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).
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List of the most influential female people in Sociology,
#101
Beverley Skeggs
#24059
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Beverley Skeggs is a British sociologist, noted as one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the world. Currently, she works as a "Distinguished Professor" in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, developing a Center for Social Inequalities in the North West of England. She continues to run the "Economics of Care" theme at the International Inequalities centre at the London School of Economics and is a visiting professor at Goldsmiths University. She has been the head of two of the UK's leading Sociology Departments, at the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, as well as co-director of Lancaster's Women's Studies.
Go to Profile#102
Ullica Segerstråle
#29684
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ullica Christina Olofsdotter Segerstråle is a Finnish sociologist and historian of science who is professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Segerstråle’s published nonfiction books include Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond and Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W. D. Hamilton , the latter of which is the first biography of evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton.
Go to Profile#103
Mireia Vehí
#32566
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Mireia Vehí i Cantenys is a Spanish sociologist and politician from Catalonia, who currently serves as Member of the Congress of Deputies of Spain. She was previously a member of the Parliament of Catalonia.
Go to Profile#104
Gayatri Reddy
#25822
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Gayatri Reddy is an Indian anthropologist who has also made contributions to queer and gender studies. Reddy received her PhD in Anthropology in 2000 from Emory University after M.A in Anthropology from Columbia University and B.A. in Psychology from Delhi University. She is currently an associate professor in Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Reddy has carried out fieldwork on a community of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh in India. Her current research is on male queer identity among South Asian immigrants to the US.
Go to Profile#105
Marge Frantz
#49396
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Marge Frantz was an American activist and among the first generation of academics who taught women's study courses in United States. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, from a young age she became involved in progressive causes. She worked as a labor organizer, agitated for civil rights, and participated in the women's poll tax repeal movement. After working as a union organizer for the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in 1944, she was employed full time at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Nashville, as a secretary and as the editor of the organization's press organ, Southern Patriot.
Go to Profile#106
Suad Joseph
#32256
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Suad Joseph received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1975. Dr. Joseph is Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis and in 2009 was President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her research addresses issues of gender; families, children, and youth; sociology of the family; and selfhood, citizenship, and the state in the Middle East, with a focus on her native Lebanon. Her earlier work focused on the politicization of religion in Lebanon. Joseph is the founder of the Middle East Research Group in...
Go to Profile#107
Gadis Arivia
#20868
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gadis Arivia is an Indonesian feminist philosopher, lecturer, scholar, and activist. While teaching feminism and philosophy at the University of Indonesia, Arivia founded , Indonesia's first feminist journal, in 1996. She was arrested by the Suharto government for protesting against the regime in 1998.
Go to Profile#108
Beverly J. Silver
#34013
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Beverly J. Silver is an American scholar of labor and development whose work has been translated into over twelve languages. She is a professor of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Go to Profile#109
Tricia Rose
#18839
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tricia Rose is an American sociologist and author who pioneered scholarship on hip hop. Her studies mainly probe the intersectionality of pop music and gender. Now at Brown University, she is a professor of Africana Studies and is the director of the Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Rose also co-hosts a podcast, The Tight Rope, with Cornel West.
Go to Profile#110
Raka Ray
#46538
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Raka Ray is an American sociologist and academic. She is a full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies. She became the Dean of Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley in January 2020. Ray's research interests include gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, emerging middle classes, South Asia, inequality, qualitative research methods, and social movements. Her current project explores changes in the meanings and relations of servitude in India. Ray is also an editor of the publication Feminist Studies.
Go to Profile#111
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
#24623
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender , a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in Augu...
Go to Profile#112
Catherine Hakim
#26698
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Catherine Hakim is a British sociologist who specialises in women's employment and women's issues. She is known for developing the preference theory, for her work on erotic capital and more recently for a sex-deficit theory. She is currently a professorial research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Civil Society , and has formerly worked in British central government and been a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Policy Studies. She has also been a visiting professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin.
