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,

#3451

Joyelle McSweeney

#82028

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Toxicon & Arachne from Nightboat Books, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults from University of Michigan Press, Salamandrine: 8 gothics and Nylund, the Sarcographer , both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Percussion Grenade , Flet , The Commandrine and Other Poems , and The Red Bird , the latter four published by Fence Books. In addition to her books, she has published two plays; Dead Leaks, or, the Youths performed by Runaway Labs Theater in 2017, and The C...

#3452

Gary Barwin

#89377

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gary Barwin is a Canadian poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer and educator who lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He writes in a range of genres including poetry, fiction, visual poetry, music for live performers and computers, text and sound works, and writing for children and young adults. His music and writing have been presented in Canada, the US, Japan, and Europe.

#3453

Craig Dworkin

#75663

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Craig Dworkin is an American poet, critic, editor, and Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is founding senior editor of Eclipse, an online archive of 20th-century small-press writing and 21st-century born-digital publications.

#3454

Eugen Gomringer

Eugen Gomringer

#33610

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Eugen Gomringer is a Bolivian-born German concrete poet. He is head of the Institut für Konstruktive Kunst und Konkrete Poesie in Rehau, Germany. Between 1977 and 1990, he was a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the Arts Academy of the city of Düsseldorf. Gomringer writes in German, Spanish, French and English.

#3455

Jan Grue

#85083

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Jan Grue is a Norwegian writer, academic and actor. Career Born in Oslo on 28 March 1981, Grue graduated with a doctorate in linguistics in 2011. He was assigned to the University of Oslo from 2012, and a professor from 2016.

#3456

Diana Kleiner

#54572

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Diana Elizabeth Edelman Kleiner was an American art historian and educator. A scholar of Ancient Roman art and architecture, Kleiner was the Dunham Professor of the History of Art Emerita at Yale University.

#3457

Jonathan Nolan

#50396

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Jonathan Nolan is a British-American screenwriter, producer and director. He is the creator of the CBS science fiction series Person of Interest and of the HBO science-fiction/Western series Westworld .

#3458

Idra Novey

#83725

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Career Idra Novey is a novelist, poet, and translator. She is the author of the novels Take What You Need , a New York Times Notable Book, Ways to Disappear and Those Who Knew , which received the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize, the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Prize, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Those Who Knew was also a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a Best Book of the Year with over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, Kirkus Review, and O Magazine.

#3459

Christian Hawkey

#86362

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Christian Hawkey , is an American poet, translator, editor, activist, and educator. Life and work Hawkey was born in Hackensack, New Jersey. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Sonne from Ort, Ventrakl, Citizen Of, The Book of Funnels, and a number of chapbooks. His work has been translated into German Slovene, French, Swedish, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; and he translates several contemporary German poets including Daniel Falb, Sabine Scho and Steffen Popp, and Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger.

#3460

Mercedes Valdivieso

Mercedes Valdivieso

#71615

Overall Influence

1924 - 1993 (69 years)

Mercedes Valdivieso was a Chilean writer, known since her earliest writings for the subversive nature of her texts. She was born in Santiago, Chile. She first wrote La Brecha in 1961, which is considered to be a landmark feminist Latin-American novel. This novel caused dismay from the reactionary segment of society and loud applause from the critics and is considered a revolutionary departure from the traditional treatment of the feminine role in marriage. Breakthrough is a novel that ends with the heroine's awareness that she didn't really need to depend upon a man in order to lead a fulfilling life.

#3461

Scott Snyder

#68597

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Scott Snyder is an American author. He is known for his 2006 short story collection Voodoo Heart, and his work for DC Comics, including series such as American Vampire, Detective Comics, a highly acclaimed run on Batman, Swamp Thing, and Justice League as well as the company-wide crossover storylines "Dark Nights: Metal" and "Dark Nights: Death Metal." He has also written creator-owned comics published through Image Comics, including Wytches, Undiscovered Country, and Nocterra.

#3462

Fiona Macintosh

#80308

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception at the University of Oxford, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Curator of the Ioannou Centre, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford.

#3463

Jeffrey Moore

#50993

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jeffrey Moore is a Canadian writer, translator and educator currently living in Val-Morin in the Quebec Laurentians. Moore was born in Montreal, and educated at the University of Toronto, BA, the Sorbonne and the University of Ottawa, MA.

