Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

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

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

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

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

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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#4801

Elana Greenfield

#82437

Overall Influence

Elana Greenfield is an American playwright, and short story writer. Life Greenfield was raised in Israel. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, and from Brown University with an MFA. She was Artistic Director of New Dramatists. Currently, she teaches dramatic writing at The New School, in the Eugene Lang College division. She formerly taught the same subject at New York University.

#4802

Frances McCue

#94353

Overall Influence

Frances McCue is an American poet, writer, and teacher. She has published four books of poetry and two books of prose. Her poetry collection The Bled received the 2011 Washington State Book Award and the 2011 Grub Street National Book prize. Three of her other books, Mary Randlett Portraits , Timber Curtain , and The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs were all finalists for the Washington State Book Award.

#4803

Malik Yusef

#87500

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Malik Yusef El Shabazz Jones is an American spoken word artist, poet, rapper, writer, composer, producer and director based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Early life He was raised in Chicago's South Side neighborhood known as the "Wild 100's" and is a former member of the Blackstone Rangers street gang. In his youth he became friendly with rapper Common. He is dyslexic, which he first realized as a teenager. He has evolved over the years from a street poet into an actor, mainly acting out his "street hustler" persona. In an interview an ex-girlfriend said this persona couldn't be further from the truth.

#4804

Abdul Sattar Jawad

#81810

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Abdul Sattar Jawad is an Iraqi-born professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at Duke University. He was a Barksdale Fellow at the University of Mississippi, Honors College. Prior to this he was a visiting professor at the department of English and American language and literature, Harvard University, and he was with the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University. He received a Ph.D. in English literature and journalism, from London's City University, .

#4805

Paolo Canettieri

#97746

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Paolo Canettieri is a romance philologist, working in Italy. He is a full professor at the University of Rome and researcher in the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies. He is one of the founders of Cognitive philology and Editor in chief of the Journal with the same name. Canettieri's research interests include cognitive poetics and textual criticism . He discovered that the 6-1-5-2-4-3 permutation formula of the sestina coincides with that of the distribution of the points on the dice. He worked in analysis, synthesis and reviews of romance medieval literature , with particular emphasis on poetry and its formal structures.

#4806

Kang Eun-gyo

#129704

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Kang Eun-gyo is a South Korean poet and Professor Emerita at Dong-a University. Life Kang Eungyo was born on December 13, 1945 in Hongwon, Hamgyeongnam-do. She was raised in Seoul, and graduated from Gyeonggi Girls’ Middle School and Gyeonggi Girls’ High School. She went on to earn her bachelor's degree in English Literature and Ph.D. in Korean Literature from Yonsei University. Kang has a daughter. She made her literary debut with the publication of "Night of the Pilgrims" , which earned her the 1968 New Writer Prize, sponsored by the journal World of Thoughts . She was a member of the coter...

#4807

Park Hyoung-su

#98798

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Park Hyoung-su is a male South Korean writer of fiction born in Chuncheon, Gangwan-do, South Korea. His short story Krabi, named after the Thai district, has been published in a bilingual edition in France.

#4808

Yvette Biro

#65786

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Yvette Biro is a Hungarian-American essayist, screenwriter and Professor Emeritus at New York University Graduate Film School . Her early books on the aesthetics of film were first published in her native Hungary, which became handbooks for film-schools in the country. Meanwhile, she worked on a dozen of prizewinning films with noted directors . She was both the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Filmkultura, the magazine of the Hungarian Film Institute and Film Archive.

#4809

Richard McCann

#89190

Overall Influence

1949 - 2021 (72 years)

Richard John McCann was an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a longtime professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University.

#4810

David Stern

#97368

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

David M. Stern is an American scholar of Hebrew literature. He is the Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature at Harvard University. Biography Stern received his B.A. from Columbia College and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and was the Berg Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature before joining Harvard's faculty in 2015. His work has focused on interpreting works of Jewish literature in their historical and cultural contexts as well as the material history of Jewish literary works, with a specialization in Classica...

#4811

Al Young

#98307

Overall Influence

1939 - 2021 (82 years)

Albert James Young was an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. He was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2005 to 2008. Young's many books included novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, a...

#4812

Elizabeth Chater

#77942

Overall Influence

1910 - 2004 (94 years)

Elizabeth Eileen Chater was a Canadian writer of novels and poetry, and a professor at San Diego State University. Biography Chater was born August 22, 1910, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her father was a successful attorney who provided a home with a library filled with books. At a time when women were not encouraged to seek higher education, she attended the University of British Columbia at sixteen. While there, she was the President of the Debating Society, Vice President of the senior class, and graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She was married to Melville Thomas Chater in 1932.

#4813

Simon Harel

#91677

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Simon Harel is a Canadian intellectual. In addition to being a prolific writer and speaker and an adjunct professor at the Département d'études littéraires of the Université du Québec à Montréal, he is full professor at and Director of the Département de littérature comparée of the University of Montreal.

#4814

Joshua Katz

#96866

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Joshua Timothy Katz is an American linguist and classicist who was the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University until May 2022. He is a scholar on the languages, literatures, and cultures of ancient and medieval history. Currently, he is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

#4815

Nigel Spivey

#53912

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Nigel Jonathan Spivey is a British classicist and academic, specialising in classical art and archaeology. He is a senior lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College. He studied at Cambridge, the British School at Rome, and the University of Pisa.

#4816

Robert Sonkowsky

#100870

Overall Influence

1931 - 2014 (83 years)

Robert Sonkowsky was a professor emeritus of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He was an authority on Latin rhetoric and the pronunciation of Golden Age Latin. His bachelor's degree was from Lawrence College , and his PhD from the University of North Carolina . He was an Honorary Member of the Center for Chronobiology in the Mayo Building, Medical School.

#4817

Beth Bachmann

#128792

Overall Influence

Beth Bachmann is an American poet. Bachmann is Writer in Residence of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Tin House, and Ploughshares. They are included in the textbook The Practice of Creative Writing .

#4818

Alan Sinfield

#88136

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Alan Sinfield was an English theorist in the fields of Shakespeare and sexuality, modern theatre, gender studies, queer theory, queer studies, post-1945 politics and cultural theory. He was a professor of English at the University of Sussex, and the author of a dozen books, and is credited with a leading role in establishing queer studies in mainstream academic studies.

#4819

Patricia McFadden

Patricia McFadden

#13978

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Patricia McFadden is a radical African feminist, sociologist, writer, educator, and publisher from eSwatini. She is also an activist and scholar who worked in the anti-apartheid movement for more than 20 years. McFadden has worked in the African and global women’s movements as well. As a writer, she has been the target of political persecution. She has worked as editor of the Southern African Feminist Review and African Feminist Perspectives. She currently teaches, and advocates internationally for women's issues. McFadden has served as a professor at Cornell University, Spelman College, Syracuse University and Smith College in the United States.

#4820

Talvikki Ansel

#123349

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Talvikki Ansel is an American poet. She was chosen as a winner by James Dickey, for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1996. Life She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1985, and Indiana University Bloomington. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies New Young American Poets and The Pushcart Prize XXVI, and in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Journal, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah.

#4821

Emily Ruskovich

#125783

Overall Influence

Emily Ruskovich is an American writer who won the 2019 International Dublin literary award for her novel Idaho. She grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2011 and is an assistant professor at the University of Montana where she teaches creative writing; she was formerly on the faculty of Boise State University. She lives in the mountains west of Missoula.

#4822

Olga Humo

#91695

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

Olga Humo was a Yugoslav partisan, writer and university professor. She was attached to the Partisan Supreme Headquarters as one of the most prominent women fighters and served as personal secretary to communist leader Josip Broz Tito throughout the Second World War. At the same time, her father Momčilo Ninčić was senior minister in the opposing Yugoslav Royal government in-exile in London.

#4823

Lloyd Haft

#109805

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Lloyd Haft is an American-born Dutch poet, translator, and sinologist. He has been living in the Netherlands since 1968. Haft was educated at Harvard College and Leiden University. His translations into Dutch include works by Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. He has translated Herman Gorter, Gerrit Kouwenaar, H. H. ter Balkt, Anton Ent, Bian Zhilin, Zhou Mengdie, Yang Lingye, and Lo Fu into English.

