#44417

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Georges-Claude Guilbert is a French literary critic and academic who teaches American literature, gender studies, and popular culture. He is Professor in American Studies at the University of Havre, France.

#2409

Tayari Jones

#37177

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emo...

#2410

Jane Asher

#27516

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Jane Asher is an English actress and author. She achieved early fame as a child actress and has worked extensively in film and TV throughout her career. Asher has appeared in TV shows and films such as Deep End , The Masque of the Red Death , Alfie , The Mistress, Crossroads, Death at a Funeral , and The Old Guys. She also appeared in two episodes of the 1950s TV series The Buccaneers alongside Robert Shaw. She was well known as the partner of Paul McCartney from 1963 to 1968.

#2411

Stefan Brecht

#30532

Overall Influence

1924 - 2009 (85 years)

Stefan Sebastian Brecht was a German-born American poet, critic, and scholar of theatre. Early life and education Brecht was born in Berlin to playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel.

#2412

Joel Myerson

#27235

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Joel Myerson was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. He edited many books about the works of such American literary figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.

#2413

Phil Klay

#39364

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Phil Klay is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was named as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year as well as one of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year.

#2414

Chris Offutt

#31669

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Christopher John Offutt is an American writer. He is most widely known for his short stories and novels, but he has also published three memoirs and multiple nonfiction articles. In 2005, he had a story included in a comic book collection edited by Michael Chabon, and another in the anthology Noir. He has written episodes for the TV series True Blood and Weeds.

#2415

Carsten Gansel

#85503

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Carsten Gansel is a German literary scholar and university teacher. He is professor of modern German literature and German literature and media didactics at the University of Giessen. In 2012, he discovered the original manuscript of Heinrich Gerlach's semi-autobiographical novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, The Forsaken Army, in the Russian State Military Archive.

#2416

Sharif Kunjahi

#73327

Overall Influence

1914 - 2007 (93 years)

Sharif Kunjahi was a leading writer and poet of Punjabi. He was among the first faculty members of the Department of Punjabi Language at University of Punjab in the 1970s and contributed to Punjabi literature as a poet, prose writer, teacher, research scholar, linguist, lexicographer and translator.

#2417

Mary Caponegro

#72315

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Mary Caponegro is an American experimental fiction writer whose collections include Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts, The Complexities of Intimacy, and All Fall Down. Her stories appear regularly in Conjunctions and in other periodicals. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature in 1992, and is also the recipient of The General Electric Award for Younger Writers, the Bruno Arcudi Prize, and the Charles Flint Kellog Award in Arts and Letters. She has taught at Brown University, RISD, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Syracuse University.

#2418

Koldo Zuazo

#23198

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Koldo Zuazo is a Basque linguist, professor at the University of the Basque Country and specialist in Basque language dialectology and sociolinguistics. The dialects of the Basque language Since 1998, Zuazo's work on the Basque dialects has drawn a new classification and a new map of these dialects—this has been a revolution in a field where few changes were made since Louis Lucien Bonaparte's works .

#2419

Cyril Dabydeen

#61146

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Cyril Dabydeen is a Guyana-born Canadian writer of Indian descent. He grew up in Rose Hall sugar plantation with the sense of Indian indenture rooted in his family background . He's a cousin of the UK writer David Dabydeen.

#2420

Kenneth White

#54144

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. Biography Kenneth White was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, but he spent his childhood and adolescence at Fairlie near Largs on the Ayrshire coast, where his father worked as a railway signalman.

#2421

Christine Montalbetti

#54391

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Christine Montalbetti is a French novelist, playwright and professor of literature at the University of Paris. In her writing, Montalbetti practices what Warren Motte calls "intrusive narration," or a narrative style that engages the reader directly in dialogue. Thus in one of her short stories, Montalbetti remarks to the reader, "you are the one person who many imagine flawlessly the particular trouble that the unlucky hero of this story experiences."

#2422

Sven Delblanc

#69932

Overall Influence

1931 - 1992 (61 years)

Sven Delblanc was Swedish author and professor of literature. Born in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, Deblanc died in Gottsunda Parish, Uppsala, and is buried in Hammarby kyrkogård in Uppsala, Sweden.

#2423

Joyce Reynolds

#33009

Overall Influence

1918 - 2022 (104 years)

Joyce Maire Reynolds was a British classicist and academic, specialising in Roman historical epigraphy. She was an honorary fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She dedicated her life to the study and teaching of Classics and was first woman to be awarded the Kenyon medal by the British Academy. Among Reynolds' most significant publications were texts from the city of Aphrodisias, including letters between Aphrodisian and Roman authorities.