#3464

Helen King

#17413

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Helen King is a British classical scholar and advocate for the medical humanities. She is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University. She was previously Professor of the History of Classical Medicine and Head of the Department of Classics at the University of Reading.

#3465

Gerry Smyth

#49684

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Gerry Smyth is an academic, musician, actor and playwright born in Dublin, Ireland. He works in the Department of English at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is Professor of Irish Cultural History. His early publications were mainly in the field of Irish literature, although since 2002 he has also written widely on the subject of Irish music.

#3466

Kenneth Fields

#91936

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Kenneth Fields is an American poet and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University, where he has been on faculty since 1967. Fields teaches the Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop for the Stanford Writing Fellows.

#3467

Louise Murphy

#77141

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Louise Murphy was born in 1943 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her ethnicity is Scottish, Irish, and German. Murphy's hobbies include playing the flute, classical music, and the opera. Ms. Murphy began writing when she was five because as she puts it, “I wrote because of the joy of holding in my hand something that I had made, something that could never disappear again the way all my thoughts did”. Louise Murphy also loved reading and still today tells her students to read anything possible.

#3468

Gloria Bird

#95950

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Gloria Bird is a Native American poet, essayist, teacher and a member of the Spokane Tribe in Washington State. Gloria spreads her work not only by writing for her but all Native American people. In her work, Bird’s main priority is to question and diminish harmful stereotypes placed on Native American people. Her focus in on educating about her community in accurate scripts without exploiting the culture.

#3469

Khurshid Rizvi

#40918

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Khurshid Rizvi is a Pakistani scholar of languages and an Urdu poet. Early life Rizvi was born on 8 December 1940 in Amroha, Muradabad in a Sunni Sadaat family. As a young child, he immigrated with his family to Montgomery in 1948 , Punjab . He studied at Islamia High School, and Government High School & finally graduated from Government College, Montgomery in 1959. He moved to the University Oriental College Lahore for higher studies and earned his MA in Arabic in 1961. Later, he got his Ph.D. in Arabic from the same university in 1981.

#3470

Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy

#77762

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers-Newark.

#3471

Viktor Zhivov

#59373

Overall Influence

1945 - 2013 (68 years)

Viktor Markovich Zhivov was a Russian and American philologist, specializing on the history of Russian language. Zhivov was a professor at the Russian Language Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and at the Department of Slavic and Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3472

Alicia Kozameh

#77809

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Alicia Kozameh is an Argentine novelist, short story writer and poet, and Professor in the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, at Chapman University in Southern California. Kozameh has published seven novels, a collection of short stories and six books of poetry. She has also edited two anthologies and wrote a book in collaboration with other authors, former political prisoners from the last Argentine military dictatorship in her country.

#3473

Endel Nirk

#91779

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

Endel Nirk was an Estonian literary scientist, critic and writer. In 1949, he graduated from Tartu State University in Estonian philology. After graduating he worked at the editorial board of the newspaper Sirp ja Vasar. Since 1953 he worked at Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences' Language and Literature Institute.

#3474

Richard Holeton

#73367

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Richard Holeton is an American writer and higher-education administrator. Holeton's creative works are foundational in the hypertext and electronic literature genres. As a writer, his most notable work is the hypertext novel Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, which has been recognized as an important early work of electronic literature and is included in the hypertext canon.

#3475

Erika J. Waters

#38972

Overall Influence

Erika J. Waters is an Americann editor, academic and critic. She was the founding editor of the literary journal The Caribbean Writer in 1986 and has published critical works on Caribbean literature and on women's literature, notably on writers including Caryl Phillips, Una Marson and Jean Rhys.

#3476

Robert McKee

#62100

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Robert McKee is an author, lecturer and story consultant who is known for his "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California. McKee is the author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Dialogue: the Art of Verbal Action for Stage, Page and Screen, Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World and Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen. McKee also has the blog and online writers' resource "Storylogue".

#3477

David H. Porter

David H. Porter

#53625

Overall Influence

1935 - 2016 (81 years)

David Hugh Porter was an American academic and the fifth president of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, serving from 1987 to 1999. Porter was a professor and lecturer of classics and music, starting his career at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where he taught from 1962 to 1987.

#3478

Greg Delanty

#50583

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Greg Delanty is an Irish poet. An issue of the British magazine, Agenda, was dedicated to him. Early life and education Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland, and is generally placed in the Irish tradition, though he is also considered a Vermont and US poet appearing in various US anthologies. He lives for most of the year in America, where he is the poet in residence at Saint Michael's College, Vermont. He became an American citizen in 1994, retaining his Irish citizenship. He is a past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.

