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.

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#3501

Carlos Ezquerra

Carlos Ezquerra

#62389

Overall Influence

1947 - 2018 (71 years)

Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra was a Spanish comics artist who worked mainly in British comics. He is best known as the co-creator of Judge Dredd. Biography Early work Born in Ibdes, province of Zaragoza, Aragon, Ezquerra started his career drawing westerns and war stories for Spanish publishers. In 1973, he got work in the UK market through agent Barry Coker, drawing for girls' romance titles such as Valentine and Mirabelle, as well as westerns for Thorpe & Porter's Pocket Western Library, and a variety of adventure strips for D. C. Thomson & Co.'s The Wizard. The UK was a popular market for Spani...

#3502

Scott Sanders

#61411

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Scott Russell Sanders is an American novelist and essayist. Sanders has won acclaim for his skill as a personal essayist. A contributing editor for Orion magazine, he has won the John Burroughs Natural History Essay Award, the Indiana Authors Award, and the Mark Twain Award, among other honors. A frequent public lecturer, Sanders also conducts writing workshops across the United States, including recent ones in Alaska, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon, and New Mexico. He received the Lannan Literary Award in 1995 for his non-fiction writing, and has received the Frederic Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award given at Indiana University.

#3503

Marilyn Arnold

#81733

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Marilyn Arnold is an American emeritus professor of English at Brigham Young University . She served as assistant to President Dallin H. Oaks and as dean of graduate studies. A native of Salt Lake City, Utah, Arnold received bachelor's and master's degrees from BYU. Arnold also holds a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a leading scholar on the work of Willa Cather having written among other works A Reader's Companion to the Fiction of Willa Cather and Willa Cather's Short Fiction. Arnold also studied the works of other authors who set their works in the great plains states.

#3504

Camille Dungy

#84788

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor. Career Born in Denver, Colorado, Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA.

#3505

Chinweizu

#69348

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Chinweizu Ibekwe , known mononymously as Chinweizu, and also by the pen-name Maazi Chinweizu, is a Nigerian critic, essayist, poet, and journalist. While studying in the United States during the Black Power movement, Chinweizu became influenced by the philosophy of the Black Arts Movement. He is commonly associated with Black orientalism and emerged as one of the leading figures in contemporary Nigerian journalism, writing a highly influential column in The Guardian of Lagos.

#3506

Cris Cheek

#80968

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Cris Cheek is a British-American multimodal poet and scholar. He began his career in the mid 1970s working alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and with the Writers Forum group, who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. During that time he co-founded a poetry performance group known as jgjgjgjgjgjgjg . . . with Lawrence Upton and Clive Fencott. Subsequently, cris collaborated on electronic music improvisations with Upton and ee Vonna-Michel as "bang crash wallop" and released several cassettes through Balsam Flex. In 1981, he was a c...

#3507

Jean Sprackland

#85201

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Jean Sprackland is an English poet and writer, the author of five collections of poetry and two books of essays about place and nature. Biography Originally from Burton upon Trent, Jean Sprackland studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury, then taught for a few years before beginning to write poetry at age 30. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was Chair of the Poetry Archive from 2016 to 2020.

#3508

Mike Grell

#58735

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Mike Grell is an American comic book writer and artist, known for his work on books such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Warlord, and Jon Sable Freelance. Early life Grell studied at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, and took the Famous Artists School correspondence course in cartooning. To avoid getting drafted into Army service during the Vietnam War, he enlisted for four years in the U.S. Air Force, including a stint as illustrator in Saigon. After the Air Force, Grell enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, and also worked as a freelance graphi...

#3509

David Konstan

#71069

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

David Konstan is an American classicist and academic, known for his work on notions of emotion and beauty in the ancient world. Currently a Professor of Classics at NYU, he previously spent three decades teaching at Brown University, where he remains John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classics and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature.

#3510

Danielle Wood

#45229

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Danielle Wood is a Tasmanian journalist, writer and academic. Her first book, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2002. Biography Wood was born in Hobart, Tasmania. She was educated at The Friends' School in Hobart and went on to complete a Bachelor of Arts with honours from the University of Tasmania, before working as a cadet journalist. At age 26, Wood moved to Western Australia and enrolled in a PhD through Edith Cowan University, starting work on her book at the same time. She has since returned to Tasmania where she is a lecturer at University of T...

