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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#4051
Dean Sheppard
#123609
Overall Influence
#4052
Mariasun Landa
#76067
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mariasun Landa Etxebeste is a Spanish writer. Most of her literary production has been developed in the Basque language in the field of children's and young people's literature. She is one of the writers in Basque language more translated to other languages.
Go to Profile#4053
T. M. McNally
#119912
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
T. M. McNally is an American novelist, and short story writer. Life Born May 20, 1961, he was raised in Chicago, Illinois. He moved to Arizona when he was 15. He graduated from Rockford College, and Arizona State University. McNally taught literature and writing at Webster University. He currently teaches at Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
Go to Profile#4054
Jane Kurtz
#92501
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jane Kurtz is an American writer of more than thirty picture books, middle-grade novels, nonfiction, ready-to-reads, and books for educators. A member of the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in children's and adult literature, Kurtz is an international advocate for literacy and writing. She was also part of a small group of volunteers who organized the not-for-profit organization, Ethiopia Reads, which has established more than seventy libraries for children, published books, and built four schools in rural Ethiopia.
Go to Profile#4055
Caroline Randall Williams
#46381
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Caroline Randall Williams is an American author, poet and academic best known for the 2015 cookbook Soul Food Love, co-written with her mother, author Alice Randall, and published by Random House. In February, 2016, Soul Food Love received the NAACP Image Award in Literature .
Go to Profile#4056
Roger Pearson
#73214
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Roger Pearson is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. His research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth century French literature and has worked particularly on Voltaire, Stendhal, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire. Pearson has also worked as a French to English translator.
Go to Profile#4057
M. Miriam Herrera
#90693
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
M. Miriam Herrera is an American author and poet. She teaches at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and currently teaches Introduction to Mexican Studies as well as Composition and Rhetoric and Creative Writing. She is a Lecturer with the Department of Writing Language Studies, and a Mexican American Studies Program Affiliate. Her poetry often explores Mexican-American or Chicano life and her Crypto-Jewish and Cherokee heritage, but mainly the universal themes of nature, family, myth, and the transcendent experience.
Go to Profile#4058
Egil Törnqvist
#75167
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Per Egil Törnqvist was Professor Emeritus of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam and an academic literary critic. Earlier he was in charge of the drama division in the comparative literature program at Uppsala University. From 1969 to 1997 he was professor of Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Amsterdam. His daughter is artist Marit Törnqvist.
Go to Profile#4059
Kasia Boddy
#90922
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kasia Boddy is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Fitzwilliam College. She was born in Aberdeen in 1966 and grew up in Glasgow, where she attended Hyndland Secondary School. She did an MA in English and Philosophy at Edinburgh and a PhD on American short fiction at Cambridge. She has also taught at the universities of York, Dundee and University College London.
Go to Profile#4060
Phillis Levin
#100574
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Phillis Levin is an American poet. Life Levin is the daughter of Charlotte E. Levin and Herbert L. Levin of Yardley, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1976, and Johns Hopkins University in 1977. She was an Associate Professor of English at The University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently a visiting professor in the graduate writing program at New York University and a teaching poet-in-residence at Hofstra University. She is also an elector of the American Poets' Corner of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, and the co-director of the Sarah Lawrence Language Exchange.
Go to Profile#4061
Dulce María González
#101329
Overall Influence
1958 - 2014 (56 years)
Dulce María González was a Mexican writer and educator. In 2003, she was awarded the UNAL's Premio a las Artes for her work. Biography She was born in Monterrey and studied Spanish literature at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León . González was editor for the literary column of the newspaper El Norte. She also contributed to the newspaper El Porvenir, to the UANL journals Deslinde and Vida Universitaria and was founder and editorial advisor for the magazines Otra Orilla, El Correo Chuan and Papeles de la Mancuspia. She was a fellow of the Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Nuevo León.
Go to Profile#4062
Sydney Lea
#92619
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sydney Lea is an American poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. He was the founding editor of the New England Review and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015. Lea's writings focus the outdoors, woods, and rural life New England and "the mysteries and teachings of the natural world."
Go to Profile#4063
Mindy Aloff
#85355
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mindy Aloff is an American editor, journalist, essayist, and dance critic. Aloff's writing on dance, literature, film, and culture have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other articles and publications worldwide.
