Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#4101

Yi Munyeol

#106056

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Yi Mun-yol is a South Korean writer. Yi's given name at birth was Yol; the character, Mun , was added after he took up a writing career. His works include novels, short stories and Korean adaptations of classic Chinese novels as well as political and social commentaries. An informal count has estimated that over 30 million copies of his books have been sold and, as of 2021, they have been translated into 21 languages. His works have garnered many literary awards and many have been adapted for film and television.

#4102

David Bradley

#88341

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Henry Bradley, Jr. is the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. Both novels have been recently released in electronic editions by Open Road Media.

#4103

Simon Morgan Wortham

#81045

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor in Humanities at Kingston University, London, and co-director of The London Graduate School. He is a literary critic and theorist, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the writings of Jacques Derrida. Recent work concentrates on rearticulating post-structuralist thought to Marxist and realist traditions in philosophy.

#4104

Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan

#91332

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Anselm Berrigan is an American poet and teacher. Life and work Anselm Berrigan grew up in New York City, where he currently resides with his wife, poet Karen Weiser. From 2003 to 2007, he served as artistic director at the St. Mark's Poetry Project. He is the brother of poet and musician Edmund Berrigan, half-brother of Kate Berrigan and scientist David Berrigan, son of poets Alice Notley and the late Ted Berrigan, and stepson of the late English poet and prose writer Douglas Oliver. He has also lived in Buffalo, New York at the "Ranch" and was known lovingly as "Anton" in San Francisco, California.

#4105

Bruce Bennett

#91830

Overall Influence

1941 - 2012 (71 years)

Bruce Harry Bennett was an Australian specialist in Australian literary studies. A Rhodes Scholar, his professional career was spent largely at the University of Western Australia where he was also director of the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature.

#4106

Emily Barton

#71666

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Emily Barton is an American novelist, critic and academic. She is the author of three novels: The Testament of Yves Gundron , Brookland and The Book of Esther . Background and education Barton was raised in New Jersey, where she attended Kent Place School. She attended Harvard College, from which she graduated summa cum laude and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society. She also earned an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#4107

Michael C. J. Putnam

#66679

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Michael Courtney Jenkins Putnam is an American classicist specializing in Latin literature, but has also studied literature written in many other languages. Putnam has been particularly influential in his publications concerning Virgil‘s ‘’Aeneid‘’. He is the son of politician and businessman Roger Putnam. Putnam received his B.A., M.A., and Ph. D. from Harvard. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1959 he taught at Smith College for a year. He then moved on to teach at Brown University and serving as W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and a professor of comparative literature for 48 years before retiring in 2008.

#4108

Michael Parker

#66887

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Michael Parker is an American short story writer, novelist and journalist. Life Michael Parker was born in Siler City, North Carolina and grew up in Clinton, North Carolina. He attended Appalachian State University and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with honors in Creative Writing. Parker received his MFA from the University of Virginia in 1988.

#4109

Edgar Rosenberg

#75543

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Edgar Rosenberg was an American scholar and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University from 1965 until his retirement in 2002. Early life and education Born to Jewish parents in Fuerth, Germany, Rosenberg fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland and then Haiti in 1939, reaching New York City in 1940. He knew no English. After graduating from high school he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Europe, receiving a Combat Infantry medal in 1944.

#4110

Fern Kupfer

#47121

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Fern Lee Kupfer is an American author and retired professor of creative writing at Iowa State University. She has written several novels and as well as memoirs reflecting on her life experiences, the discovery that she is a carrier of the BRCA gene, and the loss of her son to Canavan disease.

#4111

Liv Bliksrud

#98954

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Liv Bliksrud is a Norwegian philologist. She took the cand.philol. degree in 1973 and the dr.philos. degree in 1987. She is a professor at the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages, University of Oslo. Among her literary interests are Nobel Prize laureate Sigrid Undset. She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature.

#4112

Lucia Perillo

#58708

Overall Influence

1958 - 2016 (58 years)

Lucia Maria Perillo was an American poet. In 2000, Perillo was recognized with a "genius grant" as part of the MacArthur Fellows Program. Life and career Perillo was born in Manhattan on September 30, 1958 and grew up in Irvington.

#4113

Hein Willemse

#99428

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Heinrich Stephen Samuel Willemse is a South African academic, literary critic, activist and author. He currently serves as professor in the Department of Afrikaans at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He was the former editor-in-chief of the African literary journal Tydskrif vir Letterkunde .

#4114

Charles Van Doren

Charles Van Doren

#34267

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Charles Lincoln Van Doren was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the U.S. Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. Terminated by NBC, he joined Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. in 1959, becoming a vice-president and writing and editing many books before retiring in 1982.