#2424

Alfonso Vallejo

#10277

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

Alfonso Rodríguez Vallejo was a Spanish playwright, poet, painter and neurologist. He had published 34 plays and 25 poetry books. Vallejo was awarded the Lope de Vega prize in 1976 for his play "El desgüace". "Ácido Sulfúrico" was the runner up prize in 1975. In 1978 he received the Internacional Tirso de Molina prize for his work A Tumba Abierta. The Spanish Royal Academy , in 1981, awarded Vallejo the Fastenrath Award for "El cero transparente".

#2425

Etheridge Knight

#40610

Overall Influence

1931 - 1991 (60 years)

Etheridge Knight was an African-American poet who made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison. The book recalls in verse his eight-year-long sentence after his arrest for robbery in 1960. By the time he left prison, Knight had prepared a second volume featuring his own writings and works of his fellow inmates. This second book, first published in Italy under the title Voce negre dal carcere, appeared in English in 1970 as Black Voices from Prison. These works established Knight as one of the major poets of the Black Arts Movement, which flourished from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s.

#2426

David Ray

#52371

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

David Ray , is an American poet and author of fiction, essays, and memoir. He is particularly noted for poems that, while being rooted in the personal, also show a strong social concern. Ray is the author of twenty-two volumes of poetry, including "Hemingway: A Desperate Life" , "When" , "Music of Time: Selected and New Poems" and The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars . "After Tagore: Poems Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore" was published in India in 2008.

#2427

Niall Rudd

#60328

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

William James Niall Rudd was an Irish-born British classical scholar. Life and work Rudd was born in Dublin and studied Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. He then taught Latin at the Universities of Hull and Manchester. From 1958 to 1968 he was Associate Professor of Latin at University College, Toronto. In 1968 he returned to England and taught for five years as a professor of Latin at the University of Liverpool. In 1973 he moved to the University of Bristol to the chair of Latin, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. From 1976 to 1979 he was Director of the Department of Class...

#2428

Monica Youn

#40152

Overall Influence

Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer. Life Youn was raised in Houston, Texas. She graduated from St. Agnes Academy , Princeton University, Yale Law School with a J.D., and Oxford University with a M. Phil, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

#2429

Farman Fatehpuri

Farman Fatehpuri

#21974

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Farman Fatehpuri was an Urdu linguist, researcher, writer, critic and scholar of Pakistan. He is widely regarded as a leading authority on the life and work of Ghalib. He wrote many scholarly articles, book reviews, and editorials. He received Sitara-e-Imtiaz Award for his literary accomplishments in 1985 from the President of Pakistan.

#2430

Funso Aiyejina

#40904

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Funso Aiyejina is a Nigerian poet, short story writer, playwright and academic. He is the former Dean of Humanities and Education and current Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies. His collection of short fiction, The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book .

#2431

Reginald Gibbons

#48642

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic. He is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, as well as poems, short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O.

#2432

Lloyd Schwartz

#39220

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Lloyd Schwartz is an American poet, and the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He was the classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, a publication that is now defunct. He is Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts , Senior Music Editor at New York Arts and the Berkshire Review for the Arts, and a regular commentator for NPR's Fresh Air.

#2433

David Fishelov

#46354

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Fishelov , born June 1, 1954, is an Israeli professor emeritus of comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Education Fishelov earned his bachelor's degree in comparative literature and philosophy , his master's degree in comparative literature from Tel Aviv University , and a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley . He wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of metaphors in theories of literary genres.

#2434

Frederick Busch

#59019

Overall Influence

1941 - 2006 (65 years)

Frederick Busch was an American writer who authored nearly thirty books, including volumes of short stories and novels. Early life and education Busch was born in Brooklyn, New York City on August 1, 1941. He graduated from Muhlenberg College in 1962, and earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1967. Busch and his wife lived briefly in Greenwich Village, where they scraped by until Busch got a job teaching at Colgate University in 1966.

#2435

John Grant

#28710

Overall Influence

1949 - 2020 (71 years)

Paul le Page Barnett , known by the pen name of John Grant, was a Scottish writer and editor of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction. Biography Born Paul le Page Barnett in Aberdeen, Scotland, Grant has sometimes written under his own name , as Eve Devereux, and under various other pseudonyms; he has also ghostwritten a number of books. The author of some 70 books in all , he has published several original novels as well as one novel in the Judge Dredd series and, with Joe Dever, 11 novels and a novella collection in the Legends of Lone Wolf series; edited several anthologies, beginning w...

#2436

Trevanian

#32775

Overall Influence

1931 - 2005 (74 years)

Rodney William Whitaker was an American film scholar and writer who wrote several novels under the pen name Trevanian. Whitaker wrote in a wide variety of genres, achieved bestseller status, and published under several other names, as well, including Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot, and Edoard Moran. He published the nonfiction book The Language of Film under his own name.

#2437

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

#43730

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan writer who is the author of novels, short stories and essays. She won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "Weight of Whispers". Education and professional life Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Owuor studied English at Kenyatta University, before taking an MA in TV/Video development at Reading University. She obtained an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, Australia.