Go to Profile#4064
Edgardo Vega Yunqué
#83607
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
Edgardo Vega Yunqué was a Puerto Rican novelist and short story writer, who also used the Americanized pen name Ed Vega. Early years Edgardo Vega Yunqué was born in Ponce, to Alberto Vega, a Baptist minister, and Abigail Yunqué, and lived in Cidra, Puerto Rico, until his family moved to the South Bronx in 1949. Even as a child he loved to read, and became familiar with many of the great European works. His seminal influences included Miguel de Cervantes, Azorín, Borges, Unamuno, Lope de Vega, Victor Hugo, and members of the Generation of '27 literary movement.
Go to Profile#4065
Robin Hemley
#86088
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Robin Hemley, born in New York City, is an American nonfiction and fiction writer. He is the author of fifteen books, and has had work published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Conjunctions, The Sun, and Narrative, among others. In 2020, he joined the faculty of Long Island University, where his is Director and Polk Professor in Residence of the George Polk School of Communications.
Go to Profile#4066
Yi Hocheol
#115548
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Yi Hocheol was a South Korean writer who won several awards. Life Yi Hocheol was born on 15 March 1932 in Wonsan, Hamgyeongnam-do, North Korea, and lived through the tragedy of the ideological conflict in Korea. His father refused to cooperate with Northern communists, so his family had their property confiscated, and were chased out of their hometown. During the war Yi Hocheol was drafted into the North Korean army and sent to the front in the South. He eventually rejoined his family in his native town, but ultimately decided to move to South Korea by himself. A prolific writer as well as an...
Go to Profile#4067
Craig Santos Perez
#99668
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Craig Santos Perez is a poet, essayist, university professor, American publisher from the Chamorro people, born in Mongmong-Toto-Maite, Guam Island. His poetry has received multiple awards, including the 2023 National Book Award, a 2015 American Book Award and the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.
Go to Profile#4068
Djelal Kadir
#95135
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Djelal Kadir is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he teaches literatures of the Americas, modernism, postmodernism, world literature, and classical and modern theory, and where he has been the recipient of departmental teaching awards and the College Distinguished Service Medal. He has published more than one hundred articles and is the author and editor of a dozen books on the Americas, globalization, world literature, postcolonialism, modernism and literary theory as well as editor of more than twenty special issues of literary periodicals.
Go to Profile#4069
Javier O. Huerta
#107126
Overall Influence
Javier O. Huerta is a Mexican American and Chicano poet. His first book Some Clarifications y otros poemas was awarded the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from the University of California at Irvine. Personal background Huerta was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico and immigrated to the United States with his mother and younger brother, crossing the Rio Grande in 1981. In 1986, he gained legal residency under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and became a US citizen in January 2000 after serving four years in the United States Navy. , he resides in the Bay Area, California.
Go to Profile#4070
Diana Mashkova
#98084
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Diana Vladimirovna Mashkova is a Russian journalist, writer and author. Early life and education Mashkova was born in Kazan. She was born in the family of a professor and engineer. Mashkova graduated from Kazan State Pedagogical University and was a postgraduate at Kazan State University where she learnt the English language and foreign literature. In 2002 Mashkova obtained her Ph.D. for foreign literature.
Go to Profile#4071
José Tolentino de Mendonça
#32098
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça is a Portuguese prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. A theologian and university professor, he is also regarded as one of the most original voices of modern Portuguese literature and a Catholic intellectual. His work includes poetry, essays and plays that he signs José Tolentino Mendonça.
Go to Profile#4072
João Almino
#93141
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
João Almino is a Brazilian novelist. He is the author of The Brasília Quintet, which consists of the novels Ideas on Where to Spend the End of the World, Samba-Enredo, The Five Seasons of Love ; The Book of Emotions and Cidade Livre . His 2015 novel Enigmas da Primavera was published in English in 2016 by Dalkey Archive Press and won the Jabuti Award for Best Brazilian Book in translation. His seventh novel was published in November 2017 in Brazil: Entre facas, algodão . His most recent novel, Homem de Papel, was published in 2022 . He has also authored books of philosophical and literary essays.
Go to Profile#4073
Carol Senf
#95257
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Carol A. Senf is professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. With four books, two critical editions, one edited essay collection, and various critical essays, she is a recognized expert on the biography and works of Irish author Bram Stoker. She received the Lord Ruthven Award in 1999.
Go to Profile#4074
John Manuel Cook
#92631
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
John Manuel Cook, was a British classical archaeologist. He was educated at Marlborough College, and went to King's College, Cambridge . His older brother was Robert Manuel Cook, also a noted scholar of antiquity.
Go to Profile#4075
Jacques Rougeot
#98352
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Jacques Rougeot was a French literary critic and political activist. Biography After earning a doctorate in literature in 1978, Rougeot was a French professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He was one of the founders and served as President of Union Nationale Inter-universitaire from 1969 to 2009. He was also founding President of the Initiative and Liberty Movement.
Go to Profile#4076
Tiffany Atkinson
#88450
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Tiffany Atkinson is a British academic and award-winning poet. In 1993, she moved to Wales, where after completing her studies in Cardiff, she became a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. In 2014, she was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was the recipient of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award.
Go to Profile#4077
Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga
#77481
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga was a Romanian comparatist and essayist. A native of the national capital Bucharest, she was educated at its main university, going on to become a professor there. Together with a focus on interdisciplinary studies, she was noted for devoting several studies to Mihai Eminescu. Meanwhile, Dumitrescu was a dignitary of the Romanian Communist Party. Following the Romanian Revolution, after several years spent in Rome, she retired to a monastery.
Go to Profile#4078
Lee Jangwook
#111464
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Lee Jangwook is a South Korean poet, novelist, and critic. Life Born in Seoul, Korea in 1968, Lee Jangwook majored in Russian literature the undergraduate and graduate school levels at Korea University. He has worked as an editor and also as a Professor of Creative Writing at Chosun University in Gwangju Korea. Lee began his writing career in earnest in 1994 with a series of poems being published as winners of the new writer's award in the poetry division of the literary journal Contemporary Literature.
Go to Profile#4079
Elisa Pérez Vera
#27534
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Elisa Pérez Vera is a Spanish jurist, a professor of Private International Law at the National University of Distance Education and magistrate of the Constitutional Court of Spain from 2001 to 2012. In 1982 she was appointed Rector of the UNED, becoming the first woman rector at a Spanish public university. The UNED has instituted the Elisa Pérez Vera Award to recognize research work on gender or feminism.
Go to Profile#4080
Wendy Law-Yone
#39660
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Wendy Law-Yone is the critically acclaimed Burmese-born American author of A Daughter's Memoir of Burma , Golden Parasol , The Road to Wanting , Irrawaddy Tango , and The Coffin Tree . Biography The daughter of notable Burmese newspaper publisher, editor and politician Edward Michael Law-Yone, Law-Yone was born in Mandalay but grew up in Rangoon. Her background is diverse, with one grandfather a merchant from Yunnan and another a colonial officer from Great Britain. Law-Yone states that she is "half Burman, a quarter Chinese and a quarter English".
Go to Profile#4081
Zhu Xiao Di
#63932
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Zhu Xiao Di is a Chinese-American writer. He authored a biographical work, Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China, which was listed for further reading in MSN encyclopedia under the topic of "Communism" along with a few other books. He also authored a novel Tales of Judge Dee, and 6 collections of essays in Chinese including Leisure Thoughts on Idle Books , , , , , and .
Go to Profile#4082
E. J. Levy
#32933
Overall Influence
Ellen J. Levy is an American writer and academic who is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University. Her collection of short stories, Love, In Theory, was published in 2012, and her first novel, The Cape Doctor, in 2021 to positive reviews.
Go to Profile#4083
Yi Cheong-jun
#116558
Overall Influence
1939 - 2008 (69 years)
Yi Cheong-jun was a prominent South Korean novelist. Throughout his four decade-long career, Yi wrote more than 100 short stories and 13 novels. Life Yi Cheong-jun was born in 1939. He graduated with a degree in German literature from Seoul National University. In 1965, he debuted with a short story titled Toewon . Two years later, he won a Dongin Literature Award for The Wounded . He died from lung cancer at the age of 68 on July 31, 2008.
Go to Profile#4084
Michael Winter
#59136
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Winter is a Canadian writer, the author of five novels and three collections of short stories. Life and career Michael Winter was born in 1965 in Jarrow, England. His father was an industrial arts teacher, who moved the family to Newfoundland, Canada three years later, eventually settling in Corner Brook. After high school, Winter attended Memorial University, graduating in 1986 with a BA in economic geography.
Go to Profile#4085
David Ignatow
#28169
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
David Ignatow was an American poet and editor. Life David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, aged 83, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#4086
Tatiana Nicolescu
#124515
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Tatiana Nicolescu is a Romanian historian of literature and translator, born in Chişinău on 9 July 1932. She was a professor at the University of Bucharest, also teaching at Moscow University during the 1970s. She specialized in Russian literature in Bucharest and in Romanian literature and language in Moscow. Since 1988 she has been a visiting professor at the University Institute of Modern Languages in Milan, Italy. She is the wife of George Cristea Nicolescu.
