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

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#3801

Dvir Abramovich

#54109

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Dvir Abramovich is an Israeli-Australian Jewish studies academic, columnist, and editor. Abramovich is the chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission , a former division of B'nai B'rith in Melbourne, and director of the Program for Jewish Culture and Society at The University of Melbourne. Abramovich's areas of study are the Hebrew language, Israel and Holocaust studies.

#3802

Jamil Jalibi

#59028

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Jameel Jalibi was a noted linguist, critic, writer, and scholar of Urdu literature and linguistics from Pakistan. He also was Vice-Chancellor at the University of Karachi. Early life Jameel Jalibi was born Mohammad Jameel Khan on 12 June 1929 in a Yusufzai family of Aligarh, British India. His early schooling was in Aligarh. He matriculated in Saharanpur and did his Bachelor of Arts from Meerut College. One day before the partition of India, on 13 August 1947, Jalibi migrated to Karachi, Pakistan, where he continued his education and literary activities. He received Master of Arts in English , Bachelor of Laws , Ph.D.

#3803

Böðvar Guðmundsson

#69218

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Böðvar Guðmundsson is an Icelandic writer born 9 January 1939; he grew up in Borgarfjörður, specifically Kirkjuból í Hvítársíðu. He is known for plays, poetry, novels, and children's books. He is said to be best known for the novels Híbýli vindanna and Lífsins tré He has done numerous translations of writers such as Roald Dahl and Heinrich Böll. He was a teacher and guest lecturer at the University of Bergen in the 1980s. He was at one time married to the Icelandic literary scholar Helga Kress. He lives in Denmark and is still writing.

#3804

Caroline Hau

#77778

Overall Influence

Caroline Sy Hau is a Chinese-Filipino author and academic known for her work on Filipino culture and literature and for her books The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation and Region In and Beyond the Philippines and Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946—1980.

#3805

James Toback

#51153

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

James Lee Toback is an American screenwriter and film director. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1991 for Bugsy. He has directed films including The Pick-up Artist, Two Girls and a Guy and Black and White.

#3806

David M. Stern

#95124

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Michael Stern is an American television screenwriter. Among his first work in television was writing episodes of The Wonder Years in the late 1980s. He then proceeded to write several episodes of The Simpsons in the 1990s. In 2010, he developed the animated television series Ugly Americans. Stern is the younger brother of actor Daniel Stern, who served as the narrator of The Wonder Years.

#3807

Kevin Kopelson

#93158

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Kevin Kopelson is an American literary critic. He received a B.A. from Yale University, a J.D. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Brown University. Currently, he is Emeritus Professor of English at The University of Iowa.

#3808

Ken Urban

#86843

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and musician based in New York. He is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Music and Theatre Arts Program's dramatic writing program. Urban is also a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.

#3809

Denise Giardina

#52005

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.

#3810

Kent Hartman

#43188

Overall Influence

Kent Hartman is a Portland, Oregon-based author. His book The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret won the Frances Fuller Victor Oregon Book Award in 2013 and was a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

#3811

Holly Peterson

#59198

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Holly Peterson is an American producer, journalist, and novelist. The daughter of Peter George Peterson, she was a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, an editor-at-large for Talk magazine, and a producer for ABC News, where she covered global politics.

#3812

Douglas Kearney

Douglas Kearney

#65210

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Douglas Kearney is an American poet, performer and librettist. Kearney grew up in Altadena, California. His work has appeared in Nocturnes, Jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Callaloo, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Scapegoat, Obsidian, Boundary 2, Jacket2, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, and Indiana Review. In 2012, his and Anne LeBaron's opera, Crescent City, premiered and received widespread praise. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota.

#3813

Nancy Mercado

#78784

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Nancy Mercado is an American writer, editor, educator and activist; her work focuses on issues of injustice, the environment, and the Puerto Rican and Latino experience in the United States. She forms part of the Nuyorican Movement, a literary genre which arose from the Beat Movement.

#3814

Philomen Probert

#75446

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Philomen Probert is a British classicist and academic, specialising in linguistics. She is Professor of Classical Philology and Linguistics at the University of Oxford. Early life and education From 1991 to 1995, Probert studied classics at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Remaining at Exeter College, she undertook postgraduate studies in general linguistics and comparative philology, completing her Master of Philosophy degree in 1997. She then moved to St John's College, Oxford, where she undertook research towards her Doctor of Philosophy degree under the supervision of Anna Morpurgo Davies.

