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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Literature,
#2501
Serenella Iovino
#52990
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Serenella Iovino is an Italian cultural and literary theorist, and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is considered one of the main environmental philosophers of Italy.
Go to Profile#2502
James M. Redfield
#26694
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James M. Redfield is the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has made numerous contributions to current scholarship on Homer and Herodotus, probably the most notable of which is his book, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector , an anthropological reading of the Iliad with the stated goal of analyzing Hector's role in the work.
Go to Profile#2503
Jo Ann Beard
#64552
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jo Ann Beard is an American essayist. Life Beard was born in 1955, Moline, Illinois. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a BFA in art, and from The Nonfiction Writing Program with an MFA in creative nonfiction. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Go to Profile#2504
Jüri Talvet
#61744
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jüri Talvet is an Estonian poet and academic. He is the author of various literary works including poetry, criticism, and essays. Education Talvet received his MA degree in English philology from the University of Tartu in 1972 and defended his PhD degree in Western European literature at Leningrad University in 1981.
Go to Profile#2505
Richard Marggraf Turley
#34238
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Richard Marggraf Turley is a British literary critic, poet and novelist. He specialises in Romanticism and the poetry of Timmy Mallett, surveillance studies and ecocriticism. He is professor of English Literature at Aberystwyth University, and between 2013 and 2018 was that institution's Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination.
Go to Profile#2506
Robert Olmstead
#65127
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Olmstead is an American novelist and educator. Early life and education Olmstead was born in 1954 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm. After high school, he enrolled at Davidson College with a football scholarship, but left school after three semesters in which he compiled a poor academic record. He later attended Syracuse University, where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.
Go to Profile#2507
Catherine Conybeare
#44671
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Catherine Mary Conybeare is an academic and philologist and an authority on Augustine of Hippo. She is currently Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Academic career Conybeare was born in 1966 at Bristol in the United Kingdom and was educated at Oxford High School , Simon Langton Girls' Grammar School , and The King's School, Canterbury . She read classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and did graduate work in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Brian Stock. From 1996 to 2002 she was at the University of Manc...
Go to Profile#2508
Fred C. Robinson
#49110
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Fred Colson Robinson was an American historian at Yale University. He was widely considered one of the world's foremost authorities on Old English. Biography Robinson received in 1953 his bachelor's degree in English and fine arts from Birmingham–Southern College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English and comparative linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His 1961 doctoral dissertation is titled Variation: A Study in the Diction of 'Beowulf'. After teaching at Stanford University and at Cornell University, he joined the Yale faculty in 1972 and eventually retired there a...
Go to Profile#2509
Natalia Makarova
#7073
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Natalia Romanovna Makarova is a Russian prima ballerina and choreographer. The History of Dance, published in 1981, notes that "her performances set standards of artistry and aristocracy of dance which mark her as the finest ballerina of her generation in the West."
Go to Profile#2510
Chris Bachelder
#73011
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Chris Bachelder is an American writer and frequent contributor to the publications McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and The Believer. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he grew up in Christiansburg, Virginia. He attended Virginia Tech and the University of Florida at Gainesville .
Go to Profile#2511
Matthew Zapruder
#59447
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Matthew Zapruder is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist, won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. His first book, American Linden, won the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize. His most recent book of poetry, Sun Bear, brings the strangeness of poetry closer to everyday life.
Go to Profile#2512
Mason Hammond
#61196
Overall Influence
1903 - 2002 (99 years)
Mason Hammond was an American educator and scholar. He was a Harvard University professor, an authority on Latin and the history of Rome and its empire, and chairman of the board of trustees at St. Mark's School.
Go to Profile#2513
Paul Cantor
#29986
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Paul A. Cantor was an American literary and media critic. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where he was the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English. Cantor wrote on a wide range of subjects, including Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Romanticism, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Leo Strauss, Tom Stoppard, Don Delillo, New His...
Go to Profile#2514
Helmuth Kiesel
#66217
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Helmuth Kiesel is a German literary studies scholar who specializes in German literature from the period 1918 to 1945. He was professor of modern German literature at the University of Bamberg from 1987 to 1990 and at the Heidelberg University from 1990. Since 2015 he has been professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#2515
István Borzsák
#55261
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
István Borzsák , was a Hungarian classical scholar who was a specialist in Roman literature. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Selected publications Budai Ézsaiás és klasszika-filológiánk kezdetei, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1955.P. Cornelius Tacitus, der Geschichtsschreiber, A. Druckenmüller, Stuttgart, 1968.
Go to Profile#2516
Kirstin Valdez Quade
#66292
Overall Influence
Kirstin Valdez Quade is an American writer. Early life and education Quade was born to a white father and a Hispanic mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her father was a desert geologist and her family lived throughout the Southwestern United States, as well as in Australia. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy and earned her BA from Stanford University and her MFA from the University of Oregon. From 2009 to 2011 she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where she also taught as a Jones Lecturer. In 2014–15, she was the Delbanco Visiting professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#2517
Tony Curtis
#55981
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Tony Curtis FRSL is a Welsh poet who writes in English. Biography Tony Curtis was born in 1946 in Carmarthen, and was educated at Swansea University. He subsequently studied for a MFA degree at Goddard College, Vermont. He taught English in secondary schools in Cheshire and Yorkshire before returning to Wales to a lecturing post. He introduced and developed Creative Writing at the Polytechnic of Wales and ran the M.Phil. In Writing when it became the University of Glamorgan. Tony Curtis's book debut was in Three Young Anglo-Welsh Poets , published by the Welsh Arts Council, in which he featured together with Duncan Bush and Nigel Jenkins.
Go to Profile#2518
Mordecai Richler
#31380
Overall Influence
1931 - 2001 (70 years)
Mordecai Richler was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney's Version . His 1970 novel St. Urbain's Horseman and 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here were nominated for the Booker Prize. He is also well known for the Jacob Two-Two fantasy series for children. In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about Canadian and Quebec nationalism. Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! , a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-Semitism, generated considerable controversy.
Go to Profile#2519
Gilad Shalit
#3299
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Gilad Shalit is a former MIA soldier of the Israel Defense Forces who, on 25 June 2006, was captured by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid via tunnels near the Israeli border. Hamas held him captive for over five years until his release on 18 October 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange deal.
Go to Profile#2520
Robin Schone
#50893
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robin Schone is a best-selling American author of erotic romance novels. Biography Schone read her first romance novel, These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer, at age twelve, and began reading erotic novels when she was fifteen. Although she has always written stories for herself, Schone was determined to be a painter, and studied art, classics, and world religion at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois. Schone claims to have begun writing after she was married because it was too messy to set up an easel and paint in a small apartment.
Go to Profile#2521
Terence Cave
#47862
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Terence Christopher Cave is a British literary scholar. Life Terence Cave studied for his Bachelor of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Cave began his academic career in 1962 as an assistant lecturer at the University of St Andrews and went from there 1965 to the University of Warwick. Cave became Fellow and a Tutor in French at St John's College, Oxford, in 1972, and between 1989 and 2001 was also professor of French literature at the University of Oxford. In 1985 he was elected to become Drapers Professor of French at Cambridge, but remained at...
Go to Profile#2522
Sheldon Patinkin
#29561
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Sheldon Arthur Patinkin was a chair of the Theater Department of Columbia College Chicago, artistic director of the Getz Theater of Columbia College, Artistic Consultant of The Second City and of Steppenwolf Theatre and co-director of the Steppenwolf Theatre Summer Ensemble Workshops.
Go to Profile#2523
Sadakazu Fujii
#56358
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
is a Japanese poet and scholar of Japanese literature, which includes the genres of ancient novels, the Man'yōshū, oral literature, Okinawan culture, Ainu language, and contemporary poetry. He is well known for his study on the Genji Monogatari. His poems and palindromes have been used in the musical compositions of Takahashi Yuji.
Go to Profile#2524
Cole Swensen
#48553
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown Universi...
Go to Profile#2525
Dejan Ajdačić
#74938
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dejan Ajdačić , is a Serbian Slavist, philologist, folklorist, ethnolinguist, literary critic, translator and editor. Biography Education He grew up in Belgrade. Both of his parents were physiochemists. He attended the Primary School "Drinka Pavlović", the Fifth Belgrade Grammar School and Music High School "Stanković" . He studied at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade at the Department of Yugoslav Literature and World Literature. He graduated in 1984 with the paper "On Colours in Serbian National Poetry". He defended his Masters thesis under the title "Images of Love and Beauty in the Poet...
Go to Profile#2526
John Meaney
#37779
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Meaney is a British science fiction author. Biography Meaney grew up in London and Slough, England with his brother Colm . He has studied martial arts since childhood and has a black belt in shotokan karate. Meaney originally studied at Birmingham University and holds a combined degree in Physics and Computer Science from the Open University. He has done postgraduate work at Oxford University and is a part-time IT consultant.
Go to Profile#2527
Eamon Grennan
#60623
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Eamon JR Grennan is an Irish poet born in Dublin, Ireland. He attended University College Dublin where he completed a BA 1963 and an MA 1964. He has lived in the United States, except for brief periods, since 1964. He was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004.
Go to Profile#2528
Tina Chang
#72189
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Tina Chang is an American poet, professor, editor, organizer, and public speaker. In 2010, she was named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. Early life Chang was born in 1969 in Oklahoma to Taiwanese immigrants, who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics. The family moved to Queens, New York, when she was a year old, where she was raised except for a period during her youth, when Chang and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. "I started questioning even at a very young age, well, what is language?" she said.
Go to Profile#2529
Pino Mlakar
#25778
Overall Influence
1907 - 2006 (99 years)
Pino Mlakar was a Slovenian ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher. He was born in Novo Mesto. In 1927 he graduated from the Rudolf Laban Choreographic Institute in Hamburg. He was a member of the Ljubljana Opera and Ballet Company from 1946 to 1960. For 25 years he was a full professor at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television of the University of Ljubljana.
Go to Profile#2530
Guillermo Sucre
#43804
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Guillermo Sucre Figarella , was a Venezuelan poet and literary critic born in Tumeremo in the state of Bolivar. He was also a member of the Sucre family like his uncle Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre and his older brothers General Juan Manuel Sucre Figarella, and Senator Leopoldo Sucre Figarella.
Go to Profile#2531
Thomas Lux
#40225
Overall Influence
1946 - 2017 (71 years)
Thomas Lux was an American poet who held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and ran Georgia Tech's "Poetry @ Tech" program. He wrote fourteen books of poetry.
Go to Profile#2532
Takashi Inukai
#49069
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
was professor emeritus at Osaka University and Kōnan Women's University, and a noted scholar of Japanese literature and especially the Man'yōshū poetry. He earned his bachelor's degree in Japanese literature from the University of Tokyo in 1932, as well as its Ph.D. in 1962. He received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon from the Japanese Government in 1978. He was qualified as a Person of Cultural Merit in 1987. Upon his death, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, was posthumously granted on him.
Go to Profile#2533
Shigeru Mizuki
#44304
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
, also known as Shigeru Mizuki, was a Japanese manga artist and historian. He was known for his yōkai manga such as GeGeGe no Kitarō and Akuma-kun, as well as for his war stories based on his own war manga such as Shōwa-shi.
Go to Profile#2534
Izabela Filipiak
#61185
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Izabela Filipiak is a Polish writer, an essayist, a columnist, and a scholar. Biography She debuted in the beginning of the 90s as one of the most distinct figures of Polish literary life. In her short stories and essays, she promoted the new literature in democratic Poland as open to voices previously excluded from cultural discourse. Her novel Absolutna Amnezja published in 1995, critiques the communist past from the point of view of socially maladjusted young women. The book mixes satirical representation of authoritarian schools and dysfunctional families with historical events from the p...
Go to Profile#2535
Michael P. Branch
#54655
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael P. Branch is an ecocritic, writer, and humorist with over three hundred publications, including work in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. An important member of the environmental and writing community, Western American Literature has described him as part of the "enduring procession of outdoor journalists."
Go to Profile#2536
Martha Nell Smith
#48718
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Martha Nell Smith is a professor of English and founding director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work's main focus is on the life and works of the poet Emily Dickinson.
Go to Profile#2537
A. J. Langguth
#20427
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Arthur John Langguth was an American author, journalist and educator, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was professor of the Annenberg School for Communications School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Langguth was the author of several dark, satirical novels, a biography of the English short story master Saki, and lively histories of the Trail of Tears, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, Afro-Brazilian religion in Brazil and the United States, the Vietnam War, the political life of Julius Caesar and U.S. involvement with torture in Latin America. A graduate of H...
