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,

#3701

Marianne Katoppo

Marianne Katoppo

#83396

Overall Influence

1943 - 2007 (64 years)

Henriette Marianne Katoppo was an Indonesian novelist and internationally known Asian feminist theologian. She was a recipient of the S.E.A. Write Award. Career Born in Tomohon, North Sulawesi, on 9 June 1943, Katoppo studied theology from 1963 at the Jakarta Theological Seminary, Sekolah Tinggi Teologi.

#3702

Mihangel Morgan

#103702

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Mihangel Morgan is a Welsh author. Background and career He changed his name from Michael Finch to Mihangel Morgan in his early twenties, taking his mother's maiden name. His work often reflects Welsh academia and the crisis of Welsh culture and many actual figures are easily recognised in some of his works. References to key moments in Welsh literature speckle his work; e.g. Dan Gadarn Goncrit is a reference to the Artist in Philistia theme from a political Welsh poem about Saunders Lewis. Born in the village of Trecynon, near Aberdare in South Wales, he lectures in 20th-century Welsh liter...

#3703

Francisco Márquez Villanueva

#28569

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

Francisco Márquez Villanueva was a literary critic and Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Emeritus at Harvard University.

#3704

Colin Hardie

#62777

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Colin Graham Hardie was a British classicist and academic. From 1933 to 1936, he was Director of the British School at Rome. From 1936 to 1973, he was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a tutor in classics. In addition, from 1967 to 1973, he was the Public Orator of the University of Oxford. He was a member of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group which included the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

#3705

Zhenia Vasylkivska

#95454

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Zhenia Vasylkivska was a Ukrainian poet and translator, literary critic, member of The New York Group of Poets. Biography She was born in Kovel in 1929. Vasylkivska left Ukraine in 1944. She first lived in the Austrian city of Linz, where she graduated from high school. In 1951, she moved to the United States, where she settled in New York City.

#3706

Ghulam Murshid

#41244

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Ghulam Murshid is a Bangladeshi author, scholar and journalist, based in London. He won a number of awards, including Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1982 for his contribution to research.; Prothom Alo Book Award in 2007; IFIC literary prize 2018; the Ekusey Padak for language and literature in 2021 and the Vidyasagar Endowments Lectures 1973 at Calcutta University. Besides being a prolific author, Dr. Murshid is a distinguished lexicographer. He edited a three-volume Bengali dictionary, called 'Bibartonmulak Bangla Abhidhan', published in 2013–2014, by the Bangla Academy. In the two ...

#3707

Charles North

#92415

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Charles North is an American poet, essayist and teacher. Described by the poet James Schuyler as “the most stimulating poet of his generation,” he has received two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award , four Fund for Poetry awards, and a Poets Foundation award.

#3708

Cosmo Pieterse

#68694

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Cosmo George Leipoldt Pieterse is a South African playwright, actor, poet, literary critic and anthologist. Education and career Cosmo Pieterse went to the University of Cape Town and taught in Cape Town until leaving South Africa in 1965. He was banned under the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1962. He subsequently taught in London and at Ohio University in the United States: arriving at Ohio University in 1970, he became a tenured faculty member in 1976. However, after travelling to meet his London publisher in 1979 he was denied re-entry to the US on classified information, allegedly for being "...

#3709

John Balaban

#60288

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John B. Balaban is an American poet and translator, an authority on Vietnamese literature. Biography Balaban was born in Philadelphia to Romanian immigrant parents, Phillip and Alice Georgies Balaban. He obtained a B.A. with highest honors in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1966. A Woodrow Wilson Fellowship that he received in his senior year at Penn State allowed him to study English literature at Harvard University, where he received his A.M.

#3710

John Barrell

#40075

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Charles Barrell FBA FEA is a British scholar of eighteenth and early nineteenth century studies. Early life John Barrell was born in February 1943. He took his first degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his PhD at the University of Essex.

#3711

Georges Banu

#81910

Overall Influence

1943 - 2023 (80 years)

Georges Banu was a Romanian-born French writer, theatre critic, and academic. Biography Born in Buzău on 22 June 1943, Banu studied at the Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film. He moved to France in 1973 and became a professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3. He began writing essays on theatre and was notably the author of Théâtre sortie de secours, L'Acteur qui ne revient pas, Notre théâtre, La Cerisaie, L'Homme de dos, and Peter Brook. Vers un théâtre premier.

#3712

Lojze Krakar

#104885

Overall Influence

1926 - 1995 (69 years)

Lojze Krakar was a Slovene poet, translator, editor, literary historian, and essayist. He also wrote poetry for children. Krakar was born in Semič in White Carniola in 1926. He studied Slavic languages and literature at the University of Ljubljana and graduated in 1954 and obtained a doctorate from the Frankfurt Goethe University in 1970. He worked as a lecturer, editor, and translator.