#3815

Rainer Nägele

#75420

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Rainer Nägele was an American literary scholar whose research primarily focused on modern German and comparative liteture. He was the author of several books, including Reading after Freud: Essays on Goethe, Hölderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud. Nägele was the Alfred C. & Martha F. Mohr Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature at Yale University.

#3816

Douglas Glover

#76107

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Douglas Glover is a Canadian writer. He was raised on his family's tobacco farm just outside Waterford, Ontario. He has published five short story collections, four novels , three books of essays, and The Enamoured Knight, a monograph on Don Quixote and novel form. His 1993 novel, The Life and Times of Captain N., was edited by Gordon Lish and released by Alfred A. Knopf. His most recent book is an essay collection, The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form .

#3817

Melinda Rackham

#50491

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Melinda Rackham is an Australian writer, artist and curator. Education and early art Rackham studied sculpture and performance at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, graduating in 1989 with the Sculpture and Alumni prizes. It was here she was first involved in Australian artist-run initiatives, initially as Co-Director in 1987 of ArtHaus laneway gallery in Darlinghurst, New South Wales, then as a member of Ultimo Project Studio Collective in Ultimo and Glebe in Sydney.

#3818

Jenny Zhang

#42004

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Jenny Zhang is an American writer, poet, and prolific essayist based in Brooklyn, New York. One focus of her work is on the Chinese American immigrant identity and experience in the United States. She has published a collection of poetry called Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and a non-fiction chapbook called Hags. From 2011 to 2014, Zhang wrote extensively for Rookie. Additionally, Zhang has worked as a freelance essayist for other publications. In August 2017, Zhang's short story collection, Sour Heart, was the first acquisition by Lena Dunham's Lenny imprint, Lenny Books, via Random House.

#3819

Roberta Frank

#47548

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Roberta Frank is an American philologist specializing in Old English and Old Norse language and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University. Career Frank received a B.A. in comparative literature from New York University in 1962 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 1968. Her doctoral dissertation was titled Wordplay in Old English Poetry. Frank taught at the University of Toronto beginning in 1968, from 1978 as a full professor and from 1995 as University Professor. She was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1985. ...

#3820

Maureen Owen

#97480

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Maureen Owen is an American poet, editor, and biographer. Life Born in Graceville, Minnesota, Owen was raised on her family’s farm and later on California’s horseracing tracks where her parents were horse trainers. She traveled in the Racing Fair Circuit along with her family in the summers. They wintered at Santa Anita Racetrack. Owen attended Seattle University and San Francisco State University. In 1965, she moved to Japan, and then to New York in 1968. Owen was co-director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City. She has worked as Program Coordinator at the St. Mark's Poetry Pr...

#3821

Linda Stern Zisquit

#83037

Overall Influence

Linda Stern Zisquit is an American-born Israeli poet and translator. She teaches poetry, Hebrew literature and poetry translation at Bar-Ilan University. Biography Linda Stern was born in Buffalo, NY. She studied at Tufts University and, later, at Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo. In 1978, she moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem. She is married to the lawyer Donald Zisquit, and is the mother of five children. She also runs the ArtSpace Gallery at her home in Jerusalem's German Colony.

#3822

Deborah Paredez

Deborah Paredez

#67746

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Deborah Paredez is an American poet, scholar, and cultural critic. She is the author of the poetry collections, Year of the Dog and This Side of Skin, and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. She is co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization that supports Latinx poets and poetry. She lives in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University.

#3823

Sybil Marshall

#56713

Overall Influence

1913 - 2005 (92 years)

Sybil Marshall was a British writer, novelist, social historian, broadcaster, folklorist and educationalist. Biography Born as Sybil Mary Edwards in Ramsey Heights, the daughter of a smallholder on the Fens who had left school at the age of nine, she was educated at Ramsey Heights Elementary School and Ramsey Grammar School in Cambridgeshire . Marshall was not able to attend university because no scholarship was available so she started work in 1933 as an untrained teacher, first in Essex and then in Huntingdon. As an unqualified teacher at Kingston Primary School in Cambridgeshire from 1942 to 1948 she worked on her own in one room containing 26 pupils aged between 4 and 11.

