The Most Influential People Across History
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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Sociology,
#51
Lucy Suchman
#5303
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.
Go to Profile#52
Kathleen M. Blee
#28111
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kathleen Marie Blee is an American sociologist. She is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest include gender, race and racism, social movements, and sociology of space and place. Special interests include how gender influences racist movements, including work on women in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
Go to Profile#53
Donatella della Porta
#9235
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Donatella della Porta is an Italian sociologist and political scientist, who is Professor of political science and political sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. She is known for her research in the areas of social movements, corruption, political violence, police and policies of public order. In 2022, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#54
Nina Lykke
#17268
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Nina Lykke is a Danish–Swedish gender studies scholar. She is noted for her work on feminist theory, and is distinguished professor of gender studies at Linköping University in Sweden. Biography Nina Lykke was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. She received a mag.art. degree in literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1981 and a dr.phil. in gender studies at Odense University, Denmark in 1992. From 1984 until 1999 she was director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, the first of its kind in Denmark, at the University of Southern Denmark. She was an assistant professor from 1981 and was promoted to associate professor in 1986.
Go to Profile#55
Sharon Zukin
#13008
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sharon L. Zukin is an American professor of sociology who specializes in modern urban life. She is a professor emerita at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has been a fellow of the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center and chair of the sections on community and urban sociology and consumers and consumption of the American Sociological Association Consumers and Consumption Section, as well as a visiting professor at Tongji University , the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Western Sydney.
Go to Profile#56
Madeleine Akrich
#16134
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Madeleine Akrich is a French sociologist of technology. She served as the director of the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech from 2003 to 2013. She is known for developing actor–network theory with Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and others.
Go to Profile#57
Judith Lorber
#14553
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Judith Lorber is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.
Go to Profile#58
Freda Adler
#8213
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Freda Adler is a criminologist and educator, currently serving as professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was President of the American Society of Criminology in 1994-1995. She has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975, holding various roles within United Nations organizations. A prolific writer, Adler has published in a variety of criminological areas, including female criminality, international issues in crime, piracy, drug abuse, and social control theories.
Go to Profile#59
M. Lynne Markus
#14350
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
M. Lynne Markus is an American Information systems researcher, and John W. Poduska, Sr. Chair of Information and Process Management, Bentley University, who has made fundamental contributions to the study of enterprise systems and inter-enterprise systems, IT and organizational change, and knowledge management.
Go to Profile#60
Judy Wajcman
#7704
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Judy Wajcman, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute. She is also a visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Prior to joining the LSE in 2009, she was a Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#61
Renée Fox
#14899
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Renée Claire Fox was an American sociologist. She was a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1949, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she studied in the Department of Social Relations. Renée Fox’s major teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics – involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe , in Central Africa , and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges, universities...
Go to Profile#62
Elizabeth S. Anderson
#3004
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Secor Anderson is an American philosopher. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.
Go to Profile#63
Coretta Scott King
#145
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
Go to Profile#64
Vron Ware
#23371
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Vron Ware is a British academic and visiting professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously a Professor at Kingston University, editor of Searchlight magazine from 1981 to 1983, and worked as a freelance journalist until 1987, when she co-founded the Women's Design Service. She taught cultural geography at the University of Greenwich from 1992 to 1999, sociology and gender studies at Yale University from 1999 to 2005, and was senior research fellow at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the Open University from 2008...
Go to Profile#65
Lauren Berlant
#7123
Overall Influence
1957 - 2021 (64 years)
Lauren Gail Berlant was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
Go to Profile#66
Mirra Komarovsky
#21905
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Mirra Komarovsky , was an American pioneer in the sociology of gender. Early years Born to Mendel and Anna Komarovsky in a privileged Jewish family in the Russian Empire, her family fled the country after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Komarovsky's parents were Zionists and landowning Jews in Akkerman, Russia, until tsarist police drove them from their home. They moved initially to Baku and then to Wichita, Kansas after the Bolshevik Revolution, when Mirra was 16. In Baku, Komarovsky lived a solidly middle-class lifestyle; she was homeschooled by private tutors and learned Russian, English, H...
Go to Profile#67
Leopoldina Fortunati
#24291
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leopoldina Fortunati is an Italian feminist, theorist, and author. Her influences include Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri, and Karl Marx. Work She is the author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital , a feminist critique of Marx.
Go to Profile#68
Gabriele Rosenthal
#20793
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gabriele Rosenthal is a German sociologist and head of Department for Qualitative Methods of the Center for Methods in Social Sciences of the University of Göttingen, Germany. Rosenthal is recognized for the introduction of the method of biographical case reconstruction using biographical narrative interviews . She is known for systemizing the influences of the Gestalt theory , the sociology of knowledge , and the sociology of figurations and processes to explain the interrelationship between experience, memory and narrative, as well as how social figurations intertwine with individual biog...
