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

#51

Henry Brant

#87914

Overall Influence

1913 - 2008 (95 years)

Henry Dreyfuss Brant was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques. Biography Brant was born in Montreal, to American parents , in 1913. Something of a child prodigy, he began composing at the age of eight, and studied first at the McGill Conservatorium and then in New York City . He played violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion at a professional level and was fluent with the playing techniques for all of the standard orchestral instruments.

#52

Bonnie Costello

#88180

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

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

#53

Julia Randall

#88429

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Julia Randall was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems . Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets” , her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America , the Poets’ Prize for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Institute of Arts & Letters , and a Sewanee Review Fellowship .

#54

Chris Barron

#94345

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Chris Barron is an American singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer of Spin Doctors. Biography Christopher Gross was born February 5, 1968, in Honolulu, where his father was stationed during the Vietnam War. Barron spent his childhood in the Bronx and Rye, New York, and later moved to Australia for over three years when he was eight years old. He went to primary school in Sydney.

#55

Milford Graves

#95461

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Milford Graves was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, Professor Emeritus of Music, researcher/inventor, visual artist/sculptor, gardener/herbalist, and martial artist. Graves was noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the 1960s with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet, and is considered to be a free jazz pioneer, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role. The composer and saxophonist John Zorn referred to Graves as "basically a 20th-century shaman."

#56

Margo Davis

#98104

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Margo Baumgarten Davis is a photographer, educator and author of several photographer's books. Personal life Margo was raised in Connecticut and has lived for over 30 years in Palo Alto, California. She attended Bennington College, spent time at the Sorbonne studying French literature, and graduated from University of California, Berkeley. It was at UC Berkeley where she met her first husband Gregson Davis and traveled frequently to his home country of Antigua. She has a daughter, Anika and a son, Julian.

#57

Larry Atlas

#98924

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Larry Atlas is the author of eight produced plays, and the novel South Eight. He is best known for the award-winning play Yield of the Long Bond, which premiered at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles starring Ian McShane and Byron Jennings. He directed the second production of this play at NY Stage and Film with Jennings, David Strathairn, and Kyra Sedgwick. Also noteworthy is Total Abandon, which was produced on Broadway starring Richard Dreyfuss and John Heard.

#58

Aileen Passloff

#100939

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Aileen Passloff was an American dancer and teacher who lived and worked in New York City. From 1949 to 1953, she studied at Bennington College. She attended the School of American Ballet, where she met James Waring, and participated in his workshops and dance company. From 1958 to 1968, Passloff ran the Aileen Passloff Dance Company in New York City. She was a member of the experimental dance collective Judson Dance Theater and part of their retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She was a professor of dance at Bard College for 40 years. Passloff stars in Marta Renzi's film Her Magnum Opu...

#59

Tara Ison

#104677

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Tara Ison is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She is the author of three novels: Rockaway , The List , and A Child out of Alcatraz , which was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned To Live, Love & Die at the Movies, was published by Soft Skull Press in January 2015, and was the winner of the 2015 PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her short story collection, Ball, was published by Soft Skull Press in Fall 2015. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2020 in support of ...

#60

Morton Klass

#108627

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Morton Klass was an American anthropologist known for his studies of caste and kinship in India, as well as his work on religion and culture among the Bhojpuri-speaking Indo-Caribbean population. Klass completed his doctoral degree at Columbia University, where he later taught anthropology for many years. He conducted extensive fieldwork in both India and the Caribbean, beginning with Trinidad from 1957 to 1958. From 1962 to 1963, he began Indian studies at Columbia University under the direction of Conrad M. Arensberg in West Bengal. With a sponsorship from the Social Science Research Counci...

#61

Marianna Pineda

#108633

Overall Influence

1925 - 1996 (71 years)

Marianna Pineda was an American sculptor, who worked in a stylized realist tradition. The female figure was typically her subject matter, often in a striking or expressive pose. Major work included an eight-foot bronze statue of the Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani, for a site between the Hawaii State Capitol and Iolani Palace, which she used as the subject matter of Search for the Queen, a 1996 documentary she produced on the life of her subject and the sculpture-making process. Other significant work includes the figure of a seated woman in The Accusative, for a site in the Honolulu, Hawaii off...

#62

Joseph S. Iseman

#110276

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Joseph S. Iseman was an attorney and educator known for his work with National Television, Children's Television Workshop, also known as Sesame Workshop, and Bennington College , as well as the American University of Paris, where he served for a time as the vice chair. As a lawyer at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Iseman notably managed the estates of composer Cole Porter, writer Vladimir Nabokov, writer Jean Stafford, poet Robert Lowell, writer A. J. Liebling, artist Robert Motherwell, writer and historian Theodore H. White, Saturday Review and its editor Norman Cousins, and playwright Arthur Miller.

#63

David Lazar

#110856

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

David Lazar is an American writer and editor, primarily known as an essayist. Born in Brooklyn, NY, he has been involved in the development of "creative nonfiction" in the United States, creating graduate programs, writing theoretically about the essay, and mentoring and publishing many subsequent writers of note.

#64

Betsy Jolas

#111861

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Elizabeth Jolas is a Franco-American composer. Biography Jolas was born in Paris in 1926. Her mother, the American translator Maria McDonald, was a singer. Her father, the poet and journalist Eugene Jolas, founded and edited the magazine transition, which published over ten years most of the great names of the interwar period.

#65

Cynthia Macdonald

Cynthia Macdonald

#113068

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Cynthia Lee Macdonald was an American poet, educator, and psychoanalyst. Life Macdonald was born in Manhattan to screenwriter Leonard Macdonald and his wife Dorothy Kiam Macdonald. She earned a B.A. in English from Bennington College in 1950 and pursued studies in voice at the Mannes School of Music in 1951-1952. She pursued a career in opera and concert singing from 1953-1966. After changing her focus to poetry, Macdonald received a master's degree in writing and literature from Sarah Lawrence College.

#66

Judith Chafee

#116970

Overall Influence

1932 - 1998 (66 years)

Judith Chafee nee Davidson Bloom was an American architect known for her work on residential buildings in Arizona and for being a professor of architecture at the University of Arizona. She was a recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome during the middle of her career and was the first woman from Arizona to be named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

#67

Martha Rockwell

Martha Rockwell

#125151

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Martha Rockwell is a retired American cross-country skier and coach, who competed at the Winter Olympic Games in 1972 and 1976. She has been cited in the U.S. as a "pioneer" and a "legend" in women's cross-country skiing, having been the U.S. women's cross-country ski champion 18 times between 1969 and 1975 as part of the first U.S. national cross-country ski team for women.

#68

David Moss

#132907

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

David Moss is an American composer, percussionist and self-taught vocalist, founder of the David Moss Dense Band; co-founder and artistic director of the Institute for Living Voice, Antwerp. His performances are noted for their innovative style, multimedia approach and improvisation. Moss has lived in Berlin, Germany since 1991, when he received a fellowship from the prestigious Berlin Artist Program of the DAAD.

#69

Eugenia Kim

#143585

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Eugenia Kim is a Korean American writer and novelist who lives in Washington, DC. She is most known for her novel, The Calligrapher's Daughter, which was critically acclaimed and won multiple awards, including a 2009 Borders Original Voices Award for Fiction. Kim teaches at Fairfield University's MFA Creative Writing program.

#70

Jill Hoffman

#152303

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jill Hoffman is an American poet, and editor. She graduated from Bennington College with a B.A., from Columbia University with an M. A., and from Cornell University with a Ph.D. She taught at Bard College, Brooklyn College, Columbia University, and The New School.

#71

John Bell Young

#155929

Overall Influence

1953 - 2017 (64 years)

John Bell Young was an American concert pianist, music critic and author, best known for his performances and recordings of the music of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Early years, education and training Young spent his childhood on the north shore of Long Island. His mother was a librarian, and his father, of Cherokee descent, was an amateur pianist and inventor. As a child, his first piano teachers were Miriam Freundlich, whose brother-in-law Irwin was chair of the piano division at Juilliard, and later Kyriena Siloti, the daughter of Russian pianist Alexander Siloti.

#72

Michael Klein

#162440

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Michael Klein is an American Lambda literary award-winning fiction writer, poet, and faculty member of the English department at Goddard College and The Frost Place Conference on Poetry. Life Klein was born in Washington, DC and attended Bennington College as an undergraduate, later receiving his MFA from Vermont College. He resides in New York City, where he has lived since the age of two. Klein attended PS 41 in the West Village, and New Lincoln School on the Upper West Side for Junior High School, and finished at New York City's Music and Art High School where he studied voice.

#73

Nick Carbó

#162604

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Nick Carbó is a Filipino-American writer from Legazpi, Albay, Philippines. Carbó writes poetry, essays, and edits magazines and anthologies. He is primarily known for his book of poetry titled Secret Asian Man Tia Chucha Press which won the Asian American Writers Workshop's Readers Choice Award. He also won the 2005 Calatagan Award from the Philippine American Writers & Artists for his book Andalusian Dawn Cherry Grove Collections. His most noted award is the 1999 Gregory Millard/New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

#74

Helen Mirra

#171050

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Hendl Helen Mirra is an American conceptual artist. "[Like Henry David Thoreau, she is a] maximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice. She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist and pragmatist philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking. She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity, and a free activity, and an always-available activity, and an equipment-free activity, and an active activity." In an essay on Mirra's work, Yukio Lippit described her engagement thus: "Mirra’s practice champions walking as a specific form of thinking that bypasses language.

#75

Caleen Sinnette Jennings

#174068

Overall Influence

Caleen Sinnette Jennings is an American actor, director, and playwright. She is a professor of performing arts at American University College of Arts and Sciences. Jennings is the author of the plays "Queens Girl in the World" and "Queens Girl in Africa."

#76

Leonard Hokanson

#175143

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

Leonard Hokanson was an American pianist who achieved prominence in Europe as a soloist and chamber musician. Early life and education Born in Vinalhaven, Maine, he attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and Bennington College in Vermont, where he received a master of arts degree with a major in music. He made his concert debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of eighteen. He was drafted into the U.S. Army after graduate school, and in December 1955, he was a private performing in the 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Later, he was posted to Augs...

#77

Kathryn Posin

#178212

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Kathryn Posin is an American choreographer known for her musical and sculptural fusing of ballet and modern dance genres. In addition to choreographing, she has also taught technique and composition at several American universities. Her most recent season with The Kathryn Posin Dance Company commissioned by 92nd Street Y in February 2016 received an award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and an Arts Works Grant from the NEA in 2017.

#78

J. R. Mitchell

#183853

Overall Influence

1937 - 2004 (67 years)

James Roland "J. R." Mitchell was an American jazz drummer and educator who sought to promote awareness of the African American music experience. In the early 1980s, jazz journalist and Washington Post music critic W. Royal Stokes wrote, "J. R. Mitchell is the renaissance man of jazz."

#79

Lisa Sokolov

#184362

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Lisa Sokolov is a jazz singer known for her improvisational style and wide vocal range. Early life and education Sokolov was born in Manhasset, New York in 1954 to Bernard and Helen Sokolov and was raised in nearby Roslyn. She was exposed to jazz from a young age through her father, who played stride piano and listened to Art Tatum, Mabel Mercer, and Stan Getz. She began singing from a young age and for many years studied piano.

#80

Elana Herzog

#185459

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design , Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museu...

#81

Robert McBride

#185972

Overall Influence

1911 - 2007 (96 years)

Robert McBride was an American composer and instrumentalist. Life McBride was born in Tucson, Arizona, and learned from an early age to play clarinet, oboe, saxophone and the piano. He studied composition with Otto Luening at the University of Arizona, receiving a Bachelor of Music degree in 1933, and a Master of Music in 1935. From 1935 until 1946 he taught at Bennington College, where he met and married his wife, Carol. He then moved to New York City, where he worked briefly as a commercial composer and arranger, at first for Triumph Films, producing scores for Farewell to Yesterday , The Man with My Face , Garden of Eden , and a number of short subjects.

#82

Jules Rosskam

#190896

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Jules Rosskam is an American filmmaker, artist, and educator. His films, which include transparent , against a trans narrative , Thick Relations , and Paternal Rites , have helped shape the discussion around transgender narratives in 21st century film. Rosskam is also a noted fine artist, lecturer, and professor. He is currently assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

#83

Richard Deacon

1921 - 1984 (63 years)

Richard Lewis Deacon was an American television and motion picture actor, best known for playing supporting roles in television shows such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave It To Beaver, and The Jack Benny Program, along with minor roles in films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds .

#84

Robert Devore Leigh

Robert Devore Leigh

1890 - 1961 (71 years)

Robert Devore Leigh was an American educator, political scientist, and leader in the field of library science. He was the founding president of Bennington College, and served there from 1928-1941. He made the college a center of progressive education, designing a curriculum with no rigid requirements, intensive instruction, off-campus study, and an emphasis on the arts. He attracted a faculty that included distinguished writers, artists, and dancers.

#85

Wallingford Riegger

1885 - 1961 (76 years)

Wallingford Constantine Riegger was an American modernist composer and pianist, best known for his orchestral and modern dance music. He was born in Albany, Georgia, but spent most of his career in New York City, helping elevate the status of other American composers such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. Riegger is noted for being one of the first American composers to use a form of serialism and the twelve-tone technique.

#86

Karl Polanyi

1886 - 1964 (78 years)

Karl Paul Polanyi , was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.

#87

Hanya Holm

1893 - 1992 (99 years)

Hanya Holm is known as one of the "Big Four" founders of American modern dance. She was a dancer, choreographer, and above all, a dance educator. Early life, connection with Mary Wigman Born as Johanna Eckert on 3 March 1893 in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, German Empire. Holm was drawn to music and drama at an early age, she attended the Dalcroze Institute of Applied Rhythm in Frankfurt, studying under Emile Jaques-Dalcroze throughout her childhood and young adult life.

#88

Edward J. Bloustein

Edward J. Bloustein

1925 - 1989 (64 years)

Edward Jerome Bloustein was the 17th President of Rutgers University serving from 1971 to 1989. Biography He was born in New York City, and he graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1942. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University in 1948 and subsequently traveled to the University of Oxford as a Fulbright scholar and received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1950. Returning to the United States, he taught philosophy briefly at Brooklyn College and spent close to a year in Washington, DC with the O...

#89

Joseph Welles Henderson

1890 - 1957 (67 years)

Joseph Welles Henderson , born in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, was acting president of Bucknell University from 1953 to 1954. Education Henderson received his A.B. and master's degrees from Bucknell, and his law degree from Harvard Law School .

#90

George A. Lundberg

George A. Lundberg

1895 - 1966 (71 years)

George Andrew Lundberg was an American sociologist. Background Lundberg was born in Fairdale, North Dakota. His parents, Andrew J. Lundberg and Britta C. Erickson, were immigrants from Sweden. Lundberg received his bachelor's degree from the University of North Dakota in 1920, a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1922, and a doctorate in 1925 from the University of Minnesota, where he studied under and F. Stuart Chapin.

#91

Esther Ballou

1915 - 1973 (58 years)

Esther Williamson Ballou was an American music educator, organist and composer. She was born in Elmira, New York, began organ lessons at age 13, and began composing in her twenties. She studied at Bennington College, Mills College and The Juilliard School of Music in 1943.

#92

Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud

1914 - 1986 (72 years)

Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer , about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

#93

Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz

1913 - 1966 (53 years)

Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer. Early life Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. He had a younger brother, Kenneth. In 1930, Schwartz's father suddenly died at the age of 49. Though Harry had accumulated a good deal of wealth from his dealings in the real estate business, Delmore inherited only a small amount of that money as the result of the shady dealings of the executor of Harry's estate. Accordi...

#94

Kenneth Burke

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."

#95

Robert Gaudino

1925 - 1974 (49 years)

Robert Lee Gaudino was an American political scientist and educational theorist who worked as a professor of political science at Williams College from 1955 until his death 1974, also serving as the Peace Corps training director at Williams.

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