#3824

Etgar Keret

#71603

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. Personal life Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1967. He is a third child to parents who survived the Holocaust. Both of his parents are from Poland. He studied at Ohel Shem high school, and at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Programme for Outstanding Students of Tel Aviv University. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Shira Geffen, and their son, Lev. He is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, and at Tel Aviv University. He holds dual Isr...

#3825

Josué Guébo

#77073

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Josué Yoroba Guébo, or Josué Guébo , is an Ivorian academic and man of letters. A major figure of African contemporary poetry, he is also a short story writer, playwright, essayist and author of children's literature. 6th President of the Ivoirian Writers' Association , he is the recipient of the Bernard Dadié Grand Prize and the U Tam'si Prize.

#3826

Jasper Griffin

#71569

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Jasper Griffin was a British classicist and academic. He was Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature in the University of Oxford from 1992 until 2004. Early life Griffin was born on 29 May 1937. He was educated on a scholarship at Christ's Hospital, a private school in Horsham, West Sussex. He read Classical Moderations and Greats at Balliol College, Oxford between 1956 and 1960. He graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree. He was Jackson Fellow at Harvard University from 1960 to 1961 where he undertook research in early Latin poets.

#3827

Lina Meruane

#87494

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Lina Meruane Boza is a Chilean writer and professor. Her work, written in Spanish, has been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese, German, and French. In 2011 she won the Anna Seghers-Preis for the quality of her work, and in 2012 the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for her novel Sangre en el ojo.

#3828

Hannah Sullivan

#79348

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Hannah Sullivan is a British academic and poet. She is the author of The Work of Revision , which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the University English Book Prize, as well as the poetry collection Three Poems , which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is associate professor of English literature at New College, Oxford

#3829

Boris Chichibabin

Boris Chichibabin

#99872

Overall Influence

1923 - 1994 (71 years)

Boris Alekseyevich Chichibabin was a Soviet poet and a laureat of the USSR State Prize , who is typically regarded as one of the Sixtiers. He lived in Kharkiv, and in the course of three decades became one of the most famous and best-loved members of the artistic intelligentsia of the city, i.e., from the 1950s to 1980s. From the end of the 1950s, his poetry was widely distributed throughout the Soviet Union as samizdat. Official recognition came only at the end of his life in the time of perestroika.

#3830

Marnie Woodrow

#70863

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Marnie Woodrow is a Canadian comedian and writer and editor. She has also worked as an editor, magazine writer and as a researcher for TV and radio. Woodrow has published two short fiction collections, Why We Close Our Eyes When We Kiss in 1991 and In the Spice House in 1996, before publishing her debut novel Spelling Mississippi in 2002. Spelling Mississippi was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2003.

#3831

Kathleen Alcalá

Kathleen Alcalá

#106315

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of a short-story collection, three novels set in the American Southwest and nineteenth-century Mexico, and a collection of essays. She teaches creative writing at workshops and programs in Washington state and elsewhere, including Seattle University, the University of New Mexico and Richard Hugo House.

#3832

Mercedes Rein

#65737

Overall Influence

1930 - 2006 (76 years)

Mercedes Rein was a Uruguayan writer, translator, and dramatist. Biography Mercedes Rein was a Professor of Literature in Secondary Education. In 1955 she earned a travel scholarship to the University of Hamburg to study philosophy and letters. She was also an assistant of Hispano-American Literature at the University of the Republic's Faculty of Humanities and Sciences, a position from which she was dismissed by the dictatorship.

#3833

Mark Nowak

#80189

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mark Nowak is an American poet, as well as cultural critic, playwright and essayist, from Buffalo, New York. Nowak is a professor in the English Department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY.

#3834

Dick Higgins

#44096

Overall Influence

1938 - 1998 (60 years)

Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement . Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 196...

#3835

Ernesto Quiñonez

#61199

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Ernesto Quiñonez is an Ecuadorian-Puerto Rican novelist. His work received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers designation, the Borders Bookstore Original New Voice selection, and was declared a "Notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Quiñonez is an associate professor at Cornell University.

#3836

Ashok Chavda

#84508

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Ashok Chavda, also known by his pen name Bedil, is a Gujarati poet, writer and critic from Gujarat, India. His anthology of poetry, Dalkhi Thi Saav Chhutan , was awarded the Yuva Puraskar by the Sahitya Akademi in 2013. His collection of known writings include Pagla Talaavma , Pagarav Talaavma , Tu Kahu Ke Tame , Pityo Ashko , Shabdoday , and Ghazalistan , which is a translation of Urdu ghazals written by Indian and Pakistani poets. He is also a recipient of the Yuva Gaurav Award from the Gujarat Sahitya Akademi, and the Dasi Jivan Award from the Government of Gujarat. He has appeared in sev...

