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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#2451

Walid Saif

#53700

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Waleed Saif is a Palestinian-Jordanian poet, short storywriter, television drama writer, playwright, critic, researcher, and academic. Origin, study and life Walid Saif was born in Tulkarem city in the West Bank, Palestine, and received a BA in Arabic language and literature from the University of Jordan. He received his doctorate in linguistics from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 1975. After that, he worked as a lecturer at the Department of Arabic at the University of Jordan for three years before leaving the department to work as a writer for television drama.

#2452

Curt Wittlin

#34709

Overall Influence

1941 - 2019 (78 years)

Curt Wittlin was a Swiss philologist and an expert of medieval Catalan language and literature. Biography Wittlin studied romance philology in Basel with Germà Colon, and later in Paris, Florence and Barcelona. He got his PhD in 1965 with a thesis about the Catalan translation of Brunetto Latini's Treasure by Guillem de Copons. He became Professor of Romance Philology and Historical Linguistics at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon , where he arrived in 1967.

#2453

Jurek Becker

#32786

Overall Influence

1937 - 1997 (60 years)

Jurek Becker was a Polish-born German writer, screenwriter and East German dissident. His most famous novel is Jacob the Liar, which has been made into two films. He lived in Łódź during World War II for about two years and survived the Holocaust.

#2454

Gillo Dorfles

#8977

Overall Influence

1910 - 2018 (108 years)

Angelo Eugenio "Gillo" Dorfles was an Italian art critic, painter, and philosopher. Biography Born in Trieste to a Gorizian father of Jewish descent and a Genoese mother, Dorfles graduated in medicine, specializing in psychiatry. He was a professor in aesthetics at the University of Trieste, Milan and Cagliari and, in 1948, established the MAC with artists Atanasio Soldati, Galliano Mazzon, Gianni Monnet, and Bruno Munari. His paintings were displayed in two personal exhibitions held in Milan in 1949 and 1950 and also in numerous collective MAC exhibitions in the 1950s. In 1956 Dorfles co-fo...

#2455

Tom DeFalco

#39735

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Tom DeFalco is an American comic book writer and editor well known for his association with Marvel Comics, with long runs on Amazing Spider-Man, Thor, and Fantastic Four. Career While in college, DeFalco "wrote for a few local newspapers, a weekly comic strip and did a few short stories", and after graduation "got in touch with the various comic book companies", which led to him beginning his comics career as an editorial assistant with Archie Comics in mid-1972. During his tenure with Archie Comics, he "initiated and developed the Archie Comics Digest Series, which is still being produced today and remains the company's most profitable publishing series".

#2456

Aleš Debeljak

#28673

Overall Influence

1961 - 2016 (55 years)

Aleš Debeljak was a Slovenian cultural critic, poet, and essayist. Biography Debeljak was born in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, to a family with rural origins; he was the first of the family to attend university. In his youth he was the junior Slovenian champion in judo, and got a silver medal at the Yugoslav championship. He stopped his sport career after an injury.

#2457

Marvin Bell

#38793

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Marvin Hartley Bell was an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa. Biography Bell was raised in Center Moriches, Long Island. He served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1965 at the rank of First Lieutenant, and he was a licensed amateur radio operator. He earned his bachelor's degree from Alfred University, his master's degree from the University of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#2458

Nigel Kneale

#41966

Overall Influence

1922 - 2006 (84 years)

Thomas Nigel Kneale was a Manx screenwriter who wrote professionally for more than 50 years, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and was twice nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay.

#2459

Jess Row

#48965

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Jess Row is an American short story writer, novelist, and professor. Early life He received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1997. He later taught English in Hong Kong for two years. He completed his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Michigan in 2001.

#2460

Herbert Meier

#38772

Overall Influence

1928 - 2018 (90 years)

Herbert Meier was a Swiss writer and translator. Meier studied literature, history of art and philosophy at the universities of Basel, Vienna, Paris and Fribourg. Since 1955, Meier has been a freelance writer in Zurich. He won the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis in 1964. The main component of his work has been translating classical and modern theatre plays from French into German .

#2461

Seán Burke

#61007

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

#2462

Rita Lejeune

#62287

Overall Influence

1906 - 2009 (103 years)

Rita Lejeune was a Belgian philologist who became a leading expert in the study of medieval French literature. Life Lejeune was born in Herstal on 22 November 1906. Her father, Jean Lejeune, was a local government clerk and also a poet under the pen name Jean Lamoureux. He died in the 1918 influenza pandemic shortly before her twelfth birthday. After secondary school she became a student and then a researcher at the University of Liège, obtaining her doctorate in 1928 with a thesis on Jean Renart. She married Fernand Dehousse in 1929 and together they had two children. In the meantime she also studied at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.

#2463

Abdulla Pashew

#58285

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Abdulla Pashew is a Kurdish poet. He was born in 1946 in Hewlêr, Iraqi Kurdistan. He studied at the Teachers' Training Institute in Hewlêr , and participated in the Foundation Congress of the Kurdish Writers' Union in Baghdad in 1970. In 1973 he went to the former Soviet Union, and in 1979 he received an M.A. in pedagogy with a specialisation in foreign languages. In 1984 he was granted a PhD in Philology from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. For the next five years he was a professor at al-Fatih University in Tripoli, Libya. He has lived in Finland since 1995.

#2464

Gersh Kuntzman

#34517

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Gersh Kuntzman is an American journalist. Career Journalism Kuntzman previously worked for the New York Post, writing the column "MetroGnome," which ran during 1995–2004. He had a weekly column for Newsweek online that ran during 2001–2005.

#2465

Nii Parkes

#55341

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Nii Ayikwei Parkes , born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.

#2466

Nikola Milošević

#35216

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

Nikola Milošević, PhD was a Serbian writer, political philosopher, literary critic, and politician. He graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy. He was professor of Literary Theory at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology since 1969. He became a correspondent member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1983 and a full member in 1994. He was president of the Miloš Crnjanski Endowment in Belgrade.

#2467

Henry Braun

#41844

Overall Influence

Henry Braun was an American poet, teacher, and peace activist. Biography Henry Braun was born in Olean, New York in 1930. His mother died when he was two years old, and he grew up in an orphanage and foster homes in Buffalo. He was later raised by his father, and attended Hutchinson Central High School.

#2468

Takeshi Obata

#33677

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Takeshi Obata is a Japanese manga artist that usually works as the illustrator in collaboration with a writer. He first gained international attention for Hikaru no Go with Yumi Hotta, but is better known for Death Note and Bakuman with Tsugumi Ohba. Obata has mentored several well-known manga artists, including Nobuhiro Watsuki of Rurouni Kenshin fame, Black Cat creator Kentaro Yabuki, and Eyeshield 21 artist Yusuke Murata.

#2469

Katherine Duncan-Jones

#46650

Overall Influence

1941 - 2022 (81 years)

Katherine Dorothea Duncan-Jones, was an English literature and Shakespeare scholar and was also a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge , and then Somerville College, Oxford . She was also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1998 to 2001. She was a scholar of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

#2470

Oleg Khafizov

#62198

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Oleg Esgatovich Khafizov , is a Russian writer. He was born in the family of factory employees. From the age of three lives in Tula. As a pupil of a suburban high school he was closely interested in history, rock music and arts, learned music and painting, practiced boxing and martial arts. Under the influence of Russian classics and contemporary European, mainly Anglo-American, literature commenced prose-writing at the age of 24.

#2471

Daniel Sloate

#72061

Overall Influence

1931 - 2009 (78 years)

Daniel Sloate was a Canadian translator, poet and playwright. Sloate attended the University of Western Ontario and obtained a doctorate in French literature from the Sorbonne. He taught translation at the Translators' School in Paris before taking a position also teaching translation at the Université de Montréal, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.

#2472

Maria Tallchief

Maria Tallchief

#7923

Overall Influence

1925 - 2013 (88 years)

Elizabeth Marie Tallchief, "Two-Standards" was an American ballerina. She was considered America's first major prima ballerina. She was the first Native American to hold the rank, and is said to have revolutionized ballet.

#2473

Ann Lauterbach

#37013

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ann Lauterbach is an American poet, essayist, art critic, and professor. Early life Lauterbach was born and raised in New York City, and earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin. She lived in London for eight years, working in publishing and for art institutions, including London's Thames and Hudson art publishing house. On her return to the U.S., she worked in art galleries in New York before she began teaching.

#2474

Marita Golden

#48107

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.

#2475

Francis Berry

#59704

Overall Influence

1915 - 2006 (91 years)

Francis Berry was a British academic, poet, critic and translator. He was born in Ipoh, Malaya, and educated at the University of London and the University of Exeter. After serving as an army soldier during World War II, and then as a schoolteacher in Malta, he held various appointments in English literature. He was professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield from 1947 to 1970, where he was a friend of William Empson. From 1970 until his retirement in 1980, he was professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. He also wrote radio plays, and an edited translation of the ...