#4115

Pearl Abraham

#39773

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Pearl Abraham is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. She was the third of nine children in a Hasidic family. Her father was a rabbi. At age five, the family moved to New York City and two years later returned to Israel. Following several moves back and forth between New York and Israel, the family settled in New York when she was 12. She studied first in Yiddish, then in English and then again in Yiddish.

#4116

Eric McCormack

#109421

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Eric Patrick McCormack was a Scottish-born Canadian author. He was known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction, gothic horror and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as Inspecting the Vaults , The Paradise Motel , The Mysterium , First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and The Dutch Wife .

#4117

Priscilla Wald

#75768

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Priscilla Wald is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University and the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative . She has published widely on the intersections of science, medicine, law, and literature. She is currently at work on a book-length study entitled Human Being After Genocide, which chronicles the challenge to conceptions of human being that emerged from scientific and technological innovation in the wake of the Second World War, as well as a series of essays that explore th...

#4118

Fanny Rubio

#89755

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Francisca Rubio Gámez , better known by the pseudonym Fanny Rubio, is a Spanish professor, researcher, and writer, an expert in contemporary Spanish poetry. Biography Born in Linares on 18 October 1949, Fanny Rubio began her university studies in Granada, then graduated in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1971. She earned a PhD in Romance Philology from the University of Granada in December 1975, with a doctoral thesis about poetry magazines in Francoist Spain. Linked to the University of Granada since 1971 as a research fellow, she went to Fez, Morocco with her husband, Bernabé López García, a specialist in Arab History and Culture, in 1974.

#4119

Ed Roberson

#63828

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Charles Edwin Roberson is a distinguished American poet, celebrated for his unique diction and intricacy in exploring the natural and cultural worlds. His poetic voice is informed by a background in science and visual art, coupled with his identity as an African American. Roberson has been an active poet since the early 1960s and has authored eight collections, including "Atmosphere Conditions" and "City Eclogue" . Among his many honors are the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award .

#4120

Quiara Alegría Hudes

#64120

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, producer, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights , and screenplay for its film adaptation. Hudes' first play in her Elliot Trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, her second play in that trilogy.

#4121

Sergiu Grossu

#62010

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Sergiu Grossu was a Romanian writer and theologian. Biography Sergiu Grossu was born to Ion and Maria Grossu on 14 November 1920 in Cubolta. In 1927, his family moved to Bălţi, where he was a classmate of Eugen Coşeriu. He published in Viaţa Basarabiei. He graduated from the University of Bucharest with degrees in theology, philosophy and modern philology. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, he became a refugee in Bucharest. In the wake of the Soviet occupation of Romania, he joined Oastea Domnului , a spiritual renewal movement of lay volunteers as well as clerics, associated with the Romanian Orthodox Church.

#4122

Hunter R. Rawlings III

#31985

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Hunter Ripley Rawlings III is an American classics scholar and academic administrator. He is best known for serving as the 17th President of the University of Iowa from 1987 until 1995 and as the 10th President of Cornell University from 1995 until 2003. He also served as Cornell's interim president in 2005–2006 and again from 2016–2017. Currently, Rawlings is Professor and University President Emeritus at the Department of Classics.

#4123

William Cookson

#80953

Overall Influence

1939 - 2003 (64 years)

William Cookson was a British poet, writer on poetry and literary editor, best known for his poetry magazine Agenda, regarded as one of the most influential of its age. He was brought up in Surrey and London, and educated at Westminster School and New College, Oxford. At 16, he started a correspondence with Ezra Pound, who started mentoring him and introducing him to his network of contacts. In October 1958, aged 19, he travelled to Italy to meet him, and as a result of this visit, decided to become an editor, launching his magazine Agenda, in January 1959. Initially, Agenda continued Pound's economic and political ideas at the time of composing Thrones .

#4124

John R. Milton

#89330

Overall Influence

1924 - 1995 (71 years)

John Ronald Milton was an American writer and editor of the South Dakota Review. Life Born on May 24, 1924, in Anoka, Minnesota, John Milton's early years were around Saint Paul. In the Second World War from 1943 to 1946, John served in the Army Signal Corps. On August 3, 1946, Milton married Lynn Hinderlie. Together they had one daughter.

#4125

Gabriel Janer Manila

Gabriel Janer Manila

#84278

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Gabriel Janer Manila is a Spanish university professor, translator and writer. He is well-known across Spain for being a prolific author who has worked in almost every genre. His work has been translated into several languages, including German, English, Spanish, Basque and Galician. Manila combines his literary career with teaching at the University of the Balearic Islands.