Go to Profile#113
Susan Leigh Star
#20950
Overall Influence
1954 - 2010 (56 years)
Susan Leigh Star was an American sociologist. She specialized in the study of information in modern society; information worlds; information infrastructure; classification and standardization; sociology of science; sociology of work; and the history of science, medicine, technology, and communication/information systems. She commonly used the qualitative methods methodology and feminist theory approach. She was also known for developing the concept of boundary objects and for contributions to computer-supported cooperative work.
Go to Profile#114
Hildegard Maria Nickel
#67813
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hildegard Maria Nickel is a German sociologist and feminist who has specialized in the sociology of work and gender studies. From 1977, she was attached to the East-German Academy of Pedagogical Sciences becoming a full professor at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt University, Berlin, from 1992 until her retirement in 2014. In 1994, she received the Helge Pross Prize from the University of Siegen for her contributions to family and gender studies. From 2002 to 2008, Nickel was State Secretary for Economy, Labour and Women at the Senate of Berlin.
Go to Profile#115
Monique de Saint-Martin
#34688
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Monique de Saint-Martin is a sociologist born in France. Introduction She is the director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales , Monique de Saint-Martinis is known for her work with Pierre Bourdieu. The focus of her research is on the sociology of elites, the sociology of the Grandes écoles and the sociology of employers. Prior to her position at the EHESS, she was involved with the Laboratory Council of the Center for the Study of Social Movements from 2005 to 2008.
Go to Profile#116
Georgiann Davis
#8936
Overall Influence
Georgiann Davis is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico and author of the book Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis. Davis formerly held similar positions at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Born with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, she writes widely on intersex issues and the sociology of diagnosis.
Go to Profile#117
Hanna Herzog
#48138
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Hanna Herzog is a professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and a senior research fellow and the academic director of the Civil Society forums at Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#118
Patricia Bell-Scott
#31357
Overall Influence
Patricia Bell-Scott is an American scholar of women's studies and black feminism. She is currently a professor emerita of women's studies and human development and family science at the University of Georgia. As an author, she has been widely collected by libraries worldwide.
Go to Profile#119
Rose Laub Coser
#19819
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Rose Laub Coser was a German-American sociologist, educator, and social justice activist. She taught sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1968 until her retirement in 1987. She was interested in the effect of social structures on individuals, and much her work fell within medical sociology, role theory, and sociology of the family.
Go to Profile#120
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
#44315
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim , is a German sociologist. She holds a professorship at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. After studying sociology, psychology, and philosophy in Munich, she obtained her PhD in 1973. After several fellowships, she graduated from Munich University in 1987.
Go to Profile#121
Linda Woodhead
#11782
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British sociologist of religion and scholar of religious studies at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".
Go to Profile#122
Helene Raskin White
#48946
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Helene Raskin White is an American sociologist. She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University. White's areas of specialization include alcohol and drug studies, delinquency and crime, violence, longitudinal and survey methodology, and prevention and evaluation research. White has also been involved in the development, implementation and evaluation of numerous alcohol and drug prevention programs.
Go to Profile#123
Mimi Thi Nguyen
#47327
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Mimi Thi Nguyen is a Vietnamese-born American scholar, punk and zine author. Biography Born in 1974 in Ho Chi Minh City to Hiep and Lien Nguyen, Nguyen earned a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies and a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Her master's degree was in American Studies from New York University. She grew up in Minnesota and relocated to San Diego, California, where she was drawn to the D.I.Y. punk scene.
Go to Profile#124
Frigga Haug
#20110
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Frigga Haug is a German socialist-feminist sociologist and philosopher. Life Frigga Langenberger was born in Mülheim. She studied sociology and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. In 1963, she interrupted her studies to move to Cologne and give birth to a daughter. In 1965 she married a second time to the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug. She graduated in sociology in 1971, and gained a PhD in sociology and social psychology in 1976.
Go to Profile#125
Grace Davie
#41117
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Grace Riestra Claire Davie is a British sociologist who serves as professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Exeter. She is the author of the book Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing Without Belonging.
