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.

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#4751

Sylvia Lago

#43420

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Sylvia Lago Carzolio is a Uruguayan writer, teacher, and literary critic. She has made a particular focus of women's issues, addressing various conflicts that women encounter in her work. Biography Sylvia Lago was born in Montevideo on 20 November 1932. Her great-aunt was professor Elda Lago, a member of the Generación del 45, who bequeathed her home to the University of the Republic . Lago studied literature at the . She carried out academic and scientific activities at the Department of Uruguayan and American Literature at UdelaR's Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences, eventually...

#4752

Carol Moldaw

#136563

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Carol Moldaw is an American poet, novelist and critic. Her book The Lightning Field won the FIELD Poetry Prize. Biography Carol Moldaw was born in Oakland, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moldaw holds an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.A. from Boston University.

#4753

Julie Sanders

#61065

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Julie Sanders is the Principal of Royal Holloway, University of London. Career Sanders gained her doctorate at the University of Warwick, and studied at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and at University of California, Berkeley. In 1995 she took a lectureship at Keele University and in 2004 joined the University of Nottingham as Chair of English Literature and Drama. She was Head of the School of English from 2010 to 2013 and was subsequently seconded for two years to the Ningbo, China, joint venture campus as Vice Provost, launching the Arts and Humanities Research Council's first centre in China for Digital Copyright and IT research.

#4754

Jan Erik Rekdal

#144030

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Jan Erik Rekdal is a Norwegian philologist and poet. He has issued such poetry collections as Vandring på verdens vestkyst , Linedanseren , Sentrum i periferien , Oppstandelse nærvær , I Rumis skygge and Hotellvertens bedrøvelse og andre samtaler .

#4755

Hank Lazer

#94236

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Hank Lazer is an American poet and critic who teaches at the University of Alabama. Biography Lazer received an A.B. in English from Stanford University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees the University of Virginia. He has been a professor of English at the University of Alabama since 1977. From 1991 to 1997, he was Assistant Dean for Humanities and Fine Arts; from 1997 to 2006 he was Assistant Vice President for Undergraduate Programs and Services; and since 2006 he serves as Associate Provost for Academic Affairs.

#4756

John Beverley

#90121

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Randolph Beverley II is a literary and cultural critic at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies as well as an adjunct professor in the English and communication departments. He was influential in co-founding the Latin American subaltern studies group as well as a founding member of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

#4757

Elena Catena

#78735

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Elena Catena López was a Spanish university professor, philologist, publisher, and feminist. She was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate in at the Complutense University of Madrid, and the first to reach the position of vice dean of that same faculty. In 1960 she co-founded the Seminar on Women's Sociological Studies.

#4758

Nan Cohen

#106864

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Nan Cohen is an American poet and teacher. She has published two poetry collections, Rope Bridge and Unfinished City. Life She was raised in Reisterstown, Maryland, and graduated from Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

#4759

Tom Flynn

#64650

Overall Influence

1955 - 2021 (66 years)

Thomas W. Flynn was an American author, journalist, novelist, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and editor of its journal Free Inquiry. He was also director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum and the Freethought Trail.

#4760

Leonardo Alishan

#65094

Overall Influence

1951 - 2005 (54 years)

Leonardo Paul Alishan was an Armenian-Iranian writer, scholar, and translator. He was a professor of Persian and Comparative Literature at the University of Utah from 1978-1997. His published works include three collections of poetry, a book of short stories, and many scholarly articles. His translations included works by Nima Yushij, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Ahmad Shamlu who dedicated one of his poems to Alishan. He was a member of the Armenian Catholic Church

#4761

Rod Jellema

#94677

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Rod Jellema was an American poet, teacher, and translator. Life Jellema held a B.A. from Calvin College and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh . He began teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1955, where he founded and directed the creative writing program. At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus.

#4762

Michael Burkard

#111586

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Michael Paul Burkard is an American poet. Life He graduated from Hobart College in 1968 and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in 1973. He taught at Kirkland College and Sarah Lawrence College , and has taught in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997. He has been a visiting writer at New York University and the University of Louisville , as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University .

#4763

Peter Levitt

#93716

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Peter Levitt is a poet and translator. He is also the founder and teacher of the Salt Spring Zen Circle, in the Soto Zen lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi. Background He has taught poetry, writing and creativity workshops and seminars around the world, including at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, Naropa Institute Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and as a faculty member in poetry and translation for the MFA Writers Program at Antioch University. He emigrated to Canada in 2000 and became a citizen shortly thereafter. He is an instructor in the University of British Columbia Creative Writing Optional Residency MFA Program.