#4126

Barbara Clare Foley

Barbara Clare Foley

#79370

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Barbara Foley is an American writer and the Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She focuses her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist criticism. The author of six books and over seventy scholarly articles, review essays, and book chapters, she has published on literary theory, academic politics, US proletarian literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the writers Ralph Ellison and Jean Toomer. Throughout her career, her work has emphasized the centrality of antiracism and Marxist class analysis to both literary s...

#4127

Wendy Murray

#62671

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Wendy Murray is a prolific writer best known for her books about religion. Wendy Murray grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio , majoring in religion and graduating magna cum laude. She also received membership in Hiram’s Phi Beta Kappa society. She completed a master's degree in theological studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, S. Hamilton, Massachusetts, graduating magna cum laude in 1985.

#4128

Kass Fleisher

#92880

Overall Influence

1959 - 2023 (64 years)

Helen Kassia Fleisher was an American writer best known for her fiction and creative nonfiction. Biography Fleisher earned degrees in English from Dickinson College , the University of North Dakota , and Binghamton University . Fleisher was the author of five books and numerous essays and reviews, and the editor, with Caitlin M. Alvarez, of a literary anthology. With her frequent writing partner, Joe Amato, Fleisher wrote several screenplays . From 2003 to 2023, Fleisher was a member of the creative writing faculty at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. She founded Steerage Press ...

#4129

Julia Jarcho

#60577

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Julia Jarcho is an American experimental playwright and director and professor of theater and performance studies. The NYC company Minor Theater produces and debuts her new works. She won the 2013 Obie for Best New American Play for Grimly Handsome. Chief theater critic for The New York Times Ben Brantley has called her "a queen of experimental mayhem". Jarcho is an Associate Professor and Head the MFA Playwriting Program at Brown University.

#4130

Peter Parker

#83524

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Peter Parker is a British biographer, historian, journalist and editor. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. Life and career Education Parker was born to Edward Parker and Patricia Sturridge on 2 June 1954 in Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England. He attended the Downs Malvern in Colwall and Canford School in Dorset, and read English literature at University College London. He began a career in literary journalism while working in the Design Centre's bookshop in the 1980s, contributing regular book reviews to Gay News and London Magazine. He published a...

#4131

James Simmons

#54853

Overall Influence

1933 - 2001 (68 years)

James Stewart Alexander Simmons was a poet, literary critic and songwriter from Derry, Northern Ireland. Biography Simmons was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Derry in 1933. He attended Campbell College in Belfast before moving to the University of Leeds to read for a degree in English. He married Laura Stinson and returned to Northern Ireland to teach at Friends' School Lisburn for five years. His final foreign excursion was a position at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, where he worked for three years. During this time, they had five children: Rachael, Sarah, Adam, Helen and Penelope.

#4132

Una Chi

#100139

Overall Influence

1942 - 2021 (79 years)

Una Chi was an Italian translator and writer. Life Bruna Bianchi was born in Milan in 1942. For many years she was a professor of German literature at the University of Milan. She translated into Italian several German literature masterpieces, including Günter Grass' From the Diary of a Snail ; Max von der Grün's Stellenweise Glatteis ; Max Frisch's Bluebeard ; and Martin Walser's Das Einhorn . She also translated works by Goethe and Thomas Mann.

#4133

Alan Bowman

#72876

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Alan Keir Bowman, FBA is a British classicist and academic. He was Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 2002 to 2010, and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2015.

#4134

Loree Rackstraw

#67744

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Loree Rackstraw was an American literary critic and memoirist. She taught English at the University of Northern Iowa from 1966 to 1996, and she was the author of Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As I Knew Him .

#4135

Arsenio Hall

#31958

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Arsenio Hall is an American comedian, actor and talk show host. He hosted the late-night talk show, The Arsenio Hall Show, from 1989 until 1994, and again from 2013 to 2014. He has appeared in Martial Law, Coming to America , Coming 2 America , and Harlem Nights . He was also the host of Star Search and appeared as Alan Thicke's sidekick on the talk show Thicke of the Night.

#4136

David Wallace

#85364

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Wallace is a British scholar of medieval literature and Judith Rodin Professor of English, who teaches in the USA University of Pennsylvania. After undergraduate study at the University of York, he completed a Ph.D. in 1983 at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge. From 2018 to 2019, he served a one-year term as President of the Medieval Academy of America.

#4137

Samantha George

#68875

Overall Influence

Dr Samantha George is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Research Institute at the University of Hertfordshire. She completed a PhD at the University of York in 2004, then taught in the Department of English Literature at Sheffield University till taking up her post at Hertfordshire in 2007. She is known for her research on eighteenth century literature and science with a particular emphasis on the role of women and botany.

