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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Sociology,

#151

Julie Bindel

#3560

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Julie Bindel is an English radical feminist writer. She is also co-founder of the law reform group Justice for Women, which has aimed to help women who have been prosecuted for assaulting or killing violent male partners.

#152

Amita Baviskar

#40715

Overall Influence

Amita Baviskar is a sociologist and Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University, India. Previously, she was Professor at the Sociology Unit, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India. She received the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research and, in 2010, was awarded the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences – Sociology in recognition of her analysis of social and environmental movements in modern India. Baviskar studies the cultural politics of environment and...

#153

France Winddance Twine

France Winddance Twine

#16551

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism. She has published 11 books and more than 100 articles, review essays, and books on these topics.

#154

Marie Cornwall

#71468

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Marie Cornwall is the editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, a professor of sociology and women's studies at Brigham Young University and a former director of BYU's Women's Research Institute.

#155

Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici

#4758

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.

#156

Janet Finch

#16484

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Dame Janet Valerie Finch DBE, DL, FAcSS is a British sociologist and academic administrator. She was Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Social Relations at Keele University, and has held a number of other public appointments in the UK. She currently holds an honorary position at the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, based in the School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester. She is also part of Flooved advisory board.

#157

Kathryn Edin

#24433

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Kathryn J. Edin, is an American sociologist and a professor of sociology and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She specializes in the study of people living on welfare. Two of her books are Making ends meet: how single mothers survive welfare and low-wage work, and Promises I can keep: why poor women put motherhood before marriage.

#158

Jasbir Puar

#51098

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jasbir K. Puar is an American professor at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability . Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times . She has written on South Asian diasporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian ter...

#159

Barbara Engelking

Barbara Engelking

#24282

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

#160

Karen Barkey

#36885

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Karen Barkey is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the Othering & Belonging Institute and a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley. She is also the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion at UC Berkeley. She was previously a professor of sociology and history at Columbia University. She was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean studies at IMéRA for 2021–2022.

#161

Tibisay Lucena

#14181

Overall Influence

1959 - 2023 (64 years)

Tibisay Lucena Ramírez was a Venezuelan politician, president of the National Electoral Council between 2006 and 2020, one of the five branches of government of Venezuela. Since 2017, Lucena was sanctioned by several countries for her role in undermining democracy and human rights in the country.

#162

Elina Haavio-Mannila

#20894

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Elina Haavio-Mannila is a Finnish social scientist and Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Helsinki where she served as the Docent of Sociology , Assistant Professor , and Professor . She is known for researching gender roles and gender in Finnish life. Much of the research in the latter field was done together with Osmo Kontula. In 1958, she became the first woman in Finland to earn the Doctor in Social Sciences degree.

#163

Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom

#13607

Overall Influence

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, and professor. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is also an opinion columnist at The New York Times.

#164

Barbara Evelyn Bailey

#54254

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Barbara Evelyn Bailey OJ is an educator, writer and gender studies scholar from Kingston, Jamaica. In addition to her education work, she has represented Jamaica at numerous conferences and assemblies regarding women's rights. In 2008 she was elected by the state parties as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

#165

Karla Jay

#20247

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Karla Jay is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, where she taught English and directed the women's and gender studies program between 1974 and 2009. A pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies, she is widely published.

#166

Elżbieta Hałas

#60830

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Elżbieta Hałas is a Polish sociologist and a professor at the University of Warsaw. She specializes in the sociology of culture. She is the director of the Cultural Department in the University of Warsaw's Institute of Sociology. Previously she lectured at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, where she received her doctorate in 1986.

#167

Cecilia L. Ridgeway

#44681

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Cecilia L. Ridgeway is an American sociologist and the Lucie Stern Professor of Social Sciences, Emerita in the Sociology Department at Stanford University. She is known for her research on gender and status processes, specifically on how large, societal-level gender and status inequalities are recreated in face-to-face interaction. Ridgeway served as president of the American Sociological Association in 2013. She also edited Social Psychology Quarterly from 2001 to 2003.

#168

Kim Voss

#57585

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Kim Voss is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley whose main field of research is social movements and the American labor movement. Education and career Voss received her bachelor's degree from Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1974.

#169

Elizabeth Povinelli

#20291

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1991. She is the author of books and essays of critical theory as well as a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture.

#170

June Jordan

#10479

Overall Influence

1936 - 2002 (66 years)

June Millicent Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.

#171

Leonore Davidoff

#28770

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Leonore Davidoff was a feminist historian and sociologist who pioneered new approaches to women's history and gender relations, including through her analysis of the gendered division of roles in public and private spheres. She helped create the Feminist Library in London in 1975. She was also the founding editor of the academic journal Gender & History. For much of her academic career, Davidoff was based at the University of Essex in the UK, and was a Professor Emerita when she died.

#172

Saskia Wieringa

Saskia Wieringa

#54559

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Saskia Eleonora Wieringa is a Dutch sociologist. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Same-Sex Relations Crossculturally at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. The area of study was established by the Foundation for Lesbian and Gay Studies and sponsored by Hivos. From 1 April 2005 to 19 April 2012, she served as the director of Aletta, Institute for Women's History in Amsterdam.

#173

Dominique Schnapper

Dominique Schnapper

#34478

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Dominique Schnapper was a member of the Constitutional Council of France from 2001 to 2010. She is also a scholar and professor of sociology. Her sociological studies have been largely historical and have ranged from inquiries into minorities and labour to others on citizenship and nations. She has been named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

#174

Ann Morning

#7644

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race.

#175

Renate Mayntz

#35113

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Renate Mayntz is a German sociologist. She was director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and is now director emerita. Biography Mayntz studied in the United States, and in 1957 received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin. She taught at the Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer and the University of Cologne before founding, in 1984, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. In 1999, she won the Schader Award, Germany's highest accolade for a social scientist, and in 2004 she was awarded the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis.

#176

Ruth Levitas

#55716

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ruth Levitas is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. She is well known internationally for her research on utopia and utopian studies. Her book, The Concept of Utopia , addresses the notion of the ideal society throughout European history. Her follow-on book, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society , makes the case that 'utopia should be understood as a method rather than a goal.' She has formulated a program of sociology which is fundamentally utopian-focused in conventional sociological discourse.

#177

Ann Shola Orloff

#29463

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ann Shola Orloff is an American sociologist, specializing in Comparative-Historical Sociology, Gender and Social Inequalities, Sociological Theory and Political Sociology. She is a Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair at Northwestern University. She is also editor of Social Politics, published by Oxford University Press, which she co-founded with Barbara Hobson in 1994.

#178

M. Jacqui Alexander

#64805

Overall Influence

M. Jacqui Alexander is a writer, teacher, and activist. She is both a Professor Emeritus at the Women and Gender Studies Department of the University of Toronto as well as the creator and director of the Tobago Centre "for the study and practice of indigenous spirituality". Jacqui Alexander is an enthusiast of "the ancient African spiritual systems of Orisa/Ifá, and a student of yoga and Vipassana meditation". She has received teachings on this meditative practice in Nigeria, the Kôngo, India, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and New York. The themes of her work have captured a range of social jus...

#179

Iryna Bekeshkina

#45544

Overall Influence

1952 - 2020 (68 years)

Iryna Bekeshkina was a Ukrainian sociologist. She was the head of the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation from 2010 until 2020. She specialized in the study of Ukrainian society and politics. She was also a frequent media commentator and policy advocate.

#180

Uta Gerhardt

#43947

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Uta Gerhardt is a German sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Heidelberg. She studied sociology, philosophy and history at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1969, she obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz. The focus of her work is on medical sociology, structural-functionalist role theory, and general sociological theory. She also wrote a major biography of Talcott Parsons.

#181

Shalini Randeria

#14341

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Shalini Randeria is an American-born Indian anthropologist. Education She was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, and brought up in Mumbai and New Delhi, Randeria is an alumna of the University of Delhi, the University of Oxford and Heidelberg University, and earned her PhD at the Free University of Berlin.

#182

Tina Campt

#53704

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Campt previously held faculty positions as Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities at Brown University, Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women's Studies at Barnard College, Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Campt is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, Image Matters: Archive...

