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.

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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,

#2601

Samuel Fuller

#31691

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

Samuel Michael Fuller was an American film director, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, actor, and World War II veteran known for directing low-budget genre movies with controversial themes, often made outside the conventional studio system. Fuller wrote his first screenplay for Hats Off in 1936, and made his directorial debut with the Western I Shot Jesse James . He would continue to direct several other Westerns and war thrillers throughout the 1950s.

#2602

Diablo Cody

#51961

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Brook Maurio , known professionally by the pen name Diablo Cody, is an American writer and producer. She gained recognition for her candid blog and subsequent memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper . Cody received critical acclaim for her screenwriting debut film, Juno , winning the Academy Award, and the BAFTA Award.

#2603

Jesús López Pacheco

#47162

Overall Influence

1930 - 1997 (67 years)

Jesús López Pacheco was a novelist, translator, poet and professor of Spanish. López Pacheco studied philosophy and arts at the University of Madrid. His communist sympathies soon became evident and he participated in the fledgling anti-Franco student protests.

#2604

Paul Watkins

#67935

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Paul Watkins is an American author who currently lives with his wife, Cathy, and two children, Emma and Oliver, in Hightstown, New Jersey. He is a teacher and writer-in-residence at The Peddie School, and formerly taught at Lawrenceville School. He attended the Dragon School, Oxford, Eton and Yale University. He received a B.A. from Yale and was a University Fellow at Syracuse University. His recollections of his time at the Dragon School and Eton form his autobiographical work Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England . He wrote his first book, Night Over Day Over Night , when ...

#2605

Laura Walls

#34186

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Laura Dassow Walls is an American professor of English literature and currently the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Areas of research Walls has researched the intersections of literature and science in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander von Humboldt and related authors. She specializes in American Transcendentalism—especially Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, transatlantic romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism.

#2606

Julie Vargas

#16967

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Julie Skinner Vargas is an American educator who has written extensively on the science of behavior. Vargas is the daughter of B.F. Skinner and is the president of the B. F. Skinner Foundation, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is an officer of The International Society for Behaviorology.

#2607

Wilhelm Aarek

#59644

Overall Influence

1907 - 1999 (92 years)

Wilhelm Aarek was a Norwegian philologist and educationalist. He was a cand.philol. by education, and was appointed as a lecturer in English language at Kristiansand Teacher's College in 1938. He had also applied for a job at Stavanger Cathedral School, but was rejected by the government. At Kristiansand Teacher's College he soon began writing books about pedagogy as well as his original field of philology. He served rector of the college from 1948 to 1976. He was decorated with the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, and died in 1999.

#2608

Lionel Charles Knights

#55148

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Lionel Charles Knights was an English literary critic, an authority on Shakespeare and his period. His essay How many children had Lady Macbeth? is a classic of modern criticism. He became King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1965.

#2609

Andrew Karpati Kennedy

Andrew Karpati Kennedy

#36563

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

Andrew Edmund Karpati Kennedy was a Hungarian-born British author, literary critic and academic with a passionate interest in the language of drama. Biography Early years Born in Győr in the west of Hungary, Kennedy spent his early childhood in Debrecen, where his father was manager of the Credit Bank. He attended the Calvinist Gymnasium in Debrecen from September 1941 until the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944.

#2610

Talât Sait Halman

#27568

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Talât Sait Halman, GBE was a Turkish poet, translator and cultural historian. He was the first Minister of Culture of Turkey. From 1998 onward, he taught at Bilkent University as the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Letters.

#2611

Mohit Chattopadhyay

Mohit Chattopadhyay

#41357

Overall Influence

1934 - 2012 (78 years)

Mohit Chattopadhyaya was a Bengali Indian playwright, screenwriter, dramatist and poet. He was a leading figure in modern Indian drama. Mohit Chottopadhya died on 12 April 2012. He had been suffering from cancer.

#2612

Mahesh Bhatt

#25068

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Mahesh Bhatt is an Indian film director, producer and screenwriter known for his works in Hindi cinema. A stand-out film from his earlier period is Saaransh , screened at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. It became India's official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for that year. The 1986 film Naam was his first piece of commercial cinema. In 1987, he turned producer with the film Kabzaa under the banner, "Vishesh Films", with his brother Mukesh Bhatt.

#2613

Safinaz Kazem

#36197

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Safinaz Kazem, also written Safynaz Kazem , is an Egyptian author and literary critic. After obtaining her Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Cairo University in 1959, she wrote many articles.

#2614

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

#24809

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer was an American novelist and poet who was a Professor of English at Brooklyn College for more than thirty years. She won numerous national writing awards and contributed book reviews for The New York Times.

