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,
#4251
Helmut Gneuss
#91351
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Helmut Gneuss was a German scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Latin manuscripts and literature. Academic career Gneuss was emeritus professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he occupied the chair for English language from 1965 to 1997. He served as Visiting Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1974-75. He lived in Eichenau. He was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Academia Europaea, the British Academy, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Medieval Academy of America.
Go to Profile#4252
Matthew McDiarmid
#96303
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Matthew McDiarmid, full name Matthew Purdie McDiarmid was a Scottish literary scholar, essayist, campaigning academic and poet. He was a founding member of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies and the first president of the Robert Henryson Society which he also helped to found in 1993.
Go to Profile#4253
Betty Adcock
#107998
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Elizabeth "Betty" Sharp Adcock is an American poet and a 2002–2003 Guggenheim Fellow. Author of six poetry collections, she has served as a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina and in the Writer-in-Residence program at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has also held residencies at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Kalamazoo College, and Duke University, and has twice served as Visiting Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University.
Go to Profile#4254
John Archer
#52737
Overall Influence
John Archer is a British comedy magician, television writer and actor. As well as performing magic, he has also commercially released a number of his tricks through various magic suppliers. Career Archer was a police officer in Cleveland Constabulary in the north-east of England for ten years, until 1996 when he was medically retired due to partial hearing loss, after which he began entertaining full-time.
Go to Profile#4255
Henry Rudolph Immerwahr
#107241
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Henry Rudolph Immerwahr was a German-born American Classicist known for his work on Attic scripts and Greek epigraphy. Life The eldest son of Kurt Immerwahr and Johanna Freund Immerwahr, he was educated at the University of Florence . Immerwahr then emigrated to the United States, earned a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1942 and then performed military service for three years during World War II. He returned to Yale after the war and taught there until 1957, at which point he moved to the University of North Carolina. Immerwahr served as Professor of Greek in the Department of Classics at the Un...
Go to Profile#4256
José Ortega Torres
#96593
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
José Ortega Torres is a poet born in Granada, Spain; he is a known author in the Andalusian poetic scene. A contemporary of the Novísimos poetic movement, his work follows more traditional forms , with a marked rhythm and deliberate word choice that bring to mind the classical Mediterranean tradition His biography sheds light on the local history of poetry in the city of Granada.
Go to Profile#4257
Maria Hummel
#108697
Overall Influence
Maria Hummel is an American writer. Her poetry collection, House and Fire, was winner of the 2013 APR/Hickman First Book Prize. She has written five novels: Goldenseal , Lesson in Red , Still Lives , Motherland and Wilderness Run .
Go to Profile#4258
Cornelius Hasselblatt
#124593
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Cornelius Theodor Hasselblatt is a German Finno-Ugric specialist, translator and Estophile. He lives in the Netherlands. From 1980 to 1986 he studied Finno-Ugric languages and culture in Hamburg and Helsinki. In 1990 he defended his doctoral thesis.
Go to Profile#4259
Rachel Wetzsteon
#103524
Overall Influence
1967 - 2009 (42 years)
Rachel Todd Wetzsteon was an American poet. Life Born in New York City, New York, the daughter of editor and critic Ross Wetzsteon, she graduated from Yale University in 1989 where she studied with Marie Borroff and John Hollander. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University with an MA, and from Columbia University with a Ph.D. She taught at Barnard College.
Go to Profile#4260
Roxana Robinson
#70521
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Roxana Robinson is an American novelist and biographer whose fiction explores the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines. She is best known for her 2008 novel, Cost, which was named one of the Five Best Novels of the Year by The Washington Post. She is also the author of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, and has written widely on American art and issues pertaining to ecology and the environment.
Go to Profile#4261
Jürgen Hein
#89333
Overall Influence
1942 - 2014 (72 years)
Jürgen Hein was a German literary critic and university lecturer. Career Hein was born in Cologne. After his Abitur from high school he engaged in German studies, philosophy and pedagogics at the University of Cologne. In 1968 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy. From 1969 he also worked as a lecturer at the Pädagogische Hochschule Rheinland, Cologne department. In 1972 he habilitated in Cologne. From 1973 until his retirement in 2007, Hein was professor of modern German literary studies and didactics of literature at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.
Go to Profile#4262
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
#91961
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a poet and novelist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Early life Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1978. She was educated at The Queen's University of Belfast, where she received a BA , MA, and PhD by the age of 25. At 26 she took up a lectureship in film studies at the University of Sunderland, where she established herself as a film theorist, publishing numerous articles and books and receiving a reference in Who's Who in Research: Film. She took up a senior lectureship in Creative Writing at the University of Northumbria in 2009 but tendered he...