#3479

Patricia Meyer Spacks

#55973

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Patricia Ann Meyer Spacks is an American literary scholar. She is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia and former President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Modern Language Association. She specializes in eighteenth-century English Literature and also writes cultural criticism on varied subjects such as boredom, gossip, and feminism. "With remarkable breadth of reference, Spacks has written more extensively than any other feminist critic on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English narrative".

#3480

Sukanta Chaudhuri

Sukanta Chaudhuri

#41262

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sukanta Chaudhuri is an Indian literary scholar, now Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and the University of Oxford. He taught at Presidency College from January 1973 to December 1991 and at Jadavpur University thereafter till his retirement in June 2010. At Jadavpur, he was founding Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, a pioneering centre of digital humanities in India. His chief fields of study are the English and European Renaissance, translation, textual studies and digital humanities. He has held visiting ...

#3481

Jorma Taccone

#74055

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Jorma Christopher Taccone is an American actor, comedian, writer, director, producer, and musician. He is one-third of the sketch comedy troupe The Lonely Island, with childhood friends Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer. In 2010, Taccone co-wrote and directed the SNL spinoff film MacGruber, which was his directorial debut. He directed his second feature alongside Schaffer, the musical comedy Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which he also co-wrote and co-starred in with Schaffer and Samberg.

#3482

Isidore Okpewho

#39439

Overall Influence

1941 - 2016 (75 years)

Isidore Okpewho, NNOM , was a Nigerian novelist and critic. He won the 1976 African Arts Prize for Literature, and the 1993 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book Africa. Also a classicist and scholar, he has been described as one of the most brilliant men of his generation and one of Nigeria's most iconic literary figures. His academic career took him to the US, where he lived with his wife and four children since 1991 until his death, in Binghamton, New York. According to Professor G. G. Darah of the Nigerian Oral Literature Association , Okpewho "will be best remembered for his original contribution to the discourse of oral literature and epics.

#3483

Alfred Arteaga

#57461

Overall Influence

1950 - 2008 (58 years)

Alfred Arteaga was a Mexican-American poet, writer, and scholar. He was noted as an important poet of the Chicano Movement, who also contributed to the foundations postcolonial and ethnic studies. Themes He envisioned Chicano identity as a product of hybridity. For Arteaga, part of the Chicano worldview is seeing the world beyond binaries, or as speaking from spaces of overlapping nature that are more ambiguous than the nation state.

#3484

John King

#50573

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

John King is an English writer best known for his novels which, for the most part, deal in the more rebellious elements driving the country's culture. His stories carry strong social and political undercurrents, and his work has been widely translated abroad. He has written articles and reviews for alternative and mainstream publications, edits the fiction journal Verbal, and is the co-owner of the London Books publishing house.

#3485

Sally Shuttleworth

#29666

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sally Ann Shuttleworth is a British academic specialising in Victorian literature. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. From 2006 to 2011, she was Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford. From 2014 to 2019 she was a principal investigator on the Diseases of Modern Life project, a multidisciplinary research initiative exploring nineteenth century scientific and cultural ideas related to stress and information overload.

#3486

Gina Gionfriddo

#58349

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Gina Gionfriddo is an American playwright and television writer. Her plays Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn were finalists for the 2009 and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. She has written for the television series Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, FBI: Most Wanted, The Alienist, and House of Cards.

#3487

Nicolae Manolescu

#83970

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Nicolae Manolescu is a Romanian literary critic. As an editor of România Literară literary magazine, he has reached a record in reviewing books for almost 30 years. Elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1997, he was upgraded to titular member in 2013.

#3488

Ana Merino

#57413

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Ana Merino is a Spanish poet. Biography Ana Merino was born in Madrid in 1971, daughter of José María Merino. Ana Merino was between 2004 and 2009 an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Dartmouth College. She left Dartmouth in 2009 to create and develop the Spanish MFA at the University of Iowa that was inaugurated on 2011. She is a Full Professor of Spanish Creative Writing and Cultural Studies at The University of Iowa and was the founder director of their MFA in Spanish Creative Writing between 2011 and 2018. She has published two scholarly books on comics: El Comic Hispánico ,Diez ensayos p...

#3489

Sylvia Huot

#83121

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Sylvia Huot is a professor of Medieval French Literature at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Pembroke College. She is the author of several internationally renowned books on Medieval French Literature and the leading expert on the manuscripts of Roman de la Rose, having published extensively on its iconography.