#2476

Gwee Li Sui

#48496

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Gwee Li Sui is a poet, a graphic artist, a literary critic, and a translator from Singapore. Biography Gwee went to the now-defunct MacRitchie Primary School and then Anglo-Chinese Secondary School and Anglo-Chinese Junior College. In 1995, he graduated from the National University of Singapore with a First-Class Honours degree in English literature and was awarded the NUS Society Gold Medal for Best Student in English. His Honours thesis was on Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum . His Master's thesis was on Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil .

#2477

Paweł Huelle

#65634

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Paweł Marek Huelle was a Polish prose writer. Life and career Huelle studied Polish philology at Gdańsk University and, in 1980, participated in the efforts to establish an independent student organization. He later became a journalist and worked for the press service of Solidarność . After the declaration of martial law in 1981, he cooperated with the samizdat movement. He also taught literature, philosophy and history. He was the director of TVP3 Gdańsk from 1994 to 1999 and served as the literary manager for the .

#2478

James Miller

#14547

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

James Miller is an American writer and academic. He is known for writing about Michel Foucault, philosophy as a way of life, social movements, popular culture, intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory and history of political philosophy. He currently teaches at The New School.

#2479

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Linton Kwesi Johnson

#41756

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Linton Kwesi Johnson , also known as LKJ, is a Jamaica-born, British-based dub poet and activist. In 2002 he became the second living poet, and the only black one, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. His performance poetry involves the recitation of his own verse in Jamaican patois over dub-reggae, usually written in collaboration with reggae producer/artist Dennis Bovell.

#2480

Louis O. Coxe

#37905

Overall Influence

1918 - 1993 (75 years)

Louis Osborne Coxe was an American poet, playwright, essayist, and professor who was recognized by the Academy of American Poets for his "long, powerful, quiet accomplishment, largely unrecognized, in lyric poetry." He was probably best known for his dramatic adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, which opened on Broadway in 1951.

#2481

Sam Lipsyte

#38714

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Sam Lipsyte is an American novelist and short story writer. Life The son of the sports journalist Robert Lipsyte, Sam Lipsyte was born in New York City and raised in Closter, New Jersey, where he attended Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest. He attended Brown University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1990. At Brown, Lipsyte lived with Steven Johnson.

#2482

Wolf Erlbruch

#29649

Overall Influence

1948 - 2022 (74 years)

Wolf Erlbruch was a German illustrator and writer of children's books, who became professor at several universities. He combined various techniques for the artwork in his books, including cutting and pasting, drawing, and painting. His style was sometimes surrealist and is widely copied inside and outside Germany. Some of his storybooks have challenging themes such as death and the meaning of life. They won many awards, including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1993 and 2003. Erlbruch received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2006 for his "lasting contribution" as a children's illustrator.

#2483

Robert Barsky

#39385

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Robert Franklin Barsky is Canada Research Chair in Law, Narrative, and Border Crossing. He is a Professor in the College of Arts and Science and Associate Faculty in the School of Law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an expert on Noam Chomsky, literary theory, convention refugees, immigration and refugee law, borders, work through the Americas, and Montreal. His biography of Chomsky titled Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent was published in 1997 by MIT Press, followed in 2007 by The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, and in 2011 by a biography of Chomsky's teacher: Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism.

#2484

Thanhha Lai

#50859

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Thanhha Lai is a Vietnamese-American writer of children's literature. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was published by HarperCollins.

#2485

Timothy Liu

#65602

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Timothy Liu is an American poet and the author of such books as Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse, For Dust Thou Art, Of Thee I Sing, Hard Evidence, Say Goodnight, Burnt Offerings and Vox Angelica. He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry.

#2486

Stephanie Strickland

Stephanie Strickland

#55051

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.

#2487

Kao Kalia Yang

#26140

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir from Coffee House Press and The Song Poet from Metropolitan Press. Her work has appeared in the Paj Ntaub Voice Hmong literary journal, "Waterstone~Review," and other publications. She is a contributing writer to On Being's Public Theology Reimagined blog. Additionally, Yang wrote the lyric documentary, The Place Where We Were Born. Yang currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

#2488

Keiko Takemiya

#38215

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Keiko Takemiya is a Japanese manga artist and the former president of Kyoto Seika University. Career Keiko Takemiya is included in the Year 24 Group, a term coined by academics and critics to refer to a group of female authors in the early 1970s who helped transform manga from being created primarily by male authors to being created by female authors. As part of this group, Takemiya pioneered a genre of manga about love between young men called . In 1970, she published a historical short story titled Sunroom Nite in Bessatsu Shōjo Comic, which is possibly the first manga ever published....