#3714

Jonas Grethlein

Jonas Grethlein

#60298

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Jonas Grethlein is a German scholar of Ancient Greek literature. Having received a doctorate from the University of Freiburg, he is a professor of Ancient Greek at Heidelberg University. His academic work has focused on Greek tragedy, the Homeric epics, narratology, and historiography. In 2012, he was awarded a Starting Grant of about €1.4 Million by the European Research Council.

#3715

Ehud Havazelet

#93936

Overall Influence

1955 - 2015 (60 years)

Ehud Havazelet was an American novelist and short story writer. Ehud Havazelet was born in Jerusalem, Israel. His father, Meir Havazelet, a rabbi and emeritus professor at Yeshiva University, emigrated to the United States in 1957. He graduated from Columbia University in 1977, and received an M.F.A at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1984. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University from 1984 to 1989. He taught creative writing at Oregon State University from 1989 to 1999. He began teaching at the University of Oregon in 1999 and held the position of...

#3716

Ada Palmer

#17391

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Ada Palmer is an American historian and writer and winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, was published in May 2016. The work has been well received by critics and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

#3717

Egil Kraggerud

#64502

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Egil Kraggerud is a Norwegian philologist. He was born in Hemnes as a son of dentist John Kraggerud and teacher Borghild Johanne Westeren . He took the examen artium at Oslo Cathedral School in 1957, and studied classical philology for five years at the University of Oslo. He took examinations in Latin and Greek in 1963 and 1964, but not the cand.philol. degree. Nonetheless, he was hired as a research fellow in 1965 and took the dr.philos. degree in 1968 with the thesis Aeneisstudien, a study of Virgil's Aeneid. In June 1963 he married teacher Ellen Beate Sinding-Larsen, and became a son-in-law of Henning Sinding-Larsen.

#3718

Eda Ahi

#101782

Overall Influence

1990 - Present (36 years)

Eda Ahi is an Estonian poet, translator and diplomat. She graduated from Tallinn University, where she received master's degree; specialty was Russian culture. After graduation, she worked as a diplomat in Ukraine.

#3719

Richard Russo

#84398

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Richard Russo is an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher. In 2002, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel Empire Falls. Early life and education Russo was born in Johnstown, New York, and raised in nearby Gloversville. He earned a bachelor's degree, a Master of Fine Arts degree, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Arizona, which he attended from 1967 through 1979. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the works of the early American writer, historian and editor Charles Brockden Brown.

#3720

Thomas Christopher Greene

#73977

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Thomas Christopher Greene is an American novelist and college president. His sixth novel, The Perfect Liar, was published by St. Martin's Press in January 2019. His fiction has been translated into thirteen languages and has found a worldwide following. He is best known for the international bestseller, The Headmaster's Wife, which both Library Journal and Publishers Weekly called "brilliant."

#3721

David Ayer

#58926

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

David Ayer is an American filmmaker known for making crime films that are set in Los Angeles and deal with gangs and police corruption. His screenplays include Training Day , The Fast and the Furious , and S.W.A.T. . He has also directed Harsh Times , Street Kings , End of Watch , and Sabotage . In 2016, he directed the superhero movie Suicide Squad from the DC Extended Universe, and then the urban fantasy film Bright for Netflix. He has twice collaborated with actor Shia LaBeouf: first with the World War II drama Fury , then the crime thriller The Tax Collector . He has also collaborated wi...

#3722

Connie Porter

#82289

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Connie Rose Porter is an African-American writer of young-adult books, and a teacher of creative writing. Porter is best known for her contribution to the American Girl Collection Series as the author of the Addy books: six of her Addy books have gone on to sell more than 3 million copies. In addition, she published two novels with Houghton-Mifflin, All-Bright Court , and Imani All Mine .

#3723

Elizabeth Robinson

#94978

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Elizabeth Robinson is an American poet and professor, author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart , "Three Novels" "Also Known A," , and The Orphan and Its Relations . Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, the Denver Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and New American Writing. Her poems have been anthologized in "American Hybrid" , "The Best of Fence" , and Postmodern American Poetry With Avery Burns, Joseph Noble, Rusty Morrison, and Brian Strang, she co-edited 26 magazine. Starting in 2012, Robinson began editing a new literary periodical, Pallaksch.

#3724

Leslie Brody

#55358

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Leslie Brody is an American author. Born in the Bronx and brought up on Long Island, Brody went to grade school in Riverhead, New York and high school in Massapequa, New York. At 17 years old, she left home to become an underground press reporter for the Berkeley Tribe. A year later, she set off to travel around Europe. From 1971 to 1976, Brody lived in London and Amsterdam, sampling various hippie occupations. She returned to California in the late 1970s and worked as a librarian both at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, and for the Sierra Club, while attending college at San F...