#3490

Frank Galati

#79983

Overall Influence

1943 - 2023 (80 years)

Frank Joseph Galati was an American director, writer, and actor. He was a member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company and an associate director at Goodman Theatre. He taught at Northwestern University for many years.

#3491

Donald Finkel

#59567

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

Donald Alexander Finkel was an American poet best known for his unorthodox styles and "curious juxtapositions". Life Finkel was born in New York City on October 21, 1929. He grew up in the Bronx, and aspired to be a sculptor as a youth. He attended the University of Chicago, only to be expelled for smoking marijuana. Finkel attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1952. He earned a master's degree in English from Columbia in 1953.

#3492

Alicia Partnoy

#24665

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Alicia Mabel Partnoy is a human rights activist, poet, college professor, and translator. After Argentinian President Juan Perón died, the students from the left of the Peronist political party organized with fervor within the country's universities and, along with workers, were persecuted and imprisoned. There was a military coup in 1976 and people began to disappear. Partnoy was one of those who suffered through the ordeals of becoming a political prisoner. She became an activist of the Peronist Youth Movement while attending Southern National University .

#3493

David Ferry

#39285

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

David Russell Ferry was an American poet, translator, and educator. He published eight collections of his poetry and a volume of literary criticism. He won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2012 collection Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations.

#3494

Barbara Goff

#82815

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Barbara Elizabeth Goff is a Classics Professor at the University of Reading. She specialises in Greek tragedy and its reception; women in antiquity; postcolonial classics and reception of Greek political thought.

#3495

Barry McCrea

#64242

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Barry McCrea is an Irish writer and academic. He grew up in Dalkey, County Dublin, and was educated at Gonzaga College, and Trinity College, Dublin where he studied French and Spanish literature. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004. He taught Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was appointed full professor in 2012. He holds a chair in literature at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches at its campuses in Dublin and Rome.

#3496

Bob Hicok

#88901

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Bob Hicok is an American poet. Life Hicok is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech, where he has taught since 2003 with the exception of the 2015-2016 academic year when he taught at Purdue as a full-time Associate Professor. He subsequently returned to Virginia Tech where he was promoted to full professor. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business. He formerly taught at Western Michigan University.

#3497

Russell Soaba

#100270

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Russell Soaba is a writer from Papua New Guinea, who was educated there, in Australia and in the United States at Brown University. Soaba is one of Papua New Guinea's most prolific writers. He now also works as an editor at Anuki Country Press and a lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea.

#3498

Zoé Jiménez Corretjer

Zoé Jiménez Corretjer

#72161

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Zoé Jiménez Corretjer is an author from Puerto Rico. She is a professor in the Department of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. Life Jiménez Corretjer born in San Juan, Puerto Rico has a Doctorate Degree from Temple University in Philadelphia and has taken several professional seminars at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain, and at the Ateneo de Madrid. Since 1996, she has taught literature and humanities at the University of Puerto Rico. She is the director of The Journal of Humanistic Studies and Literature from her department. Dr. Jiménez contributes as External Ev...

#3499

Edward Balcerzan

#34553

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Edward Balcerzan is a Polish literary critic, poet, prose writer, and translator. Awards 1971 – nagroda czasopisma "Odra" za książkę Oprócz głosu. Szkice krytycznoliterackie. PIW, Warszawa 19711989 – nagroda Fundacji Literatury za książkę Poezja polska w latach 1939–1965, cz. II: Ideologie artystyczne. WSiP, Warszawa 19881992 — nagroda Fundacji A. Jurzykowskiego w Nowym Jorku w dziedzinie teorii literatury za Przygody człowieka książkowego. . PEN, Warszawa 19901998 – nagroda Polskiego PEN Clubu za Śmiech pokoleń – płacz pokoleń. Universitas, Kraków 19971998 – nagroda "Literatury na Świecie" za książkę Literatura z literatury .

#3500

Leslie Dick

#78431

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Leslie Dick is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, based in Los Angeles. Her work explores feminist themes, especially in relation to queer theory and Lacanian discourse. Dick has published two novels, a collection of short stories, and several critical essays. She is a member of the editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, a Los Angeles-based, internationally distributed journal of art. She has been faculty at the California Institute of the Arts since 1992, and is currently co-director of the CalArts Program in Art. Since 2012 she has also held a position as a c...

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