#2438

Werner Sollors

#42969

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Werner Max Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and of African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also Global Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi.

#2439

Venko Andonovski

#82203

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Venko Andonovski is a Macedonian writer , essayist, critic and literary theorist. Biography Venko Andonovski graduated from the Faculty of Philology "Blaze Koneski" in Skopje. He holds a PhD in Philology and works as a professor at the Faculty of Philology "Blaze Koneski" in Skopje. Andonovski is a member of the PEN center. In 1990 he became a member of the Writers' Association of Macedonia.

#2440

Mayumi Inaba

#70835

Overall Influence

1950 - 2014 (64 years)

was a Japanese writer and poet. She won the Tanizaki Prize in 2011 for her memoir To the Peninsula . Her short story was translated into English by Lawrence Rogers for the collection Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll.

#2441

Kostiantyn Tyshchenko

#33670

Overall Influence

1941 - 2023 (82 years)

Kostiantyn Mykolayovych Tyshchenko was a Ukrainian linguist, teacher, translator, Doctor of Philology , and professor . Tyshchenko is the author of more than 240 works on metatheory of linguistics, sign theory of language, linguistic laws, optimization of morphological descriptions of languages, linguopedagogy, problems of language development, Romance and Oriental linguistics, as well as series of articles on studies of German, Slavic, Celtic, Basque, Finnish and Altaic languages. Teacher and polyglot speaking more than two dozen different languages. He lectures on general linguistics and conducts practical courses in French, Italian, Persian, Finnish, Basque, Welsh, and other languages.

#2442

Beverly Smith

#24322

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Beverly Smith in Cleveland, Ohio, is a Black feminist health advocate, writer, academic, theorist and activist who is also the twin sister of writer, publisher, activist and academic Barbara Smith. Beverly Smith is an instructor of Women's Health at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

#2443

Wolf Liebeschuetz

#21845

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was a German-born British historian who specialized in late antiquity. Early life John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was born in Hamburg on 22 June 1927, the son of historian Hans Liebeschuetz and physician Rahel Plaut. His father was a prominent medievalist who taught at the University of Hamburg. The family had been wealthy, having inherited a large fortune from Wolf's great-grandfather Brach, who amassed wealth trading in Texas and Mexico though much was lost in the German inflation. The Liebeschuetz family was Jewish, and were subjected to increasing persecution following the Adolf Hitler's seizure of power by the Nazis.

#2444

Mark Jarman

#63422

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Mark F. Jarman is an American poet and critic often identified with the New Narrative branch of the New Formalism; he was co-editor with Robert McDowell of The Reaper throughout the 1980s. Centennial Professor of English, Emeritus, at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of eleven books of poetry, three books of essays, and a book of essays co-authored with Robert McDowell. He co-edited the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism with David Mason.

#2445

Gareth Griffiths

#63447

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Gareth Griffiths is a Welsh-born academic, Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Life Griffiths was born in Wales, and educated at Cyfarthfa Grammar School. Apart from a period as Chair at SUNY Albany, he has been based in Australia since 1973. He has also taught at Macquarie University in Sydney and in the United Kingdom and France. From 2002 to 2005 he chaired the English Department at SUNY Albany in the United States. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has previously held positions as Head of the Theater Studi...

#2446

Roger Pulvers

#47542

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Roger Pulvers is an Australian playwright, theatre director and translator. He has published more than 45 books in English and Japanese, from novels to essays, plays, poetry and translations. He has written prolifically for the stage and has seen his plays produced at major theatres in Japan, Australia and in the U.S.

#2447

Joy Connolly

#44528

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Joy Connolly is an American scholar of classics and the president of the American Council of Learned Societies. She was previously interim president and provost of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was formerly a professor of classics and the dean for humanities at New York University. Connolly's main research interests are Roman republicanism, rhetoric, civic discourse, classical reception, and the role that aesthetic experience plays in the formation of political judgement.

#2448

George A. Kennedy

#25877

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

George Alexander Kennedy was an American scholar of classical rhetoric and literature. Biography George Alexander Kennedy was born in Hartford, Connecticut on November 26, 1928. He received his Ph.D. in classics from Harvard University in 1954 with a dissertation entitled "Prolegomena and Commentary to Quintilian VIII ". Kennedy taught classics, comparative literature, and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for twenty-eight years. He retired as George L. Paddison professor of classics. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

#2449

Siba Shakib

#23799

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Siba Shakib is an Iranian/German filmmaker, writer and political activist. She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Her international bestseller Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep has been translated into 27 languages and won a P.E.N. prize

#2450

Lorenzo Semple Jr.

Lorenzo Semple Jr.

#56223

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Lorenzo Elliott Semple III , known professionally as Lorenzo Semple Jr., was an American writer. He is best known for his work on the television series Batman, as well as political thriller films The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor .

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