#4138

Susan Johnson

#97649

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Susan Johnson is an Australian author of literary fiction, memoir, short stories and essays. She has been a full-time writer since 1985, with occasional stints of journalism at Australian newspapers, journals and magazines.

#4139

Miriam Waddington

#62995

Overall Influence

1917 - 2004 (87 years)

Miriam Waddington was a Canadian poet, short story writer and translator. She was part of a Montreal literary circle that included F. R. Scott, Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. Biography Miriam Waddington was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, she studied English at the University of Toronto and social work at the University of Pennsylvania . She worked for many years as a social worker in Montreal, Quebec. She later relocated to the then Toronto suburb of North York, where she worked for North York Family Services. In 1964, she joined the English department at York University. She retired in 1983.

#4140

Joan Blos

#74047

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Joan Winsor Blos was an American writer, teacher and advocate for children's literacy. For her 1979 historical novel, A Gathering of Days, Blos won the U.S. National Book Award in category Children's Books and the Newbery Medal for the year's most distinguished contribution to American children's literature.

#4141

Nick Catalano

#97719

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Dr. Nick Catalano is an American university educator and author. He is a professor of Literature and Music at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York. He is director of the university's Performing Arts Music and Literature Program. In addition, he is a music columnist , book reviewer , contributing editor to Arts&Opinion magazine, and a writer/producer of documentaries for film and television .

#4142

Cecil Dawkins

#91975

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Cecil Dawkins was an American author who wrote primarily fiction. Early life Dawkins was born October 2, 1927, in Birmingham, Alabama, where she grew to adulthood. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a B.A. in English in 1950, where she was a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha women's fraternity. She then studied at Stanford University, where she earned her M.A. degree in English literature in 1953. Her second year at Stanford she was awarded the Stanford University Creative Writing Fellowship, , 1952–1953.

#4143

Laleh Khadivi

#84799

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Laleh Khadivi is an Iranian American novelist, and filmmaker. Life Khadivi was born to a Kurdish family in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, she emigrated to the United States with her family in 1979, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from Reed College and from Mills College with an MFA. In 2002 she began to research the Kurds, particularly their fate in the southwestern region of Iran under the first Shah. Her first novel, The Age of Orphans, is the story of a Kurdish boy whose father is killed in a battle with the Iranian army in 1921. The boy...

#4144

Odd Einar Haugen

#93660

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Odd Einar Haugen is professor of Old Norse Philology at the University of Bergen, Norway. He was born and grew up in Lunde, Telemark, but moved to Bergen in 1973 when he began his studies at the university. He is not related to the American linguist Einar Haugen.

#4145

Kathleen Mary Tillotson

#87499

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Kathleen Mary Tillotson CBE was a British academic and literary critic, professor of English and distinguished Victorian scholar. Her various works on Elizabethan literature have accumulated significance in the literary sphere, conducting important research and producing publications that feature her editorship. Her work has encouraged many to become involved with literary research.

#4146

Tony Isabella

#60000

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Tony Isabella is an American comic book writer, editor, actor, artist and critic, known as the creator and writer of Marvel Comics' Black Goliath; DC Comics' first major African-American superhero, Black Lightning; and as a columnist and critic for the Comics Buyer's Guide.

#4147

Rita K. Gollin

#68101

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Rita Kaplan Gollin was a professor of English and a scholar of American literature. Life and career Rita Gollin was born Rita Kaplan on January 22, 1928, in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated magna cum laude from Queens College with a B.A. in English in 1949, and received her M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1950. She earned her doctorate in English from the same university in 1961 under Professor C. H. Foster.

#4148

Willie van Peer

#98714

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. He is a linguist, literary scholar, and one of the founders of the empirical study of literature. Van Peer has published extensively in his main areas of research: foregrounding, narratology, literary evaluation, literary theory, emotion in literature and intimate relations in literature. Van Peer was Vice President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics , Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association and President of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature .

#4149

David Steinberg

David Steinberg

#60772

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

David Steinberg is a Canadian comedian, actor, writer, director, and author. At the height of his popularity, during the late 1960s and mid 1970s, he was one of the best-known comics in the United States. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson more than 130 times and served as guest host 12 times, the youngest person ever to guest-host. Steinberg directed several films and episodes of television situation comedies, including Seinfeld, Friends, Mad About You, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Golden Girls, and Designing Women. Steinberg also hosted the interview program Inside Comed...

#4150

Scott Brown

#85836

Overall Influence

Scott Brown is an American author, screenwriter, journalist, critic and occasional composer based in New York and Western Massachusetts. He was previously the chief theater critic for New York magazine from 2010 to 2014. He grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and later attended Harvard University.

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