The Most Influential People Across History
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,
#3951
Constance Hunting
#85303
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Constance Hunting was an American poet and publisher, widely known in the Northeastern United States. She taught English literature and creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono until her death on April 5, 2006.
Go to Profile#3952
Dennis Nurkse
#77887
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dennis Nurkse is a poet from Brooklyn. Life Nurkse is the son of the eminent Estonian economist Ragnar Nurkse. He graduated from Harvard College. He has taught workshops at Rikers Island, and his poems about prison life appeared in The American Poetry Review, Evergreen Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other magazines. He has taught at The New School University and Columbia University, and is currently on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He has translated anonymous medieval and flamenco Spanish lyric poems and has written about the Spanish pastoral poems by contemporary Giannina Braschi.
Go to Profile#3953
Steve Chimombo
#39141
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Steve Bernard Miles Chimombo was a Malawian writer, poet, editor and teacher. He was born in Zomba. Life He was educated at Zomba Catholic Secondary School, then at the University of Malawi where he earned a B.A. At the University of Wales, he took a teaching diploma in English as a Second Language. At Columbia University in the United States, he was awarded his M.A. and Ph.D. in teaching. After studying at Leeds, England, Chimombo returned to Malawi to edit the literary bulletin Outlook-lookout.
Go to Profile#3954
Ray Cooney
#50130
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Raymond George Alfred Cooney OBE is an English playwright, actor, and director. His biggest success, Run for Your Wife , ran for nine years in London's West End and is its longest-running comedy. He has had 17 of his plays performed there.
Go to Profile#3955
Anthony Julian Tamburri
#46337
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Anthony Julian Tamburri is the seventh executive director and longest serving with the title of Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures. He has written over one hundred journal articles and book chapters, and sixteen books.
Go to Profile#3956
Ventseslav Konstantinov
#65935
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Ventseslav Konstantinov was a Bulgarian writer, aphorist and translator of German and English literature. Life Konstantinov was born in Sofia, the son of a music professor. He graduated in Germanic studies and philosophy and wrote a thesis on influences of German expressionism on Bulgarian poetry during the interwar period. Since 1987 he has been teaching translation of German-language poetry at the University of Sofia.
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Matthew Olzmann
#107393
Overall Influence
Matthew Olzmann is a poet, author, and essayist. Personal life Matthew Olzmann was born in Detroit, Michigan. He currently teaches at Dartmouth College, and the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Olzmann is married to poet Vievee Francis.
Go to Profile#3958
Khushwant Singh
#44141
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Khushwant Singh was an Indian author, lawyer, diplomat, journalist and politician. His experience in the 1947 Partition of India inspired him to write Train to Pakistan in 1956 , which became his most well-known novel.
Go to Profile#3959
Pak Dujin
#102097
Overall Influence
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
Pak Dujin was a Korean poet. A voluminous writer of nature poetry, Pak Dujin is chiefly notable for the way he turned his subjects into symbols of the newly emerging national situation of Korea in the second half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#3960
Marjorie Housepian Dobkin
#30750
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Marjorie Anaïs Housepian Dobkin was an author and an English professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York. Her books include the novel A Houseful of Love and the history Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City.
Go to Profile#3961
Ye Xin
#118751
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ye Xin is a Chinese writer who has written profusely about "sent-down youths" , drawing from his own experience. A Shanghai native, Ye Xin "volunteered" to receive his "rustication" in remote Guizhou in 1969, where he spent 2 decades of his life. He has written over 20 novels, but is best known for writing the teleplay of mega-hit series Sinful Debt , based on his 1992 novel Educated Youth.
Go to Profile#3962
Flora Veit-Wild
#106428
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Flora Veit-Wild is a German literary academic, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, and on the body and madness in African literature.
Go to Profile#3963
Angela Leighton
#76479
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Angela Leighton, FBA is a British literary scholar and poet, who specialises in Victorian and twentieth-century English literature. Since 2006, she has been a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Previously, from 1979 to 2006, she taught at the University of Hull, rising to be Professor of English.
Go to Profile#3964
Lee Ki-ho
#91849
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Lee Ki-ho is a South Korean writer. Life Lee Ki-ho was born in Wonju, Gangwon Province, South Korea, in 1972. Lee Ki-ho debuted when his short story “Birney” won the monthly Modern Literature New Writer's Contest in 1999. He is currently a professor in the department of creative writing at Gwangju University.
Go to Profile#3965
Maria Tumarkin
#105148
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Maria Tumarkin is an Australian cultural historian, essayist and novelist., and is senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, teaching creative writing.
