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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#3651

Joan Houlihan

#76385

Overall Influence

Joan Houlihan is an American poet. She is the author of six books, most recently It Isn't a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest , winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Award. Her other books are Shadow-feast , described by the Los Angeles Review as "...a tour de force sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances"; The Us described by Lucie Brock-Broido as: "...like nothing I have ever read or seen...wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon.…both syntactically inventive and radically simple"; Ay , the sequel to The Us, described by ...

#3652

Tom W. Mayer

#77057

Overall Influence

Thomas W. Mayer is a writer and retired professor of the English Department at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where he held the position of Associate Professor during his tenure there from the 1970s through 1990s.

#3653

Barbara Henning

#103422

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Barbara Henning is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her recent novelized biography of her mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story, was named by the Library of Michigan as a Notable Book of 2023. She is also the editor of a collection of interviews, [Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works] and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Her work has been published in numerous journals. Some recent books of poetry and prose are Digigram ; a novel, Just Like That ; and...

#3654

Lucy Corin

#68004

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Lucy Corin is an American novelist and short story writer. The winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize, Corin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship in 2015.

#3655

Vincent O'Sullivan

#84375

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Sir Vincent Gerard O'Sullivan is one of New Zealand's best-known writers. He is a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, and librettist. Early life and family Born in Auckland, O'Sullivan is the youngest of six children born to Timothy O'Sullivan and Myra O'Sullivan . He was educated at St Joseph's Primary, Grey Lynn, and Sacred Heart College, Auckland, in Glendowie. He graduated from the University of Auckland and the University of Oxford.

#3656

Giulia Sissa

#35543

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Giulia Sissa is an Italian classical scholar and historian of philosophy. She is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Classics at UCLA. The majority of her works deal specifically with the role of women in the Ancient Mediterranean.

#3657

Luigi Ballerini

#67871

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Luigi Ballerini is an Italian writer, poet, and translator. Biography Son of Umbertina Santi, a seamstress, and Raffaele Costantino Edoardo, known as Ettore, himself a tailor who died in combat against the Germans on the island of Cephalonia in 1943, Luigi Ballerini was born in Milan and grew up in the district of Porta Ticinese. Since 2010, he has divided his time between New York, Milan, and Otranto. He studied literature at the Università Cattolica in Milan, lived for a time in London, and graduated from Bologna with a thesis on the American writer, Charles Olson. His first poems, Inno all...

#3658

Andrew Biswell

#86905

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Andrew Biswell is the biographer of Anthony Burgess. He was made Professor of Modern Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University in June 2013 having previously held the positions of Lecturer, then Principal Lecturer, in English and Creative Writing, and Academic Director of the Manchester Writing School.

#3659

Bryan Washington

#79305

Overall Influence

1993 - Present (33 years)

Bryan Washington is an American writer from Houston. He published his debut short story collection, Lot, in 2019 and a novel, Memorial, in 2020. Early life and education Washington was born October 1993 in Kentucky and moved to Katy, Texas when he was 3 years old. He knew he was gay at a young age but did not formally come out, fearing stigmatization. He graduated from James E. Taylor High School in 2011. Washington graduated from the University of Houston with a BA in English, and continued his education at the University of New Orleans where he graduated with an MFA.

#3660

Michel Zink

#45755

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Michel Zink is a French writer, medievalist, philologist, and professor of French literature, particularly that of the Middle Ages. He is the Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, a title he has held since 2011, and was elected to the Académie française in 2017. In addition to his academic work, he has also written historical crime novels, one of which continues the story of Arsène Lupin.

#3661

Masamune Shirow

#30559

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

, better known by his pen name , is a Japanese manga artist. Shirow is best known for the manga Ghost in the Shell, which has since been turned into three theatrical anime films, two anime television series, an anime television film, an anime ONA series, a theatrical live action film, and several video games.

#3662

W. Geoffrey Arnott

#80925

Overall Influence

1930 - 2010 (80 years)

William Geoffrey Arnott was a British Hellenist who was Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Leeds. He studied comic and other forms of poetry, as well as birds in the ancient world.

#3663

Benoît Peeters

#42090

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Benoît Peeters is a French comics writer, novelist, and comics studies scholar. Biography After a degree in Philosophy at Université de Paris I, Peeters prepared his Master's at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales under the direction of Roland Barthes. He holds a habilitation à diriger les recherches , i.e. a supplementary PhD enabling him to supervise the work of PhD candidates .

#3664

Shelly Oria

#107942

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Shelly Oria is an Israeli-American author, notable for short stories featuring queer characters. Personal life and achievements Oria was born in Los Angeles, California, but grew up in Israel. She features queer characters in her stories. She received the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, a Sozopol Fiction Seminars Fellowship in Bulgaria and was an artist in residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council between 2014 and 2015.

#3665

Adam Horowitz

#91992

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Adam Horowitz is an American screenwriter and producer. He is known for co-creating the ABC fairy tale drama series Once Upon a Time with his writing partner Edward Kitsis. Days after the show ended its seven-year run in 2018, Kitsis and Horowitz were announced as showrunners for Apple TV's Amazing Stories.

#3666

Mark Lipovetsky

#91665

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky is a Russian literary, film, and cultural critic who advocates the position that postmodernism is replacing socialist realism as the dominant art movement in Russia. His major interests include 20th century Russian literature, Russian postmodernism, fairy-tales, Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival, and totalitarian and post-communist cultures.

#3667

Ruthanne Lum McCunn

#51280

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Ruthanne Lum McCunn is an American novelist and editor of Chinese and Scottish descent. Early life Ruthanne Lum McCunn was born as Roxey Drysdale on February 21, 1946, in Chinatown, San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong. Her father was a Scottish American merchant seaman from Idaho, and her mother was from Hong Kong. Her parents met in the late 1930s when her mother came to San Francisco with a cousin to visit the World's Fair, where she met Ruthanne's father, fell in love with him and got married. Interracial marriage was illegal in California at the time so they drove to Washington, where a minister, who was a friend of her father's family, married them.

#3668

Jesse Glass

#87371

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jesse Glass is an American expatriate poet, artist and folklorist. In America Glass first began to write and publish experimental poetry in c. 1972. Starting in 1976, he edited and published the mimeographed Goethe’s Notes Magazine and Goethe's Press from his family home in Westminster, Maryland. Richard Kostelanetz's wide-ranging cultural activities were a major influence during this period, particularly Kostelanetz's Assembling Magazine.

#3669

Maynard Mack

#66046

Overall Influence

1909 - 2001 (92 years)

Maynard Mack was an American literary critic and English professor. Mack earned both his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. at Yale. An expert on Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, Mack taught at Yale University for many years, starting as an instructor of English in 1936 and ending his career as Sterling Professor Emeritus of English. He was remembered as an inspiring lecturer whose lectures on Shakespeare were described in one account as "unforgettable."

#3670

Suzanne Berne

#72247

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Suzanne Berne is an American novelist known for her foreboding character studies involving unexpected domestic and psychological drama in bucolic suburban settings. Berne's debut novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, won the 1999 Orange Prize for Fiction.

#3671

Viktar Martinowich

Viktar Martinowich

#88730

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Viktar Martinowich is a Belarusian writer, journalist, and art critic. Biography Martinowich was born in Ashmyany. In 1999 he graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Belarusian State University in 2002 and obtained a PhD from BSU with a thesis about the Vitebsk avant-garde in Soviet newspapers in the 1920s.

#3672

David Cook

#83611

Overall Influence

1929 - 2003 (74 years)

David Cook was a British academic, literary critic and anthologist. As a professor of literature at the Universities of Makerere and Ilorin, he played an important role in encouraging literature in East Africa.

#3673

Clare Pollard

#82679

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Clare Pollard is a British writer , literary translator and critic. Early life and education Pollard was raised in Bolton. She was educated at Turton School in Bromley Cross. She read English at Cambridge University.

#3674

Andrew Schelling

#94532

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Andrew Schelling , is an American poet and translator. Life Schelling grew up in the townships of New England west of Boston. Early influences were the wildlands of New England, and Asian art viewed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University's Fogg Museum. He moved west to Northern California in 1973, and graduated from University of California, Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Religious Studies in 1975. In Northern California he explored wilderness regions of the Coast Range and Sierra Nevadas. At U.C. Santa Cruz he studied poetry with Norman O. Brown and natural history with Gregory Bateson.

#3675

Peter White

#85829

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Peter White is a professor of Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He has made some contributions to scholarship on Latin literature, even Roman poetics. He has written Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome , for which he won the American Philological Association's Goodwin Award in 1995. He has won some other honors, including the University of Chicago's highly prized Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He took his B.A. from Boston College in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972. He has been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1968.

#3676

Robert Carlock

#89337

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Robert Morgan Carlock is an American screenwriter and producer. He has worked as a writer for several NBC television comedies, and as a showrunner for 30 Rock, which was created by his recurring collaborator, comedian Tina Fey. He co-created Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with Fey. He co-created the television show Mr. Mayor starring Ted Danson, again with Fey.

#3677

Marion L. Starkey

#92926

Overall Influence

1901 - 1991 (90 years)

Marion Lena Starkey was an American writer of history books, including The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. She was born April 13, 1901 in Worcester, MA to Arthur and Alice T. Starkey. She earned a bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1922, and a master's degree from Harvard University in 1935.

#3678

Noha Radwan

#60682

Overall Influence

Noha Mohamed Radwan is an assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the University of California, Davis. She was an Egyptian literary scholar and assistant professor of Arabic Literature at Columbia University and has also taught at U. C. Berkeley. She teaches "Introduction to Islamic Civilization". Her interests include modern Middle Eastern literature in Arabic and Hebrew, and she has a particular interest in modern Arabic poetry.

#3679

John Gery

#66023

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

John Gery is an American poet, critic, collaborative translator, and editor. He has published seven books of poetry, a critical work on the treatment of nuclear annihilation in American poetry, two co-edited volumes of literary criticism and two co-edited anthologies of contemporary poetry, as well as, a co-authored biography and guidebook on Ezra Pound's Venice.

#3680

Charles Mungoshi

#28646

Overall Influence

1947 - 2019 (72 years)

Charles Lovemore Mungoshi , was a Zimbabwean writer. Life and career Mungoshi was born on 2 December 1947 at Manyene, near Chivhu . He was educated at St Augustine's, Penhalonga. After leaving school, he worked with the Forestry Commission before joining Textbook Sales in Harare. From 1975 to 1981 he worked at the Literature Bureau as an editor and then moved to the Zimbabwe Publishing House.

#3681

Diane Elam

#59994

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Diane Michelle Elam is an American feminist writer, the author of Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme , Romancing the Postmodern , and co-editor of Feminism Beside Itself . A recurrent theme in her work is an argument against the possibility of a complete and definitive representation of women.

#3682

Niels Ingwersen

#91662

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

Niels Ingwersen was a Danish scholar in Scandinavian Studies and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His courses on Hans Christian Andersen were particularly popular. Early life Born in Horsens, Denmark, Ingwersen studied Scandinavian literature at the University of Copenhagen, Stockholm University and the University of Oslo. When in Oslo, he met an American student, Faith Boswell Sloniger, whom he married in Tybjerg, near Næstved, Denmark, in 1961.

#3683

Hiroshi Mori

#62913

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Hiroshi Mori is a Japanese writer and engineer. He is known for writing mystery novels – particularly his debut work The Perfect Insider, which won him the first Mephisto Prize in 1996 – but he considers himself to be a researcher as well as craftsman.

#3684

Kevin Williamson

Kevin Williamson

#66298

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Kevin Meade Williamson is an American screenwriter, director, and producer. He is known for developing and writing the screenplay for the slasher film Scream —which launched the Scream franchise—along with those for Scream 2 and Scream 4 . He is also known for creating the WB teen drama series Dawson's Creek , the CW supernatural drama series The Vampire Diaries , the Fox crime thriller series The Following and the CBS All Access thriller series Tell Me a Story .

#3685

Lisa D'Amour

#66448

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Lisa D'Amour is a playwright, performer, and former Carnival Queen from New Orleans. D'Amour is an alumna of New Dramatists. Her play Detroit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Biography

#3686

Julia Britton

#80577

Overall Influence

1914 - 2012 (98 years)

Julia Britton was an Australian playwright. Britton was perhaps best known for her literary adaptations and biographical plays. Life Julia Britton was born Hilda Hartt in Romiley, Cheshire in 1914, the daughter of Richard and Elizabeth Hartt . She attended Withington Girls' School and later, the University of Manchester graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1930. She moved to South Africa six years later, where she worked as a journalist. It was during these years that she began to experiment with writing for the theatre, beginning with her un-produced play The Jacky Hangman. In 1939 she ma...

#3687

Herbert Lomas

#69397

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Herbert Lomas was a British poet and translator. He served in the infantry from 1943 to 1946née Aatila Awards Guinness Poetry Competition1982 Cholmondeley AwardKnight, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland

#3688

James Walker Benét

#79423

Overall Influence

1914 - 2012 (98 years)

James Walker Benét was an American journalist, author, and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED. Benét was one of the last surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of American volunteers during the Spanish Civil War who fought for the Republicans as part of the International Brigades.

#3689

Kevin Eastman

#51386

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Kevin Brooks Eastman is an American comic book artist and writer best known for co-creating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Peter Laird. Eastman was also formerly the editor and publisher of the magazine Heavy Metal.

#3690

Jean-Marc Moura

#76118

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jean-Marc Moura is a French literary scholar. He is considered to have pioneered post-colonial studies in French literature. Moura is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Since 2014, he has been a member of the Academia Europaea.

#3691

Anders Palm

#77816

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Anders Palm is a Swedish literary scholar and linguist. He is professor of history of literature at Lund University. In 2011 he received an honorary degree of medicine. Palm is the principal architect of "Medical Humanities" which today is included in the Swedish physician education, and means that the body is seen from a humanities perspective as from a normal medical perspective.

#3692

Roderick MacLeish

Roderick MacLeish

#63927

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Roderick MacLeish was an American journalist and writer. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, he grew up in the Chicago suburbs and graduated from the University of Chicago. MacLeish was news director for WBZ radio in Boston in the early 1950s, then helped start the London and Washington, DC, bureaus of Westinghouse Broadcasting, where he was a chief commentator. He later was a commentator for CBS News, National Public Radio, and The Christian Science Monitor. His published books include both nonfiction and fiction. MacLeish was the nephew of poet Archibald MacLeish. Attorney Eric MacLeish is his son.

#3693

John Barton

#88486

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

John Barton is a Canadian poet. Early life Barton was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1957 but was raised in Calgary. Education Barton studied at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Quebec, Victoria University, and Columbia University in New York.

#3694

Peter Kravitz

#81394

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Peter Kravitz is a figure in the Scottish literary scene. He was born in London, England, but has lived most of his life in Edinburgh. He is Jewish. He has edited Contemporary Scottish Fiction, reprinted by Picador and Faber, and brought new Scottish writers to a wider audience.

#3695

Salah Ahmed Ibrahim

#53948

Overall Influence

1933 - 1993 (60 years)

Salah Ahmed Ibrahim , was a Sudanese literary writer, poet and diplomat. He is considered one of the most important Sudanese poets of the first generation after the country's independence, marking the transition from literary romanticism to social realism.

#3696

Jorge Luis Anthony Borges

#115501

Overall Influence

#3697

Katherine Harloe

Katherine Harloe

#44921

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Katherine Harloe is Professor of Classics and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Previously she was Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is an expert on the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the eighteenth-century German classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. She is the first black professor of Classics in the UK, and the first woman director of the ICS.

#3698

Ran HaCohen

#63874

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Ran HaCohen is an Israeli scholar, university teacher, and translator known for his strong criticism of Israel's policies. Having graduated from university with a B.A. in Computer Science, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies, he works as a literary translator of German, English and Dutch and Ethiopic. Occasionally, he writes for the Antiwar.com website.

#3699

Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein

#58724

Overall Influence

1930 - 1999 (69 years)

Sheldon Allan Silverstein was an American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Silverstein briefly attended university before being drafted into the United States Army. During his rise to prominence in the 1950s, his illustrations were published in various newspapers and magazines, including the adult-oriented Playboy. He also wrote a satirical, adult-oriented alphabet book, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, under the stylized name "Uncle Shelby", which he used as an occasional pen name.

#3700

Ada Salas

#96815

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Ada Salas or AdaMc is a Spanish poet and author. She has worked as a teacher. Her poetry is known for its inclusion of pauses. Life Ada Salas was born in Cáceres, Spain in 1965. She earned a doctorate in philology at the University of Extremadura. She taught in France at the University of Angers. Juan Manuel Rozas was meant to have been her teacher, but he died in 1987. Salas entered the competition named in his memory and won the award in 1988

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