#4764

James Scully

#91142

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

James Scully is an American poet. Died 12/11/20. Biography Scully attended Roman Catholic grammar and high schools. He was a beneficiary of the post–World War II economic expansion, including tuition-free access to a local teachers college. In 1964, supported by a National Defense Fellowship, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.

#4765

Dmitri Nabokov

#84350

Overall Influence

1934 - 2012 (78 years)

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov was an American opera singer and translator. Born in Berlin, he was the only child of Russian parents: author Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera; they emigrated to the United States from France in 1940. He later was naturalized. In his later years, Nabokov translated many of his father's works into other languages, and served as the executor of his father's literary estate.

#4766

Peter Streckfus

Peter Streckfus

#125843

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Peter Streckfus is an American poet. His first book, The Cuckoo, won the 2003 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. His second book, Errings, won Fordham University Press's 2013 POL Editor's Prize.

#4767

Hamid Notghi

#70309

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

Hamid Notghi was an Iranian poet, writer, author, university professor. Notghi is a founder and father of modern public relations in Iran. Literary works Javad Heyat founded Varliq magazine in 1979 with Hamid Notghi. There are also many works of public relations, poetry and prose.One hour with QaaniBooks management and public relationsBeliefs and political propagandaWine Road Of any color From yesterday to today End of the Millennium

#4768

Calvin Baker

#98869

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Calvin Baker is an American novelist, educator, essayist, and editor who has chronicled the African-American experience from the colonial era to the present, centering the Black voice and perspective within the context of trans-Atlantic history. Among his concerns are constructions of American identity, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, modernity, geography, and science. His work is often praised for its expansiveness and richness of language. He has taught at Yale College, Skidmore College, and Columbia University's Graduate Center for the Arts.

#4769

Martin Hyatt

#95798

Overall Influence

Martin Hyatt is an American contemporary writer. Born in Louisiana, he later attended Goddard College, Eugene Lang College, and received an MFA in creative writing from The New School. Hyatt's fiction is usually set in the working-class American South. His work is characterized by its lyricism and realism. He has taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, including Hofstra University and Parsons School of Design. He has taught Creative Writing at School of Visual Arts, St. Francis College, and Southern New Hampshire University.

#4770

Scott Shane

#25787

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Scott Shane is an American journalist and author, currently employed by The New York Times, reporting principally about the United States intelligence community. In 2023, his nonfiction book Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland was published by Celadon Books.

#4771

Brad Watson

#68854

Overall Influence

1955 - 2020 (65 years)

Wilton Brad Watson was an American author and academic. Originally from Mississippi, he worked and lived in Alabama, Florida, California, Boston, and Wyoming. He was a professor at the University of Wyoming until his death. Watson published four books – two novels and two collections of short stories – to critical acclaim.

#4772

Andrew Suknaski

#112359

Overall Influence

1942 - 2012 (70 years)

Andrew Suknaski was a Canadian poet and visual artist. Early life and education He was born on a homestead near Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan and studied at a number of institutions, receiving a diploma of Fine Arts from the Kootenay School of Art in 1967.

#4773

Danielle Pafunda

#109044

Overall Influence

Danielle Pafunda is an American writer and poet. She has taught for the University of Wyoming, University of California San Diego, and is 2018-19 Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Maine. She also teaches for Mississippi University for Women's low-residency MFA. She often lives and works in the Mojave Desert.

#4774

Rane Arroyo

#99656

Overall Influence

1954 - 2010 (56 years)

Ramón Arroyo was an American playwright, poet and scholar of Puerto Rican descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture, and homosexuality. Arroyo was openly gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.

#4775

Miranda Mellis

#112783

Overall Influence

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications, The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist. Her fiction, reviews, and essays have appeared in various publications including The Believer's The Logger, Harper’s, Conjunctions, the New York Times, Fence and elsewhere. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony. She co-founded and co-edited The Encyclopedia Project and once played in a band called My Invisible. She teaches at Evergreen State College.

#4776

Robert Peterson

#129938

Overall Influence

1926 - 2000 (74 years)

Robert Peterson was a widely anthologized American poet. Life His childhood was spent in San Francisco at the Fielding Hotel, a Union Square hotel owned by his adoptive parents. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. He was an Army combat medic in the 86th Division, during World War II. He studied at San Francisco State College.

#4777

James McFarlane

#92283

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

James Walter McFarlane was a scholar of European literature, author of The Oxford Ibsen, and founding Dean of the School of European Studies at University of East Anglia which included Scandinavian studies.

#4778

Nur Salman

#137627

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Nur Salman is a Lebanese writer. She was born in Beirut and received a BA in Arabic literature from the Beirut College for Girls, a MA in comparative literature from the American University of Beirut and a state doctorate in Arabic literature from Saint Joseph University. She is a professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University.

#4779

James Bradley

#59077

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

James Bradley is an Australian novelist and critic. Born in Adelaide, South Australia, he trained as a lawyer before becoming a writer. Bradley's novels, which have been published internationally, explore both past and future. His books include seven novels and a book of poetry. He has also edited two anthologies, Blur, a collection of writing by young Australian writers, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. Bradley also writes as a critic, with reviews and articles appearing regularly in Australian newspapers and magazines, and blogs at City of Tongues.

#4780

Jim Webb

#28757

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

James Henry Webb Jr. is an American politician and author. He has served as a United States senator from Virginia, Secretary of the Navy, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, Counsel for the United States House Committee on Veterans' Affairs and is a decorated Marine Corps officer.

#4781

Brian John

#88907

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Dr Brian S. John is a Welsh writer. He is the author of the historical-fiction series Angel Mountain Saga. John was born in Carmarthen, Wales. He studied at Haverfordwest Grammar School and at Jesus College, Oxford, where he read Geography from 1959 to 1962 and went on to obtain a D Phil for a study of the Ice Age in Wales. He worked as a field scientist in Antarctica and spent eleven years as a geography lecturer at Durham University. He has travelled widely in the Arctic, Antarctic and Scandinavia. Since 1977 he has made his living as a writer and publisher. He is the author of The Stone...

#4782

Oscar Casares

#60383

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Oscar Cásares is an American writer and associate professor of creative writing. He is the author of Brownsville: Stories, Amigoland, and Where We Come From. Cásares teaches at the University of Texas at Austin where he is director of the Creative Writing Program.

#4783

Shepherd Mead

#48909

Overall Influence

1914 - 1994 (80 years)

Shepherd Mead, born Edward Mead was an American writer and is best known as the author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was adapted into a hit Broadway show and motion picture.

#4784

Ian Cross

#110213

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Ian Robert Cross was a New Zealand novelist, journalist and administrator, and contributed significantly to New Zealand letters. His first novel, The God Boy, was released in 1957 to critical acclaim. Later novels are The Backward Sex , After ANZAC Day and The Family Man .

#4785

David Owen

#49644

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

David Owen is an American journalist and author. Education David Owen grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and graduated from The Pembroke-Country Day School in 1973. He attended Colorado College before transferring to Harvard University, where he was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon, as was his future wife, Ann Hodgman. He graduated from Harvard in 1978 with a degree in English.

#4786

Rosaura Sánchez

#83628

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Rosaura Sánchez is a writer, storyteller, linguist and critic. Sánchez' "most singular and significant contribution to this field [Chicano bilingualism] is the formulation of a theoretical framework for the analysis of Chicano Spanish based on the premise that Spanish use in America must be considered in its social and verbal interactions." As an editor, one of her most relevant works was the novel Who Would Have Thought it? by writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton of California, published by the Arte Público Press in Houston, Texas.

#4787

Aurelie Sheehan

#114416

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Aurelie Sheehan was an American novelist and short story writer. She was the author of two novels, History Lesson for Girls and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects , as well as four collection of stories: Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant , Jewelry Box , Demigods on Speedway , and Once into the Night , winner of FC2's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. She was a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

#4788

Hester Kaplan

#96127

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Hester Margaret Kaplan is an American short story writer, and novelist. Life Kaplan was born to a Jewish family, the daughter of novelist Anne and author Justin Kaplan. Her maternal grandparents were Doris Fleischman and Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations" and nephew of Sigmund Freud. She grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Barnard College.

#4789

Robin Behn

#103237

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Robin Behn is an American poet, and professor at University of Alabama and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She grew up in Barrington, Illinois. She graduated from Oberlin College, the University of Missouri, and University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Cortland Review, Perihelion, Poetry, and Kenyon Review.