Go to Profile#69
Pamela E. Oliver
#21143
Overall Influence
Pamela E. Oliver is an American sociologist most well-known for her contributions to theories of social action and her studies of racial injustice in the legal system. She is a Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Go to Profile#70
Marta Harnecker
#8318
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Marta Harnecker was a Chilean journalist, author, psychologist, sociologist, and Marxist intellectual. She studied the analysis of labor movements and acted as an advisor to the government of Cuba, and worked with left-wing political movements within Latin America. She was active in the government of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973, and provided advice to Hugo Chávez between 2004 and 2011.
Go to Profile#71
Claudia von Werlhof
#37562
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Claudia von Werlhof is a German sociologist and political scientist. She held the first professorship for women's studies in Austria, based at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Innsbruck.
Go to Profile#72
Meera Kosambi
#36610
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Meera Kosambi was an Indian sociologist. Biography She was the younger daughter of the illustrious intellectual, historian, linguist, statistician and mathematician, D.D. Kosambi, and granddaughter of Acharya Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, a Buddhist scholar and a Pāli language expert. Her mother's name was Nalini Kosambi . She received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Stockholm. She is the author of several books and articles on urban sociology and women's studies in India.
Go to Profile#73
Flora Botton
#33118
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Flora Botton Beja is a Mexican sinologist and gender studies scholar. She was born in Greece, but acquired Spanish nationality through her parents and naturalized as Mexican after her arrival in Mexico in 1949. She was a co-founder of the gender studies and a pioneer of Oriental studies programs at El Colegio de México. She was one of the first academics to focus on China in Mexico and Latin America. Her works have widely been influential in the region and she was one of the founders of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios de Asia y África .
Go to Profile#74
Antonina Kłoskowska
#29255
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Antonina Kłoskowska , was a Polish sociologist. In her work, she focused on the sociology of culture. Kłoskowska taught at the universities Łódź and Warsaw . She was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 1973 and worked in its Institute for Political Studies since 1990. Since 1983, she edited the journal Kultura i Społeczeństwo. From 1989 until 1993, she was the president of the Polish Sociological Association. With Władysław Markiewicz and others, Kłoskowska co-edited a multi-volume Polish complete edition of Bronisław Malinowski's works which appeared 1984-1990.
Go to Profile#75
Carol Smart
#13243
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Carol Christine Smart is a feminist sociologist and academic at the University of Manchester. She has also conducted research about divorce and children of divorced couples. Smart is an important figure within the feminist criminology world. Her book titled Women, Crime and Criminology, written in 1976, remains a key feminist critique of criminology. Smart was also the co-director of the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life at Manchester.
Go to Profile#76
Amina Mama
#18171
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Amina Mama is a Nigerian-British writer, feminist and academic. Her main areas of focus have been post-colonial, militarist and gender issues. She has lived in Africa, Europe, and North America, and worked to build relationships between feminist intellectuals across the globe.
Go to Profile#77
Brittney Cooper
#38602
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Brittney Cooper is a tenured professor of Women and Gender Studies, author, professor, activist, and cultural critic. Her areas of research and work include black women organizations, black women intellectuals, and hip-hop feminism. In 2013 and 2014, she was named to the Root.com's Root 100, an annual list of top Black influencers.
Go to Profile#78
Ann Mische
#42655
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
#79
Myra Marx Ferree
#28615
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Myra Marx Ferree is a former professor of sociology and director of the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was also a member of the Women's Studies Program. In 2005 she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and in 2004 the Maria-Jahoda Visiting professor at the Ruhr University Bochum. Ferree retired in 2018.
Go to Profile#80
Tia DeNora
#36252
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology of Music and Director of Research, in the Department of Sociology/Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Biography DeNora's undergraduate studies were in musicology and sociology. She completed her PhD in Sociology in 1989 at the University of California, San Diego. From then until 1992, she worked at University of Wales, Cardiff, where DeNora was a University of Wales Fellow from 1989-1991. DeNora moved to Exeter in 1992. DeNora was Chair of the European Sociological Association Network on Sociology of the Arts from 1999–2001 and is a Vice President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Sociology of the Arts.
Go to Profile#81
Johanna Brenner
#41992
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Johanna Brenner is an American feminist and sociologist whose writing and thought is in the socialist-feminist vein. A graduate of Reed College and the University of California, Los Angeles , she spent four years as a telephone installation technician worker in the 1970s. In 1981 she began teaching in the sociology department at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she served from 1982 to 2005 as coordinator of its women's studies program. She is now emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#82
Mimi Sheller
#19248
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA. From 2009–2021 she was professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication, and the founding Director of the New Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is widely cited and considered a "key theorist in mobilities studies" and specializes in the post-colonial context of the Caribbean.
Go to Profile#83
Peggy Levitt
#18976
Overall Influence
Peggy Levitt is professor and chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College and an associate at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organization where she co-directs the Transnational Studies Initiative. Peggy writes regularly about globalization, arts and culture, immigration, and religion. Her latest book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation on Display, is published by the University of California Press.
Go to Profile#84
Diane Vaughan
#23321
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#85
Ann Swidler
#27226
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ann Swidler is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist and authored one of the most-cited articles in sociology, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies".