#4824

Ann Bergren

#73923

Overall Influence

1942 - 2018 (76 years)

Ann Bergren was Professor of Greek literature, Literary Theory, and Contemporary Architecture at University of California, Los Angeles. She is known for her scholarship on Ancient Greek language, gender, and contemporary architecture.

#4825

Amaranth Borsuk

#119392

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.

#4826

Shannon Huffman Polson

#96958

Overall Influence

Shannon Huffman Polson is an American writer. In 1995, Polson became one of the first women to fly the Apache attack helicopter in the U.S. Army. Early life Polson was born and reared in Anchorage, Alaska, daughter of an Army JAG officer. She grew up active on the swim team and the debate team, and in her church youth group.

#4827

Johan Stenström

Johan Stenström

#117244

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Johan Gunnar Stenström is a Swedish literary scholar. He works at Lund University as docent and as professor . Stenström grew up in Helsingborg. He studied at Malmö Academy of Music and later history of literature at Lund University. He has written books, among them Den svenska sångboken and Med fantasins eld - Ingemar Leckius och bilden .

#4828

Paul Batchelor

#112979

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Paul Batchelor is a British poet. He was educated at the University of East Anglia , and completed his PhD at Newcastle University. In 2003 he received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

#4829

Reiji Nagakawa

#121297

Overall Influence

1928 - 2000 (72 years)

was a Japanese translator, writer and scholar. Living a large part of his life in Seville, Spain, he co-founded the Japanese department of the University of Seville Languages Institute with Francisco García Tortosa.

#4830

Ezz El-Din Esmail

#140585

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

Ezz El-Din Ismail Abdel-Ghani was an Egyptian critic and University professor who was the recipient of several awards. In 2000, he shared the King Faisal International Prize in Arabic Language and Literature with Dr. Abdullah Al-Tayeb. He was also awarded the Medal of Science and Arts and the Mubarak Prize for Literature.

#4831

Lauren Kessler

#34995

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Lauren Kessler is an American author, and immersion journalist who specializes in narrative nonfiction. She teaches storytelling for social change at the University of Washington and for the Forum of Journalism and Media in Vienna.

#4832

Olakunbi Olasope

Olakunbi Olasope

#46037

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Olakunbi Ojuolape Olasope is a Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She is an expert on Roman social history, Greek and Roman theatre, and Yoruba classical performance culture. Olasope is known in particular for her work on the reception of classical drama in West Africa, especially the work of the Nigerian dramatist Femi Osofisan.

#4833

Morgan Parker

#43367

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Morgan Parker is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night , There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé , and Magical Negro , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On .

#4834

Kazuo Koike

#60458

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Kazuo Koike was a prolific Japanese manga writer , novelist, screenwriter, lyricist and entrepreneur. He is best known for his violent, artful seinen manga, notably Lone Wolf and Cub , Lady Snowblood and Crying Freeman , which – along with their numerous media adaptations − have been credited for their influence on the international growth of Japanese popular culture.

#4835

John P. Allen

#8946

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

John Polk Allen is a systems ecologist, engineer, metallurgist, adventurer, and writer. Allen is a proponent of the science of biospherics and a pioneer in sustainable co-evolutionary development. He is the founder of Synergia Ranch, and is best known as the inventor and director of research of Biosphere 2, the world's largest vivarium and research facility to study global ecology. Biosphere 2 set multiple records in closed ecological systems work, including degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system . He is also involved ...

#4836

Gerald Burns

#131529

Overall Influence

1940 - 1997 (57 years)

Gerald Burns was an American poet, and artist. Life He was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College, Dublin, and taught at Southern Methodist University and New York University. In 1975 Burns moved to Dallas, Texas. In 1994, he moved to Portland, Oregon. Burns illustrated several of his own books, and designed the covers for Boccherini's Minuet and Prose. In addition to his writing and art, Burns also dabbled in amateur conjuring.

#4837

Erin Belieu

#72977

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Erin Belieu is an American poet. Early life Belieu was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, graduating from Central High School. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she learned how to construct poetry. Belieu then attended Boston University, and Ohio State University receiving advanced degrees in the area of poetry.

#4838

Richard Saller

#18990

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Richard Paul Saller is an American professor of European studies. He is the former provost of the University of Chicago and the former dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he is currently the university's president.

