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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#3751

Robert Wrigley

#88576

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Wrigley is an American poet and educator. Biography In 1971 Wrigley was inducted into the army, filing for discharge as a conscientious objector. He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976, where he studied under poets Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines. From 1987 to 1988 he served as writer-in-residence for the state of Idaho, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

#3752

Marguerite Harl

#56070

Overall Influence

1919 - 2020 (101 years)

Marguerite Harl was a French scholar, who worked on the Septuagint, Philo of Alexandria and early patristic writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. She was born in Paris in April 1919 and became a pupil of Henri-Irénée Marrou. She was a professor of Ancient Greek at the Sorbonne University from 1958 to 1983.

#3753

Richard Greenblatt

#67754

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Richard Greenblatt is a Canadian playwright who currently lives in Toronto. He is best known for 2 Pianos, 4 Hands, which he wrote and performed with Ted Dykstra. Early life Greenblatt was born in 1953 in Montreal, Quebec, to a secular Jewish family. His parents were active Communists until 1956, when they left the party after Khrushchev's Secret Speech. He is the brother of Lewis Furey, musician, actor & director.

#3754

Hayao Miyazaki

#48706

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, and manga artist. A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and creator of Japanese animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of animation.

#3755

Antonio Benítez-Rojo

Antonio Benítez-Rojo

#62981

Overall Influence

1931 - 2005 (74 years)

Antonio Benítez-Rojo was a Cuban novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He was widely regarded as the most significant Cuban author of his generation. His work has been translated into nine languages and collected in more than 50 anthologies.

#3756

Katherine Ayres

#89550

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Katherine Ayres is an American writer of children's literature. Background Born in 1947 in Columbus, Ohio, she was raised in Ohio, West Virginia, and New York. In 1965 she graduated from West Islip High School in West Islip, New York. She completed her BA at The College of Wooster in 1969 and her MA at Tufts University in 1974. Her first career was as a teacher and elementary school principal. In the 1990s she began writing for children.

#3757

Brian C. Anderson

#24550

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Brian C. Anderson is an American writer and editor of City Journal, a quarterly magazine, published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Anderson received his BA and MA from Boston College. He obtained a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Ottawa.

#3758

Alexandra Styron

#60877

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Claire Alexandra Styron known as Alexandra Styron, is an American author and professor. Early life and education Styron is the youngest child of author William Styron and poet and human rights activist Rose Burgunder. She grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Martha’s Vineyard. Styron attended Barnard College, and later the MFA Creative Writing program at Columbia University.

#3759

Tessa McWatt

#72279

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Tessa McWatt FRSL is a Guyanese-born Canadian writer. She has written seven novels and is a creative writing professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom. In 2021 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

#3760

Yu Lihua

#85001

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Yu Lihua was a Chinese writer who wrote over thirty works—novels, short stories, newspaper articles and translations—over sixty years. She is regarded as "one of the five most influential Chinese-born women writers of the postwar era and the progenitor of the Chinese students' overseas genre." She wrote primarily in Chinese, drawing on her experience as a Chinese émigré in postwar America. She was celebrated in the diaspora for giving voice to what she called the "rootless generation"—émigrés who had left for a better life but remained nostalgic for their homeland.

#3761

Jack Lindeman

#78833

Overall Influence

Jack Lindeman taught at Lincoln and Temple Universities and at Kutztown State College/Kutztown University, published poetry in the following other journals: the Southwest Review, the New York Times, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Epos: a Quarterly of Poetry, and Colorado Quarterly. His literary criticism appeared in The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, School and Society, and Modern Age. He wrote on William James and Herman Melville.

#3762

David Ian Rabey

#80282

Overall Influence

David Ian Rabey FLSW is an Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Theatre Practice at Aberystwyth University. He worked there for 35 years, until he retired from teaching at the end of August 2020. He is the Artistic Director of Lurking Truth Theatre Company for which he has written several plays including:

#3763

Emily Gowers

#48817

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Emily Joanna Gowers, is a British classical scholar. She is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She is an expert on Horace, Augustan literature, and the history of food in the Roman world.

#3764

Ian Milner

#55928

Overall Influence

1911 - 1991 (80 years)

Ian Frank George Milner was a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford who had attended Waitaki Boys' High School. He was then a political scientist, a civil servant with the Australian Department of External Affairs in Canberra and with the United Nations in New York, and from the early 1950s a professor of English at Charles University in Prague where he became the friend and translator into English of the eminent Czech poet, Miroslav Holub.