Go to Profile#3966
Juliane Okot Bitek
#78157
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Juliane Okot Bitek , also known as Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, is a Kenyan-born Ugandan-raised diasporic writer and academic, who lives, studies and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is perhaps best-known for her poetry book 100 Days, a reflection on the 100-day 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu people were killed. She has been a contributor to several anthologies, including in 2019 New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby.
Go to Profile#3967
Amy Kaplan
#92381
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
Amy Kaplan was an American academic working in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, her work focused on the critical study of the culture of imperialism, prison writing, mourning, memory, and war. Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and president of the American Studies Association in 2003.
Go to Profile#3968
Sharon Mesmer
#79110
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch , The Virgin Formica , Vertigo Seeks Affinities , Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue . Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago , In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter . She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the Amer...
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Gail Jones
#74731
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gail Jones is an Australian novelist and academic. Early life and career Gail Jones was born in Harvey, Western Australia. She grew up in Broome and Kalgoorlie. She studied fine arts briefly at the University of Melbourne before returning to Western Australia where she took her undergraduate degree and PhD from the University of Western Australia in 1994. Her thesis was titled Mimesis and alterity: postcolonialism, ethnography and the representation of racial 'others'. She is currently Professor of Writing in the Writing and Society Research School at the Western Sydney University.
Go to Profile#3970
John V. Luce
#72433
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
John Victor Luce was an Irish classicist, former professor and emeritus Fellow of Classics at Trinity College Dublin. He was also the College's Public Orator between 1971 and 2005. Luce entered Trinity in 1938 to read Classics, and was elected a Scholar in his first year, a highly unusual achievement. He took a double Moderatorship in Classics and Philosophy and was awarded Gold Medals for both subjects. He was Auditor of the College Classical Society in 1942–43. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity in 1948 and served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Oratory until 1989.
Go to Profile#3971
Neil Simon
#65487
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Marvin Neil Simon was an American playwright, screenwriter and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He has received three Tony Awards, and a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. He was awarded a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006.
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G. Lynn Nelson
#105147
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
G. Lynn Nelson was an American author and academic notable for his advocacy of young adult writing programs and the implementation of alternative approaches to language study informed by Native American concepts. Nelson began teaching at Arizona State University in 1973 and served as the director of the regional Greater Phoenix Area Writing Project , a regional site of the National Writing Project , until 2004. He co-founded the Young Adult Writing Project in 1996. Nelson died November 6, 2014.
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Michael M. Coroza
#107350
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael M. Coroza is a Filipino poet, educator, and S.E.A. Write Award laureate. Short Curriculum Vitae Michael M. Coroza is a Full Professor and former Chair of the Department of Filipino, School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University. He teaches Filipino Literature, Creative Writing , and Literary Translation at the graduate and undergraduate levels. A multi-awarded poet, essayist, literary translator, and editor, he received the S.E.A. Write Award from the Royalty of Thailand in 2007 and the Ani ng Dangal Award from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts of the Republic of the Philippines in 2009.
Go to Profile#3974
Douglas Lane Patey
#75579
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Douglas Lane Patey is an American academic and professor of English at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. His area of expertise is 18th-century British literature. Early life and education Patey was raised in Corning, New York.
Go to Profile#3975
Annette Pehnt
#95281
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Annette Pehnt is a German writer and literary critic. She lives in Freiburg in Baden-Württemberg. After graduating from school in 1986 Pehnt performed voluntary social work in Belfast. After a year living in Scotland, she studied English, Celtic studies and German language and literature at the University of Cologne, University of Galway, University of California, Berkeley and University of Freiburg. After her master's degree and the first national examination in 1994, graduation followed in 1997 at the University of Freiburg with a work on Irish literature.
Go to Profile#3976
Eugen Munteanu
#106215
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Eugen Munteanu is a Romanian linguist. He specializes in Biblical philology, historical lexicology and the philosophy of language. He has also edited into Romanian authors such as Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Aquinas, Antoine de Rivarol, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, Eugenio Coseriu, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacob Grimm and Ernst Renan.
Go to Profile#3977
Rustam Singh
#93811
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Rustam Singh is an Indian poet, philosopher, translator and editor. He writes poetry in Hindi and theoretical and philosophical papers and essays in English. He is regarded as an important Hindi poet of this period. His poems have been translated into many Indian and foreign languages including English, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Panjabi, Swedish, Norwegian and Estonian. Apart from his books, his poems have appeared in many important literary journals and magazines, such as Sakshatkaar, Poorvagrah, Bahuvachan, Jansatta, Pratilipi, Indian Literature, International Quarterly, Aufgabe, LyrikVannen etc.