#2615

Renee Gladman

#67821

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Renee Gladman is a poet, novelist, essayist, and artist who describes herself as "preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersection of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture." Her fourteen publications include the Ravicka cycle, crime novel Morelia, essay collection Calamities, and three books of drawings, beginning with Prose Architectures.

#2616

Donika Kelly

#65655

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations .

#2617

Jennifer Ingleheart

Jennifer Ingleheart

#54308

Overall Influence

Jennifer Ingleheart is a British classical scholar, who is known for her work on Ovid, Classical reception, and the influence of Rome on the modern understanding of homosexuality. She is Professor of Latin at the University of Durham.

#2618

Michael York

#16933

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Michael York is an American religious studies scholar, based in the United Kingdom, who specializes in the study of pre-Christian European religion and its relation to contemporary Paganism. In 2003, he published Pagan Theology, in which he put forward the idea that the ancient pre-Christian and pre-Islamic religions of Eurasia, indigenous religions from across the globe, and contemporary Pagan faiths could all be constituted as forms of paganism. Michael York participated in TEDxLambeth 2019 as a speaker.

#2619

Choe Yun

#29049

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Choe Hyeon-mu , better known by her pen name Choe Yun , is a South Korean writer, translator, and professor of French literature. Life Choe was born in Seoul in 1953. She received her Ph.D. from Sogang University, graduating in 1978 and travelling to France, where she received the doctorate de 3ème Cycle de l'Université de Provence D.E.A. in Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles. She made her literary debut at the relatively late age of 40, with the publication of the short story collection There a Petal Silently Falls. After her debut, however, Choe was quickly recognized as one of the most importan...

#2620

Miroslav Marcovich

#29942

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Miroslav Marcovich was a Serbian-American philologist and university professor. Early life Marcovich was born in Belgrade, Serbia. He studied at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy graduating in 1942. In 1943, he served as the assistant to Georg Ostrogorsky, an expert in Byzantine studies. He fought with the Yugoslav Partisans under Josip Broz Tito during World War II between 1944 and 1946. In 1953, he traveled to India where he began working at Visva-Bharati University.

#2621

Jerry Stahl

#40614

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jerry Stahl is an American novelist and screenwriter. His works include the 1995 memoir of addiction Permanent Midnight. A 1998 film adaptation followed with Ben Stiller in the lead role. His works include memoirs, short stories, TV, films, and Novels. He wrote novels including Bad Sex On Speed , Happy Mutant Baby Pills: A Novel , and a short story Love Without: Stories .

#2622

Ferenc Barnás

#39723

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Ferenc Barnás is a Hungarian novelist. Biography Ferenc Barnás was born in 1959 in Debrecen, Hungary. From 1982 until 1988 he attended universities in Debrecen, Budapest, and Munich, graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in 1988 with MA degrees in Hungarian language and literature and Aesthetics. In 1991 he earned his doctoral degree at ELTE with a dissertation titled Hermann Hesse világképe . From 1988 until 1994, he taught literature, philosophy and aesthetics in secondary schools for the arts in Budapest. From 1990 until 1992 he worked as an instructor of music aesthetics at the Department of Cultural History, ELTE.

#2623

Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel

#74803

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel is an Italian philologist, linguist and scholar of Celtic studies. Biography Patrizia de Bernardo was born on 5 April 1953 in Milan, Italy, the daughter of Mario de Bernardo and Adriana Marra. She studied classics at the University of Milan, where she earned a PhD in 1977. Between 1977 and 1981, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Linguistics of the University of Bonn, then as a lecturer in Italian at the Romance Department until 1986. In 1984, she married the German linguist Reinhard Stempel. The following year, she earned a PhD summa cum laude...

#2624

William X. Kienzle

#54814

Overall Influence

1928 - 2001 (73 years)

William Xavier Kienzle was an American priest and later writer. Early career Kienzle was born in Detroit, Michigan. Ordained to the priesthood of the Catholic Church in 1954, William X. Kienzle spent twenty years as a parish priest. From 1962-74 he was editor-in-chief of the archdiocese's newspaper, Michigan Catholic, earning an award from Michigan's Knights of Columbus for general excellence in journalism and a Catholic Press Association acknowledgment for editorial writing. Kienzle left the priesthood in 1974.

#2625

Carolyn Rodgers

#74438

Overall Influence

1940 - 2010 (70 years)

Carolyn Marie Rodgers was a Chicago-based writer, particularly noted for her poetry. The youngest of four, Rodgers had two sisters and a brother, born to Clarence and Bazella Rodgers. Rodgers was also a founder of one of America's oldest and largest black presses, Third World Press. She got her start in the literary circuit as a young woman studying under Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks in the South Side of Chicago.

#2626

Akiko Kiso

#23368

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Akiko Kiso is a Japanese classical scholar who specialises in Greek literature. She is a professor emeritus at Osaka University. She is the first Japanese scholar to publish on Sophocles. Her work included reconstructions of the lost plays of Epigoni and Tereus. She also worked on comparative approaches to Greek tragedy with emphasis on Japanese classical drama.

#2627

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly

#76563

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. Biography She was born in New Jersey and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. She attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, graduating in 1989. She earned a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. After graduation, she taught English for a year in a coal mining city on the Czech/Polish border. She later earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, followed by the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. She taught poetry at Knox College for two years.

#2628

Roberta Seelinger Trites

#65914

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Roberta Seelinger Trites is a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Illinois State University, specializing in children's literature. Trites graduated from Texas A&M University in 1983, and earned a master's degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1985. She received her Ph.D. in 1991 from Baylor University with a dissertation entitled Twain's innocence, Clemens' experience : narrative inconsistencies in The Innocents Abroad under the direction of James R. LeMaster. She joined the Illinois State faculty as an assistant professor in 1991, and became Distinguished Professor ...

#2629

Nasir Abbas Nayyar

Nasir Abbas Nayyar

#62481

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Nasir Abbas Nayyar is a Pakistani Urdu language writer, critic, columnist and essayist. He has written books on poetry, literary theory and post colonial study of Urdu literature. He has produced some important books on structuralism and postmodernism and their influence on Urdu literature. A book on life and poetics of Majid Amjid is another his significant contribution. His most famous work is on Postcolonial Study of Urdu Literature published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, Pakistan titled Mabad Nau Abadiat and Urdu Adab ki Tashkeel e Jadid. His books on post colonialism proved groun...

#2630

Patricia Demers

#55010

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Dr. Patricia A. Demers, is a Canadian humanist and academic. She was the first female president of the Royal Society of Canada serving from 2005 to 2007. Early life and education Demers grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French and a Master of Arts degree from McMaster University. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa.

#2631

Makoto Ueda

#50073

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Makoto Ueda was a professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Stanford University. Education and career He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1961. In 2004–2005 he served as the honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento, California. He was given that honor "in recognition of Ueda’s many decades of academic writing about haiku and related genres and his leading translations of Japanese haiku." The library added that "Ueda has been our most consistently useful source for information on Japanese haiku, as well as our finest source for ...

#2632

Tony Magistrale

#57827

Overall Influence

Anthony Samuel Magistrale is a professor in English at the University of Vermont since 1983. He received a B.A. in 1974 from Allegheny College, and from the University of Pittsburgh an M.A. in 1976 and a PhD in 1981. He has written several books about Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe.

#2633

Arun Mitra

#30865

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Arun Mitra was an Indian poet of Bengali, who also translated French literature. Selected bibliography English translations of titles are literal in most instances. Transcription of Bengali titles try to represent, as much as possible, the Bengali vernacular and not Sanskrit pronunciation of words.

#2634

T. V. Venkatachala Sastry

T. V. Venkatachala Sastry

#66008

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Togere Venkatasubbasastry Venkatachala Sastry, commonly known as T. V. Venkatachala Shastry, is a Kannada-language writer, grammarian, critic, editor and lexicographer. He has authored in excess of 100 books, translations and has edited collections of essays, biographical sketches and felicitation volumes. Recipient of the Kannada Sahitya Akademi Award , Sastry is an authority on Kannada language grammar and its various facets ranging from the metre scale on which he has written extensively to the history of Kannada literature spanning two millennia.

#2635

Gunārs Saliņš

#66676

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Gunars Saliņš was a modernist poet within the Latvian lyric poetry tradition. He became a leading voice of the "Hell's Kitchen artists" - a Latvian emigre artist community in the U.S. which flourished in the 1950s and 60s, named after the neighborhood in New York where it originated. In his youth, he was inspired by the Latvian poet Aleksandrs Čaks and later by writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico García Lorca, and Dylan Thomas. Saliņš' imagery playfully explored transformational and metaphysical elements in this world and beyond, often incorporating his person...

#2636

José Luis Villacañas

José Luis Villacañas

#55163

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

José Luis Villacañas Berlanga is a Spanish political philosopher and historian of political ideas. Biography Born in Úbeda on 10 June 1955, he studied in the Colegio de la Sagrada Familia in his native town. He graduated in Philosophy in the University of Valencia in 1977; he later obtained his PhD in Philosophy with Realismo empírico e idealismo trascendental en la filosofía teórica de Kant. Los niveles de uso y de justificación in the same university. He has been full professor in the University of Murcia and, since 2009, in the Complutense University of Madrid .

#2637

Peter Whelan

#34641

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Peter Whelan was a British playwright. Whelan was born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, England. As a student from 1951–55 Whelan was an inspirational figure in the newly-formed Drama Society at the experimental University College of North Staffordshire, later Keele University. At Keele he met his wife Frangcon Price, who also excelled in drama as a student and in her later career. They married in 1958.

