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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Literature,

#4451

Nancy Thomson de Grummond

#83787

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Nancy Thomson de Grummond is the M. Lynette Thompson Professor of Classics and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She specializes in Etruscan, Hellenistic and Roman archaeology. She serves as the director of archaeological excavations at Cetamura del Chianti in Tuscany, Italy. Her current research relates to Etruscan and Roman religion, myth and iconography.

#4452

Francisco Ortega

Francisco Ortega

#89994

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Francisco Ortega is a Chilean journalist, novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, podcaster and editor. He works as a non-fiction editor, content advisor and contributor to magazines such as Rolling Stone and VIVE. Ortega also writes for different production companies and TV channels. He is the author of the novels 60 Kilómetros, El Número Kaifman, El Horror de Berkoff, the short story collection CHIL3, and the graphic novel 1899, which was one of the top 10 best-selling books in Chile for over 8 consecutive weeks. His short stories have been published in various anthologies.

#4453

Tasos Athanasiadis

#63806

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

Anastasios Athanasiadis son of Michael was a writer and gownsman. Biography He studied law in the University of Athens and practiced law in the period 1940–1945. In 1945 he got posted as Manager of the National Theatre of Greece Secretariat, and afterwards as general Manager, job that he retained until 1972. In 1994 he got nominated as honorary doctor of the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens. Greece honoured him with three National Prizes and the medal of the Order of the Phoenix and he also got honoured with the silver medal of the French Academy. He got famous from his writings The guards of the Achaea , Pantheoi , The throne room , and The children of Niobe.

#4454

Idelber Avelar

#115250

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Idelber Avelar is a Brazilian scholar working in the field of literary and cultural studies. In 2000, the academic community took note of his book, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning , while the public at large came to know him through his blog, O Biscoito Fino e a Massa , in which he discussed politics, pop culture, and literature. His work deals with the literary representation of Latin-American dictatorships and the way culture deals with the repercussions of said regimes.

#4455

Michael Scheffel

#97861

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Michael Scheffel is a professor for the history of modern German literature and more generally of Literary sciences at Wuppertal University. He is also a co-editor of Text+Kritik. Life After successful completion of his school career in Frankfurt Scheffel studied German Literature and linguistics, Romance studies and Art history at Tübingen, Tours and Göttingen.

#4456

Naiyer Masud

#94779

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Naiyer Masud was an Indian Urdu scholar and short story writer. Early life and education Masud was born in Lucknow and spent nearly all his life there, working until his retirement as a Professor of Persian at Lucknow University.

#4457

Paul Henry

#97088

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Paul Henry is a Welsh poet, songwriter and broadcaster. His poetry collection Boy Running was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2016. Biography Starting out as a singer-songwriter, Henry's first collection Time Pieces was published by Seren Press in 1991, winning a Gregory Award. In 1992, he attended Joseph Brodsky's poetry masterclass at the Hay Festival, since which time a further eight books have appeared. His poems have been widely anthologised and can be found in journals such as Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement. They have also featured on BBC Radio 4's P...

#4458

Udo Hebel

#98040

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Udo J. Hebel is a German professor of American studies. He has been president of the University of Regensburg since 1 April 2013. He was selected as one of the ten best university rectors in Germany by the .

#4459

Tite Kubo

#43839

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Noriaki Kubo, known professionally as Tite Kubo, is a Japanese manga artist and character designer. His manga series Bleach had over 130 million copies in circulation as of 2022. Career Kubo was born on June 26, 1977, in Hiroshima Prefecture, where his father worked as a town council member. In elementary school, he had already decided to become a manga artist, due to reading the manga Saint Seiya. His first one-shot was "Ultra Unholy Hearted Machine", written for the Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1996. He wrote his first manga Zombiepowder, which was also published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1999. It ran a short 27 chapters before being canceled in 2000.

#4460

Jack Bickham

#89940

Overall Influence

1930 - 1997 (67 years)

Jack Miles Bickham was an American author who wrote 75 published novels, of which two were made into movies, The Apple Dumpling Gang and Baker's Hawk. Life Jack Bickham was born September 2, 1930, in Columbus, Ohio. He was an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma's H.H. Herbert School of Journalism in Norman, Oklahoma, from 1969 to 1972, associate professor from 1972 to 1979, and full professor in 1979. He directed the annual short course on professional writing from 1973 to 1990. Bickham received the rank of David Ross Boyd Professor, the highest honor the university can bestow for teaching excellence.

#4461

David Hill

#103874

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

David Hill is a New Zealand author, especially well known for his young adult fiction. His young fiction books See Ya, Simon and Right Where It Hurts have been shortlisted for numerous awards. He is also a prolific journalist, writing many articles for The New Zealand Herald.