#3765

Whitney Otto

#58464

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Whitney Otto is an American novelist best known for her debut novel How to Make an American Quilt. Life and career Otto was born and raised in California to a couple who later divorced; her father was an engineer, while her mother worked in advertising. She attended university at the University of the Pacific, San Diego State University, and the University of California, Irvine before graduating. Currently she lives in Portland, Oregon with her family, where they moved from San Francisco. Her first novel, How to Make an American Quilt, was a New York Times bestseller, and was featured on othe...

#3766

Tejumola Olaniyan

#51988

Overall Influence

1959 - 2019 (60 years)

Tejumola Olaniyan was a Nigerian academic. He was the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Cultural Studies, and the Wole Soyinka Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A former President of the African Literature Association , Olaniyan has approximately 35 of his works in over 100 publications, and all in one language. He died on November 30, 2019.

#3767

Evelyne Accad

#80508

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Evelyne Accad is a Lebanese-born educator and writer living in the United States, France and Lebanon. Life Accad is the daughter of a Swiss mother and a father of Lebanese and Egyptian descent . She was born in Beirut in 1943 and grew up in Lebanon and came to the United States in the early 1960s. She was educated at the Beirut College for Women, Anderson College, Ball State University and Indiana University Bloomington, receiving a PhD in comparative literature from the latter institution. Accad taught at Beirut University College in 1978 and 1984 and at Northwestern University in 1991. She...

#3768

Peter Laird

#57337

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Peter Alan Laird is an American comic book writer and artist best known for co-creating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with writer and artist Kevin Eastman. Early life and career Laird was born on January 27, 1954, in North Adams, Massachusetts. Toward the end of 1983, Laird was earning just ten dollars an illustration from a local newspaper in Dover, New Hampshire. He was also doing illustrations for fanzines like The Oracle.

#3769

Friedrich Ulfers

#59295

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Friedrich Ulfers is Professor of German at New York University. He is a distinguished fellow, having been awarded several honors from New York University. He also is the dean of the media and communications division at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, where he confers on the giving of master's and Ph.D. degrees to students. He has written as a literary critic and a philosopher.

#3770

Rosa Andújar

#116688

Overall Influence

Rosa Andújar, FHEA, is a Dominican-American classicist and senior lecturer at King's College London. She is an expert in ancient Greek tragedy, especially the tragic chorus, and Hellenic classicisms in Latin America.

#3771

Mike Birbiglia

#65472

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Mike Birbiglia is an American stand-up comedian, actor, storyteller, director, producer and writer. He is a frequent contributor to This American Life and The Moth, and has released several comedy albums and television specials. His feature-length directorial debut Sleepwalk with Me , based on his one-man show of the same name and in which he also starred, won awards at the Sundance and Nantucket film festivals. He also wrote, directed, and starred in the comedy-drama Don't Think Twice . His 2010 book Sleepwalk with Me and Other Painfully True Stories was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor.

#3772

Michael Ryan

#79625

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael Ryan has been teaching creative writing and literature at University of California, Irvine since 1990. Life He taught previously at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. He is currently the director of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.

#3773

Margot Mifflin

#41951

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Margot Mifflin is an author who has written for The New York Times, ARTnews, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Elle Magazine,The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications.

#3774

Laurent Bigorgne

#15671

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Laurent Bigorgne is a French essayist. He was the Director of the Institut Montaigne from 2010 until 27 February 2022. Early life and education Laurent Bigorgne is the son of two secondary school teachers. His father was head teacher at the lycée professionnel of Pompey and his mother was an IT teacher. He was born on 20 October 1974 in Épinal, a commune in the Vosges, a department of the Grand Est region of France. He was brought up in Meurthe-et-Moselle.

#3775

David Stone Potter

#52517

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

David Stone Potter is the Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Greek and Latin in Ancient History at The University of Michigan. Potter is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities and specializes in Greek and Roman Asia Minor, Greek, and Latin historiography and epigraphy, Roman public entertainment, and the study of ancient warfare.

#3776

Brian Farrell

#48511

Overall Influence

1929 - 2014 (85 years)

Bernard Brendan "Brian" Farrell was an Irish author, journalist, academic and broadcaster. He presented programmes such as Today Tonight, and Prime Time on RTÉ. Early life Born in Manchester, England to Irish parents, Farrell moved to Dublin, Ireland during the Second World War. He was educated at Coláiste Mhuire, Dublin; University College Dublin and Harvard University. He married Marie-Thérèse Dillon in April 1955 while attending Harvard.