Go to Profile#3978
Robert Patrick
#43121
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Robert Patrick was an American playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, and novelist. Patrick was a prolific playwright, with more than 300 productions of his plays staged in New York City, including Broadway venues.
Go to Profile#3979
Jerzy Jarniewicz
#74854
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and essayist. He was awarded the 2022 Nike Award, the most important distinction in Polish literature as well as the Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis .
Go to Profile#3980
Kwak Jae-gu
#86094
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kwak Jae-gu is a South Korean modern poet. Life Kwak Jaegu was born in Gwangju, Jeollanam-do in 1954. He graduated from Chonnam National University. After his poem won a literary contest sponsored by the JoongAng Ilbo in 1981, Kwak became active in the literary circle that produced the magazine May Poetry . Kwak is currently a professor at Sunchon National University, where he works with Korean author Kim Won-il.
Go to Profile#3981
Heather Watts
#50343
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Heather Watts is a ballet dancer, most known for her time with the New York City Ballet. Biography Born in Long Beach, California, her dream as a little girl was to be an actress. An acting coach advised her taking ballet classes, seeing as she was incredibly dramatic . So she started dancing at the age of 10, to "develop poise." She came to New York at the age of 13 on a Ford Foundation summer scholarship to attend the School of American Ballet, the official school of the New York City Ballet. She moved permanently to New York at age 15, again on a Ford Foundation scholarship to the School o...
Go to Profile#3982
Carlo L. Golino
#76831
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Golino, Carlo Luigi was an Italian American who taught Italian literature at many colleges in the United States Golino received his B.A. from City College of New York ; an M.A. from Columbia University ; an M.A. from the University of Colorado ; and his Ph.D. in romance languages and literature from the University of California, Berkeley . From 1942 to 1946, he served in the United States Navy where he acted as a Japanese interpreter. He was appointed to the faculty at UCLA in 1947. In 1965, he was appointed Professor of Italian and Dean of College of Letters and Sciences on the Riverside campus.
Go to Profile#3983
Jason Shinder
#106586
Overall Influence
1955 - 2008 (53 years)
Jason Shinder was an American poet who authored three books and founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice. His last book, Stupid Hope , was released posthumously. He was born in Brooklyn New York in 1955, and published his first literary work in 1993, with the release of Every Room We Ever Slept In, which became a New York Public Library Notable Book. He went on to author Among Women and Uncertain Hours, he also edited numerous anthologies, including The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later and The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry That Inspires Them. In additi...
Go to Profile#3984
Ram Krishna Singh
#59236
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ram Krishna Singh is a reviewer, critic, and contemporary poet who writes in Indian English. Early life Dr.Singh was born on 31 December 1950 in Varanasi, India. After earning a B.A in 1970, he gained his M.A. in English Literature from Banaras Hindu University in 1972, and his Ph.D. from Kashi Vidyapith, Varanasi, in 1981. He also obtained a Diploma in Russian in 1972.
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John Errington Moss
#76996
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Errington Moss is a Canadian author. Notable for the Quin and Morgan novels that he began after teaching for many years at the University of Ottawa, he has lectured on Canadian literature in Europe, the United States, Japan, Greenland, and the Canary Islands. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Jørgen Leth
#60180
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jørgen Leth is a Danish poet and film director who is considered a leading figure in experimental documentary film making. Most notable are his documentary A Sunday in Hell and his surrealistic short film The Perfect Human . He is also a sports commentator for Danish television and is represented by the film production company Sunset Productions.
Go to Profile#3987
Samuel Archibald
#92396
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Samuel Archibald is a Canadian writer. He is best known for his short story collection Arvida, which won the Prix Coup de cœur Renaud-Bray in 2012, and was defended by Bernard Landry in the 2013 edition of Le Combat des livres. Its English translation by Donald Winkler was a shortlisted nominee for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Go to Profile#3988
Gregg Bordowitz
#57097
Overall Influence
1964 - 2003 (39 years)
Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, artist, and activist currently working as a professor in the Video, New Media, and Animation department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Biography Gregg Bordowitz was born August 14, 1964, in Brooklyn, New York. In 1982, Bordowitz began his academic career at the School of Visual Arts, then studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program from 1985 to 1986, and at New York University from 1986 to 1987. In 1987, Bordowitz dropped out of school to become a full-time video artist, guerilla TV director, and activist with the direct action advocacy group ACT UP.
Go to Profile#3989
Angela Flournoy
#87783
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Angela Flournoy is an American writer. Her debut novel The Turner House won the First Novelist Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. She was also listed on the National Book Awards' 5 under 35 list, nominated by her former teacher ZZ Packer.
Go to Profile#3990
C. J. Henderson
#69256
Overall Influence
1951 - 2014 (63 years)
Chris "C. J." Henderson was an American writer of horror, hardboiled crime fiction and comic books, known for such works as the Piers Knight and Teddy London series. His comics work includes books for Marvel Comics and Valiant Comics.
Go to Profile#3991
Rob Penny
#97537
Overall Influence
1941 - 2003 (62 years)
Robert Lee "Rob" Penny was an American playwright, poet, social activist, and professor. Penny wrote more than 30 plays and 300 poems. Early life Penny was born in Opelika, Alabama, on August 6, 1941. He moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Hill District as a toddler, where he was raised. A 1957 graduate of Central Catholic High School , Penny had childhood aspirations of joining the priesthood.
Go to Profile#3992
Jasmine Warga
#86836
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Jasmine Warga is an American children's and young adult book author. Her free verse book Other Words for Home received a Newbery Honor in 2020. Early life and education Warga was born in Cincinnati to an American mother and immigrant Jordanian father. She graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in history and art history. She also earned her MFA in creative writing at Lesley University. After graduating college, Warga worked as a sixth grade science teacher in Texas. While still teaching, she began writing stories.
Go to Profile#3993
Alan Ball
#60054
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alan Erwin Ball is an American writer, director and producer. Ball wrote the screenplay for American Beauty, for which he earned an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He also created the series Six Feet Under and True Blood, works for which he earned an Emmy as well as awards from the Writers, Directors, and Producers Guilds of America. He was an executive producer on the Cinemax television series Banshee. He also wrote and directed the film Uncle Frank.
Go to Profile#3994
Sybille Haynes
#84741
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Sybille Edith Haynes, is a British expert on Etruscology. She grew up and was educated in Germany and Austria before moving to the UK in the 1950s. She worked with Etruscan artefacts at the British Museum for many years as well as publishing numerous books, for fellow scholars and also for the general public. In the 1980s she joined the Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#3995
Yael Renan
#75018
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Yael Renan was an Israeli writer and translator. Biography Renan was born and grew up in Tel Aviv and attended Tel Aviv University, where she received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a doctorate in English literature in 1978, for her work on "Figurative Language in the Prose of Modernism". She was a senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature at Tel Aviv University until her retirement in 2007, and also volunteered in the Department of Women's Studies.
Go to Profile#3996
O Seyeong
#101188
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
O Seyeong is a South Korean poet, critic, educator, and professor at Seoul National University. He has been awarded the Korean Poets’ Association Prize, the Nokwon Literary Award, the Cheong Chi-Yong Literature Prize, the Pyun-Woon Literary Prize, the Gong Cho Literary Award, and the Manhae Literature Prize in Poetry.
Go to Profile#3997
Shirley Barlow
#79093
Overall Influence
Shirley Ann Barlow is a classicist specialising in the study of Classical drama and was one of the founding members of the Department of Classics at the University of Kent. One of her former students is comedian Alan Davies. She was an Honorary Fellow of University College London.
Go to Profile#3998
Fausta Garavini
#105476
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Fausta Garavini is an Italian writer and translator. She studied French and Occitan literature at the University of Florence She later worked as a literature professor at this university and as an essayist in several publications like "Paragone", "Nuovi Argomenti", "Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France" and "Littérature".
Go to Profile#3999
Lia Schwartz
#120341
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Lia Schwartz was an Argentine-American historian of Spanish and Comparative Literature. Biography Lia Schwartz was born in Corrientes, Argentina, 1941. She served as a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Schwartz taught Spanish and Comparative Literature at Fordham University and at Dartmouth College , and since 2000 is Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She was Executive Officer of its Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages from...
Go to Profile#4000
Peter Robinson
#37272
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire. Life and career Born Salford, Lancashire, the son of an Anglican curate and geography teacher, Peter Robinson grew up, with the exception of five years spent in Wigan , in poor urban parishes of north and south Liverpool. He graduated from the University of York in 1974. In the 1970s he edited the poetry magazine Perfect Bound and helped organise several international Cambridge Poetry Festivals between 1977 and 1985, acting as festival coordinator in 1979. He was awarded a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1981 for a thesis on the poetry of Donald Davie, Roy Fisher and Charles Tomlinson.
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