#4462

Doug Wright

#74568

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Douglas Wright is an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2004 for his play I Am My Own Wife. He also wrote the books to the Broadway musicals Grey Gardens in 2006, The Little Mermaid in 2007, Hands on a Hard Body in 2012, and War Paint in 2017. His play Good Night, Oscar made its Broadway debut in 2023.

#4463

Eric Ormsby

#56184

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Eric Linn Ormsby is deputy head of academic research and publications at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. He was formerly a professor at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies, where he also served as director. He has published widely on Islamic thought, including Theodicy in Islamic Thought .

#4464

Jem Poster

#118412

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jem Poster is a British poet and novelist. His works include the collection of poetry Brought to Light and the novels Courting Shadows and Rifling Paradise . Early life Poster was born in Cambridge, England.

#4465

David Yaffe

#101233

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

David Yaffe grew up in Dallas, TX, where he attended the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He received his BA from Sarah Lawrence, and he began writing for The Village Voice while he was a student there. He received his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University — where he began teaching in 2005 – and is known for his critical writings on music. During the 2008–2009 academic year, he was the Gould Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Claremont McKenna College. He subsequently returned to Syracuse.

#4466

Rich Hall

#79843

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Richard Travis Hall is an American comedian, writer, documentary maker, and musician, first coming to prominence as a sketch comedian in the 1980s. He wrote and performed for a range of American networks, in series such as Fridays, Not Necessarily the News , and Saturday Night Live.

#4467

Caleb Carr

#70722

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Caleb Carr is an American military historian and author. Carr is the second of three sons born to Lucien Carr and Francesca Von Hartz. He authored The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, The Lessons of Terror, Killing Time, The Devil Soldier, The Italian Secretary, and The Legend of Broken. He has taught military history at Bard College, and worked extensively in film, television, and the theater. His military and political writings have appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals, among them The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in upstate New York.

#4468

James H. Morey

#92622

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

James H. Morey is an American academic. He is a professor of English at Emory University teaching courses in Old and Middle English, including Chaucer. Morey is a graduate of Hamilton College . He holds a Master's and a Ph.D. from Cornell University and received a Fulbright Scholarship to Iceland .

#4469

Betsy Colquitt

#85081

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

Elizabeth "Betsy" Colquitt was an American professor of English and a poet known for themes and poetic structures which reflect a modernist sensibility. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, United States in 1926 and died on 7 April 2009.

#4470

Jenny Xie

#123094

Overall Influence

Jenny Xie is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Eye Level, winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018, and of The Rupture Tense, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2022.

#4471

Saviana Stănescu

#55197

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Saviana Stănescu is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in Ithaca, New York. Hailed as one of the most exciting voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Stănescu has received numerous accolades for her work, including the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Script and the Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award . She has been inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame and was named the Indie Theater Person of the Year in 2010. Richard Schechner wrote on the cover of Stănescu's poetry book Diary of a Clone: "Saviana Stănescu is for and of the 21st century.

#4472

Allison Joseph

#100723

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Allison Joseph is an American poet, editor and professor. She is author of eight full-length poetry collections, most recently, Confessions of a Bare-Faced Woman . Biography Born in London, England, to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and the Bronx, New York. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale , and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of S...

#4473

Marleen S. Barr

#77983

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Marleen S. Barr teaches communication and media studies at Fordham University, New York City. She is notable for her significant contributions to science fiction studies, for which she won a Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 1997. Her primary contributions have been her foundational work in the field of feminist science fiction criticism; her 1981 anthology Future Females: A Critical Anthology "served as an introduction and eye-opener to the field of Feminist Science Fiction."

#4474

Fred Ritchin

#44189

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Fred Ritchin is dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography School. Ritchin was also the founding director of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program at the School of ICP and was appointed dean in 2014. Prior to joining ICP, Ritchin was professor of photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and co-director of the NYU/Magnum Foundation Photography and Human Rights educational program. He has worked as the picture editor of The New York Times Magazine and of Horizon magazine, executive editor of Camera Arts magazine , Ritchin has w...

#4475

Catherine Millot

Catherine Millot

#16064

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Catherine Millot is a French Lacanian psychoanalyst and author, professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris-VIII. Millot studied philosophy before turning to psychoanalysis. In 1971 she started an eight-year analysis with Lacan, and attended his seminars from 1971 until his death. Her thesis, turned into the book Freud anti-pédagogue, argued that pedagogy could not be based on psychoanalysis, since the role of analyst involved a radical openness to lack which was incompatible with the role of teacher. In 1975 she started teaching in the department of psychoanalysis at Paris VIII.

