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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#4901

John Dufresne

#99590

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Dufresne is an American author of French Canadian descent born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Worcester State College in 1970 and the University of Arkansas in 1984. He is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program of the English Department at Florida International University. In 2012, he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his work.

#4902

Diana Ross

#49441

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Diana Patience Beverly Ross was an English children's author. A graduate of the Central School of Art in London, she also worked on sculpture and graphic arts and illustrated several of her own books under the name of her cat, Gri.

#4903

Reggie Watts

#74217

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts is an American comedian, actor, beatboxer, and musician. His improvised musical sets are created using only his voice, a keyboard, and a looping machine. Watts refers to himself as a "disinformationist" who aims to disorient his audience in a comedic fashion. He was the regular house musician on the spoof IFC talk show Comedy Bang! Bang!. From 2015 to 2023, Watts led the house band for The Late Late Show with James Corden.

#4904

Maggie Smith

#76763

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Maggie Smith is an American poet, freelance writer, and editor who lives in Bexley, Ohio. Smith's poem "Good Bones," originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as "keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents," citing that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, U.K., the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic.

#4905

Joshua Bennett

#81262

Overall Influence

Joshua Bennett is an American author, professor and artist. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bennett's research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century African American literature, animality studies, affect theory, black poetics, and environmental studies.

#4906

Clare Lees

#101732

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Clare A. Lees is professor of medieval literature and history of the language, and Director of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Education Lees earned her Bachelor of Arts and master's degree at the University of Leeds before earning her PhD at the University of Liverpool.

#4907

Lydia Vasikova

#104248

Overall Influence

1927 - 2012 (85 years)

Lydia Petrovna Vasikova was a Soviet and Russian Finno-Ugric linguist, the first among Mari women, who became a Doctor of Science , a professor , an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation , and a holder of the Order of the Cross of the Land of Mary .

#4908

Thomas Centolella

Thomas Centolella

#114756

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Thomas Centolella is an American poet and educator. He has published four books of poetry and has had many poems published in periodicals including American Poetry Review. He has received awards for his poetry including those from the National Poetry Series, the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Dorset Prize. In 2019, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#4909

Terence Tunberg

Terence Tunberg

#50515

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Terence Tunberg is a professor of Latin at the University of Kentucky, specialising in Neo-Latin studies, especially the use of Ciceronian language; and the use of spoken Latin as a teaching tool. He is also Director of the university's Institute for Latin Studies. His academic output is in both Latin and English.

#4910

Robert M. Durling

#124683

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Robert M. Durling was an American scholar and translator, known for his translations of Petrarch's Rime Sparse and of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. He was professor emeritus of Italian and English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He died on May 21, 2015.

#4911

Brenda Coultas

#72395

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Brenda Coultas is an American poet. Life She was raised in Indiana, often working odd jobs such as welding. She graduated from Naropa University, studying with Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. Coultas also taught at Naropa University.

#4912

David Groff

#114801

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Groff is an American poet, writer, and independent editor. Biography Groff graduated from the University of Iowa, with an MFA, and MA. He has taught at University of Iowa, Rutgers University, and NYU, and at William Paterson University.

#4913

Miriam Allott

#113713

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Miriam Allott or Miriam Farris; Miriam Farris Allott; Miriam Allott-Farris was an English literary scholar. She was a professor in Liverpool and at Birkbeck College. Life Allott was born in Cairo or Fulham in 1920. This was just after her father Labib Farris who was an Egyptian medical student and her mother Ada Violet Rennie married. She studied in Cairo and the Froebel Demonstration School at the same time as Iris Murdoch. She then went to Liverpool University. After her degree in general studies she taught and studied for a doctorate in English literature on Henry James. She was supervised by her future husband, Kenneth Allott.

#4914

Peter Boyle

#105554

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Peter Boyle , is an Australian poet and translator. He has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including The Blue Cloud of Crying and Coming Home From the World. Boyle has also published translations of Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Eugenio Montejo, César Vallejo, Pierre Reverdy, and others.