#3777

Jacqueline Osherow

#86210

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jacqueline Osherow is an American poet, and Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah. Biography Raised in Philadelphia, Jacqueline Osherow graduated from Radcliffe College with a BA magna cum laude, and from Princeton University with a PhD. At Harvard, she was part of the Harvard Lampoon. Her specialty is love poetry and Biblical poetry and she has been featured in Best American Poetry.

#3778

John Stammers

#87920

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

John Stammers is a British poet and writer. Life Stammers read philosophy at King's College London and is an Associate of King's College. He took up writing poetry in his 30s, joining Michael Donaghy’s City University poetry group. Stammers now teaches at City Lit. In 2002/03 he was appointed Judith E Wilson Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has edited Magma magazine and was convenor of the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference. His work has also appeared in London Review of Books, The New Republic, Poetry Daily , Poetry Review and various broadsheets.

#3779

Ralph Angel

#58420

Overall Influence

1951 - 2020 (69 years)

Ralph Angel was an American poet and educator. Early life and education Born on May 2, 1951, in Seattle, Washington, Angel was a second-generation American of Sephardic Jewish descent. He attended inner-city public schools in Seattle and, while working on freight trains for the Union Pacific Railroad, earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Washington. He later received a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Irvine, and lived in and around Los Angeles.

#3780

Daniele Pantano

#77281

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Daniele Pantano is a poet, essayist, literary translator, artist, editor, and scholar. He was born in Langenthal, Switzerland, of Sicilian and German parentage. Pantano holds degrees in philosophy, literature, and creative writing. His poems have been translated into several languages, including Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, French, German, Italian, Kurdish, Slovenian, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. He is the former American editor of Härter, a prominent German literary magazine; co-editor of em: a review of text and image; publisher/faculty advisor of the Black Market Review; translations ed...

#3781

John Pinsent

#88159

Overall Influence

1922 - 1995 (73 years)

John Pinsent was an English classical scholar, especially in the area of Greek mythology. He founded and edited an academic journal on classical antiquity, the Liverpool Classical Monthly. It was established in 1976 and continued until 1995. Pinsent was its editor-in-chief for its complete lifespan and, because of this, it was sometimes known as Pinsent's Paper.

#3782

Dorothea Smartt

#99503

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Dorothea Smartt FRSL is an English-born poet of Barbadian descent. Biography The daughter of Caribbean immigrants from Barbados, Dorothea Smartt was born in London, England, and grew up there. She earned a BA degree in Social Sciences from South Bank Polytechnic and an MA in anthropology from Hunter College .

#3783

Moteane Melamu

#37174

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Moteane John Melamu is a writer and academic from Botswana. He is a professor at the University of Botswana. Works Children of the Twilight, short stories Living and Partly Living, short stories External links Brief mention from AEAABookfinderNon-English site

#3784

David Jacobs

#39184

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

David Arnold Jacobs was an American television writer, producer, and director. He is most well known as the creator of the CBS primetime series Dallas, Knots Landing, and Paradise. Life and career David Jacobs was born on August 12, 1939 in Baltimore, Maryland, the elder of two children to Melvin and Ruth Jacobs. His Jewish parents were of modest means, and Jacobs's father worked as a household appliance salesman. Jacobs was educated at Baltimore City College High School, and received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Soon after graduation, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator and researcher for Grolier's Encyclopedia.

#3785

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

#57991

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a Puerto Rican academic who specializes in research of the Caribbean. She holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair at Vassar College. Early life and education Lizabeth Paravisini was born in 1953 in Puerto Rico to Virgenmina and Domingo Paravisini. She grew up in Puerto Rico and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras in 1973 in comparative literature. Continuing her education, she moved to New York City and completed a Master of Arts degree in 1976 at New York University. Paravisini furthered her post-graduate education at New York University, earning a Master of Philosophy in 1980 and a Ph.D.

#3786

Emma Bull

#96104

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Emma Bull is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Her novels include the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Bone Dance and the urban fantasy War for the Oaks. She is also known for a series of anthologies set in Liavek, a shared universe that she created with her husband, Will Shetterly. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, she has been a member of the Minneapolis-based folk/rock bands Cats Laughing and The Flash Girls.

#3787

W. H. New

#63386

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

William Herbert New is a Canadian poet and literary critic. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he was educated at John Oliver Secondary School, where he received one of the top matriculation exam scores in British Columbia in 1956, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Leeds. He taught English literature at the University of British Columbia from 1965 to 2003, where he was also the Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies from 1975–1977, and an acting head of the English Department. He also was an associate in 1971 at Cambridge University's Clare Hall. On October 5, 2006, he...

