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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#3151

M.L. Liebler

#61512

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

M.L. Liebler is the author and editor of several books of poetry including Brooding in the Heartlands. He is a senior lecturer at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. Selected writings Working Words:Punching the Clock & Kicking Out the Jams, Coffee House Press Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream, Wayne State University Press Stripping the Adult Century Bare, Burning Cities Press Deliver Me, Ridgeway Press Breaking the Voodoo, Parkville Press

#3152

Nikola Moravčević

#58029

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Nikola Moravčević is a Serbian-American literary historian, literary critic, academic and novelist. Born and educated in Yugoslavia, he moved to the United States in 1955, and made an academic career, chiefly at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in the field of Slavic Studies and literary history. Since 1990s, he published several historical novels in Serbian and English. He lives in Chicago.

#3153

Andrew Crozier

#62748

Overall Influence

1943 - 2008 (65 years)

Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival. Life Crozier was educated at Dulwich College, and later Christ's College, Cambridge. His 1976 book Pleats won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, awarded jointly that year with Lee Harwood. He was co-editor of the important Revival magazine The English Intelligencer and for many years ran Ferry Press, an independent poetry publisher that issued books by Anthony Barnett, David Chaloner, Douglas Oliver, J. H. Prynne, Peter Riley, and others. With Tim Longville he edited the influential anthology A Various Art. He also edited the poems of Carl Rakosi and John Rodker.

#3154

Suzette Mayr

#78832

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Suzette Mayr is a Canadian novelist who has written five critically acclaimed novels. Currently a professor at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Arts, Mayr's works have both won and been nominated for several literary awards.

#3155

Czesław Hernas

#83683

Overall Influence

1928 - 2003 (75 years)

Czesław Hernas was a Polish philologist and folklorist, professor at the University of Wrocław. Director of the Institute of Polish Philology , member of the Wroclaw Citizen's Committee of Solidarity

#3156

Saskia Hamilton

#74944

Overall Influence

1967 - 2023 (56 years)

Maria Saskia Hamilton was an American poet, editor, and professor and university administrator at Barnard College. She published four collections of poetry, with a fifth collection, All Souls, set to be posthumously published in September 2023. Her academic focus was largely on the American poet Robert Lowell; she edited several collections of the writings and personal correspondence of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Elizabeth Bishop. Additionally, she served as the director of literary programs at the Lannan Foundation, as the Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard Col...

#3157

Gilles Vigneault

#33428

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Gilles Vigneault is a Canadian poet, publisher, singer-songwriter, and Quebec nationalist and sovereigntist. Two of his songs are considered by many to be Quebec's unofficial anthems: "Mon pays" and "Gens du pays", and his line Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver became a proverb in Quebec. Vigneault is a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec, Knight of the Legion of Honour, and Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

#3158

Slobodan Selenić

Slobodan Selenić

#62765

Overall Influence

1933 - 1995 (62 years)

Slobodan Selenić was a Serbian writer, literary critic, dramatist, academic and university professor of 20th century literature. One of the main themes in his work is the destruction of the civic class from Kingdom of Yugoslavia, its values and later destruction with the formation of the second Yugoslavia. He became the director of Avala Film at the age of 29. The Slobodan Selenić Award is annually awarded in his honour for the best graduate work at his alma mater.

#3159

Michael Ferrier

Michael Ferrier

#45186

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Michaël Ferrier is a French writer, novelist and essayist, living in Tokyo. Biography Ferrier was born in Strasbourg. He comes from a French family and also from Mauritian Creole people and Réunion Creole people, with Indian, French, Malagasy and British origins. After a nomadic childhood , he gained entrance to the highly selective École Normale Supérieure, at the age of 18, where he passed the agrégation in literature and graduated from the University of Paris. He is currently Professor at Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, and director of the Research Group Figures de l'Etranger .

#3160

Ralph Salisbury

#86961

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Ralph James Salisbury was an American poet. His poem "In the Children's Museum in Nashville" was published in The New Yorker in 1960, making him one of the first self-identified Native American poets to receive national attention. His autobiography So Far, So Good won the 2012 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His book Light from a Bullet Hole: Poems New and Selected was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

#3161

Jocelyn Harris

#45538

Overall Influence

Jocelyn Harris is an academic known for her studies of Jane Austen's creative process, and for her promotion of the teaching and study of women's literature at the University of Otago. Harris was a founding member of the Dunedin Collective for Woman, and from 1970 until 2005 taught at the University of Otago, of which she remains Professor Emerita.

#3162

Alex Garland

#45938

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Alexander Medawar Garland is an English novelist and filmmaker. He rose to prominence with his novel The Beach . He subsequently received praise for writing the Danny Boyle films 28 Days Later and Sunshine , as well as Never Let Me Go and Dredd . In video games, he co-wrote Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and served as a story supervisor on DmC: Devil May Cry .

#3163

William V. Spanos

#49960

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

William Vaios Spanos was a Heideggerian literary critic. Spanos was a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York; he was a founder and editor of the critical journal boundary 2. His work draws heavily on the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger, and while it does show the influence of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Spanos's vocabulary and concepts remain closer to Heidegger's Destruktion of metaphysics than to its philosophical successors.

#3164

Lee Moon-jae

#97285

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Lee Moon-jae is a South Korean poet and professor. He is described as a poet who expresses "environmental imagination" in his literature. He also critiques contemporary literature, and currently writes a column in the . He is a creative writing professor at Kyung Hee University.

#3165

Mathias Clasen

#61876

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Mathias Clasen is a Danish scholar of horror fiction and recreational fear and the author/editor of several non-fiction books on the horror genre as well as two horror anthologies. He is associate professor in literature and media at Aarhus University, his alma mater, from where he received his PhD in 2012. He is also director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, a research unit dedicated to the scientific study of recreational fear and horror.

#3166

Mahmoud Saeed

#56938

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Mahmoud Saeed is an Iraqi-born American novelist. Born in Mosul, Saeed has written more than twenty novels and short story collections, and hundreds of articles. He started writing short stories at an early age. He wrote an award-winning short story in the Newspaper "Fata Al-Iraq, Newspaper" in 1956. He published a collection of short stories, Port Saeed and other stories, in 1957. In 1963, the government after 1963 coup destroyed his two novel manuscripts one under review, "The Old Case" and "The Strike".

#3167

Lars Iyer

#61731

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Lars Iyer is a British novelist and philosopher of Indian/Danish parentage. He is best known for a trilogy of short novels: Spurious , Dogma , and Exodus , all published by Melville House. Iyer has been shortlisted for both the Believer Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize . He has also written and published two books about Maurice Blanchot.

#3168

Ann Douglas

#29535

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ann Douglas is an American literary historian who specializes in intellectual history. She is the Parr Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Biography Douglas attended Milton Academy, received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and B.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She taught at Princeton University from 1970 to 1974 and was the first woman to teach in Princeton's English department and the first woman to be offered assistant professorship at Harvard. She then joined Columbia's faculty. Her research interests include 20th-century American intellectual and cultural history.

#3169

Speer Morgan

#85371

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Speer Morgan is an American novelist, short story writer, and editor. Life His parents were Charles Donald and Betty Morgan. Morgan attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1966, as well as the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he received a BA in 1968. He received a PhD in 1972 from Stanford University.

#3170

Amanda Cockrell

#59011

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Amanda Cockrell is a professor of English at Hollins University, specializing in children's literature and creative writing. She is the author of a number of historical novels for adults, some written under her own name and some under the pseudonym Damion Hunter. She has written novels about the Romans and about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her first young adult novel, What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay, was published in 2011 and was named one of the best children's books of the year by The Boston Globe.

#3171

Simon Swain

#38513

Overall Influence

Simon Charles Robert Swain, FBA, is a classicist and academic. Since 2000, he has been Professor of Classics at the University of Warwick, where he has also been Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts and Social Sciences since 2014.

#3172

Dave Smith

#49288

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Dave Smith is an American poet, writer, critic, editor, and educator. Biography Dave Smith holds BA, MA, and PhD degrees in English from the University of Virginia, Southern Illinois University, and Ohio University, respectively. He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, and has also published works of prose and edited collections. Smith has taught literature and creative writing at numerous institutions of higher education, including the University of Utah, the University of Florida, Virginia Commonwealth University, Louisiana State University, and Johns Hopkins University. Fo...

#3173

Peter Iden

#38526

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Peter Iden is a German theater critic and art critic. Biography Iden was born in Meseritz, now Międzyrzecz, Poland. His family fled the Red Army to the British-occupied area and settled in Lauenburg on the Elbe. There, Iden grew up and attended the humanist branch of the Johanneum high school in Lüneburg. From 1955, he spent two years in California. After moving to Frankfurt am Main and graduating from the Helmholtz School in Frankfurt in 1958, Iden studied philosophy, history and theater at Goethe University in Frankfurt. He studied with Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Afterwards he continued his studies at the University of Vienna.

#3174

Kathi Appelt

#92689

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kathi Appelt is an American author of more than forty books for children and young adults. She won the annual PEN USA award for Children's Literature recognizing The Underneath . Biography Kathi Appelt was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and grew up in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Texas A&M University and lives in College Station, Texas.

#3175

Kirsty Gunn

#92271

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Kirsty Gunn is a novelist and writer of short stories. Her stories include "Rain", which led to the 2001 film of the same name, directed by Christine Jeffs and also the 2001 ballet by the Rosas Company, set to "Music for Eighteen Musicians" a 1976 score by Steve Reich.

#3176

Robert Dana

#67133

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Robert Dana was an American poet, who taught writing and English literature at Cornell College and many other schools, revived The North American Review and served as its editor during the years 1964–1968, and was the poet laureate for the State of Iowa from 2004 to 2008.

#3177

Douglas Unger

#53105

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Douglas Arthur Unger is an American novelist. Life and work Unger was born in Moscow, Idaho. He received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1973 and a MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977.

#3178

Michael North

#55972

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Michael North is an American literary critic and a professor in the department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Background North received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1973 and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1980. North taught at the College of William and Mary before joining the University of California, Los Angeles in 1991.

#3179

Hugh Ogden

#83345

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Hugh Ogden was an American poet and educator. Ogden was a 1959 graduate of Haverford College. Ogden received his master’s degree from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He taught at Michigan and then for four decades at Trinity College in Hartford. While at Trinity, Ogden co-founded the College’s creative writing program in 1968.

#3180

Sam Ragan

#63106

Overall Influence

1915 - 1996 (81 years)

Samuel Talmadge Ragan was an American journalist, author, poet, and arts advocate from North Carolina. Early life and education Sam Ragan was born in Berea, North Carolina, an unincorporated community in Granville County. In 1936, he graduated from Atlantic Christian College, in Wilson, North Carolina.

#3181

Luca Serianni

#37819

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

Luca Serianni was an Italian linguist and philologist. Biography Serianni was professor of Italian language at Sapienza Università di Roma. A student of Arrigo Castellani’s, he conducted research about Italian linguistic history from the Middle Ages to the present day.

#3182

Marvin Carlson

#58919

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Marvin Albert Carlson is an American theatrologist, currently the Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and also previously the Walker-Ames Professor at University of Washington. A largely collected author, his work covers mainly the history of theatre in Europe from the 18th to the 20th century.

#3183

Stephen Barber

#36486

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Stephen Barber is a professor at Kingston University and a writer on urban culture, experiment in film and Japanese culture. Barber has been a professor at Kingston University since 2002, and is currently a Research Professor in the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. He has previously worked at such institutions as the California Institute of the Arts, University of Tokyo, Berlin University of the Arts, and Sussex University. He has a PhD from the University of London, and has lived in Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, Vienna and London. He has...

#3184

Vievee Francis

#79117

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Vievee Elaure Francis is an American poet. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. Vievee is the author of three collections of the poetry, the third of which, Forest Primeval, won the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts poetry award.

#3185

Max Pfister

#93683

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Max Pfister was a Swiss Romance studies scholar and linguist. He is the initiator of the LEI , which deals with Italian and German research of etymology and dialectology of the Italian language, now directed together with Wolfgang Schweickard .

#3186

Emily Fridlund

#53035

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Emily Fridlund is an author and academic best known for her novel History of Wolves. Personal life Fridlund grew up in Edina, Minnesota. She has a bachelor's degree from Principia College in Illinois, an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.

#3187

MacDonald P. Jackson

#64470

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

MacDonald Pairman Jackson FNZAH is a New Zealand scholar of English literature. Most of his work is on English Renaissance drama; he specialises in authorship attribution. He is also internationally recognised for his work on Shakespeare's texts.