#4476

Ma Ruifang

#90642

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Ma Ruifang is a Chinese author, scholar and professor at the School of Literature, Shandong University. Biography Ma was born in 1942 in Qingzhou, Shandong. Her grandfather Ma Defu and father Ma Chuzhen were doctors. She belonged to the Hui ethnic group. Her mother was educated. Ma read books in Yidu County Library when she studied at primary school. She was accepted into Shandong University and graduated in 1965. In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural revolution and she was persecuted. In 1980, Ma started to study the literature of Pu Songling.

#4477

Eli Gottlieb

#101703

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Eli Gottlieb is an American author. His first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, was published by St. Martin's Press, in 1997. The novel debuted to widespread critical acclaim and earned Gottlieb the Rome Prize and the McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors in 1998.

#4478

Kenneth Irby

#101639

Overall Influence

1936 - 2015 (79 years)

Kenneth Lee Irby was an American poet. He won a 2010 Shelley Memorial Award. He is sometimes associated with the Black Mountain poets, especially with Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn. He was born in Bowie, Texas, and In 1940 he moved to Fort Scott, Kansas with his family. He graduated from the University of Kansas, from Harvard University with an A.M., and from the University of California, Berkeley with a M.L.S. degree. He was a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen on a Fulbright grant. Irby's last role was as a professor of English at the University of Kansas.

#4479

Michelle Huneven

#89195

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Michelle Huneven is an American novelist and journalist. Huneven was born and raised in Altadena, California, where she returned to live in 2001. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and attended the Methodist Claremont School of Theology to become a UU minister, but she quit after two years to write novels.

#4480

Manju Jaidka

#113531

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Manju Jaidka is former Faculty Dean and Head of Department at Shoolini University's Department of English. She was formerly a professor at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Books Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English. Co-edited with Tej N. Dhar. Slated for September 2023.When Cato Played Cupid and Other Stories. Petals Publishers, 2022.Gumshoe Mania: A Novel. Vishwakarma Publishing House, November 2021.Covid’s Metamorphosis: Stories from our Corona Times. Amazon Kindle publication, Sept 2020. https://www.amazon.in/COVIDS-METAMORPHOSIS-STORIES-CORONA-TIMES-ebook/dp/B08HQR3W85Saudade.

#4481

Mary Gallagher

#60645

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher. For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher. These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play. In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010. ...

#4482

William Pitt Root

#96236

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

William Pitt Root is an American poet. He was raised in Fort Myers, Florida. He studied at the University of Washington, and University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was Tucson Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2002, and taught at Hunter College. He was a US/UK Exchange Artist, Rockefeller Foundation fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and an NEA fellow.

#4483

Douglas MacDowell

#98771

Overall Influence

1931 - 2010 (79 years)

Douglas Maurice MacDowell, was a British classical scholar. His early career was as a teacher, first in the British Army as part of his national service and then at two private school. He then moved into academia and was a lecturer at the University of Manchester. Finally, for thirty years, he was Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow.

#4484

Elaine Terranova

#95329

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Elaine Terranova is an American poet. Life She grew up in Philadelphia, the daughter of Nathan and Sadie Goldstein. She remained in her home town gaining her education at Temple University where she graduated in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in English. She also married her first husband Philip Terranova that same year. Twelve years later in 1973, she worked as a manuscript editor for J. B. Lippincott & Co. While working there, she attended Vermont's Goddard College culminating in earning her master's degree in 1977. Her career shifted from editing to education and she began teaching English ...

#4485

Zheng Min

#39820

Overall Influence

1920 - 2022 (102 years)

Zheng Min was a Chinese scholar and modernist poet. Early life and career Zheng Min was born on 18 July 1920 in Minhou County, China. She attended the Southwestern University of Kunming, where she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1943. She first began publishing work during The War of Resistance, one of few female modernist poets doing so at the time. Zheng attended Brown University in the United States and earned her Master's in literature in 1951, before returning to China in 1955. She is one of nine prolific modernist poets considered to be in the "Nine Leaves" school of poetry.

#4486

Nicole Garcia

#59214

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Nicole Garcia is a French actress, film director and screenwriter. Her film Charlie Says was entered into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Her film Going Away was screened in the Special Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. She was the President of the Jury for the Caméra d'Or section of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

#4487

Howard White

#107343

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Franklin Howard White, is a Canadian writer, editor and publisher. In the early 1970s, he founded the Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing. In 2013 he and his wife Mary purchased the assets of the leading British Columbia book publisher Douglas & McIntyre and restructured it as Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. with White as publisher. He has been president of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, a member of the Board of Governors of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fra...