#3788

Michael Salcman

#76264

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael Salcman is an American poet and physician who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His poetical work is infused and vivified by his medical profession, his love of and expertise in contemporary art, and by the fact that his parents were Holocaust survivors. His work is characterized by a lushness of diction, a strong moral focus, and a sense of playful imagery.

#3789

Michael Krasny

#33884

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael Jay Krasny is a professor and retired American radio host of Forum, a news and public affairs program on San Francisco public radio station KQED-FM, covering current events, politics, and culture from 1993 to 2021. Additionally, Krasny is currently a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University.

#3790

Catherine Barnett

#92558

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Catherine Barnett is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Human Hours ; The Game of Boxes , winner of the James Laughlin Award; and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced , winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her honors include a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has published widely in journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Pleiades, Poetry, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Washington Post. Her poetry was featured in The Best American Poetry 2016, edited by Edward Hirsch.

#3791

Ted Deppe

#86667

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Theodore "Ted" Deppe is an American poet and professor, author of books of poetry. His most well-known collection is Orpheus on the Red Line , and he has had his poems published in many literary journals and magazines including The Kenyon Review, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Ireland Review. He was the Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing’s Stonecoast in Ireland program.

#3792

Djanet Sears

#67878

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Djanet Sears is a Canadian playwright, actor and director, nationally recognized for her work in African-Canadian theatre. Sears has many credits in writing and editing highly acclaimed dramas such as Afrika Solo, the first stage play to be written by a Canadian woman of African descent; its sequel Harlem Duet; and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. The complexities of intersecting identities of race, and gender are central themes in her works, as well as inclusion of songs, rhythm, and choruses shaped from West-African traditions. She is also passionate about "the preservation o...

#3793

Tim Rood

#73410

Overall Influence

Tim Rood is a British classical scholar, specialising in Greek historiography and reception studies. He is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at St Hugh's College, Oxford. His research is principally concerned with the literary techniques of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

#3794

Thomas Mallon

#79341

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Thomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism , diaries , letters and the Kennedy assassination , as well as two volumes of essays .

#3795

Susan Glickman

#98677

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Susan Glickman is an American-born Canadian writer and critic. She is a teacher of literature and creative writing, teaching at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto. Career Glickman was formerly an English professor at the University of Toronto, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare's dramaturgy. She also works as an freelance editor, primarily of academic texts.

#3796

Susan Mitchell

#104130

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Susan Mitchell is an American poet, essayist and translator who wrote the poetry collections Rapture and Erotikon. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Life Mitchell grew up in New York City, New York and now lives in Boca Raton, Florida. She has a B.A. in English literature from Wellesley College, an M.A. from Georgetown University, and was a PhD student at Columbia University. She has taught at Middlebury College and Northeastern Illinois University, and currently holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University.

#3797

Rafael Marín

#45349

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Rafael Marín Trechera is a Spanish novelist, translator, comic book writer and co-plotter. He is best known in the United States for his work with artist Carlos Pacheco on the Fantastic Four Vol.3 title in 2000 and 2001, and The Inhumans with José Ladronn and Jorge Lucas. For the Spanish market he wrote the mini-series Iberia Inc and Triada Vértice, as well as the 12-issue historical graphic novels, still in process, 12 del Doce. He is also a well-known scholar on comics history.

#3798

Karen Bender

#64514

Overall Influence

Karen E. Bender is an American novelist and short story writer. Biography Karen E. Bender is the author of the short story collection Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in fiction for 2015, and on the shortlist for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People; Like Normal People was a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Both her collections Refund and The New Order were Longlisted for The Story Prize.

#3799

Padilla affair

#86589

Overall Influence

1932 - 2000 (68 years)

Heberto Juan Padilla was a Cuban poet put to the center of the so-called Padilla affair when he was imprisoned for criticizing the Cuban government. He was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces , was published in 1949. Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticize it openly and in 1971 he was imprisoned by the Cuban government.

#3800

Jonathan Wilson

#37094

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jonathan Wilson is a British-born writer and professor who lives in Newton, Massachusetts. He is the Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate as well as the Director of the Center for Humanities at Tufts University. Within the English Department at Tufts, he teaches courses on Creative Writing and contemporary American Fiction. He lives with his wife, Sharon Kaitz, who is an artist. He has two sons, Adam Wilson, a journalist and writer and Gabriel Wilson, who works in film.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions