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

#1

Andrea Dworkin

#838

Overall Influence

1946 - 2005 (59 years)

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.

#2

Michael Pollan

#1370

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael Kevin Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is currently Professor of the Practice of Non-Fiction and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Concurrently, he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where in 2020 he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, in which he leads the public-education program. Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of...

#3

Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis

#2162

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Bret Easton Ellis is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters.

#4

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler

#3385

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades , she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field.

#5

Hildegard Peplau

#4023

Overall Influence

1909 - 1999 (90 years)

Hildegard E. Peplau was an American nurse and the first published nursing theorist since Florence Nightingale. She created the middle-range nursing theory of interpersonal relations, which helped to revolutionize the scholarly work of nurses. As a primary contributor to mental health law reform, she led the way towards humane treatment of patients with behavior and personality disorders.

#6

Anne Waldman

#5400

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.

#7

Sally Mann

#6096

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of her immediate surroundings—her children, husband, rural landscapes, and self-portraits. Early life and education Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann was introduced to photography by her father, who encouraged her interest in photography; his 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today.

#8

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem

#6487

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.

#9

Sheila Miyoshi Jager

Sheila Miyoshi Jager

#6878

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an American historian. She is a Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, author of two books on Korea, co-editor of a third book on Asian nations in the post-Cold War era, and a forthcoming book on great power competition in northeast Asia at the turn of the 19th-20th century. She is a well-known historian of Korea and East Asia.

#10

Donna Tartt

#8923

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist and essayist. Her novels are The Secret History , The Little Friend , and The Goldfinch , which has been adapted into a 2019 film of the same name She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.

#11

Ann Goldstein

#17554

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ann Goldstein is an American editor and translator from the Italian language. She is best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. She was the panel chair for translated fiction at the US National Book Award in 2022. She was awarded the PEN Renato Poggioli prize in 1994 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008.

#12

Alec Wilkinson

#18368

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Alec Wilkinson is an American writer who has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1980. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer he is among the "first rank of" contemporary American "literary journalists... of Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Agee".

#13

Sylvie Weil

#18859

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Sylvie Weil is a French professor and writer. She is known for her novels for children and her writing about her prominent intellectual family, which includes André Weil and Simone Weil. Biography Weil was born in the United States in 1942. Her family moved to Brazil when she was three and then to Chicago when she was five. Much of her education took place in Paris.

#14

Kiran Desai

#18906

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Kiran Desai is an Indiann author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.

#15

Alan Arkin

#21180

Overall Influence

1934 - 2023 (89 years)

Alan Wolf Arkin was an American actor and filmmaker. In a career spanning seven decades, he received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for six Emmy Awards.

#16

Brenda Laurel

#21680

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Brenda Laurel is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic.

#17

Carol Channing

#22579

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Carol Elaine Channing was an American actress, comedian, singer and dancer who starred in Broadway and film musicals. Her characters usually had a fervent expressiveness and an easily identifiable voice, whether singing or for comedic effect.

#18

Michael Brooks

#25575

Overall Influence

1983 - 2020 (37 years)

Michael Jamal Brooks was an American talk show host, writer, political commentator, and comedian. While co-hosting The Majority Report with Sam Seder, he launched The Michael Brooks Show in August 2017 and provided commentary for media outlets, making regular appearances on shows such as The Young Turks. Brooks contributed to various publications, including HuffPost, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, and Jacobin. His book Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right was published by Zero Books in April 2020.

#19

Elizabeth Coleman

#25894

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Elizabeth Coleman was the ninth president of Bennington College from 1987 to 2013. Coleman also served as the founding Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at The New School for Social Research.

#20

Betty Ford

#25988

Overall Influence

1918 - 2011 (93 years)

Elizabeth Anne Ford was the first lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977, as the wife of President Gerald Ford. As first lady, she was active in social policy and set a precedent as a politically active presidential spouse. Ford also was the second lady of the United States from 1973 to 1974 when her husband was vice president.

#21

Amy Gerstler

#26505

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Amy Gerstler is an American poet. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. Biography Amy Gerstler was born in 1956. She is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program.

#22

Joseph S. Murphy

#27820

Overall Influence

1933 - 1998 (65 years)

Joseph Samson Murphy was an American political scientist and university administrator, who was President of Queens College, President of Bennington College, and Chancellor of the City University of New York.

#23

Mary Bunting

#28391

Overall Influence

1910 - 1998 (88 years)

Mary Ingraham Bunting was a bacterial geneticist and an influential American college president; Time profiled her as the magazine's November 3, 1961, cover story. She became Radcliffe College's fifth president in 1960 and was responsible for fully integrating women into Harvard University.

#24

Peter Dinklage

#29060

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Peter Hayden Dinklage is an American actor. He received international recognition for portraying Tyrion Lannister on the HBO television series Game of Thrones , for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series a record four times. He also received a Golden Globe Award in 2011 and a Screen Actors Guild Award in 2020 for the role. Dinklage has a common form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia; he stands tall. He has used his celebrity status to raise social awareness concerning dwarfism.

#25

Mariam Ghani

#31303

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Mariam Ghani is an Afghan-American visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and social activist. Biography Mariam Ghani was born in 1978 in Brooklyn, New York, of Afghan and Lebanese descent. Her father, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, was president of Afghanistan. Her mother, Rula Saade, is a Lebanese citizen. Ghani grew up in exile and was unable to travel to Afghanistan until 2002, at age 24. Her family lived in the suburbs of Maryland. Ghani earned her degrees from New York University and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in comparative literature and video photography and installation art. Ghani was an Eyebeam resident.

#26

Liz Rosenberg

#35245

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lizbeth Meg Rosenberg is an American poet, novelist, children's book author and book reviewer. She is currently a professor of English at Binghamton University, and in previous years has taught at Colgate University, Sarah Lawrence College, Hamilton College, Bennington College, and Hollins College. Her children's book reviews appear monthly in The Boston Globe.

#27

Mary Ruefle

#42826

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce , was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow .

#28

E. Ethelbert Miller

E. Ethelbert Miller

#44351

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Eugene Ethelbert Miller, best known as E. Ethelbert Miller , is an African-American poet, teacher and literary activist, based in Washington, DC. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs, the editor of Poet Lore magazine, and the host of the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin.

#29

Tim Daly

#44485

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

James Timothy Daly is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Joe Hackett on the NBC sitcom Wings and his recurring role as the drug-addicted screenwriter J.T. Dolan on The Sopranos . He starred as Pete Wilder on the ABC medical drama Private Practice from 2007 to 2012. He is also known for his voice role as Clark Kent/Superman in Superman: The Animated Series. From 2014 until 2019, he portrayed Henry McCord, husband of the Secretary of State, on the CBS drama Madam Secretary.

#30

James Tenney

#44788

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

James Tenney was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.

#31

Susan Crile

#48155

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Susan Crile is an American painter and printmaker. Biography Crile was born in 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bennington College, graduating in 1965. In 1972 Crile was interviewed by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art. The same year her image was included the iconic poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

#32

Maren Hassinger

#48169

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our...

#33

Bessie Schonberg

Bessie Schonberg

#48510

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Bessie Schonberg was a highly influential dancer, choreographer and teacher of the 20th century. She was at the center of contemporary modern dance from her beginning at Bennington College up until her death in 1997. Her career spanned sixty-five years and she helped mold a new generation of modern dancers including Lucinda Childs, Elizabeth Keen, Meredith Monk and Carolyn Adams .

#34

Megan Marshall

#48562

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Megan Marshall is an American scholar, writer, and biographer. Her first biography The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism earned her a place as a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

#35

Ben Belitt

#53233

Overall Influence

1911 - 2003 (92 years)

Ben Belitt was an American poet and translator. Besides writing poetry, he also translated several books of poetry by Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca from Spanish to English. Life Belitt was born in New York City. He was educated at the University of Virginia, receiving a B.A. in 1932 and an M.A. in 1934, and he was a doctoral student at that university from 1934 to 1936. By the early 1940s, he had taken up an appointment at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, where he remained, living in a former firehouse in North Bennington, for the rest of his life. A bachelor, he became a g...

#36

Justin Theroux

#55007

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Justin Paul Theroux is an American actor and filmmaker. He gained recognition for his work with director David Lynch in the mystery film Mulholland Drive and the horror film Inland Empire . He also appeared in films such as Romy and Michele's High School Reunion , American Psycho , Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle , Strangers with Candy , Miami Vice , Wanderlust , The Girl on the Train , The Spy Who Dumped Me , On the Basis of Sex the voice of Dropkick in Bumblebee , and Lady and the Tramp .