#4790

Jean Said Makdisi

#97553

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Jean Said Makdisi is a Palestinian writer and independent scholar, best known for her autobiographical writing. Life Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, British Mandate Palestine, to a Palestinian family. The younger sister of Rosemarie Said Zahlan and Edward Said, she was raised in Egypt and educated in the United States and England. She married a Lebanese academic of Palestinian origin, Samir Makdisi. They lived in America before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, in 1972, where she taught English and Humanities at the Beirut University College. They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Lebanon War.

#4791

Michael Dreyer

#107912

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Michael Dreyer is a German artist, author, and director, who analyzes the basis of art. He creates, analyses and proves the connection between the presentation, history, attraction and forms of Art. Since 1982, Dreyer had worked as a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, where he had been teaching visual communication.

#4792

Blanche McCrary Boyd

#111164

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Blanche McCrary Boyd is an American author. She is currently the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College. Early life and education Blanche McCrary Boyd was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Charles Fant McCrary and Mildred McDaniel. She says that growing up in South Carolina was the source of her "redneck roots." Boyd started college at Duke University, though left after getting a C+ in her first English class and being asked to leave because she was "drunk all the time". She married a man who "wouldn't put up with her drinking," and t...

#4793

Thomas Ferraro

#97198

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Thomas J. Ferraro is an American non-fiction writer, and Frances Hill Fox Professor of English at Duke University. Life He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, and earned his Ph.D. at Yale University, where he took the Theron Rockwell Field Prize for Distinguished Humanities Dissertation. He teaches American literature and cultural studies at Duke University, with a special emphasis on Catholicity, immigrant literature, and visual media.

#4794

Howard Starks

#108409

Overall Influence

1929 - 2003 (74 years)

Howard Vernon Starks was an American poet from the U.S. state of Oklahoma. He is best known for his poem, "August: Osage County," which was one of the inspirations for Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name.

#4795

Alexandru Mușina

#77713

Overall Influence

1954 - 2013 (59 years)

Alexandru Muşina was a Romanian poet, essayist, and editor born in Sibiu. He studied literature at the University of Bucharest in the late 1970s and published poetry in the 1980s beginning with Cinci in 1982.

#4796

Maria Arrillaga

#99539

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

María Arrillaga is a Puerto Rican poet who has been a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She taught in the Spanish Department on the Rio Piedras campus. She is a member of PEN American Center as well as PEN Club de Puerto Rico. She was a member of the Women's Writing Committee of PEN International, served as its secretary and organizer for Latin America. Arrillaga was president of PEN Club de Puerto Rico during 1989–1991.

#4797

Rory Waterman

#121850

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Rory Waterman is a poet, critic, editor and academic resident in Nottingham, England. Early life Waterman grew up mainly in a lodge house to an estate near Nocton, Lincolnshire with his mother and grandmother, then in a council house in Metheringham, with long stays in Coleraine in Northern Ireland from the age of 10, to see his father. He then took degrees in English at the University of Leicester and Durham University.

#4798

Enriqueta Harris

#65439

Overall Influence

1910 - 2006 (96 years)

Enriqueta Harris Frankfort was a British art historian and writer who specialised in Spanish art. Born into a family with an English father and a Spanish mother, she attended the University College London to read modern languages and later studied a Doctor of Philosophy art degree under Tancred Borenius. Harris travelled to Spain to research Caravaggio's influence on 17th-century Spanish paintings and her first book was published in 1938. She billeted Basque child refugees during the Spanish Civil War and worked with the Ministry of Information to keep Spain neutral during World War II. After...

#4799

Ellen Doré Watson

#98312

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Ellen Doré Watson is an American poet, translator and teacher. Career Watson is author of six collections of poems, most recently, pray me stay eager . Her book, Ladder Music, was a New York/New England Award winner from Alice James Books. Other honors include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant and a 1997 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

#4800

Anwaar Ahmad

#41134

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Anwaar Ahmad is an Urdu short story writer, scholar and academician from Pakistan. Presently, he is serving as the Director General at University of Gujrat's Sialkot Campus.He has been associated with Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, and Government College University, Faisalabad as a teacher, researcher, and departmental head for over 35 years. He has also served as a visiting professor at Ankara University in Ankara, Turkey and the Urdu department at Osaka University of Foreign Studies in Osaka, Japan.

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