#3188

Dan Jurgens

#53058

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Dan Jurgens is an American comic book writer and artist. He is known for his work on the DC comic book storyline "The Death of Superman" and for creating characters such as Doomsday, Hank Henshaw, Jon Kent, and Booster Gold. Jurgens had a lengthy run on the Superman comic books including The Adventures of Superman, Superman vol. 2 and Action Comics. At Marvel, Jurgens worked on series such as Captain America, The Sensational Spider-Man and was the writer on Thor for six years. He also had a brief run as writer and artist on Solar for Valiant Comics in 1995.

#3189

Stephen Harrison

#86877

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Stephen Harrison is a British classicist and a professor of Latin at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the poetry of Virgil and Horace. Life and career Having read Classics at Balliol College, Harrison has taught Latin literature at the University of Oxford since 1987. In addition, he has been an occasional visiting professor at the universities of Copenhagen and Trondheim. While his research focuses on the poetry of Virgil and Horace, he has also written on the reception of classical literature and the Roman novel. He is a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

#3190

Darcey Steinke

#68348

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Darcey Steinke is an American author and educator. She has written five novels: Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and Milk, Easter Everywhere, and Sister Golden Hair. Steinke has also served as a lecturer at Princeton University, the American University of Paris, New School University, Barnard College, the University of Mississippi, and Columbia University.

#3191

Alberto Ríos

#50592

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Alberto Álvaro Ríos is a US academic and writer who is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. Rios was named Arizona's first state poet laureate in August 2013, a position he continues to hold.

#3192

Ron Loewinsohn

#63800

Overall Influence

1937 - 2014 (77 years)

Ronald William Loewinsohn was an American poet and novelist who was associated with the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance since his inclusion in Donald Allen's 1960 poetry anthology, The New American Poetry 1945–1960. He was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3193

S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman

#56544

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

S. Bear Bergman is an American author, poet, playwright, and theater artist. He is a trans man, and his gender identity is a main focus of his artwork. Biography Bergman, who was educated at Concord Academy, was one of the founders of the first Gay–straight alliance and a member of the Governor of Massachusetts' Safe Schools Commission for LGBT youth. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Hampshire College in 1996.

#3194

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

#78149

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian poet and writer and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University. She is a Liberian Civil War survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991, and the author of six books of poetry and a children's book, as well as an anthology editor. Jabbeh Wesley also founded, chairs, and teaches in the educational/humanitarian organization Young Scholars of Liberia.

#3195

Sergio Rossetti Morosini

Sergio Rossetti Morosini

#11051

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Sergio Rossetti Morosini is a Brazilian-American Scholar, artist and author of Venetian extraction who served as Brazil's Cultural attaché in New Orleans and is dedicated to preserving the Atlantic Forest and restoring the art in stone of New York City Landmarks.

#3196

Carol Iannone

#95483

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Carol Iannone is a conservative writer and literary critic. She first made her mark as a strong critic of feminism in articles such as "The Barbarism of Feminist Scholarship." She has published extensively in Commentary, National Review, First Things, Modern Age, The American Conservative, Academic Questions, and other conservative and neoconservative publications.

#3197

Pippin Parker

#67991

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Pippin Parker is an American playwright and theatre director. He is Dean of The New School for Drama. Career Parker is an American playwright and director. He is the former Dean of the School of Writing, Acting, and Directing program at The New School. He is one of the co-founding members of Naked Angels, a theater company in New York City where he was Artistic Director. Along with Nicole Burdette, Frank Pugliese and Kenneth Lonergan, he is a member of a writer's group for dramatic and fiction authors.

#3198

Roy Scranton

#80756

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Roy Scranton is an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His essays, journalism, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Dissent, LIT, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boston Review. His first book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene was published by City Lights. His novel War Porn was released by Soho Press in August 2016. It was called "One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years" by Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. He co-edited Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He currently teaches at the ...

#3199

Nigel Krauth

#78294

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Nigel Krauth is an Australian novelist and academic. he is a professor at Griffith University. He has published several novels and co-authored a number of young adult works. Early life and education Krauth was born in Cremorne, New South Wales in 1949.

#3200

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#78535

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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