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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#1

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey

#8151

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

#2

Annie Dillard

#12388

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

#3

Mary K. Gaillard

#15072

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Mary Katharine Gaillard is an American theoretical physicist. Her focus is on particle physics. She is a professor of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, and visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was Berkeley's first tenured female physicist.

#4

Henry S. Taylor

#17161

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Henry Splawn Taylor is an American poet, academic, and translator. The author of more than 15 books of poems, translation, and nonfiction, he is the recipient of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Early life and education Taylor was born in Lincoln, Virginia, in rural Loudoun County, where he was raised as a Quaker. He went to high school at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Virginia in 1965 and a Master of Arts from Hollins University in 1966.

#5

Ann Compton

#17641

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ann Compton is an American former news reporter and White House correspondent for ABC News Radio. Career highlights Ann Compton graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1965. She began her broadcasting career in Virginia, where an internship during her junior year at Hollins College led to a full-time job as the first woman reporting for WDBJ TV, a CBS affiliate in Roanoke. She established a State Capitol Bureau in Richmond for the station. In 1973, ABC News hired her and she reported from New York City until December 1974, when she was assigned to the White House.

#6

Lee Smith

#28994

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Lee Smith is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.

#7

R. H. W. Dillard

#37045

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Richard Henry Wilde Dillard was an American poet, author, critic, and translator. Life and career Richard Henry Wilde Dillard was born in Roanoke, Virginia, Dillard was best known as a poet. He is also highly regarded as a writer of fiction and critical essays, as well as one of the screenwriters for the cult classic Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Roanoke College and went on to receive of a Master of Arts and the Ph. D. from the University of Virginia. While at the University of Virginia he was both a Woodrow Wilson and a DuPont Fellow. He...

#8

Gay Hendricks

#39937

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, writer, and teacher in the field of personal growth, relationships, and body intelligence. He is best known for his work in relationship enhancement and in the development of conscious breathing exercises. After receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1974, Hendricks began teaching at the University of Colorado. He spent 21 years at the University of Colorado and became a full professor in the Counseling Psychology Department while founding The Hendricks Institute. He conducts workshops with his wife of nearly 40 years, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks.

#9

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

#44404

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is an American writer of children's literature whose work includes Kids on Strike! and Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow. She was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but eventually the family ended up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. She graduated from the University of Scranton in 1982.

#10

Balli Kaur Jaswal

#47245

Overall Influence

Balli Kaur Jaswal is a Singaporean novelist, having family roots in Punjab. Her first novel Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2014, and was adapted for a film presented at the 2017 Singapore International Festival of the Arts. Her second novel Sugarbread was a finalist for the 2015 inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Her third novel, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was released in 2017, and garnered her a wider international following, driven in part by being picked as a selection for Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine online book club. Movie rights for Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows have been sold to Scott Free Productions and Film4.

#11

James Dodson

#54114

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

James Dodson is an American sports writer. He is currently a Writer-in-Residence for The Pilot newspaper, an editor of PineStraw magazine in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and an editor of the arts and culture magazine of the Carolina Sandhills. He also serves as Founding Editor of O. Henry Magazine, the arts and culture sister publication in Greensboro, North Carolina, Dodson's hometown, and Salt Magazine in Wilmington, North Carolina.

#12

George Garrett

#57175

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

George Palmer Garrett was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.

#13

Amanda Cockrell

#59011

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Amanda Cockrell is a professor of English at Hollins University, specializing in children's literature and creative writing. She is the author of a number of historical novels for adults, some written under her own name and some under the pseudonym Damion Hunter. She has written novels about the Romans and about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her first young adult novel, What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay, was published in 2011 and was named one of the best children's books of the year by The Boston Globe.

#14

Lyda Hill

#62885

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Lyda Hill is an American investor and philanthropist. Early life Hill was born on September 17, 1942, in Dallas, Texas. Her father was Albert Galatyn Hill Sr. and her mother, Margaret Hunt Hill . Her maternal grandfather was H.L. Hunt .

#15

Karen Bender

#64514

Overall Influence

Karen E. Bender is an American novelist and short story writer. Biography Karen E. Bender is the author of the short story collection Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in fiction for 2015, and on the shortlist for the 2015 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People; Like Normal People was a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Both her collections Refund and The New Order were Longlisted for The Story Prize.

#16

Donna Richardson

Donna Richardson

#65455

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Donna Richardson Joyner is an American fitness and aerobics instructor, author and ESPN television sports commentator. Widely known for her series of fitness videos, she was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to serve on the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. She also produces and hosts Donna Richardson: Mind, Body, & Spirit, which airs on TV One, and Sweating In The Spirit, which airs on The Word Network.

#17

Herta Freitag

#68907

Overall Influence

1908 - 2000 (92 years)

Herta Freitag was an Austrian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Hollins College, known for her work on the Fibonacci numbers. Life She was born as Herta Taussig in Vienna, earning a master's degree from the University of Vienna in 1934. She took a teaching position at the university. However, her father had publicly opposed the Nazis. Herta and her parents decided to move to a summer cottage in the mountains outside Vienna, to give themselves some time to make plans for the future. Herta's brother, Walter Taussig, a musician, was touring the United States and decided to remain in the U.S.

#18

Christine Schutt

#73576

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Christine Schutt, an American novelist and short story writer, has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She received her BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and her MFA from Columbia University. She is also a senior editor at NOON, the literary annual published by Diane Williams.

#19

Candice F. Ransom

#75701

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Candice F. Ransom is a popular children's and young-adult author. She has written over 150 books as of June 2020, including 18 books for The Boxcar Children series, The Time Spies series and the Sunfire series. She wrote the Dungeons & Dragons novel, Key to the Griffon's Lair . Her work includes picture books, easy readers, middle grade fiction, biographies, and nonfiction. More than 45 of her titles have been translated into 12 languages.

