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,

#3051

Christine Schutt

#73576

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Christine Schutt, an American novelist and short story writer, has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She received her BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her MFA from Columbia University. She is also a senior editor at NOON, the literary annual published by Diane Williams.

#3052

James Baker Hall

#76681

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

James Baker Hall was an American poet, novelist, photographer and teacher. Biography James Baker Hall was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1935. He was raised in a southern family of means and social standing, only to have a family scandal turn tragic when he was eight years old. This trauma, and its enduring consequence, would shape Hall's life work as an artist, which began when he took up photography at age eleven.

#3053

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

#45635

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Fiston Nasser Mwanza Mujila is a Congolese writer. He lives in Graz, Austria, where he teaches African literature. Biography Fiston Mwanza Mujila was the recipient of the gold medal for literature at the 2009 Francophone Games in Lebanon for his text "The Night".

#3054

Scott Bradfield

#72748

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Scott Michael Bradfield is an American essayist, critic and fiction writer who resides in London, England. He has taught at the University of California, the University of Connecticut and Kingston University and has reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement, Elle, The Observer, Vice and The Independent. He is best known, however, for his short stories, of which he has had four collections published. The 1998 film Luminous Motion, for which he wrote the screenplay, was based on his first novel, The History of Luminous Motion . Bradfield also operates a public youtube channel, where he uploads...

#3055

Estela Portillo-Trambley

#73953

Overall Influence

1936 - 1998 (62 years)

Estela Portillo-Trambley was a Chicana poet and playwright. She gained recognition through the publishing of her many plays, prose, and poetry depicting the lives and plight of Chicana women in male-dominated societies.

#3056

Reingard M. Nischik

#82257

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Reingard M. Nischik is a retired German university professor and literary scholar. Academic career Nischik studied English and North American Literature as well as Social Sciences at the University of Cologne , taking the First State Examination in 1977. She spent one year of her doctoral studies on a scholarship from the Canadian Government at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1978-79. In 1980 she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Cologne with a thesis on single and multiple plotting in English-language literatures. Between 1984 and 1989 Nischik conducted postdocto...

#3057

Edward Kitsis

#80709

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Edward Lawrence Kitsis is an American screenwriter and television producer, best known for his work with his writing partner Adam Horowitz on the popular ABC drama series Lost and Once Upon a Time. Early life and education Kitsis was born to a Jewish American family, the son of Arlene and Tybe Kitsis of Minneapolis. In 1993, he graduated with a B.A. in radio, television, and film from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he met Adam Horowitz in his "Introduction to Film" class.

#3058

Bruce Weigl

#55507

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Bruce Weigl is an American contemporary poet whose work engages profoundly with experience of both Americans and Vietnamese during and after the Vietnam war. Biography Weigl enlisted in the United States Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent three years in the service. He served in the Vietnam War from December 1967 to December 1968 and received the Bronze Star. When he returned to the United States, Weigl obtained a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a Master of Arts Degree in Writing/American and British Literature from the University of New Hampshire. From 1975-76, Weigl w...

#3059

Gina B. Nahai

#64484

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, Sunday's Silence and Caspian Rain. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She was also a lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

#3060

Jerzy Limon

#64659

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

Jerzy Limon was a Polish literary scholar, translator and writer specialising in Shakespearean and Elizabethan theatre. He initiated the creation of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre and served as its first director.

#3061

M. T. Vasudevan Nair

M. T. Vasudevan Nair

#46682

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Madath Thekkepaattu Vasudevan Nair , popularly known as M.T., is an Indian author, screenplay writer and film director. He is a prolific and versatile writer in modern Malayalam literature, and is one of the masters of post-Independence Indian literature. At the age of 20, as a chemistry undergraduate, he won the prize for the best short story in Malayalam at World Short Story Competition conducted by The New York Herald Tribune. His first major novel Naalukettu , written at the age of 23, won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958. His other novels include Manju , Kaalam , Asuravithu and Randamoozham .

#3062

Christopher Benfey

#44098

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Christopher Benfey is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Early life and education Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana. and attended The Putney School. His father was a German immigrant and his mother was from North Carolina. He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father, Otto Theodor Benfey, was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his B.A. at Guilford College. Benfey holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature ...

#3063

Natalia Tolstaya

#58274

Overall Influence

1943 - 2010 (67 years)

Natalia Nikitichna Tolstaya was a Russian writer and translator from the Tolstoy family. She was a granddaughter of writer Alexei Tolstoy and poet Mikhail Lozinsky, and sister of the writer Tatyana Tolstaya. She taught for many years at Saint Petersburg State University, from which she had also graduated. Tolstaya's specialty was Scandinavian languages, and she wrote her first stories in Swedish before turning to Russian. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of the Polar Star by the Swedish government for her efforts in fostering better relations between Russia and Sweden.

#3064

David Biespiel

#80695

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

David Biespiel is an American poet, critic, memoirist, and novelist born in 1964 and raised in the Meyerland section of Houston, Texas. He is the founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, Oregon and Poet-in-Residence at Oregon State University.

#3065

Joan Ferraté i Soler

#100279

Overall Influence

1924 - 2003 (79 years)

Joan Ferraté i Soler is a Spanish poet, critic and translator. He studied classical languages at the University of Barcelona, and lived abroad for a few years, teaching in Cuba and then in Canada. He served as the literary director of Seix Barral between 1970 and 1973. Ferrate has published widely across many genres: poetry, essays, biography, literary criticism. As a translator, he is best known for his translations of classical Greek poetry and of the complete poems of Cavafy. He won the 1979 Premio Crítica Serra d’Or for his volume of Cavafy translations, titled Vuitanta-vuit poemes.

#3066

Shane McCrae

#50740

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Shane McCrae is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image. McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 2017, in 2018 his collection In the Language of My Captor won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and in 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#3067

William Matthews

#55955

Overall Influence

1942 - 1997 (55 years)

William Procter Matthews III was an American poet and essayist. Life Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Matthews attended Berkshire School and later earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University as well as a master's from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#3068

John Guare

#38025

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. Early life He was raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. In 1949, his father suffered a heart attack and subsequently moved the family to Ellenville, New York while he recovered. His father's relatives lived there, making it an idyllic experience for him. Guare did not regularly attend school in Ellenville because the school's daily practices were not in keeping with the recommendations of the Catholic Church, causing his father to suspect the school had communist leanings.

#3069

Robert Fraser

#72723

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Robert Fraser FRSL is a British author and biographer. Early life Fraser was born on 10 May 1947 in Surbiton, Surrey, the second son of Harry MacKenzie Fraser, a London solicitor, and Ada Alice Gittins of Pontypool in the county of Monmouthshire. His brother was Malcolm Fraser , Emeritus Professor of Opera at the University of Cincinnati and co-founder of the Buxton Festival. At the age of eight, Robert Fraser won a choral scholarship to Winchester Cathedral, where he sang the daily services while studying at the Pilgrims School in the Close. Among his fellow choristers were the future newscaster Jon Snow and international tenor Julian Pike.

#3070

Herwig Görgemanns

#76054

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Herwig Görgemanns is a German classicist, former professor and emeritus of classical philology at Heidelberg University. In Würzburg he presented his dissertation in classical philology: contributions to the interpretation of Plato's Laws . With an analysis on Plutarch's dialogue "De facie in orbe luna" he habilitated in 1965 in Heidelberg. His teacher was Franz Dirlmeier. In 1967/1968 he was a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University. In 1972 Görgemanns became Professor for classical philology at Heidelberg University. In 1997 he retired.

#3071

Ron Rash

#38117

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Ron Rash is an American poet, short story writer and novelist and the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. Early life Rash was born on September 25, 1953, in Chester, South Carolina and grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Gardner-Webb University and Clemson University from which he holds a B.A. and M.A. in English, respectively.

#3072

Larry Brown

#75891

Overall Influence

1951 - 2004 (53 years)

#3073

Norman Jeffares

#60892

Overall Influence

1920 - 2005 (85 years)

#3074

Dale Peterson

#40068

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Dale Peterson is an American author who writes about scientific and natural history subjects. Early life and education Dale Alfred Peterson was born and raised in Corning, New York, a small town known for glass manufacturing in western New York State. He obtained his BA from the University of Rochester in 1967, then began his graduate studies at Stanford University, first in the writing program under Wallace Stegner, later in the English Department. Stanford awarded him a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1977.

#3075

Michael Stokes

#31419

Overall Influence

1933 - 2012 (79 years)

Michael Christopher Stokes was a British Professor of Greek. Childhood and education Michael Stokes was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, England. The family moved to Oxford in 1939. Stokes was educated at the Dragon School , Eton College, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first degree in classics.

#3076

Josh Schwartz

#53313

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Joshua Ian Schwartz is an American screenwriter and television producer. He is best known for creating and executive producing the Fox teen drama series The O.C. which ran for 4 seasons. Schwartz is also known for developing The CW's series Gossip Girl based on the book of the same name and for co-creating NBC's action-comedy-spy series, Chuck.

#3077

Tim Minear

#86061

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Timothy P. Minear is an American screenwriter and director. He has been nominated for four Emmy Awards for his role as an executive producer on American Horror Story and Feud. Life and career Minear was born in New York City, grew up in Whittier, California, and studied film at California State University, Long Beach.

#3078

Ronald Ribman

#63150

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Ronald Burt Ribman is an American author, poet and playwright. "As poet-playwright, Ronald Ribman has, throughout thirty years of writing, confronted the questions of what is man's and what is God's role, if any, in man's behavior. Suffusing his work are anger and satire, more often sorrow and haunting mystery, but always the mocking spirit of the grotesque behind the action, be it commonplace or exalted. Ribman's plays consistently reveal man's universe as abandoned by God but inextricably webbed into His rules, rules only hinted at as boundless in range and consequence. A corrosive absurdit...

#3079

Sofia Polyakova

Sofia Polyakova

#99202

Overall Influence

1914 - 1994 (80 years)

Sofia Polyakova was a Soviet classical philologist, Byzantine specialist and scholar of ancient Greek and Byzantine authors. She published the first collection of the works of the Russian poet Sophia Parnok and was the first scholar to unravel the relationship of Parnok and Marina Tsvetaeva. Her work on Parnok, revived scholarly interest in the poet.

#3080

Joel Hayward

#16849

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Joel Hayward is a New Zealand-born British scholar, academic and writer. He has been listed in the 2023 and 2024 editions of The World's 500 Most Influential Muslims. He has been the Dean of the Royal Air Force College Cranwell and is now the Chief Executive of the Cambridge Muslim College in the United Kingdom.

#3081

Astrid Cabral

#92857

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Astrid Cabral Félix de Sousa is a novelist, critic, environmentalist, and diplomat, and one of the most eminent contemporary poets in Brazil. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Through Water and Anteroom , along with many collections of essays and short fiction. Born in Manaus, Amazonasas, she has lived and worked as a diplomat in Beirut and Chicago and has taught in both the United States and Brazil. A mother of five, she currently resides in Rio de Janeiro, where she continues her work as a figure in the Amazonian cultural identity and recovery movement.

#3082

Thomas Cobb

#72985

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Thomas Cobb is an American novelist and author of the 1987 novel Crazy Heart which was adapted into the 2010 Academy Award winning 2009 film Crazy Heart. Life and career Raised in Tucson, Arizona, Cobb acquired an MFA from the University of Arizona. He earned a PhD from the University of Houston, where he studied fiction writing with Donald Barthelme. Barthelme also advised him on the writing of Crazy Heart.

#3083

Alejandra Costamagna

Alejandra Costamagna

#90473

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Alejandra Costamagna Crivelli is a Chilean writer and journalist. Biography Costamagna's parents arrived in Chile from Argentina in 1967. Alejandra Costamagna recalls that her first approach to writing was through journal entries that she began to make irregularly from age 10.

#3084

Delia Grigore

#71371

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Delia Grigore is a Romanian Romani writer, philologist, academic, and Romani rights activist. Biography Delia Grigore was born in Galați and grew up under the Romanian communist regime, when the Roma were not recognized as an ethnic group, but as foreign elements that must assimilate in Romanian society. During that time, her family hid their real identity so as to avoid discrimination. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989 she could reassert her Romani ethnicity and relearn the language. In 1990, she completed secondary studies at the Zoia Kosmodemianskaia High School in Bucharest, while in...

#3085

Brian Garfield

#37467

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Brian Francis Wynne Garfield was an Edgar Award-winning American novelist, historian and screenwriter. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he wrote his first published book at the age of eighteen. Garfield went on to author more than seventy books across a variety of genres, selling more than twenty million copies worldwide. Nineteen were made into films or TV shows. He is best known for Death Wish , which launched a lucrative franchise when it was adapted into the 1974 film of the same title.

#3086

Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas

#75643

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas is a Filipina poet, fiction writer and essayist. Personal life and education She was born to writers Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo in Dumaguete, Philippines. Torrevillas received a bachelor's degree in 1971, and a masters in 1978, both in creative writing. She also received a PhD in English Literature, all from Silliman University. She married Multimedia artist Lemuel Torrevillas and together they have a daughter, Lauren Maria Torrevillas Seamans .

#3087

Kaifi Azmi

#56578

Overall Influence

1919 - 2002 (83 years)

Kaifi Azmi was an Indian Urdu poet. He is remembered as the one who brought Urdu literature to Indian motion pictures. Together with Pirzada Qasim, Jaun Elia and others he participated in many memorable Mushaira gatherings of the twentieth century. His wife was theatre and film actress Shaukat Kaifi.

#3088

Thomas Glave

#57334

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Thomas Glave is an American author who has published widely and won numerous awards. He is also a university professor. Biography Born to Jamaican parents in The Bronx, New York, Glave grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. He earned a B.A. degree from Bowdoin College in 1993 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1998. He is a member of the English faculty at the Binghamton University, where he teaches creative writing and courses on Caribbean, African-American, black British, postcolonial, and L.G.B.T./queer literatures, among other topics. Glave possesses dual Jamaican and U.S.