#4488

Bart Moore-Gilbert

#100358

Overall Influence

1952 - 2015 (63 years)

Bart Jason Moore-Gilbert was a Tanzanian-born, British academic, orientalist and political campaigner, most widely known for his work in the field of postcolonial literary studies and theory. Education Moore-Gilbert graduated from Durham University in 1975 with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature.

#4489

Ramón Griffero

#57101

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Ramón Griffero Sánchez is a Chilean playwright and theater director, one of the most prominent in his country. He is considered an emblematic figure of the national theater during the 1980s; his earliest productions are associated with cultural and political resistance to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

#4490

Zoë Skoulding

#91215

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Zoë Skoulding FLSW is a poet, living in Wales, whose work encompasses translation, editing, sound-based vocal performance, literary criticism and teaching creative writing. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, translated into over 25 languages and presented at numerous international festivals.

#4491

Joseph Aquilina

#82850

Overall Influence

1919 - 1997 (78 years)

Joseph Aquilina was a Maltese author and linguist born in Munxar. Education Aquilina graduated first as Bachelor of Arts and later as a lawyer from the University of Malta. Between 1937 and 1940 he read comparative Semitic philology at the University of London, where he obtained a doctorate.

#4492

Mark Bosco

#86985

Overall Influence

Mark Bosco, S.J. is a Jesuit priest and a professor. His areas of research and specialization are in the fields of 20th-Century American and British Literature, the Roman Catholic literary tradition, aesthetics, art, and the religious imagination. He is an authority on the works of Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene.

#4493

Julia Leigh

#89831

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Julia Leigh is an Australian novelist, film director and screenwriter. In 2011 her debut feature film Sleeping Beauty was selected to screen in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival. She is an author of two award-winning novels, The Hunter and Disquiet, for which she has been described as a "sorceress who casts a spell of serene control while the earth quakes underfoot".

#4494

Emmy Pérez

#90877

Overall Influence

Emmy Pérez is a Chicanx poet and writer originally from Santa Ana, California, United States. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 2017. She has lived in the borderlands of Texas since 2000, where she has taught creative writing in college and MFA programs, as well as in detention facilities and as part of social justice projects. Her latest collective is Poets Against the Border Wall. She was also a fellow and organizing committee member of CantoMundo and is a long-time member of Macondo Writers Workshop.

#4495

Pattiann Rogers

#82031

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry. Life Pattiann Rogers is an American poet living in Colorado with her husband and has two sons and three grandsons. She was born in Joplin, Missouri, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri in 1961. She received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Houston in 1981. She taught as a visiting writer at the University of Texas, the University of Montana, and at Washington University in St.

#4496

Kawataro Nakajima

#44402

Overall Influence

1917 - 1999 (82 years)

Kawatarō Nakajima was a Japanese researcher of Japanese popular culture. See also Shunro Oshikawa

#4497

Brighde Mullins

#92651

Overall Influence

Brighde Mullins is an American playwright and poet. Biography She graduated from the Yale School of Drama and the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa , with MFAs. She taught at San Francisco State University, Brown University, Harvard University, CalArts, and currently teaches at University of Southern California where she is also the director of USC's Master of Professional Writing Program. In 2012, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

#4498

Fahmida Hussain

#91928

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Dr Fahmida Hussain was born in a literary family on July 5, 1948, in Tando Jam in district Hyderabad Sindh, Pakistan. Her father Mohammad Yakoon "Niaz" was also a scholar who had translated poetry of Hafiz Shirazi from Persian to Sindhi language. Her brother Sirajul Haq Memon was also a well-known author and researcher. She is a well-known author, scholar, linguist and intellectual of Pakistan. Her fields of work have been: Literature, Linguistics, Woman studies and Anthropology. Her specialization is in the study of the great classical mystic poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Dr Fahmida was the Chairperson of Sindhi Language Authority from May 2008 to March 2015.

#4499

Phillip Harth

#96177

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Phillip Harth was an American literary scholar. Phillip Harth was a Sioux City, Iowa, native, born to parents John and Grace Harth on February 1, 1926. He attended Trinity College. Upon completing his bachelor's degree in 1946, Harth served in the United States Army. Harth obtained a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1949, and continued his doctoral studies, funded partly by a Fulbright Scholarship, at the University College, London. Harth began teaching at Northwestern University in 1956, two years before the University of Chicago awarded him a doctorate. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962, and taught at Northwestern until 1965.

#4500

Karen Head

#26945

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Karen Head is an American poet, educator and editor. She is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she is the executive director of the Communication Center. Head is known for her contributions to Massive Open Online Courses

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