Go to Profile#86
Hilary Rose
#15743
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Hilary Ann Rose is a British sociologist. Biography During World War II, she was evacuated from London with her mother and brother. In 1940, they were sent to Weymouth, Dorset. The same year, the French army was defeated, and many evacuated troops took shelter in Weymouth. Exhausted soldiers slept on the pavements and the luckier ones on straw in the requisitioned schools. The children, with no school to attend, mostly watched the war, fascinated but sometimes terrified. The authorities soon despatched the evacuees to safer places. Eventually, her mother found a home in Framlingham, her family home.
Go to Profile#87
Vandana Shiva
#400
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalization author. Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more than 20 books. She is often referred to as "Gandhi of grain" for her activism associated with the anti-GMO movement.
Go to Profile#88
Margaret Somers
#11078
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Margaret R. Somers is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan She is the recipient of the inaugural Lewis A. Coser Award for Innovation and Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology, Somers's work specializes in historical, political, economic, and cultural sociology and social theory.
Go to Profile#89
Robin DiAngelo
#7113
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robin Jeanne DiAngelo is an American author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to "white fragility", an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book entitled White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
Go to Profile#90
Jennifer Platt
#22915
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jennifer Platt FAcSS is a sociologist who is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex, where she taught from 1964 to 2002. She has been President of the British Sociological Association in 1987–89, and edited its journal Sociology for 1985–87. She was a member of the International Sociological Association’s executive from 1994–2002. Her research interests in the history of sociology have been reflected in her terms as Secretary and President of the ISA’s Research Committee on the History of Sociology, as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on the History of Sociology, In 2002 she became an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Go to Profile#91
Bertice Berry
#41010
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Bertice Berry is an American sociologist, author, lecturer, and educator. Early life and education Berry grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, as one of seven children raised by a single mother. The family was poor and her mother struggled with alcoholism. In a 1994 article, Berry reflected on her upbringing and her mother's abusiveness when she was "in one of her frightening stages of drunkenness." Berry ultimately forgave her mother, writing that "her drinking was a way to mask her own pain. I think of the burden she endured as a black woman with few resources for herself or her children."
Go to Profile#92
Veronica Beechey
#33213
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Veronica Beechey was a British feminist sociologist and patient's rights advocate. Early life and education Beechey was born in Hastings and grew up in Battle, Sussex. She attended Ashford School for Girls and Hastings College. She studied sociology at Essex University, achieving a first in her degree, before going to Oxford to complete a doctorate.
Go to Profile#93
Chela Sandoval
#17416
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Chela Sandoval , associate professor of Chicana Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, is a noted theorist of postcolonial feminism and third world feminism. Beginning with her 1991 pioneering essay 'U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World', Sandoval emerged as a significant voice for women of color and decolonial feminism.
Go to Profile#94
Min Zhou
#13733
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Min Zhou 周敏 is a Chinese-born American sociologist. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Zhou completed a bachelor's degree in English at Sun Yat-sen University in 1982, and became a lecturer at her alma mater until 1984, when she began graduate study. She enrolled at the State University of New York at Albany, earning a master of arts and doctorate in sociology in 1985 and 1989, respectively. Zhou started her teaching career as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in 1990, then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1994, where she was promoted to associate and later full professor.
Go to Profile#95
Helga Nowotny
#11441
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Helga Nowotny is Professor emeritus of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich. She has held numerous leadership roles on Academic boards and public policy councils, and she has authored many publications in the social studies of science and technology.
Go to Profile#96
Filomina Clarice Steady
#43488
Overall Influence
Filomena Clarice Steady is a US-based Sierra Leonean author and academic who specializes in the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Early life and education Steady was born in Sierra Leone, studied in the US and England, and currently lives in the US.
Go to Profile#97
Juliet Schor
#12395
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. From 2010 to 2017, she studied the sharing economy under a large research project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She is currently working on a project titled "The Algorithmic Workplace" with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#98
Marisa Matias
#26839
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Marisa Isabel dos Santos Matias is a Portuguese sociologist and Member of the European Parliament, elected for the first time in 2009 and re-elected in 2014. She currently sits on the Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industry, Research and Energy Committees. She is also Chairwoman of the Delegation of the European Parliament for relations with the Mashreq countries . Between 2010 and 2016 she was Vice-President of the Party of the European Left.
Go to Profile#99
Lisa Jean Moore
#40880
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Lisa Jean Moore is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the State University of New York, Purchase College. She was born in New York State, received a BA from Tufts University, a Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from the University of California, San Francisco. After receiving her doctoral degree in 1995, Moore was a fellow in the National Institutes of Mental Health, Traineeship in AIDS Prevention Sciences at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, the largest research center in the world dedicated to social, behavioral and policy science approaches to HIV.
Go to Profile#100
Ariel Salleh
#3140
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ariel Salleh is an Australian sociologist who writes on humanity-nature relations, political ecology, social change movements, and ecofeminism. Background Salleh is a Founding Member of the Global University for Sustainability, Hong Kong; Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa; formerly Honorary Associate Professor in Political Economy, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia; and Senior Fellow in Post-Growth Societies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She taught in Social Ecology at the University o...
Go to Profile