#2638

Nigel Smith

#63395

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Nigel Smith is a literature professor and scholar of the early modern world. He is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and Professor of English at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1999. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work, bridging literature and history, on 17th-century political and religious radicalism and the literature of the English Revolution, including the poetry and prose of John Milton and Andrew Marvell.

#2639

Kit Reed

#57574

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Kit Reed, also known as Lillian Hyde Craig or Lilian Craig Reed , was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.

#2640

Julie Kane

#63014

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Julie Kane is a contemporary American poet, scholar, and editor and was the Louisiana Poet Laureate for the 2011–2013 term. Although born in Massachusetts, Kane has lived in Louisiana for over three decades and writes about the region with the doubled consciousness of a non-native. Her work shows the influence of the Confessional poets; indeed, she was a student in Anne Sexton's graduate poetry seminar at Boston University at the time of Sexton's suicide. She is also associated with the New Formalist movement in contemporary poetry, although she has published free verse as well as formal verse.

#2641

Thomas Habinek

#70920

Overall Influence

1953 - 2019 (66 years)

Thomas Habinek was an American classical scholar. He specialized in Latin literature and Roman cultural history. Life and career Habinek received his AB in classics from Princeton University in 1975, and later completed his PhD in classical philology from Harvard University in 1981.

#2642

José Miguel Oviedo

#68488

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

José Miguel Oviedo was a Peruvian writer and literary critic, born in Lima. He received his doctorate from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in 1961, afterwards teaching at the same institution. Coming to the US in 1975, he taught at State University of New York, Indiana University, and UCLA. In 1988 he was appointed Trustee Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and remained there until his retirement and move to Emeritus Professor in 2000. He was the recipient of important scholarships such as the Rockefeller grant and the Guggenheim fellowship.

#2643

Nancy Lee

#62206

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Nancy Lee is a Welsh-born Canadian short story writer and novelist. Early life Born in Cardiff, Wales to parents of Chinese and Indian descent, she moved with her family to Vancouver, British Columbia, in childhood.

#2644

Clinton F. Larson

#58938

Overall Influence

1919 - 1994 (75 years)

Clinton Foster Larson was an American poet and playwright and the founding editor of BYU Studies. Larson was born in American Fork, Utah to Clinton Larson and his wife, the former Lillian Foster. Larson started college at the University of Utah at age 16 with plans to study medicine. However, he had an English class with Brewster Ghiselin who convinced him to that he had potential as a writer. He served as an LDS missionary in England and then in New England from 1939–41. In 1942 he married Naomi Barlow in the Salt Lake Temple. Around this time he entered the Army Air Corps in which he served during the duration of World War II.

#2645

Robert Foster

#57156

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

#2646

Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé

#7180

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Frances Moore Lappé is an American researcher and author in the field of food and democracy policy. She is the author of 20 books including the 2.5-million-copy selling 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, which the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes as "one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She has co-founded three organizations that explore the roots of hunger, poverty, and environmental crises, as well as solutions emerging worldwide through what she calls "living democracy". Her latest work is a report entitled Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies? with Max Boland and Rachel Madison.

#2647

Mary Carruthers

#33668

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Mary J. Carruthers is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature and Professor of English, emerita, at New York University. She also teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is formerly a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Illinois.

#2648

Stephen Ratcliffe

Stephen Ratcliffe

#68458

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Stephen Ratcliffe is a contemporary U.S. poet and critic who has published a number of books of poetry and three books of criticism. He lives in Bolinas, CA and is the publisher of Avenue B Press. He was the director of the Creative Writing program at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he has been an instructor for more than 25 years, and continues to teach Creative Writing and Literature courses there.

#2649

Bogdan Bogdanović

#18097

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Bogdan Bogdanović was a Serbian and Yugoslav architect, urbanist and essayist. He taught architecture at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture, where he also served as dean. Bogdanović wrote numerous articles about urbanism, especially about its mythic and symbolic aspects, some of which appeared in international journals such as El País, Die Zeit, and others. He was also involved in politics, as a Yugoslav Partisan in World War II, later as mayor of Belgrade. When Slobodan Milošević rose to power and nationalism gained ground in Yugoslavia, Bogdanović became a dissident.

#2650

Boris Fishman

#88038

Overall Influence

Boris Fishman is an American writer. He is the author of the novels Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo and A Replacement Life , and Savage Feast . Early life Fishman was born in Minsk, formerly the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and presently the capital of Belarus to a family of Jewish-Soviet origin. Fishman immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 with his family. He holds a BA in Russian literature from Princeton University and has written works of non-fiction and literary criticism.

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