Go to Profile#126
Eiko Ikegami
#55630
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eiko Ikegami is a Japanese academic, author and the Walter A. Eberstadt Professor of Sociology and History at the New School of Social Research in New York. In 2006, she won the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in Cultural Sociology and the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award in Political Sociology both from the American Sociological Association.
Go to Profile#127
Jean Fox O'Barr
#42108
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean Fox O'Barr is an American feminist teacher, scholar, and administrator whose pioneering work helped establish women’s studies as a program of academic study and support for women in higher education.
Go to Profile#128
Julia Adams
#43019
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Julia Potter Adams is an American sociologist who works in the area of comparative and historical sociology. Julia Adams is a professor of Sociology. She conducts research in the areas of state building, gender and family, social theory and knowledge, early modern European politics, and Colonialism and empire. Her current research focuses on the historical sociology of agency relations and modernity, gender, race, and the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and on other digital platforms. Adams is Professor of Sociology and International & Area Studies and Head of Grace Hopper College, Yale.
Go to Profile#129
Sylvia Schmelkes
#18683
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sylvia Schmelkes is a Mexican sociologist and education researcher, and current director of the Mexican National Institute of Educational Evaluation. She is best known for her work in intercultural education, and her book 'Toward better quality of our schools'. Schmelkes has also written over 100 academic texts and essays. She is a former General Coordinator of Intercultural and Bilingual Education at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico, and is currently heading the Research Institute for the Development of Education at the Iberoamerican University.
Go to Profile#130
Lucie Cheng
#37667
Overall Influence
1939 - 2010 (71 years)
Lucie Cheng was a sociologist known for her work in Asian American studies, as well as being the first permanent director of the Asian American Studies Center, UCLA. She was also one of the first American academics to forge links with mainland Chinese academic institutions after the formalisation of Sino-US relations.
Go to Profile#131
Dora Barrancos
#27398
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Dora Beatriz Barrancos is an Argentine researcher, sociologist, historian, feminist, and politician. She was part of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council board of directors until May 2019, when she resigned in protest over a budget reduction that severely affected the institution.
Go to Profile#132
Nancy Ammerman
#36399
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Tatom Ammerman is an American professor of sociology of religion at Boston University School of Theology. Life In 1984, Ammerman joined the faculty of Emory University. Her book, Baptist Battles, won the 1992 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 1995, Ammerman left Emory University to teach at Hartford Seminary. Since 2003, she has been at Boston University. In 2020 she became an honorary doctor at Uppsala University.
Go to Profile#133
Toril Moi
#1601
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Moi is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. As an undergraduate, she attended University of Bergen, where she studied in the Literature Department. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. She lived in Oxford, United Kingdom from 1979 to 1989. Moi lives in North Carolina. She wor...
Go to Profile#134
Patricia A. Adler
#50339
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Patricia A. Adler is an American educator and sociologist who is currently a professor emerita at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Education Patricia A. Adler earned an A.B. in Sociology in 1973 from the Washington University in St. Louis. Adler continued her studies at the University of Chicago where she received a M.A. in Social Science in 1974. Additionally, Adler received a M.A. in Sociology in 1975, and a Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of California, San Diego.
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Sarah Thornton
#16244
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sarah L. Thornton is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture. Thornton has authored three books and many articles about artists, the art market, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves, cultural hierarchies, subcultures, and ethnographic research methods.
Go to Profile#136
Maxine Molyneux
#44017
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Maxine Deirdre Molyneux is a British sociologist whose work focuses on the women's movement. That women's interests and gender interests are different categories is the discovery for which Maxine Molyneux is most frequently cited. Her focus is women's movements, and her central question is how they and the state influence each other. Interests and law are the categories under which she examines the changeable and shapeable relationship of the gender order and the state. She wants to bring back the state and the political subject into the thinking on modernisation, democratisation and develop...
Go to Profile#137
Évelyne Sullerot
#38118
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Évelyne Sullerot was a French feminist. She was the author of many feminist books. Early life Évelyne Sullerot was born on 10 October 1924 in Montrouge, France. She was raised in a Protestant family. She was the daughter of André Hammel and Georgette Roustain. Her father, a doctor, made one of the first psychiatric clinics in France. He was Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. Her mother died of hunger and cold at Valence station in 1943. Both, very religiously committed to Protestantism socially and politically, were given the posthumous title of Righteous among the nations, for having saved eleven Jews during the German occupation.