Go to Profile#4263
Richard Katrovas
#68788
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Richard Katrovas is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program for Writers and the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, two collections of stories and three memoirs. Biography Born November 4, 1953, in Norfolk, Virginia, Richard Katrovas, the oldest of five children, spent his early years in cars and motels living on the highways of America while his father, a petty thief and conman, eluded state and federal authorities. His father was eventually caught, but upon being released on probation from federal prison reverted to his criminal ways, and was caught and incarcerated again.
Go to Profile#4264
Shirlee Taylor Haizlip
#86551
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Shirlee Taylor Haizlip is an American non-fiction author. She has written three books: The Sweeter the Juice, A Memoir in Black and White, In the Garden of Our Dreams, co-authored with her husband, Harold C. Haizlip, and Finding Grace.
Go to Profile#4265
Susann Cokal
#24466
Overall Influence
Susann Cokal is an American author. She is best known for having written the novels The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Mirabilis, Mermaid Moon, and Breath and Bones, along with short stories, literary and pop-culture criticism, and book reviews. The Kingdom of Little Wounds won a Printz silver medal from the American Library Association in 2014.
Go to Profile#4266
Tony Connor
#92002
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
John Anthony Connor is an English poet and playwright. Biography Tony Connor was born in Manchester, England. After leaving school at 14, he served in the British Army as a tank gunner, and worked as a textile designer between 1944 and 1960, and in radio and television in Manchester in the 1960s. He was a founder member of The Peterloo Group. He earned an MA at the University of Manchester in 1967 and in 1968 visiting writer at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#4267
Michael McGriff
#113224
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Michael McGriff is an American poet. Life McGriff was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon. His work has appeared in Slate, Field, AGNI, The Believer, Missouri Review, and Poetry. He is the founding editor of Tavern Books, a publishing house dedicated to poetry in translation and the revival of out-of-print books.
Go to Profile#4268
Austin Wright
#65500
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
Austin McGiffert Wright was an American novelist, literary critic and professor emeritus of English at the University of Cincinnati. Life and career Wright was born in Yonkers, New York. He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, the son of the geographer John Kirtland Wright and Katharine McGiffert Wright, and namesake of his uncle, Austin Tappan Wright, writer of the utopian novel, Islandia. His paternal grandparents were classical scholar John Henry Wright and novelist Mary Tappan Wright. He graduated from Harvard University in 1943. He served in the Army . He graduated from the University of Chicago, with a master's degree in 1948, and a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#4269
Tom Bradley
#112685
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Thomas Iver Bradley is an American novelist, essayist and writer of short stories. He is the author of The Sam Edwine Pentateuch, a five-book series, various volumes of which have been nominated for the Editor's Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Award Series in the Novel. Tom Bradley's nonfiction is regularly featured by Arts & Letters Daily, and has also appeared in Salon.com, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Ambit Magazine. He has been characterized as an "outsider" by the LA Times book blog.
Go to Profile#4270
Jakup Mato
#63157
Overall Influence
1936 - 2005 (69 years)
Prof.Dr.Jakup Halil Mato was an Albanian publicist and educational administrator. He started publishing his articles and research studies in the field of literature and arts since the beginning of the 1960s. In the 1990s he served as head of Centre of Art Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Albania.
Go to Profile#4271
Herbert Golder
#112159
Overall Influence
Herbert Golder is a professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. He has a Ph.D. in classical languages and literature from Yale University. His specialty is Greek mythology and he has to his credit a number of books and films. He played Rabbi Edelmann in the Werner Herzog film Invincible, he was also an assistant director on that film and the co-writer of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?.
Go to Profile#4272
Darrell Spencer
#114099
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Darrell Spencer is an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his short stories, which are widely published in literary journals and have been the recipients of several awards.
Go to Profile#4273
James Liddy
#91127
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
James Liddy was an Irish poet, born in Dublin, Ireland. He is best known for his collections In A Blue Smoke and Blue Mountain . The first volume of Liddy's memoir, The Doctor's House: An Autobiography, was published in 2004.
Go to Profile#4274
Charif Majdalani
#89943
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Charif Majdalani is a French-Lebanese writer. Born in Beirut in 1960, he is a novelist and professor at Saint Joseph University, where he was head of the Department of French Literature from 1999 to 2008. A member of the editorial board of L'Orient littéraire, he is also President of the International Writers’ House in Beirut.
Go to Profile#4275
Matevž Kos
#115550
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Matevž Kos is a Slovene literary historian and essayist. Kos was born in Ljubljana in 1966. He studied Comparative literature, Literary theory and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and works primarily as a literary critic and essayist and lecturer at the University of Ljubljana. He was head of the Jury for the Kresnik Award between 2004 and 2007. In 1997 he received the Rožanc Award for his book of literary essays Prevzetnost in pristranost .
Go to Profile#4276
Chris Torrance
#96616
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Chris Torrance was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s, mainly known for long poetry cycle The Magic Door published as a series of volumes over 30 years. Biography Born in Edinburgh in 1941, Torrance grew up in London and moved to Pontneddfechan, Wales in 1970. He taught an extramural creative writing course at University College Cardiff for 25 years. He performed literary cabaret with the poetry and music group Poetheat, which he co-founded in 1985 with composer Chris Vine, later called Heat Poets.
Go to Profile#4277
Christian Polak
#29867
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christian Philippe Polak is a French businessman and author who has published several books on 19th-century Franco-Japanese relations; one Le Monde book review called him "the best specialist on this question".
Go to Profile#4278
Jaume Medina
#110391
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Jaume Medina i Casanovas was a Catalan philologist, latinist, writer, translator and poet. Life Academic career Medina went to the high school in his birthplace and he got his degree in Classical Philology in the University of Barcelona . In 1976 he wrote his doctoral dissertation about The classical Rhythms in Catalan poetry in the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where he got his doctoral degree, and where he worked as a Latin Philology teacher since 1972 .
Go to Profile#4279
Milan Stitt
#107617
Overall Influence
1941 - 2009 (68 years)
Milan Stitt was an American playwright and educator. Milan Stitt was born in Detroit, Michigan; he graduated from Cooley High School in 1959. Stitt then studied at Albion College to become a priest before receiving his BA from the University of Michigan and MFA from the Yale School of Drama. At Michigan, he studied play-writing with Kenneth Thorpe Rowe.
Go to Profile#4280
Quan Barry
#42441
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Amy Quan Barry is a Vietnamese American poet, novelist, and playwright. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Barry is a Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#4281
Judith Rodriguez
#75660
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Judith Catherine Rodriguez was an Australian poet. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award. Life Rodriguez was born Judith Catherine Green in Perth and grew up in Brisbane. She was educated at Brisbane Girls Grammar School, and graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Arts. She then travelled to England, where she received a Master of Arts from Cambridge University. Following this she took up a tutorship at Kingston University, Jamaica, where she met her first husband, Colombian academic Fabio Rodriguez.
Go to Profile#4282
Robin Nisbet
#98927
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Robert George Murdoch Nisbet, FBA , known as Robin Nisbet, was a British classicist and academic, specializing in Latin literature. From 1970 to 1992, he was Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#4283
Hubert Nyssen
#57689
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Hubert Nyssen was a Belgian-French writer, publisher and founder of the Éditions Actes Sud. Biography Hubert Nyssen grew up in Boitsfort and settled in Provence in 1968. He became a naturalised French citizen in 1976. A novelist, diarist, essayist and poet, he was the author of numerous books.
Go to Profile#4284
Sarah McCoy
#77056
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Sarah McCoy is a New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling American novelist. Early life and education The daughter of a career Army officer from Oklahoma and a Puerto Rican schoolteacher, McCoy was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, but grew up on or near military installations, including Stuttgart, Germany; Aberdeen, Maryland; Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and various locations in Virginia. She attended Virginia Tech where she received her BA in Journalism and Public Relations. She earned her MFA in English Creative Writing from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
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Madeline DeFrees
#67796
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Madeline DeFrees was an American poet, teacher, and Roman Catholic nun. Biography Born in Ontario, Oregon, Madeline DeFrees lived in Seattle, Washington. She joined the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in 1936 and took the name Sister Mary Gilbert. She received her B.A. in English from Marylhurst College and an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Oregon. She reclaimed her baptismal name in 1967 when she went to teach at the University of Montana. While in Missoula, she requested a dispensation from her vows, which she received in 1973.
Go to Profile#4286
John Schultz
#66464
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
John Schultz was an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He was also a teacher of writing, the creator of the Story Workshop method of writing instruction, and an emeritus professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. He was born on July 28, 1932, in Iberia, Missouri, served as an army medic from 1953 to 1955, and then worked in Chicago as a writer and teacher. He died in 2017 at the age of 84 in his home of Riverside, a suburb of Chicago.
Go to Profile#4287
Whitney Terrell
#92417
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Whitney Terrell is an American writer and educator from Kansas City, Missouri. Terrell has published three novels and his writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, and others outlets.
Go to Profile#4288
Keath Fraser
#69927
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Keath Fraser is a Canadian fiction author. He lived in London from 1970 to 1973, where he studied at the University of London and earned his PhD He later taught English in Calgary, Alberta, Canada for five years as a tenured professor. He then stopped teaching to become a full-time author.
Go to Profile#4289
Massimo Troisi
#84246
Overall Influence
1953 - 1994 (41 years)
Massimo Troisi was an Italian actor, cabaret performer, screenwriter, and film director. He is best known for his works in the films I'm Starting from Three and Il Postino: The Postman , for which he was posthumously nominated for two Oscars. Nicknamed "the comedian of feelings", he is considered one of the most important actors of Italian theater and cinema.
Go to Profile#4290
Vladimir Abashev
#130092
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Professor Vladimir Abashev is a Russian philologist from Perm Krai and a professor of Perm State University. In 1978 he graduated from the Philological Faculty of Perm State University and since 1987 he has been working in the university in the department of Russian literature. From 1991 to 1996 he was head of the department. In 1995 he helped established the Russian Literature Research Laboratory, one of the largest centers for the study of the cultural life of Russian provinces.
Go to Profile#4291
Ward W. Briggs
#97152
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ward W. Briggs Jr. is an American classicist and historian of classical studies. He taught until 2011 as the Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities at the University of South Carolina.
Go to Profile#4292
Binnie Kirshenbaum
#100269
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Binnie Kirshenbaum is an American novelist and short story writer. She is a professor of the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts. Biography Born in 1964, Kirshenbaum received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She has been a professor of Fiction Writing at Columbia University School of the Arts since 2003.
Go to Profile#4293
Andreas Willi
#127564
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Andreas Jonathan Willi is a Swiss linguist, philologist, and classicist. He is currently the Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. He is one of the editors of . In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2019, Willi was awarded the Humboldt Prize.
Go to Profile#4294
Adel Karasholi
#52009
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Adel Karasholi is a German and Arabic writer. Life Already a published poet in his youth, he founded a literary magazine in Damascus which was banned by the Syrian government. He then began working in a publishing house and, later, as a journal and radio editor. In 1957 he became a member of the Arab Writers Union. When it was banned in 1959, Karasholi emigrated to Germany and subsequently lived in various areas of East and West Germany. In 1961 he began living permanently in Leipzig. He studied at the German Literary institute at Leipzig University where he did his doctorate on the work of Bertolt Brecht.
Go to Profile#4295
Noah Eli Gordon
#114051
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Noah Eli Gordon was an American poet, editor, and publisher. Overview Gordon was the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, an editor for The Volta, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he directed Subito Press. He ran Braincase Press, and was a founding editor of the little magazine Baffling Combustions.
Go to Profile#4296
Moira Crone
#84336
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Moira Crone is an American fiction author. She was born and raised in Goldsboro, in the tobacco country in eastern North Carolina. She is the author of three collections of short fiction and two novels. Her short stories have been classified as "Southern Gnostic", and as exemplifying the spirit of the New South. Her work has been compared to Flannery O'Connor's for its spiritual overtones and to Sherwood Anderson's for its depiction of small-town life and characters. She taught fiction writing at Louisiana State University, where she served for a number of years as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and is now Professor Emerita.
Go to Profile#4297
Faranak Margolese
#79205
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Faranak Margolese is an American-Israeli writer, best known as the author of Off the Derech, a book about contemporary assimilation in the Orthodox Jewish world. Early life and education Margolese was born in Manchester, England, in 1972, the great-granddaughter of the former Chief Rabbi of Tehran, Iran. She was raised in Los Angeles, California, to Persian immigrant parents in a traditional Sephardi Jewish household. She graduated from Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles, received a BA in philosophy from Stern College and a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction creative writing from Co...
Go to Profile#4298
Frances Smith Foster
#93264
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Frances Smith Foster is an American researcher and emeritus Professor of African-American studies and women's history. She has previously served as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies at Emory University.
Go to Profile#4299
Jose Dalisay Jr.
#90767
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. is a Filipino writer. He has won numerous awards and prizes for fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction and screenwriting, including 16 Palanca Awards. Early life and education Dalisay was born in Romblon in 1954. He completed his primary education at La Salle Green Hills, Philippines in 1966 and his secondary education at the Philippine Science High School in 1970. He dropped out of college to work as a newspaper reporter. He also wrote scripts mostly for Lino Brocka, the National Artist of the Philippines for Theater and Film. Dalisay returned to school and earned his B.A. English degree, cum laude from the University of the Philippines in 1984.
Go to Profile#4300
Catherine Chidgey
#104988
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. She has published eight novels. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
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