#4915

Malcolm Schofield

#28520

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Malcolm Schofield, is a British classicist and academic, specialising in ancient philosophy. Having taught at Cornell University and the University of Oxford, he joined the University of Cambridge in 1972 as a lecturer in classics and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was promoted to Reader in Ancient Philosophy in 1989, and made Professor of Ancient Philosophy 1998. Since retiring in 2009, he has been an emeritus professor at Cambridge.

#4916

Stefan Andriopoulos

#115911

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Stefan Andriopoulos is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and co-founder and former co-director of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University. He is the author of Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media , which analyzes the constitutive role of spiritualism for the history of philosophy and technology. It was named a book of the year in Times Literary Supplement and has also been published in German and Brazilian Portuguese translation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described its readings of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, and Schopenh...

#4917

Cara Black

#80372

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Cara Black is a bestselling American mystery writer. She is best known for her Aimée Leduc mystery novels featuring a female Paris-based private investigator. Black is included in the Great Women Mystery Writers by Elizabeth Lindsay 2nd edition. Her first novel Murder in the Marais was nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel and the third novel in the series, Murder in the Sentier, was Anthony-nominated for Best Novel.

#4918

Colleen J. McElroy

#101724

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Colleen J. McElroy is an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist. Life She graduated from Kansas State University and from the University of Washington with a Ph.D. . She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

#4919

Page duBois

#125264

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Page DuBois is professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is known for her work in Ancient Greek literature, feminist theory and psychoanalysis.

#4920

Gabriel Cevallos García

Gabriel Cevallos García

#96794

Overall Influence

1913 - 2004 (91 years)

Gabriel Cevallos García was an Ecuadorian writer, historian, professor, and philosopher. He was the rector of the University of Cuenca from 1964 to 1968 and founder, professor, and dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the university.

#4921

Janet Kaplan

#75090

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Janet Kaplan is an American poet and professor. She is the author of four full-length books: The Groundnote , "The Glazier’s County," winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press, Dreamlife of the Philanthropist: Prose Poems & Prose Sonnets, winner of the 2011 Ernest Sandeen Prize , and "Ecotones" .

#4922

Wesley McNair

#109476

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Wesley McNair is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored 10 volumes of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems , The Lost Child: Ozark Poems , The Unfastening , and Dwellers in the House of the Lord . He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry . In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.

#4923

Zoë Brigley

#117021

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Zoë Brigley or Zoë Brigley Thompson is a Welsh poet, editor of Poetry Wales, and assistant professor in the Department of English of Ohio State University. Biography Brigley was born in 1981 and grew up in Caerphilly in the Rhymney Valley. She has a BA , MA and PhD from the University of Warwick. Her doctoral thesis was titled: Exile and ecology : the poetic practice of Gwyneth Lewis, Pascale Petit and Deryn Rees-Jones. She won a 2003 Eric Gregory Award, an award given by the Society of Authors for a collection by a poet aged under 30.

#4924

David Galef

#90555

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

David Adam Galef is an American fiction writer, critic, poet, translator, and essayist. Born in the Bronx, he grew up in Scarsdale. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1981, after which he lived in Osaka, Japan, for a year. He received an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1984, and a Ph.D. in literature in 1989. In 1992, he married Beth Weinhouse. From 1989 to 2008, he was a professor of English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he administered the M.F.A. program in creative writing until 2007. David Galef and his family currently live in Montcl...

#4925

Bill Schelly

#79630

Overall Influence

1951 - 2019 (68 years)

William Carl Schelly was an Eisner Award-winning author who chronicled the history of comic books and comic book fandom, and wrote biographies of comic book creators, including Otto Binder, L.B. Cole, Joe Kubert, Harvey Kurtzman, John Stanley, and James Warren as well as silent film comedian Harry Langdon.

#4926

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

#81881

Overall Influence

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is an American writer, best known for her debut novel Wench: A Novel , which became a bestseller. She is chair of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors. Early life and education Dolen Perkins-Valdez attended Harvard College as an undergraduate, earning a BA degree. She completed a PhD in English at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

#4927

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#123375

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Mary Kay Zuravleff is an American short story writer and novelist. Life She was born in Syracuse, New York. She graduated from Rice University, and from Johns Hopkins University. She taught at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, the University of Maryland, and George Mason University. She was writer in residence at American University. She won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Jones First Novel Award. She is on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She lives in Washington, D.C.

#4928

Anil Acharya

#100237

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Anil Acharya is an Indian Bengali scholar, essayist, short story writer and poet. In 1966, he founded the Bengali literary quarterly and little magazine Anustup. Education Acharya graduated with an honors degree in English literature from the Scottish Church College. Thereafter he earned his master's degree in English literature from the University of Calcutta.

#4929

Jacques Martin

#72944

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Jacques Martin was a French comics artist and comic book creator. He was one of the classic artists of Tintin magazine, alongside Edgar P. Jacobs and Hergé, of whom he was a longtime collaborator. He is best known for his series Alix. He was born in Strasbourg.

#4930

Jorma Koivulehto

#87264

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Jorma Juhani Koivulehto was a Finnish philologist. At University of Helsinki, he was adjunct professor from 1973 to 1983, and later full professor of Germanic philology from 1983 to 1998. His research concerned Indo-European loans in the Finnish language and was therefore part of the Finnish historical-comparative research tradition which started in the late 18th century. In a series of articles, for instance Indogermanisch-Uralisch: Lehnbeziehungen oder Urverwandschaft? and Zur indogermanisch-germanischen Kontinuität in der Nachbarschaft der Finnougrier , he proposes a theory regarding the stratification of loanwords in Finnish.

#4931

Robert Sward

#104250

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Robert Sward was an American and Canadian poet and novelist. Jack Foley, in his introduction to Sward's Collected Poems, 1957–2004, called him, "in truth, a citizen, at heart, of both countries. At once a Canadian and American poet, one with a foot in both worlds, Sward also inhabits an enormous in-between."

#4932

Eric Schocket

#148711

Overall Influence

1966 - 2006 (40 years)

Eric Schocket was an associate professor of American literature at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He wrote primarily on issues of class. In Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature , Schocket examined the way in which class-conscious American literature confronted and addressed the typical American denial of issues of social stratification.

#4933

Kathleen Cambor

#67827

Overall Influence

Kathleen Cambor is an American author. Her novels include The Book of Mercy, which received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 for her second novel, In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden. The novel was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2001.

#4934

Kevin Canty

#88804

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Kevin Canty is an American novelist and short story writer. He is a faculty member in the English department at the University of Montana at Missoula, where he currently resides. Canty received his master's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1990. He received his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arizona in 1993.

#4935

Albert Spaulding Cook

#105282

Overall Influence

1925 - 1998 (73 years)

Albert Spaulding Cook was a noted American literary critic, poet, classical scholar, teacher and translator. He taught Classics, English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Western Reserve, the University at Buffalo and Brown University, as well as at various universities abroad.

#4936

Elizabeth Sewell

#94822

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Elizabeth Sewell was a British-American critic, poet, novelist, and professor who often wrote about the connections between science and literature. Among her published works were five books of criticism, four novels, three books of poetry, and many short stories, essays, and other work in periodicals in North America and Europe. Of her books, the most widely held by libraries is The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History.

#4937

Deborah Brevoort

#66194

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Deborah Brevoort is an American playwright, librettist and lyricist best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie. She teaches Creative Writing at several universities. Early years Brevoort was born in Columbus, Ohio to Virginia and Gordon Brevoort. She is the oldest of three children. She graduated from Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, NJ. She attended Kent State University where she received a BA in English and Political Science, and an MA in Political Science.

#4938

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

#139592

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jeanne Marie Beaumont is an American poet, author of four poetry collections, most recently, "Letters from Limbo" ,Burning of the Three Fires , Curious Conduct , and "Placebo Effects" . Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Court Green, Harper’s, Harvard Review, Manhattan Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Witness, and World Literature Today, and she has had poems featured on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. In 2006, San Francisco film-maker Jay Rosenblatt, made a film based on her poem "Afraid So" as narrated by Garrison Keillor.

#4939

Felicity Riddy

#111557

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Felicity Riddy is an academic, author and specialist in late-medieval English and Scottish literature. Educated at Auckland University College/the University of Auckland , New Zealand and the University of Oxford , Riddy taught at Ahmadu Bello University and the University of Stirling .

#4940

Judith Vollmer

#107452

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Judith Vollmer is an American poet and editor. She teaches privately, and in The Drew University MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation; and is Emerita Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh/Greensburg.

#4941

Victor Miller

#109402

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Victor Brooke Miller is an American writer for film and television. He is best known for his screenplay of the original Friday the 13th film, the popularity of which spawned a long series of sequels. Miller was not involved with any of the sequels, though he remains credited for creating the characters of Jason Voorhees, his mother Pamela, and the heroine Alice Hardy.

#4942

Diego Catalán

#71558

Overall Influence

1928 - 2008 (80 years)

Diego Catalán y Menéndez-Pidal was a Spanish philologist. He died of heart disease on 9 April 2008, at the age of 79. Biography Diego Catalán y Menéndez-Pidal was the son of Miguel Catalán Sañudo and Jimena Menéndez-Pidal, and therefore the grandson of philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and María Goyri de Menéndez Pidal.

#4943

Kevin Higgins

#69669

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Kevin Higgins was an Irish poet. Early life and education At the age of 15 he joined Galway West Labour Party, and became a member of the local Labour Youth section. Activity Higgins lived in London in the late 1980s where he was active in the "anti-poll tax movement". He lived in Galway from the mid-1990s, and with his wife, Susan Millar DuMars, co-organised the Over The Edge literary events in Galway City. He also facilitated poetry workshops at the Galway Arts Centre; taught creative writing at the Galway Technical Institute and National University of Ireland, Galway, and was Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital.

#4944

Katie Trumpener

#101360

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Katie Trumpener is the Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University. She won a Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, and Berlin Prize. Life She received a B.A. in English from the University of Alberta in 1982, an A.M. in English and American literature from Harvard University in 1983, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University in 1990. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale in 2002, Trumpener taught at the University of Chicago from 1990. At Yale, Trumpener has served as acting director of the Whitney Humanities Center and the director of graduate studies in comparative literature.

#4945

Shahbaz Malik

#73951

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Shahbaz Malik SI PP is a Pakistani writer, Radio Pakistan broadcaster, Punjab University Oriental College professor, bibliographer and research scholar. He has written 40 books on literature and the Punjabi language. The government of Pakistan awarded him the Pride of Performance award in 2003 and 2018, and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 2016.

#4946

Camille Martin

#100942

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Camille Martin is a Canadian poet and collage artist. After residing in New Orleans for fourteen years, in 2005 she moved to Toronto following Hurricane Katrina. Biography Early life and education Camille Martin was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1956 and spent most of her childhood in Lafayette, Louisiana. In 1980 she earned a Master of Music in Piano Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music. In 1996 she received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of New Orleans. Her thesis, a collection of poems entitled at peril, passed with distinction. In 2003 she received a PhD in English from Louisiana State University.

#4947

Rimgaila Salys

#100480

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Rimgaila "Rima" Salys is Professor Emerita of Russian Program at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert in 20th century Russian literature, film, and culture. Her research interests include Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, 20th century Russian art and culture, theory and praxis of literary modernism, and Soviet cinematic musical.

#4948

Iván Thays

#121186

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Iván Thays is a Peruvian author, professor and television host. Life Thays was born on October 21, 1968, in Lima. He studied languages and literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. After his study he continued as a professor at the same university.

#4949

Kim Haengsook

#126995

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Kim Haengsook is a South Korean poet. Life Kim Haengsook was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1970. She studied Korean language education at Korea University, where she also earned her master's and doctoral degree in Korean literature. She made her literary debut in 1999 when the journal Hyundae Munhak published “Ppul” and a few other poems. She is primarily associated with the Korean Futurism school of poetry, which emerged in the 2000s when young poets began writing experimental works that broke with the lyrical tradition of South Korea. Kim published her first poetry collection Sachungi in ...

#4950

Jon Loomis

#91592

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Jon Loomis is an American poet and writer. He is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Vanitas Motel , his first book of poetry, won the 1997 annual FIELD prize in poetry. He is also the author of the Frank Coffin mysteries set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, High Season and Mating Season , both published by St. Martin's Minotaur. The third book in the series, Fire Season, was released on July 17, 2012.

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