#3837

Marsha Norman

#62090

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She is co-chair of the playwriting department at The Juilliard School.

#3838

Harold Massingham

#70371

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Harold W. Massingham was an English poet. Life He was the son of H. W. Massingham . He attended the same Mexborough Grammar School as the Yorkshire poet and Poet Laureate Ted Hughes but in a class two years below. He taught at the University of Manchester; his students included Steven Waling, and Trevor Griffiths.

#3839

Pius Ngandu Nkashama

#65076

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Pius Ngandu Nkashama is a professor, writer, playwright, poet and literary critic. He was born in 1946 in Mbujimayi in the province of Kasai Oriental in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a degree in philosophy and letters at Lovanium University in 1970, he was appointed as assistant professor and professor at the National University of Zaire . He also led the Centre of African Studies. In the late 1970s, he flew to France where he obtained in 1981 a PhD in Arts and Humanities at the University of Strasbourg. Thereafter, he traveled the world to teach in various universities . Since 2...

#3840

Ashley Tuttle

#86876

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Ashley Tuttle is an American musical theatre actress and dancer who is best known for her role in the musical Movin' Out, which earned her a Tony Award nomination in the category of "Best Performance by a Featured Actress".

#3841

Achsah Guibbory

#100730

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Achsah Guibbory is an American academic currently serving as the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English at Barnard College. Her primary areas of focus are seventeenth century literature, religious history, and the works of both John Donne and John Milton; she has served as president of both the John Donne Society and the Milton Society of America.

#3842

Peter Cameron

#75251

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Peter Cameron is an American novelist and short-story writer. Several of his works have been adapted into films. Life and career Cameron was born and raised in the Pompton Plains section of Pequannock Township, New Jersey. He graduated in English literature in 1982 from Hamilton College. Cameron lived in Pompton Plains, London, and, later, New York City.

#3843

Denise Sweet

#64560

Overall Influence

Denise Sweet is an Anishinaabe poet. From 2004 to 2008, she served as the Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Background Sweet grew up in Minnesota and is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.

#3844

Hans-Peter Naumann

#114644

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Hans-Peter Naumann was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Hans-Peter Naumann was born in Chemnitz, Germany on 18 January 1939. Since 1958, Naumann studied German philology, Nordic philology and history at the University of Freiburg. Since 1965 he was a research assistant at the German Seminar at Saarland University. Naumann received his Ph.D. at Freiburg in 1968 with a dissertation on translations of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Swedish.

#3845

Daria Galateria

#81430

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Daria Galateria is an Italian writer and professor. Biography Daria Galateria was born in Rome, Italy, in 1950. She graduated in Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on monologue in Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. She has taught French Literature and Language at the Sapienza University of Rome since 1975. Over the years her research has focused in particular on the female memoir. She also edited the first Italian commented edition of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

#3846

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

#62645

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Virpi Hämeen-Anttila is a Finnish writer, translator, and researcher. She was the recipient of the Eino Leino Prize in 2002 along with her husband Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, for their work in translating and promoting multicultural literature. In addition to being a best-selling novelist, she is a translator and non-fiction writer. She also teaches Sanskrit and the history of Indian art at Helsinki University.

#3847

Lynn Emanuel

#71134

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lynn Collins Emanuel is an American poet. Some of her poetry collections are Then, Suddenly— and Noose and Hook . She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also won the 1992 National Poetry Series Open Competition for The Dig, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and journals including Parnassus, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Slate and Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best...

#3848

Reginald McKnight

#59172

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Reginald McKnight is an American short story writer and novelist. Life McKnight was born 26 February 1956 in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany, to an Air Force family; therefore, he moved around a lot in childhood, although he calls Colorado home. He earned degrees from Pikes Peak Community College , Colorado College and University of Denver ; he is also Phi Beta Kappa and received an honorary doctorate from Colorado College.

#3849

Francesca Coppa

#71300

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook . She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organi...

#3850

Youssouf Amine Elalamy

#60801

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Youssouf Amine Elalamy is a Moroccan writer, visual artist and professor of Media Studies and Communication at Ibn Tofail University. He has published his works mainly in French and occasionally in Moroccan Arabic.

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