#20

Cathryn Hankla

#77196

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Cathryn Hankla is an American poet, novelist, essayist and author of short stories. She is professor emerita of English and Creative Writing at Hollins University in Hollins, Virginia, and served as inaugural director of Hollins' Jackson Center for Creative Writing from 2008 to 2012.

#21

Kenneth Massey

#77969

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Kenneth Massey is an American sports statistician known for his development of a methodology for ranking and rating sports teams in a variety of sports. His ratings have been a part of the Bowl Championship Series since the 1999 season. He is an assistant professor of mathematics at Carson–Newman University in Tennessee.

#22

Adrian Blevins

#78201

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Adrian Blevins is an American poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize . Her other full-length poetry collections are Status Pending , Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha . With Karen McElmurray, Blevins co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia , a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests.

#23

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.

#24

Donna Polseno

#94157

Overall Influence

Donna Polseno is a contemporary American visual artist known for pottery, ceramics, and sculpture. Background Donna Polseno earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute and her Master of Arts in Teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives and works in Floyd, Virginia and teaches ceramics at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Polseno is a founding member of the 16 Hands Studio Tour and director of the Women Working with Clay Symposium.

#25

Caren Diefenderfer

#112758

Overall Influence

1952 - 2017 (65 years)

Caren Lea Diefenderfer was an American mathematician known for her efforts to promote numeracy. Education and career Diefenderfer was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She started her undergraduate education at Smith College, but transferred to Dartmouth College among the first women to be admitted as undergraduates to Dartmouth. She graduated with summa cum laude honors in mathematics from Dartmouth in 1973. She went on to graduate study at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her 1980 dissertation, Approximation of Functions of Several Variables concerned function approximation for m...

#26

Louis D. Rubin Jr.

#115996

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was a noted American literary scholar and critic, writing teacher, publisher, and writer. He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing company nationally recognized for fiction by Southern writers. He died in Pittsboro, North Carolina and is buried at the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Cemetery in Charl...

#27

Brendan Galvin

#117668

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Brendan James Galvin is an American poet. His book, Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965–2005, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. Life During forty years of college teaching, he served as Wyndham Robertson Visiting Writer in Residence in the MA program at Hollins University, Coal Royalty Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Whichard chair in the Humanities at East Carolina University.

#28

Frank Joseph McGuigan

#133909

Overall Influence

1924 - 1998 (74 years)

Frank Joseph McGuigan was an American psychologist. His research spanned multiple areas, including cybernetics, electrophysiology, and psychophysiology.

#29

Sandra Doller

#168290

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Sandra Doller is an American poet and writer. Life She attended Amherst College, University of Washington, and University of Chicago. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the two year Iowa Arts Fellowship.

#30

Hillary Homzie

#172257

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Hillary Homzie is a lecturer, playwright and author from Charlottesville, Virginia. Early life Homzie was born Denver and raised in Virginia, United States of America. She is the daughter of the late M.J. Homzie.

#31

A. Katherine Grieb

#175551

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Anne Katherine "Kathy" Grieb is an American biblical scholar and Episcopal priest. She has taught New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary since 1994, and is currently Meade Professor in Biblical Interpretation. She previously taught at Bangor Theological Seminary in Maine.

#32

Mary Curtis Verna

#182699

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Mary Virginia Curtis Verna was an American operatic soprano, particularly associated with the Italian repertory. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, she studied at Abbot Academy and Hollins College, and later in Italy with Ettore Verna, whom she married.

#33

Alice Rumph

1878 - 1978 (100 years)

Alice Edith Rumph was a painter of watercolors and pastels, an etcher, and an art teacher. Rumph co-founded the Birmingham Art Club, which established the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama. She served as the club's founding vice president and later as its president. In 2004, Birmingham Historical Society published Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890-1950. The volume features the artwork of Rumph and seven other prominent artists from the city.

#34

Thomas Louis Hanna

1928 - 1990 (62 years)

Thomas Louis Hanna was a philosophy professor and movement theorist who coined the term somatics in 1976. He called his work Hanna Somatic Education. He proposed that most negative health effects are due to what he called Sensory Motor Amnesia. He claimed that many common age-related ailments are not simply a matter of time but the result of poor movement habits.

#35

Jacques Lusseyran

1924 - 1971 (47 years)

Jacques Lusseyran was a French author and political activist. Blinded at the age of 7, at 17 Lusseyran became a leader in the French resistance against Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1941. He was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp because of his involvement, and was one of 990 of his group of 2000 inmates to survive. He wrote about his life, including his experience during the war, in his autobiography And There Was Light.

#36

John Canaday

1907 - 1985 (78 years)

John Edwin Canaday was a leading American art critic, author and art historian. Early life and education John Canaday was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, to Franklin and Agnes F. Canaday. His family moved to Dallas when Canaday was seven and later moved to San Antonio, where he attended Main Avenue High School.

#37

Martha Louisa Cocke

1855 - 1938 (83 years)

Martha "Matty" Louisa Cocke was an American educator known for being the president of Hollins College, the first woman college president in Virginia. Early life and education Cocke was born in 1855 to Charles Lewis Cocke and Susanna Virginia Pleasants Cocke, one of nine children. Her father was the superintendent of the Hollins Institute which he had founded, and the family lived on the grounds. She graduated from the collegiate department in 1874.

#38

Gladys L. Palmer

1895 - 1967 (72 years)

Gladys Louise Palmer was an American social statistician who "gained worldwide attention for her research on manpower problems and labor mobility" and for her work on the standardization of labor statistics.

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