#2489

Francisco X. Alarcón

Francisco X. Alarcón

#51866

Overall Influence

1954 - 2016 (62 years)

Francisco Xavier Alarcón was a Chicano poet and educator. He was one of the few Chicano poets to have "gained recognition while writing mostly in Spanish" within the United States. His poems have been also translated into Irish and Swedish. He made many guest appearances at public schools so that he could help inspire and influence young people to write their own poetry especially because he felt that children are "natural poets."

#2490

Bret Lott

#54389

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Bret Lott is the New York Times author and professor of English at the College of Charleston. He is Crazyhorse magazine's nonfiction editor and leads a study abroad program every summer to Spoleto, Italy.

#2491

Robert Appelbaum

#53693

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Robert Appelbaum is an academic specializing in early modern writing, food studies, and terrorism studies. He is a Professor Emeritus from the Department of English at Uppsala University, in Sweden.

#2492

Dhonielle Clayton

#62294

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Dhonielle Clayton is an American author and chief operating officer of We Need Diverse Books. Early life and education Clayton was born in Washington, D.C. She went to Our Lady Of Good Counsel in Wheaton, Maryland. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Wake Forest University in 2005, a Master of Arts from Hollins University in 2008, and Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from The New School in 2012.

#2493

Jack Anderson

#45051

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Jack Warren Anderson was an American poet, dance critic, and dance historian. He is well known for his numerous reviews of dance performances in The New York Times and Dance Magazine as well as for his scholarly studies in dance history and for eleven volumes of poetry.

#2494

Anis Mansour

#29530

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Anis Mansour, also transliterated as Anīs Manṣūr was an Egyptian writer. Biography Mansour was born in Al-Mansoura on 18 August 1924. He obtained his BA in philosophy at Cairo University in 1947 and started his journalistic career. He joined the staff of the newspaper Al Asas, later joining many other newspapers and magazines such as Rose al-Yousef and Al-Ahram. He served as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Akher Saa from 1970 to 1976. He became the editor-in-chief of the October magazine in 1976.

#2495

Peter Hargitai

#39818

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Peter Hargitai is a poet, novelist, and translator of Hungarian literature. Personal life and education Hargitai was born in Budapest, Hungary. At the age of nine he wrote his first poem “Rebels” meant as a tribute to the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After a daring escape, he arrived in America with his father, a royal judge before the Soviet occupation, his mother, and two brothers. Poems in his adopted language did not come until his university studies in Cleveland between 1965 and 1975 when he contributed occasional poems to the Frigate and the Dark Tower, two literary magazines connected with Cleveland State University.

#2496

Stanley Plumly

#63029

Overall Influence

1939 - 2019 (80 years)

Stanley Plumly was an American poet and the director of University of Maryland, College Park's creative writing program. Plumly was raised in Ohio and Virginia, receiving his education at Wilmington College in Ohio and later at Ohio University. He served as a teacher at Ohio University for several years, playing a pivotal role in the establishment of the Ohio Review. He taught the writing program at the University of Maryland.

#2497

Hirohiko Araki

#32863

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Toshiyuki Araki, better known as Hirohiko Araki, is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for his long-running series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which began publication in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1987 and has over 120 million copies in circulation, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history.

#2498

April Bernard

#55378

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

April Bernard is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.

#2499

Celia Brayfield

#41496

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Celia Brayfield is an English author, academic and cultural commentator. Biography Brayfield was born in the north London suburb of Wembley Park. She won a place at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, West London, and spent a year as a foreign student in France, at the Universitaire de Grenoble, studying French language and literature.

#2500

Nathan Pusey

#21996

Overall Influence

1907 - 2001 (94 years)

Nathan Marsh Pusey was an American academic. Originally from Council Bluffs, Iowa, Pusey won a scholarship to Harvard University out of high school and went on to earn bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees in the classics at Harvard. Pusey began his academic career as a professor of literature at Scripps College and Wesleyan University before serving as president of Lawrence College from 1944 to 1953.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions