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.

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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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Subdiscipline

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#4301

Jim Carroll

#85146

Overall Influence

1949 - 2009 (60 years)

James Dennis Carroll was an American author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. Carroll was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which inspired a 1995 film of the same title that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll, and his 1980 song "People Who Died" with the Jim Carroll Band.

#4302

Meredith Quartermain

#53526

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Meredith Quartermain, née Yearsley is a Canadian poet, novelist and story writer who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Life Quartermain was born in Toronto, Ontario and lived in a variety of locations in childhood before her family moved to Argenta, British Columbia. She graduated from high school in Argenta, and after working for several years, attended the University of British Columbia, where she met her future husband Peter Quartermain.

#4303

Lucía Lijtmaer

#98975

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Lucía Lijtmaer Paskvan is a journalist and writer born in Argentina and raised in Barcelona, where her parents went into exile. She is a specialist in pop culture from a gender perspective. She is also cultural curator, literary translator, and university professor. She currently writes for various media, including El País, El Diario, and .

#4304

Walter Puchner

#105532

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Walter Puchner is an Austrian writer, critic and university professor on theatre studies. He has made significant work on the theatrology of Greece, the greater area of the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Byzantium, on folkloristics but also on a variety of other subjects concerning the culture of the area with more than 80 books and numerous studies and critiques.

#4305

Adriana Iliescu

#29554

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Adriana Iliescu is a Romanian retired university teacher, philologist and author of children's novels. She received international media attention in 2005, when she gave birth to daughter Eliza at age 66, making her the oldest birth mother in the world until this record was broken in 2006 by María del Carmen Bousada de Lara. Eliza, who was delivered at Giuleşti Maternity Hospital on 16 January 2005 in Bucharest, is Iliescu's biological child, since she gestated in Iliescu's womb but was conceived by an ovum and sperm donated anonymously.

#4306

Don Welch

#39616

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Don Welch was an American poet and academic who was born in Hastings, Nebraska. The author of several published poetry collections and a regular contributor to literary magazines, Welch was an English literature professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney from 1959 to 1997. While there, he was awarded the Distinguished Paul W. Reynolds and Clarice Kingston Reynolds Endowed Chair in English, Poetry & Creative Writing. In June 2001, a bronze sculpture of Welch was finished and dedicated to him on the campus.

#4307

Angela Sorby

#82999

Overall Influence

Angela Sorby is an American poet, professor, and literary scholar. Biography She was born in Seattle, Washington and teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her main teaching areas are American literature and creative writing and main academic interests are American poetry, popular culture, and children's literature. She is particularly interested in how poetry engages with children and childhood.

#4308

Émile Ollivier

#82186

Overall Influence

1940 - 2002 (62 years)

Émile Ollivier was a Haitian-born educator and writer living in Quebec, Canada. He was considered one of the most important Haitian writers of his time. He was born in Port-au-Prince and, after studying at the Lycée in Port-au-Prince, went on to study philosophy at the École normale supérieure d'Haïti and literature and psychology in France. Following the rise to power by François Duvalier, Ollivier left Haiti for France in 1964. In 1965, he came to Quebec, first settling in Amos in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, where he taught school, and later moving to Montreal. Ollivier worked as a coordinator for the Quebec Ministry of Education from 1973 to 1976.

#4309

Clementina Díaz y de Ovando

#82833

Overall Influence

1916 - 2012 (96 years)

Clementina Díaz y de Ovando was a Mexican writer, researcher, and academic specialised in New Spain's art and architecture. She studied Philosophy and Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico .

#4310

Jeff Nuttall

#82678

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Jeffrey Addison Nuttall was an English poet, performer, author, actor, teacher, painter, sculptor, jazz musician, anarchist and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of literary critic A. D. Nuttall.

#4311

Donna Denizé

#84539

Overall Influence

Donna Denizé is an American poet and award-winning teacher at St. Albans School, located in Washington, D.C. Ms. Denize is currently Chairwoman of the English Department. She has contributed widely to journals and magazines with essays and poetry, written books of collections of poetry, participated in development of professional training programs for teachers as well as programs for students of multiple public schools. Some of her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines and she has contributed to some Corporation for Public Broadcasting print and video media.

#4312

Catherine Galbraith

#30556

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Catherine Galbraith was an American author who was the wife of economist and author John Kenneth Galbraith, and the mother of four sons: diplomat and political analyst, Peter W. Galbraith, economist James K. Galbraith, attorney J. Alan Galbraith, and Douglas Galbraith who died in childhood of leukemia.

#4313

Peter Cooley

#87029

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Peter Cooley is an American poet and Professor of English in the Department of English at Tulane University. He also directs Tulane's Creative Writing Program. Born in Detroit, Michigan, he holds degrees from Shimer College, the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa. He is the father of poet Nicole Cooley.

#4314

Paul Bové

#86643

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Paul A. Bové is distinguished professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture Boundary 2, published by Duke University Press. Bové has been a member of the Pitt faculty since 1979 and was named a distinguished professor in 2005. Bové also holds affiliations with the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Valencia in Spain and the Centre for International Political Studies in Pretoria, South Africa. From 1994 to 1999 he served on the board of directors of the Institute of Postmodern...

#4315

Bill Hicks

#55523

Overall Influence

1961 - 1994 (33 years)

William Melvin Hicks was an American stand-up comedian and satirist. His material—encompassing a wide range of social issues including religion, politics, and philosophy—was controversial and often steeped in dark comedy.

#4316

Ladislaus Löb

#65904

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Ladislaus Löb was a writer, translator, Holocaust survivor, scholar of the literature and drama of the German Enlightenment and Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Sussex in England. He was the author of From Lessing to Hauptmann: Studies in German Drama ; a monograph, in German, on the nineteenth-century dramatist Christian Dietrich Grabbe ; and Dealing with Satan: Rezső Kasztner's Daring Rescue Mission , in which he recounts his experiences an 11-year old boy sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and freed as the result of a controversial deal that Rezső Kasztner brokered ...

#4317

Yumiko Igarashi

Yumiko Igarashi

#95917

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Yumiko Igarashi is a Japanese manga artist. She is best known for illustrating the manga series Candy Candy. Career In 1968, as a third-year high school student at the Asahi Gaoka High School in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Igarashi made her debut in Shueisha's Ribon manga magazine with Shiroi Same no iru Shima. She won the 1st Kodansha Manga Award in 1977 as the artist of Candy Candy.

#4318

Thomas Nordegren

Thomas Nordegren

#28959

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Carl Axel Thomas Nordegren is a Swedish journalist and writer. Nordegren was born in Helsingborg. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for Swedish National Radio in Helsinki, Brussels, and later in Berlin and Washington, D.C. . He has been a visiting professor at New York University. Currently, he has a radio talk show, together with Louise Epstein, called Nordegren och Epstein i P1. Previously he had his own show Nordegren i P1. Nordegren is the father of Elin Nordegren and former father-in-law of golfer Tiger Woods.

#4319

Bonnie Costello

#88180

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Bonnie Costello is an American literary scholar, currently the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of English at Boston University. Her books include works on the poets Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden, and the relation of visual art to poetry through landscape painting and still life.

#4320

Daniel Orozco

#99484

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Daniel Orozco is an American writer of fiction known primarily for his short stories. His works have appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology and magazines such as Harper's and Zoetrope. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer of Stanford University and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. He won a 2011 Whiting Award.

#4321

Ned Balbo

#102412

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Ned Balbo is an American poet, translator, and essayist. Life Ned Balbo grew up on Long Island, New York. He was raised by Betty and Carmine Balbo, his birth mother's half-sister and her husband. His birth parents are Donald R. and Elaine D. Osterloh who were not yet married to each other. The couple had previously conceived Balbo's older sister who was raised by paternal relatives. At thirteen Balbo learned he was adopted and was informed of his birth parents' and sister's identities. This background informs his creative work.

#4322

Julie Okoh

#62129

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Juliana Omonukpon Omoifo Okoh is a Nigerian playwright, educator and feminist activist who was professor of theatre theory at the University of Port Harcourt from 2004 to 2017. Dealing with issues concerning women in society, her plays include The Mannequins , Edewede and Closed Doors . She was a Fulbright Scholar and in 2011 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists

#4323

Scott Carrier

#94788

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Scott Carrier is an American author, Peabody award-winning radio producer, and educator. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. His second book, Prisoner of Zion, was published in April 2013. He is a former assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Utah Valley University.

#4324

Michael Knight

#86163

Overall Influence

Michael Knight is the author of the novels The Typist and Divining Rod, the short story collections Dogfight and Other Stories, Goodnight, Nobody and Eveningland and the book of novellas The Holiday Season. His most recent novel, The Typist, was selected as a Best Book of the Year by The Huffington Post and The Kansas City Star and appeared on Oprah's Summer Reading List in 2011. His most recent collection, Eveningland, was awarded the Truman Capote Prize for Short Fiction. It was also selected as an Editor's Choice Pick by The New York Times and as a Southern Book of the Year by Southern Living magazine.

#4325

Margaret Blair Young

#90912

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Margaret Blair Young is an American author, filmmaker, and writing instructor who taught for thirty years at Brigham Young University. Biography Young's published work includes the novels House Without Walls , Salvador , and Heresies of Nature and the short story collections Elegies and Love Songs and Love Chains . She also co-authored a trilogy of historical novels about Black Mormon pioneers titled Standing on the Promises with Darius Gray. The trilogy, published between 2000 and 2003, was republished in revised and expanded form in 2012 and 2013.

#4326

Arnold Sundgaard

#74221

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

Arnold Olaf Sundgaard was an American playwright, librettist, and lyricist. He was also a writer of short stories and children's books as well as a college professor specializing in drama and theatrics. Sundgaard was best known for his role in the production of six Broadway plays.

#4327

Damiano Damiani

Damiano Damiani

#68281

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Damiano Damiani was an Italian screenwriter, film director, actor and writer. Poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini referred to him as "a bitter moralist hungry for old purity", while film critic Paolo Mereghetti said that his style made him "the most American of Italian directors".

#4328

Ross Scaife

#99218

Overall Influence

1960 - 2008 (48 years)

Allen Ross Scaife was a Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky. Life Ross Scaife was born to William and Sylvia Scaife in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1960, one of four children. He was married to Cathy Jane Edwards Scaife and they had three sons, Lincoln , Adrian , and Russell . He died at home after a year-long fight against cancer.

#4329

Bill Roorbach

#95937

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

William Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Roorbach's memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005. His novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.[18] And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize.. His latest book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017.

#4330

Philip F. Deaver

Philip F. Deaver

#67836

Overall Influence

1946 - 2018 (72 years)

Philip F. Deaver was an American writer and poet from Tuscola, Illinois. His work appeared in literary magazines, including The New England Review, the Kenyon Review, Frostproof Review, the Florida Review, Poetry Miscellany and The Reaper.

#4331

Denis Hills

#50209

Overall Influence

1913 - 2004 (91 years)

Denis Cecil Hills was a British author, teacher, traveller and adventurer. He came to international prominence in 1975 while he was living in Uganda and was sentenced to death for espionage and sedition following comments about President Idi Amin in a book which Hills wrote. After Amin rebuffed appeals for clemency by Queen Elizabeth, Hills was released and allowed to return to the UK following the intervention of the British government.

#4332

Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg

#106227

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Laura van den Berg is an American fiction writer. She is the author of five works of fiction. Her first two collections of short stories were each shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, in 2010 and 2014. In 2021, she was awarded the Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#4333

Stéphane Michaud

#73797

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Stéphane Michaud is a French scholar specializing in comparative literature. He is Professor Emeritus of the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris where he taught since the 1990s. He has written or edited more than ten books, a body of work that is influential in his field.

#4334

John Richard Parsons

John Richard Parsons

#72913

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

John Richard Parsons is an English writer and artist, noted for his prize-winning haiku poetry. He taught etching and lithography at Central Saint Martins school of art from 1962 to 1968. His art and sculpture are both figurative and abstract, and draw on many sources of inspiration, particularly prehistoric, Indian and tribal traditions. His work is noted for his attention to colour, material and technique.

#4335

Michael Dumanis

#78608

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Michael Dumanis is an American poet, professor, and editor of poetry. Works Dumanis’s first collection of poetry, My Soviet Union , won the 2006 Juniper Prize for Poetry. His second collection of poems, Creature, is being published by Four Way Books in 2023. Other works have appeared in literary journals, including American Poetry Review, The Believer, Colorado Review, The Common, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, H.O.W. Journal, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, Post Road, and Prairie Schooner.

#4336

Mark Judge

#34087

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mark Gauvreau Judge is an American author and journalist known for books about his suburban Washington, D.C. youth, recovery from alcoholism, and the role of music in American popular culture. Judge briefly drew national attention during the 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, when professor Christine Blasey Ford alleged that Judge was present and laughing as Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were high school students over 30 years previously. Judge said that he had no memory of the incident. He wrote a book about his experiences titled The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.

#4337

Stephanie Trigg

#98238

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Stephanie Joy Trigg is an Australian literary scholar in the field of medieval studies, known in particular for her work on Geoffrey Chaucer. She is on the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, having been elected a fellow in 2006. She is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English and Former Head of the English and Theatre Programme, University of Melbourne, Australia.

#4338

Rafael Campo

#95184

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Rafael Campo is an American poet, doctor, and author. Life Rafael Campo is the poetry editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. He graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. He formally practiced medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts and was Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His writing focuses on themes that promote equality and justice for gay people, people of color, and working-class people.

#4339

Barbara Paul

#73931

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Barbara Jeanne Paul was an American writer of detective stories and science fiction. She was born in Maysville, Kentucky in 1931 and was educated at Bowling Green State University and the University of Pittsburgh.

#4340

Morgan Yasbincek

#121325

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Morgan Yasbincek is a contemporary Australian poet, novelist and academic. Morgan Yasbincek lives in Western Australia where she completed her PhD at Murdoch University. She has held a residency at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom in 1998 and currently teaches creative writing at Murdoch. Her writing, in both poetry and prose, deals with everyday concerns refracted through the lens of contemporary literary theory. Her first collection of poems, Night Reversing, won both the Anne Elder and the Mary Gilmore Awards for poetry.

#4341

Paul Hendrickson

Paul Hendrickson

#44522

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.

#4342

Peter Davison

#70193

Overall Influence

1928 - 2004 (76 years)

Peter Davison was an American poet, essayist, teacher, lecturer, editor, and publisher. Life Peter Davison was born in New York City to Edward Davison, a Scottish poet, and Nathalie Davison. He grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where his father taught at the University of Colorado. Davison attended Harvard University, graduating in 1949. Among his classmates at Harvard were John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and Robert Creeley.

#4343

Haviva Pedaya

#67005

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Haviva Pedaya is an Israeli poet, author, cultural researcher, and professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University, where she is head of the Elyachar Center for Studies in Sephardi Heritage. Personal life and family Her great grandfather was the renowned Kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Fatiyah. Her grandfather, Shaul Fatiyah was also a Kabbalist. His daughter, Pedaya's mother, Simha Ovadia Fatiyah, established the "Hazon" project, which provided vocational rehabilitation for people with mental illness. He owned a shop in the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem.

#4344

Sami Damian

#113840

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Sami Damian Biography Studies S. Damian studied at the Jewish "Cultura Max Aziel" middle school in Bucharest, then at the "Mihai Eminescu" Literature and Literary Criticism School in Bucharest , and at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest .

#4345

Gloria Frym

#111918

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Biography Gloria Frym was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Los Angeles. She also lived in New Mexico for many years. She earned her MA and BA degrees at the University of New Mexico where she studied with the poet Robert Creeley.

#4346

Deborah Landau

#108562

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Deborah Landau is an American poet, essayist, and critic. Landau's "taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions" have been described as "confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg." Her meditations upon yearning and selfhood are said to remind us "of the nuanced beauty of language." Jennifer Michael Hecht has praised her poems as "Terrificly smart, witty, and slightly terrifying." Nick DePascal asserts that Landau's work "accurately matches form to content" and "leads the reader down a particular path through style as much as the meaning of the actual words on the page.....

#4347

Diana Raab

#44216

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Diana Raab is an American author, poet, lecturer, educator and inspirational speaker. Early life Raab was born in Brooklyn, New York of two immigrant parents. She received her B.S. from Cortland State University in Health Administration with a minor in Journalism. She received her R.N. degree from Vanier College in Quebec, Canada and took her licensure in French. In 2003, she earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University's low residency program in Kentucky. Raab was a medical journalist for 25 years. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology with a concentration in Transpersonal Psychology from Sofia University in Palo Alto.

#4348

Albert Mobilio

#93828

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Albert Mobilio is an American poet and critic. He teaches at Eugene Lang College, the liberal arts college of The New School university. His work appears in Bomb, Salon, Postmodern Culture, Harper's. He is co-editor of Bookforum.

#4349

Claude Pichois

#80213

Overall Influence

1925 - 2004 (79 years)

Claude Pichois was a French academic and a leading scholar on the life and work of Charles Baudelaire. He was born in Paris and studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales and at Sorbonne University. He taught at Vanderbilt University for many years.

#4350

John B. Willett

#62543

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

John Barry Willett is an emeritus professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Academy of Education who specialized in the teaching, development and application of innovative quantitative methods in the social sciences.

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