Go to Profile#4087
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
#67399
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge is an English actress, screenwriter and producer. As a creator, head writer, and star of the comedy series Fleabag , she won three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globess and a British Academy Television Award. She received further Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for writing and producing the spy thriller series Killing Eve .
Go to Profile#4088
Leza Lowitz
#82836
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Go to Profile#4089
Katherine Angel
#102139
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Katherine Angel is a British academic and writer whose 2012 work of literary non-fiction, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, attracted worldwide attention. Life Angel was born in Brussels and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy. She studied at Harvard University on a JH Choate Fellowship, and earned a Ph.D. in the history of psychiatry and sexuality from the University of Cambridge. She has been a postdoctoral fellow in the history of medicine at Warwick University. Angel is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Go to Profile#4090
Mah Chonggi
#90036
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Mah Chonggi is a Korean poet. Life Mah was born in Tokyo, Japan on January 17, 1939. He graduated from medical schools at Yonsei University and Seoul National University. After finishing his graduate research at Seoul National University in 1966, he went to the United States. He taught at Ohio State University Medical School and practice radiology in Toledo, Ohio. He retired from the medical field and professorial duties in 2002, and turned his attention entirely to writing poetry.
Go to Profile#4091
Rebecca Wolff
#97489
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Rebecca Wolff is a poet, fiction writer, and the editor and creator of both Fence Magazine and Fence Books. Wolff has won the 2001 National Poetry Series Award and 2003 Barnard Women Poets Prize for her literature.
Go to Profile#4092
Brando Skyhorse
#86150
Overall Influence
Brando Skyhorse is an American author. He won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2011 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for his novel The Madonnas of Echo Park. Life Skyhorse was born and raised in Echo Park, California and has degrees from Stanford University and from the MFA Writers' Workshop program at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#4093
Waheed Qureshi
#90467
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Waheed Qureshi was a Pakistani noted linguist, literary critic, writer, researcher, educationalist and scholar of Urdu literature and oriental languages. Waheed Qureshi was one of the foremost scholars who helped shape the mood and colour of research on oriental languages and literature.
Go to Profile#4094
Yang Bojun
#93367
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Yang Bojun was a Chinese philologist best known for his Chunqiu Zuozhuan Zhu , an annotated commentary of the ancient Chinese historical text and Confucian classic Zuo Zhuan. The work took him more than twenty years to finish. His commentaries of the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius are also highly influential.
Go to Profile#4095
Hugo Gutiérrez Vega
#54723
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Hugo Gutiérrez Vega was a Mexican poet, lawyer, writer, academic, actor and translator. In addition to his writings, Gutiérrez Vega, a career diplomat, served as Mexico's Ambassador to Greece from 1987 to 1994, which included concurrent accreditation as Ambassador to Cyprus, Lebanon, Moldova, and Romania. His diplomatic postings influenced his literary writings. In an October 2007 interview with La Jornada, Gutiérrez noted that he had written one book in every foreign city in which he had lived, including Washington D.C., Rio de Janeiro, London, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. His poetry has been ...
Go to Profile#4096
Tonino Guerra
#77219
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Antonio "Tonino" Guerra was an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors in the world such as AndreI Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, and Federico Fellini.
Go to Profile#4097
Ag Apolloni
#84904
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Ag Apolloni is an Albanian writer, poet, playwright, scholar, and essayist. He is a professor at the University of Prishtina. His literary works are distinguished for their dramatic dimension, philosophical treatment, and critical attitude towards history, politics, and society.
Go to Profile#4098
Chang Ch'ung-ho
#87922
Overall Influence
1914 - 2015 (101 years)
Chang Ch'ung-ho or Zhang Chonghe , also known by her married name Ch'ung-ho Chang Frankel, was a Chinese-American poet, calligrapher, educator and Kunqu opera singer. She is hailed as "the last talented woman of the Republic of China" .
Go to Profile#4099
Marjorie Garber
#79667
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Marjorie Garber is an American professor at Harvard University and the author of a wide variety of books, most notably ones about William Shakespeare and aspects of popular culture including sexuality.
Go to Profile#4100
Karen King-Aribisala
#35363
Overall Influence
Karen Ann King-Aribisala is a Nigerian novelist, and short story writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of Lagos. Education She was educated at the International School Ibadan, St. George's British International School, Italy , and the London Academy of Dramatic Arts.
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