#4839

Evgeny Dobrenko

#74297

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Evgeny Dobrenko is a Russian-American historian. Born in Odessa, he moved to Moscow and worked at Moscow State University and the Russian State University for the Humanities. He emigrated to the US and worked at Duke University, Stanford University, UC Irvine, Amherst College and NYU. He then moved to the UK, and worked at the University of Nottingham and the University of Sheffield. He is now professor of Russian studies at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

#4840

Justin D. Edwards

#83164

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Justin D. Edwards was a Canadian and British Professor in the Division of Literature and Languages and chair of Gothic Studies at University of Stirling. Previously Chair of English at the University of Surrey and professor and head of English at Bangor University, he was elected by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 2005. Edwards received an M.A and Ph.D. in English from the Université de Montréal, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. travel literature. Between 1995 and 2005, he taught at the Université de Montréal and the University of Copenhagen, where he was appointed as an associate professor in 2002.

#4841

Prageeta Sharma

#127120

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Prageeta Sharma is an American poet. She is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College. Life Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence , Undergloom , Infamous Landscapes , The Opening Question , which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill .

#4842

Edvige Giunta

#79152

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Edvige Giunta is a Sicilian-American writer, educator, and literary critic. Biography She was born in Gela, Sicily, in 1959, the second of four children of Vincenzo and Cettina Giunta, both schoolteachers. After earning a degree in foreign languages and literature at the University of Catania in 1983, she moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the University of Miami. She received a master's degree in English in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1989. She wrote her dissertation on James Joyce and her first book was titled A Raven Like a Writing-Desk: Lewis Carroll through James Joyce's Lo...

#4843

Daisy Hernández

#119232

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Daisy Hernández is a writer and editor in the United States. She coedited the essay collection Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism , and in 2014 published A Cup of Water Under My Bed, a memoir about growing up queer in a Colombian-Cuban family. Hernández is an assistant professor at Northwestern University.

#4844

Devoney Looser

#93481

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Devoney Kay Looser is an American literary critic and Jane Austen scholar. She is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where she focuses on women's writing and the history of the novel.

#4845

Sharon Shalom

#78448

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Rabbi Dr. Sharon Shalom is a rabbi, lecturer and Jewish author. He is a Rav of one of the Tzohar "Open Communities" in Kiryat Gat. He was born Zaude Tesfay in a Jewish community in the North of Ethiopia. He works as a Rabbi in the Merkaz Shapira Or Meofir special program for Ethiopian emigrants. He lectures in Jewish ritual and tradition at Ono Academic College in Israel, and wrote From Sinai to Ethiopia: the Halachic World and Ethiopian Jewish Thought.

#4846

Jean-Marc Lofficier

#55629

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jean-Marc Lofficier is a French author of books about films and television programs, as well as numerous comics and translations of a number of animation screenplays. He usually collaborates with his wife, Randy Lofficier , and the reason why credits sometimes read "R.J.M. Lofficier", after the initials of both spouses.

#4847

Sarah Henstra

#122819

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Sarah Henstra is a Canadian writer and academic. A professor of English literature and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University . She is most noted for her 2018 novel The Red Word, which won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2018 Governor General's Awards.

#4848

Hauwa Ali

#94391

Overall Influence

Hauwa Ali was a Nigerian writer known for her novels exploring the lives of Muslim women and raising questions about Islamic values and women's independence. Her best-known novel, Destiny, won the Delta prize for fiction.

#4849

Don McKay

#58562

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Don McKay is a Canadian poet, editor, and educator. Life McKay was born in Owen Sound, Ontario and raised in Cornwall. McKay was educated at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Wales, where he earned his PhD in 1971, with a dissertation on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He taught creative writing and English for 27 years in universities including the University of Western Ontario and the University of New Brunswick. In 2008, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. McKay has lived in southwestern Ontario, New Brunswick, Vancouver Island and Newfoundland.

#4850

Gerald Barrax

#105920

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

Gerald William Barrax was an American poet and educator. His poems appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. He was recognized by several awards, including the Raleigh Medal of Arts for "Extraordinary Achievement in the Arts" in 1993, the Sam Regan Award for contribution to the fine arts in North Carolina in 1991, and the 1983 Callaloo Creative Writing Award for Nonfiction Prose.

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