#37

Glen Van Brummelen

Glen Van Brummelen

#55377

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Glen Robert Van Brummelen is a Canadian historian of mathematics specializing in historical applications of mathematics to astronomy. He is president of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics, and was a co-editor of Mathematics and the Historian's Craft: The Kenneth O. May Lectures .

#38

Jasmin Darznik

#55734

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, a novel inspired by the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran's notorious woman poet, and The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, which became a New York Times bestseller. A New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Song of a Captive Bird was praised by The New York Times as a "complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity und...

#39

Tanya Grae

#58867

Overall Influence

Tanya Grae is an American poet and essayist, whose debut collection Undoll was awarded the Julie Suk Award and a Florida Book Award and was a National Poetry Series finalist. Her poems and essays have been widely published in literary journals, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and The Massachusetts Review. Grae was born in Sumter, South Carolina, while her father was stationed at Shaw AFB. She grew up traveling the United States as her father relocated for the military every few years and often writes about those early experiences. Her family is from Nashville, Tennessee and is of Irish, Dutch, and Cherokee descent.

#40

Holland Taylor

#60096

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Holland Virginia Taylor is an American actress. She won the 1999 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Judge Roberta Kittleson on ABC's The Practice and she received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her portrayal of Evelyn Harper on the CBS comedy Two and a Half Men .

#41

Wendy Perron

#61347

Overall Influence

Wendy Perron is an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher who was the editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine from 2004 to 2013. She is the author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer, Selected Writings, published by Wesleyan University Press in November 2013.

#42

Jo Ellis-Monaghan

#62020

Overall Influence

Joanna Anthony Ellis-Monaghan is an American mathematician and mathematics educator whose research interests include graph polynomials and topological graph theory. She is a professor of mathematics at the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics of the University of Amsterdam.

#43

Michael O'Keefe

#62706

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael O'Keefe; born Raymond Peter O'Keefe, Jr.; April 24, 1955 Early life, family and education Raymond Peter O'Keefe Jr. was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the oldest of seven children in an Irish American family. He is the son of Stephanie and Raymond Peter O'Keefe, who was a law professor at Fordham University and who also taught at St. Thomas University. O'Keefe was raised in Larchmont, New York.

#44

Jaime Clarke

#63818

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Jaime Clarke is an American novelist and editor. He is a founding editor of the literary journal Post Road and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston. Early life and education Clarke was born in Kalispell, Montana, but grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. Out of high school, Clarke worked as a runner for financier Charles Keating.

#45

Susan Wheeler

#64072

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. She has also taught at University of Iowa, NYU, Rutgers, Columbia University and The New School.

#46

Ronald L. Cohen

#68680

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ronald L. Cohen was a social psychologist whose research was focused on justice. He was born in 1945 and died in 2020. He was a faculty member at Bennington College and the co-author or editor of several books and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, including:Equity and Justice in Social Behavior, 1982Justice: Views from the Social Sciences , 1986Political Attitudes over the Life Span: The Bennington Women After Fifty Years , 1992In addition to his work as a researcher and teacher, Cohen served as a dean at Bennington College, as a co-founder of the Bennington Community Justice Center, a...

#47

Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson

#70521

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Roxana Robinson is an American novelist and biographer whose fiction explores the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines. She is best known for her 2008 novel, Cost, which was named one of the Five Best Novels of the Year by The Washington Post. She is also the author of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, and has written widely on American art and issues pertaining to ecology and the environment.

#48

Lynn Emanuel

#71134

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lynn Collins Emanuel is an American poet. Some of her poetry collections are Then, Suddenly— and Noose and Hook . She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Eric Matthieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also won the 1992 National Poetry Series Open Competition for The Dig, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and journals including Parnassus, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Slate and Ploughshares, and in anthologies including The Best...

#49

Emily Mason

#72374

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Emily Mason was an American abstract painter and printmaker. Mason developed her individual approach to the Abstract Expressionist and color field painting traditions with her veils of color and spontaneous gestural mark. Mason was born and raised in New York City, where she lived and worked until her death.

#50

Bill Dixon

#83007

Overall Influence

1925 - 2010 (85 years)

William Robert Dixon was an American composer and educator. Dixon was one of the seminal figures in free jazz and late twentieth-century contemporary music. His was also a prominent activist for artist's rights and African American music tradition. He played the trumpet, flugelhorn, and piano, often using electronic delay and reverb.

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