#3725

Sergio Jaramillo Caro

#41377

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Sergio Jaramillo Caro is a Colombian politician. He recently was the High Commissioner of Peace under President Juan Manuel Santos leading with Humberto de la Calle the Colombian Peace process between Colombia and the FARC guerrillas between 2012 and 2016. He was previously in government as vice minister of defence and also held the position of national security advisor between 2010 and 2012.

#3726

Kurt Treu

#98006

Overall Influence

1928 - 1991 (63 years)

Kurt Treu , was a German classical philologist. He was born the son of a German parson on the island Saaremaa, the largest island of Estonia. In 1940, because of World War II, the Treu family was forced to leave their homeland. Kurt Treu studied in a Gymnasium in Hohensalza. AS levels were studied by him after the war. He studied Classical philology at the University of Jena. In 1963 he graduated from the Humboldt University of Berlin.

#3727

Martha Woodmansee

#58190

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Martha Woodmansee is an American professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She has been a member of the English department since 1986 and joined the faculty at the School of Law in 2003. In addition, she was the Director of the Society for Critical Exchange, a national organization devoted to collaborative interdisciplinary work in theory. In 2008 she has founded the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property. A 1999 Guggenheim fellow and 2004 Fulbright fellow, her teaching and research interests are 18th- and 19th-century literature, ...

#3728

Eric Bogosian

#46043

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Eric Bogosian is an American actor, playwright, monologuist, novelist, and historian. Descended from Armenian-American immigrants, he grew up in Watertown and Woburn, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Chicago and Oberlin College. His numerous plays include Talk Radio and subUrbia , which were adapted to film by Oliver Stone and Richard Linklater, respectively, with Bogosian starring in the former.

#3729

Satoshi Kon

#44783

Overall Influence

1963 - 2010 (47 years)

was a Japanese film director, animator, screenwriter and manga artist from Sapporo, Hokkaido, and a member of the Japanese Animation Creators Association . He was a graduate of the Graphic Design department of the Musashino Art University. He is best known for his acclaimed anime films Perfect Blue , Millennium Actress , Tokyo Godfathers , and Paprika , and the TV series Paranoia Agent . He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46 on August 24, 2010.

#3730

Dick Allen

#76730

Overall Influence

1939 - 2017 (78 years)

Richard Stanley Allen was an American poet, literary critic and academic. Early life The son of Richard Sanders Allen, a writer and historian, and Doris , a postmaster, Allen was educated at the College of Liberal Arts at Syracuse University , then at the Brown University graduate school , and subsequently undertook two years of post-Masters work.

#3731

Simon Gaunt

#81155

Overall Influence

1959 - 2021 (62 years)

Simon Gaunt was a professor of French literature at King's College London, where he was Head of the French Department and Head of the School of Humanities. He was past president of the Society for French Studies , a Fellow of King's College, London from 2015 and an Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge from 2016.

#3732

Yxta Maya Murray

#61611

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Yxta Maya Murray is an American Latina novelist and professor at Loyola Marymount School of Law. Career Murray graduated cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles and received her JD from Stanford University with distinction. She teaches at Loyola Law School.

#3733

Steven Dietz

#41849

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Steven Dietz is an American playwright, theatre director, and teacher. Called "the most ubiquitous American playwright whose name you may never have heard", Dietz has long been one of America's most prolific and widely produced playwrights. In 2019, Dietz was again named one of the 20 most-produced playwrights in America.

#3734

Crystal Wilkinson

Crystal Wilkinson

#84745

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Crystal E. Wilkinson is an African-American feminist writer from Kentucky, and proponent of the Affrilachian Poet movement. She is the winner of a 2022 NAACP Image Award, a 2020 winner of the USA Fellow of Creative Writing, and a 2021 O. Henry Prize winner. She teaches at the University of Kentucky. Her work has primarily been in involving the stories of Black women and communities in the Appalachian and rural Southern canon. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Kentucky 2021.

#3735

Lance Larsen

#104041

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Lance Larsen is an American poet. He served as poet laureate of Utah from 2012 to 2017. In 2007, he received the Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been published in American poetry journals including Poetry, The New Republic, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Orion, and JuxtaProse and the 2005 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has been described as embodying a "quaintly romantic notion that mortality and love and soul are the abiding themes of life and art."

#3736

Brewster Ghiselin

#82351

Overall Influence

1903 - 2002 (99 years)

Brewster Ghiselin was an American poet and academic. Ghiselin was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. The family home is at 29 Jefferson Road, now designated as a historic landmark. At the age of sixteen, he moved to California, where he lived until 1934. He lived just north of San Francisco, graduating from Tamalpais High School in 1922.

#3737

Dorsey Armstrong

#71458

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

S. Dorsey "Dorrie" Armstrong is an American Arthurian scholar who is Professor of English and Medieval Literature at Purdue University. Before joining the English department at Purdue in 2002, she taught at Centenary College of Louisiana and California State University, Long Beach. Her research interests include medieval women writers; late medieval print culture; and the Arthurian legend.

#3738

D. A. Miller

#77659

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

D. A. Miller is an American literary critic and film scholar. He is John F. Hotchkis Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

#3739

Nelson George

#54990

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Nelson George is an American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Biography George attended St. John's University. He was an intern at the New York Amsterdam News before being hired as black music editor for Record World. He later served as a music editor for Billboard magazine from 1982 to 1989. While there, George published two books: Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound in 1986, and The Death of Rhythm & Blues in 1988. He also wrote a column, entitled "Native Son", for the Village Voice from 1988 to 1992.

#3740

Adriana E. Ramírez

#83079

Overall Influence

Adriana E. Ramírez is an American writer and critic of Mexican and Colombian descent. Her writing addresses the history and culture of violence in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. In 2015, she won the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize for Dead Boys. The manuscript was subsequently published as Dead Boys: A Memoir in 2016 by Little A, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, was acquired by Scribner and is forthcoming. In 2019, she received a grant of $10,000 from investing in professional artists, a joint project of the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments; she also received that year's established artist Carol R.

#3741

Michael Arnzen

#74216

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Michael A. Arnzen is an American horror writer. He has won the Bram Stoker Award three times. Early life and education Arnzen was born on May 17, 1967, in Amityville, New York. After a brief stint in the United States Army overseas, where he began writing horror stories to entertain his fellow soldiers, he moved to Colorado, where he began his writing career.

#3742

Brian Moore

#65928

Overall Influence

1921 - 1999 (78 years)

Brian Moore , was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland during and after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel". He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times . Moo...

#3743

Jo Jeong-rae

#93846

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Jo Jeong-rae is a novelist from South Korea, best known as the author of the best-selling novels Taebaek Mountain Range, Arirang, and Han River' Life Jo Jeong-rae was born in Suncheon, Jeollanam-do, in 1943 in the Sonamsa Temple. When the Korean War broke out, Jo Jeong-rae and his family evacuated to the South, where he was unpopular with the local children and frequently fought with them, fights he generally lost. He was interested in literature from early in life, and won competitions in elementary school. He majored in Korean literature at Dongguk University, and worked as a high school teacher for several years after graduation.

#3744

Jim Ottaviani

#17017

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jim Ottaviani is an American writer who is the author of several comic books about the history of science. His best-known work, Two-Fisted Science: Stories About Scientists, features biographical stories about Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Niels Bohr, and several stories about physicist Richard Feynman. He is also a librarian and has worked as a nuclear engineer.

#3745

Michael Sampson

#58874

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Dr. Michael Sampson is a Fulbright Scholar and an American children's writer best known for easy-to-read books that feature rhythmic and repetitive language. Sampson's first children's book, The Football That Won, was written solo in 1992 and illustrated by Ted Rand. Later, Sampson wrote 21 books with his best friend and mentor Bill Martin, Jr., including Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3 and The Bill Martin Jr Big Book of Poetry. Sampson taught at Texas A&M University–Commerce for 25 years before moving to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. In August 2010 he was selected as Dean of the School of Education at Southern Connecticut State University.

#3746

Karen Swassjan

#77812

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Karen A. Swassjan , *1948 in Tbilisi, is an Armenian philosopher, literary critic, historian of culture and anthroposophist. He is one of the best known contemporary philosophers in the Russian-speaking world.

#3747

Constance Merritt

#75100

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Constance Merritt is an American poet. Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1966, and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock. She is also the winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award. In 2001, Merritt received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2005, Merritt served as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. In 2005 she received Arkansas's Porter Prize. Merritt lives in Louisville, ...

#3748

William Corbett

#72936

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

William Corbett was an American poet, essayist, editor, educator, and publisher. Corbett's work and public readings acknowledge the influence on him of jazz, modernist and imagist poetry , the group of poets in Donald Allen's seminal anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960, many of them from the Black Mountain College community , classical Chinese poets , and French poetry of the mid-19th to early 20th centuries .

#3749

Janet Holmes

#93119

Overall Influence

Janet Holmes is an American poet and professor. Education and Career She earned her B.A. from Duke University and her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. She was the director of Ahsahta Press. She taught at Boise State University in the Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing from 1999 through 2019

#3750

Debra Dean

#77036

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Debra Lynn Dean is an American writer, best known for her 2006 novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad. Life Dean was born and brought up in Seattle and studied English and Drama at Whitman College, graduating in 1980. She then trained as an actress in New York City, where she married another actor, and worked mostly in theatre until returning to the Pacific Northwest to study for a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon. She now teaches creative writing at the Florida International University, where she is an associate professor of English.

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