#3089

Sam Hunt

#39299

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Samuel Percival Maitland Hunt is a New Zealand poet, especially known for his public performances of poetry, not only his own poems, but also the poems of many other poets. He has been referred to as New Zealand's best-known poet.

#3090

Bei Ling

#34813

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Bei Ling is a Chinese poet, and journal editor. He is usually associated with the Chinese misty poets. Life He came to the United States as an exchange student, he was a fellow at Brown University. After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, in 1992, he founded the literary journal .

#3091

Joan Triadú

#81886

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Joan Triadu i Font was a Catalan literary critic, academic and writer. A cultural and resistant anti-Francoist activist, he was involved in many important Catalan cultural projects in the twentieth century, including the magazines Serra d'Or and Ariel, the newspaper Avui and the association Òmnium Cultural. He was a pioneer in the teaching of Catalan language courses after the Spanish Civil War. As an educationalist, he was the general director of the Cultural Institute of the Centre of Catholic Influence, an institution that created the Thau Barcelona School in 1963 and the Thau Sant Cugat School in 1996.

#3092

Jeffrey Bell

#77193

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jeffrey Jackson Bell is an American writer and producer best known for his work on television. He began his career writing for The X-Files, where he stayed for three seasons, then became a writer/director/producer on Angel, becoming its showrunner for the final two seasons.

#3093

Beatriz Villacañas

Beatriz Villacañas

#75022

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Beatriz Villacañas is a poet, essayist and literary critic. Biography Beatriz Villacañas was born in Toledo . She obtained her PhD in English Philology at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she is professor of English and Irish literature. Daughter of Juan Antonio Villacañas. Corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and History of Toledo. She has lived in the UK where she taught Spanish. She has translated English and Irish poets such as: W. Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Michael Hartnett and Brendan Kennelly. Due to family and professional reasons, Ireland has long been her second country.

#3094

Kathy Acker

#65649

Overall Influence

1947 - 1997 (50 years)

Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.

#3095

Larry Heinemann

#75425

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Larry Curtis Heinemann was an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His published work – three novels and a memoir – is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War. Life Heinemann served a combat tour as a conscripted draftee in the Vietnam War from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division, and described himself as the most ordinary of soldiers.

#3096

Tony Abbott

#73522

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Tony Abbott is an American author of children's books. His most popular work is the book series The Secrets of Droon, which includes over 40 books. He has sold over 12 million copies of his books and they have been translated into several other languages, including Italian, Spanish, Korean, French, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, and Russian. He has also written Firegirl and The Copernicus Legacy.

#3097

Tony Earley

#74760

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tony Earley is an American novelist and short story writer. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, but grew up in North Carolina. His stories are often set in North Carolina. Earley studied English at Warren Wilson College and after graduation in 1983, he spent four years as a reporter in North Carolina, first as a general assignment reporter for The Thermal Belt News Journal in Columbus, and then as sports editor and feature writer at The Daily Courier in Forest City. Later he attended the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he received an MFA in creative writing. He quickly found succ...

#3098

Ruth Stone

#53506

Overall Influence

1915 - 2011 (96 years)

Ruth Stone was an award-winning American poet. Life and poetry Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia and lived there until age 6, when her family moved back to her parents' hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana. She went to college at the University of Illinois. Her first marriage was to John Clapp in 1935, and they had one daughter. Her second marriage was to professor and poet Walter Stone, in 1944, with whom she had two daughters. Walter Stone, who served in World War II, received a PhD from Harvard, and taught at University of Illinois, and then at Vassar College. Walter Stone committed suicide...

#3099

Florence Delay

#59685

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Florence Delay is a French academician and actress. Biography The daughter of Marie-Madeleine Carrez and Jean Delay, Delay studied at the Lycée Jean de La Fontaine and then the Sorbonne. In 1962, she played the title role of Joan of Arc in Procès de Jeanne d'Arc by Robert Bresson. At 30, she published her first novel Minuit sur les jeux. She was awarded the Prix Femina in 1983 for her novel Riche et légère. With Jacques Roubaud of the Oulipo, she compiled Graal Théâtre, a series of 10 plays about the Arthurian legend, from 1977 to 2005.

#3100

Richard Caddel

#67481

Overall Influence

1949 - 2003 (54 years)

Richard Caddel was a poet, publisher and editor who was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival. Biography Caddel was born in Bedford and grew up in Gillingham, Kent. He studied music at the University of Newcastle, but changed to English after meeting poets Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard. He helped Tom and Connie Pickard organise the seminal Morden Tower poetry readings.

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