#3511

Sylvia Molloy

#77863

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Sylvia Molloy was an Argentine professor, author, editor and essayist based in New York. Biography Molloy was born to an Irish father and a French mother on 19 August 1938 in Buenos Aires and raised in Argentina, where she grew up speaking English, French and Spanish. She moved to Paris in 1958 and graduated with her PhD in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne in 1967. Molloy then became a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She was chair of the Modern Language Association of America in 2001 and the International Institute of Latin American Studies.

#3512

James Phelan

#75368

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

James Phelan is an American writer, literary scholar, and Distinguished University Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and has been granted an honorary Ph.D degree from Aarhus University in Denmark . In 2021, Phelan received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. The citation for the Award reads in part,"Phelan has influenced generations of narrative theorists and literary scholars, as he has provided a powerful model for thinking about the purposes of literature and reasons and methods to engage with it.

#3513

Alexis De Veaux

#75070

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Alexis De Veaux is a black, lesbian American writer and illustrator. She chaired the Department of Women's Studies, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her surname also appears as DeVeaux.

#3514

Milada Blekastad

#83845

Overall Influence

1917 - 2003 (86 years)

Milada Blekastad was a Norwegian literary historian. Personal life She was born in Prague. Her grandfather František Topič was one of the most prominent publishers in that town and often published Nordic literature; her father Jaroslav Topič was a publisher as well and her mother Milada Topičová was a translator. As a fifteen-year old, Milada Blekastad received an invitation from Gunnvor Krokann, wife of the writer Inge Krokann, to travel to Norway. There she met the artist Hallvard Blekastad whom she married in 1934. She was quick to learn nynorsk and spoke fluent Gausdal dialect, but she ...

#3515

Thomas Sayers Ellis

#55164

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and band leader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.

#3516

Thomas G. Palaima

#47745

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Thomas G. Palaima is a Mycenologist, the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor and the founding director of the university's Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.

#3517

Timothy Donnelly

#84087

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Timothy Donnelly is an American poet. Life He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University's MFA in Creative Writing program. He is an associate professor at Columbia University. He became a poetry editor for the Boston Review in 1996.

#3518

Wayne Brown

#91699

Overall Influence

1944 - 2009 (65 years)

Wayne Vincent Brown was a columnist, poet and fiction writer, and a teacher and mentor to numerous Caribbean writers. Early life Wayne Brown was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Trinidadian father, Kenneth Vincent Brown, and a Barbadian mother, Vere Vincent Brown . His grandfather was Vincent Brown, the Attorney-General of Trinidad and Tobago. His mother died soon after giving birth to him, and for most of his childhood Wayne was brought up by relatives, while his father worked as a puisne judge.

#3519

Galsan Tschinag

Galsan Tschinag

#39981

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Galsan Tschinag , is a Mongolian writer of novels, poems, and essays in the German language, though he hails from a Tuvan background. He is also often described as a Shaman, and is also a teacher and an actor.

#3520

Gervase Phinn

#38029

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Gervase Phinn is an English author and educator. After a career as a teacher he became a schools inspector and, latterly, Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Teesside. He graduated from Leeds Trinity University in 1970 with a degree in Education.

#3521

Jeffrey L. Seglin

Jeffrey L. Seglin

#33989

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jeffrey L. Seglin is an American columnist, author, and teacher. He is currently a senior lecturer, emeritus, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. From 2011 until 2023, he was a senior lecturer and director of the communications program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He consults widely on writing, communications, and ethics. His weekly column on ethics, "The Right Thing," is syndicated in newspapers in the United States and Canada. Seglin lives in Boston with his wife, a psychotherapist. He has two adult children and four grand...

#3522

Marilyn Kaye

#57696

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Marilyn Kaye is an American children's writer. She taught children's literature at St. John's University, New York. She is the author of over 100 children's and young adult novel series, including the successful Replica and Gifted series.

#3523

Enver Kazaz

#92940

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Enver Kazaz is a Bosnian literary historian, literary critic, writer, social commentator and publicist. He is a Centennial Professor and head of the departament of Croatian literature in the wider department of comparative literature of the University of Sarajevo.

#3524

Ken Canning

#85723

Overall Influence

Ken Canning is a Murri activist, writer and poet, whose people are from the Kunja Clan of the Bidjara Nation in south west Queensland, Australia. Canning now lives and teaches in Sydney. Ken works with the Rainbow Lodge program where he supports Aboriginal men leaving custody.

#3525

Selima Hill

#73480

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Selima Hill is a British poet. She has published twenty poetry collections since 1984. Her 1997 collection, Violet, was shortlisted for the most important British poetry awards: the Forward Poetry Prize , the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was selected as recipient of the 2022 King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

#3526

W. S. Barrett

#63268

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

William Spencer Barrett FBA , usually credited as W. S. Barrett and known as Spencer Barrett, was an English classical scholar, Fellow and Sub-Warden of Keble College, Oxford, and Reader in Greek Literature in the University of Oxford. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy.

#3527

Elmaz Abinader

#51165

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Elmaz Abinader is an American author, poet, performer, English professor at Mills College and co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation . She is of Lebanese descent. In 2000, she received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams....

#3528

Marina Semyonova

Marina Semyonova

#39467

Overall Influence

1908 - 2010 (102 years)

Marina Timofeyevna Semyonova was the first Soviet-trained prima ballerina. She was born in Saint-Petersburg. She was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1975. Early life The first great dancer formed by Agrippina Vaganova, she graduated from the Vaganova School in 1925, which "is registered in the annals of Soviet ballet as the year of the unprecedented triumph of Marina Semyonova".

#3529

Jürgen Leonhardt

#74891

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Jürgen Leonhardt is a German classical philologist. He taught at the universities of Rostock, Marburg and at the University of Tübingen, there from 2004. He has been dean of the faculty of humanities there from 2010. His standard work about the history of Latin was translated into French and English.

#3530

Kathleen Coleman

#81580

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Kathleen M. Coleman is an academic and writer who is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Her research interests include Latin literature, history and culture in the early Roman Empire, and arena spectacles. Her expertise in the latter area led to her appointment as Chief Academic Consultant for the 2000 film Gladiator.

#3531

Joe Flaherty

#57373

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Joseph Flaherty is an American actor, writer, and comedian. He is best known for his work on the Canadian sketch comedy SCTV from 1976 to 1984 , and as Harold Weir on Freaks and Geeks, and for his role as Donald the heckler in Happy Gilmore .

#3532

Les Roberts

#52777

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Les Roberts is an American screenwriter and mystery novelist. Early life and education Roberts was born Lester Roubert, to Lester Nathaniel and Eleanor Roubert in Chicago, Illinois. He changed his name to Roberts in 1968.

#3533

Julie Sheehan

#68535

Overall Influence

Julie Sheehan is an American poet. Life She graduated from Yale University, and Columbia University. She lives in Long Island, New York, with her son, and is currently Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program as well as an assistant professor at Stony Brook Southampton.

#3534

Rachel Hadas

#64515

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Rachel Hadas is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose , and her most recent poetry collection is Love and Dread . Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

#3535

Mark Doten

#58864

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Mark Doten is an American novelist and librettist. He is the author of two novels, The Infernal and Trump Sky Alpha, both published by Graywolf Press, and he has been a librettist for the Los Angeles Opera and the San Francisco Opera.

#3536

Bill Burr

#45569

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

William Frederick Burr is an American comedian, actor, filmmaker, and podcaster. He has released multiple stand-up comedy specials, including You People Are All the Same , I'm Sorry You Feel That Way , Walk Your Way Out , and Paper Tiger . He received a Grammy Award nomination for Paper Tiger, and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the dark comedy series Immoral Compass . In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked him at No. 17 on their list of the "50 Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time".

#3537

Inocência Mata

#63463

Overall Influence

Inocência Luciano dos Santos Mata is a Lisbon-based essayist and academic from São Tomé and Príncipe. Her work as a professor and researcher at the University of Lisbon's School of Letters is focused on Portuguese-language literature and post-colonial studies.

#3538

Diane Seuss

#54360

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022. She was born in Michigan City, Indiana and grew up in Michigan in Edwardsburg and Niles. Seuss received a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University.

#3539

Jaimy Gordon

#71295

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Jaimy Gordon is an American writer. She is a winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. Biography She was born in Baltimore. She graduated from Antioch College in 1966, received an MA in English from Brown University in 1972, and earned a Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1975, also from Brown. She currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she previously taught in the MFA and PhD program of Western Michigan University.

#3540

Marc Shell

#40208

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Marc Shell, born 1947 in Montreal, is a Canadian literary critic. He has interests in nationalism and kinship. He serves as Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Harvard University. Over 5 of his publications have each been cited over 100 times.

#3541

Kathy Barker

#57135

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Kathy Barker is a scientist/writer who focuses on science management and on communicating science to society. She authored At the Bench, which teaches laboratory practice to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences, and At the Helm, which educates new principal investigators in laboratory management. She received a PhD in Biology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was a faculty member at The Rockefeller University before embarking on her writing career.

#3542

George Bilgere

#93579

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

George Bilgere is an American poet. Bilgere grew up in Riverside, California, and earned his BA at the University of California, Riverside. He received his MA in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis and earned a Ph.D. in contemporary British and American Poetry from the University of Denver in 1988.

#3543

Gabriel Gomez

#55856

Overall Influence

Gabriel "Gabe" Gómez is a poet, journalist, and marketing professional. Born in El Paso, Texas, Gómez is the author of The Outer Bands , which was selected by Valerie Martinez as the 2007 winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The title poem is a found poem on the experiences of living through Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. His second collection of poetry, The Seed Bank, was published by Mouthfeel Press. Gómez earned a bachelor's of arts degree at the College of Santa Fe and a master's of fine arts degree at Saint Mary's College of California. He has taught at Tulane University, the University of New Orleans, and the Institute of American Indian Arts.

#3544

Donald Harington

#77667

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

Donald Douglas Harington was an American author and visual artist. All but the first of his novels either take place in or have an important connection to "Stay More", a fictional Ozark Mountains town based somewhat on Drakes Creek, Arkansas, where Harington spent summers as a child.

#3545

Rod McKuen

#37098

Overall Influence

1933 - 2015 (82 years)

Rodney Marvin McKuen was an American poet, singer-songwriter, and composer. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s. Throughout his career, McKuen produced a wide range of recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks and classical music. He earned two Academy Award nominations for his music compositions. McKuen's translations and adaptations of the songs of Jacques Brel were instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world. His poetry deals with themes of love, the natural world and spirituality.

#3546

Paul Collins

#69308

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Paul Collins is an Australian writer and editor who specializes in science fiction and fantasy. Collins has written many books for younger readers. He is best known for his fantasy series, The Jelindel Chronicles , and The Quentaris Chronicles , and his science fiction series, The Maximus Black Files .

#3547

Kjell Heggelund

#79553

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Kjell Heggelund was a Norwegian literary researcher, lecturer, editor, manager, poet, translator and literary critic. Personal life Heggelund was born in Hamar. His parents were Kristian Heggelund and Katrine Vestby. He grew up in Tønsberg and later Bergen. He was married to Gerd Zelow Hofseth from 1956 to 1963, to Irene Olesen from 1965 to 1975, and then married the writer Liv Køltzow in 1985. He died in February 2017.

#3548

Frédéric Regard

Frédéric Regard

#56525

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Frédéric Regard is a professor of English Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University, where he teaches 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century literature and literary theory. He is a specialist in gender studies in France.

#3549

Svetozar Koljević

#80781

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Svetozar Koljević was a Serbian author, historian, translator, and professor, member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Academy of Sciences and Arts of the Republika Srpska. He was the elder brother of Nikola Koljević. His studies focused on South Slavic epic poetry.

#3550

Kelly Grovier

#70194

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Kelly Grovier is an American poet, historian, and art critic. Author of a dozen books, he is a regular contributor on art and literature to the Times Literary Supplement and co-founder of the scholarly journal European Romantic Review.

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