Go to Profile#2538
Lewis Warsh
#58654
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.
Go to Profile#2539
Dai Jinhua
#53092
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dai Jinhua is a Chinese feminist cultural critic. She is a Professor in the Institute of Comparative Literature and Culture, Peking University. Her research interests include popular culture, film studies, and gender studies.
Go to Profile#2540
Asghar Nadeem Syed
#47570
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Asghar Nadeem Syed is a Pakistani playwright, TV drama serial writer and poet. He has written shows for the Pakistani state channel, PTV, Shalimar Television Network. Early life and career Syed was born on 14 January 1950 in the city of Multan, Pakistan. He received his master's degree in Urdu language from the University of Punjab, Lahore and completed his PhD at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan. He is married and has three children; a son and two daughters. His son Syed Adeel Hassan is a British National who works for FTSE 100 businesses in the UK. Syed gets inspiration from his son to depict life in foreign lands.
Go to Profile#2541
John Keene
#42307
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
John R. Keene Jr. is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.
Go to Profile#2542
Nur Masalha
#17827
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nur ad-Din Masalha commonly known in English as Nur Masalha is a Palestinian writer, historian, and academic. He is a historian of Palestine and formerly professor of religion and politics and director of the Centre for Religion and History and the Holy Land Research Project at St. Mary's University. He was also programme director of the MA in religion, Politics and Conflict Resolution at St Mary's University .
Go to Profile#2543
Knut Kleve
#32002
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Knut Kleve was a Norwegian classical philologist and a professor at the University of Bergen and at the University of Oslo. He was particularly known for his efforts on restoration of papyrus fragments from the ancient Roman town Herculaneum.
Go to Profile#2544
Roger Sale
#52923
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Roger Sale was an American literary critic and author, brother of Kirkpatrick Sale and father of Tim Sale. He spent most of his career as a professor of English at the University of Washington. Children's literature Sale's influence on literary criticism is most evident in his work on children's literature. Prior to his work in the 1960s and 1970s, few professional critics chose to take children's literature seriously, but Sale argued that it could and ought to be given the same respect and scrutiny as adult fiction. In 1978, he published a book entitled Fairy Tales and After, which is esse...
Go to Profile#2545
Lin Wenyue
#66482
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Lin Wenyue was a Taiwanese scholar, writer, translator, and professor. Biography Lin was born in Shanghai in 1933, with her ancestral home in Changhua County. Lin primarily studied at a Japanese school. Her grandfather, Lian Heng, was a historian, who was Vice President Lien Chan's grandfather.
Go to Profile#2546
Elizabeth Tallent
#85714
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Elizabeth Tallent is an American fiction writer, academic, and essayist. Life Tallent's short stories and essays have been published in literary magazines and journals such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, Zyzzyva, and North American Review, and her work has been reprinted in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and Pushcart Prize collections.
Go to Profile#2547
Alain Robbe-Grillet
#44153
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on 25 March 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No. 32. He married Catherine Robbe-Grillet .
Go to Profile#2548
Michael Symmons Roberts
#38066
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael Symmons Roberts FRSL is a British poet. He has published eight collections of poetry, all with Cape , and has won the Forward Prize, the Costa Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, as well as major prizes from the Arts Council and Society of Authors. He has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. He has also written novels, libretti and texts for oratorios and song cycles. He regularly writes and presents documentaries and dramas for broadcasting and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Go to Profile#2549
Saburo Shiroyama
#55111
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Saburō Shiroyama is a Japanese novelist. Shiroyama was born in Aichi Prefecture, and studied economics at Hitotsubashi University. He later taught economics at Nagoya Gakuin University. Shiroyama trained as a pilot for the Japanese Navy, but never saw active service. He began his writing career after the end of World War II.
Go to Profile#2550
Mary Jo Salter
#64293
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mary Jo Salter is an American poet, a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. Life Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was raised in Detroit and Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.A. from Harvard University in 1976 and her M.A. from Cambridge University in 1978. In 1976, she participated in the Glascock Prize contest.
Go to Profile