Go to Profile#138
Tamar El Or
#33558
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Tamar El-Or is an Israeli sociologist and author holding the Sarah Allen Shaine chair of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University. Research El-Or's Ph.D. dissertation was a study of ultra-Orthodox women in Israel that was published as a book, Educated and Ignorant, in both Hebrew and English. Therein, El-Or discusses the possibility of educating for ignorance, or teaching certain groups to expect and respect intellectual restrictions. This research in gender and religion debated feminist questions of choice, empowerment, and resistance via the life of Orthodox women.
Go to Profile#139
Bernice A. Pescosolido
#41002
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bernice A. Pescosolido is an American sociologist, currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research at Indiana University, and also a published author. From 1998 to 2006, she was also the Chancellor's Professor of Indiana University. She has also served as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association and its Chair of Sociology of Mental Health and Medical Sociology.
Go to Profile#140
Shoshana Zuboff
#1340
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Shoshana Zuboff is an American author, professor, social psychologist, philosopher, and scholar. Zuboff is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates core themes of her research: the Digital Revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human...
Go to Profile#141
Kathleen Barry
#20014
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kathleen Barry is an American sociologist and feminist. After researching and publishing books on international human sex trafficking, she cofounded the United Nations NGO, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women . In 1985 she received the Wonder Woman Foundation Award for her strides towards the empowerment of women. She has taught at Brandeis University and Penn State University.
Go to Profile#142
Cynthia Enloe
#6681
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.
Go to Profile#143
Eve Ensler
#1614
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
V, formerly Eve Ensler , is an American playwright, author, performer, feminist, and activist. V is best known for her play The Vagina Monologues. In 2006 Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called The Vagina Monologues "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."
Go to Profile#144
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy
#33812
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy was one of the founding feminists of the field of women's studies and is a lesbian historian whose book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of the Lesbian Community documents the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York, in the decades before Stonewall.
Go to Profile#145
Mallika Sengupta
#34199
Overall Influence
1960 - 2011 (51 years)
Mallika Sengupta was a Bengali poet, feminist, and reader of Sociology from Kolkata, known for her "unapologetically political poetry". Biography Mallika Sengupta was the head of the Department of Sociology in Maharani Kasiswari College, an undergraduate college affiliated with the University of Calcutta in Kolkata. She was much better known for her literary activity. The author of more than 20 books including 14 volumes of poetry and two novels, she was widely translated and was a frequent invitee at international literary festivals.
Go to Profile#146
Joan Busfield
#27100
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joan Busfield , is a British sociologist and psychologist, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and former President of the British Sociological Association . Her research focuses on psychiatry and mental disorder.
Go to Profile#147
Juliette Rennes
#14603
Overall Influence
Juliette Rennes is a French sociologist. Since 2021, she has been the director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences . She is also the director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements . Rennes' research topics are related to the history and sociology of gender, work, and discrimination.
Go to Profile#148
Helena Flam
#51323
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Helena Flam is a Polish-born sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, known for her work on social organization, emotions and social movements. Life and work After leaving Poland for Sweden in 1969, Flam studied sociology at Lund University, where she obtained a Filosofie kandidat degree in 1977. She then obtained an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of Sociology in 1977, 1978 and 1982, respectively. Returning to Sweden, she did research at the Scandinavian Institutes of Administrative Research and SIFO as well as Uppsala University .
Go to Profile#149
Janet Abu-Lughod
#22316
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod was an American sociologist who made major contributions to world-systems theory and urban sociology. Early life Raised in Newark, New Jersey, United States, she attended Weequahic High School, where she was influenced by the works of Lewis Mumford about urbanization.
Go to Profile#150
Jadwiga Staniszkis
#34617
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jadwiga Staniszkis is a Polish sociologist and political scientist, essayist, a former professor at the University of Warsaw and the Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu , a Polish campus of National-Louis University.
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