#183

Brígida García Guzmán

#65025

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Brígida García Guzmán was a sociologist and demographer. She was born in Moca in the Dominican Republic in 1947. In 1969, she moved to Mexico to pursue studies in demographics at The College of Mexico. She later obtained her doctorate in Sociology at the School of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She became a Mexican citizen in 1991.

#184

Park Yu-ha

#30137

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Park Yu-ha is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts, Sejong University. Her research focuses on Japanese–Korean relations. Her 2013 book Comfort Women of the Empire criticized the Korean interpretation of comfort women as exclusively "sex slaves".

#185

Lynette Spillman

#46847

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Lynette Patrice Spillman is a sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and a Faculty Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, as well as the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. She is particularly known for the application of cultural sociology to the sub-fields of political sociology and economic sociology.

#186

Lisa Taraki

#47428

Overall Influence

Lisa Taraki is an Afghan-born Palestinian journalist, teacher and sociologist. She is an associate professor of sociology at Birzeit University in the West Bank and former Dean of its graduate students. She is the co-founder of the university's Institute of Women's Studies and founding Director of the doctoral program in social sciences. Taraki is also the co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel , a campaign that spearheaded the BDS movement and advocates for academic and cultural boycotts of Israel until it stops what they see as violations of the Palestinians' human rights.

#187

Patricia H. Thornton

#32484

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Patricia H. Thornton is an American organizational theorist, and Grand Challenge Initiative Professor of Sociology and Entrepreneurship at Texas A&M University as well as Adjunct Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She is known for her work on "the sociology of entrepreneurship" and "the Institutional Logics Perspective."

#188

Renata Salecl

#6622

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of emotions and law. Every year she lectures at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law , on Psychoanalysis and Law, and she has also been teaching courses on neuroscience and law. Since 2012 she has been visiting professor at the Department of Social Science, Heath and Medicine at King's College London.

#189

Catherine Delcroix

#67454

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Catherine Delcroix is a French sociologist whose work employs methods drawn from sociology and biographical tools. Her major sociological works concern poverty, inequality and homelessness. She is a professor of sociology in the French Strasbourg University and a fellow of the “UMR Printemps”, a French research institute specializing in sociological and biographical studies.

#190

Chris Weedon

#32578

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Chris Weedon is a British academic, and Professor Emerita at Cardiff University. Life She graduated from Southampton University and took her doctorate at the University of Birmingham. After her Phd she went into teaching whilst living in the UK and Germany. She joined Cardiff University in 1984.

#191

Mary Susan McIntosh

Mary Susan McIntosh

#28554

Overall Influence

1936 - 2013 (77 years)

Mary Susan McIntosh was a British sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the United Kingdom. Early life and education Mary Susan McIntosh was born on 13 March 1936 in Hampstead, North London, to Helena Agnes Britton and her husband Albert William McIntosh, a Jedburgh-born businessman and graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who went on to become the first Professor of Marketing at the London Business School. Both parents were socialists, members of the 1917 Club and later the Communist Party. Her elder brother, Andrew Robert McIntosh, was a...

#192

Linda Aiken

#53360

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Linda H. Aiken, is an American nurse and researcher who is currently the Director for the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research and a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. She also is the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing Science and a professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

#193

Penny M. Kris-Etherton

#90025

Overall Influence

Penny Margaret Kris-Etherton is an American dietitian. She is the Evan Pugh University Professor of Nutritional Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at Pennsylvania State University. Early life and education Kris-Etherton completed her Bachelor of Science degree at Rochester Institute of Technology before enrolling at Case Western Reserve University for her Master of Science degree. She concluded her post-secondary education at the University of Minnesota. In 1987, Kris-Etherton was recognized by Case Western as an Outstanding Alumni. In 2017, Kris-Etherton was recognized as a Dis...

#194

Kristin Luker

#38651

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kristin Luker is Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier she was the Doris Stevens Chair of Women's Studies at Princeton University and professor at the University of California, San Diego.

#195

Amber Case

#19023

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Amber Case is an American cyborg anthropologist, user experience designer and public speaker. She studies the interaction between humans and technology. Biography Case was born in about 1986. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology from Lewis & Clark College in 2008, having written a thesis about cell phones. In 2008, she co-founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and computers.

#196

Olive Banks

#44566

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Olive Banks was an English professor at Leicester University who worked upon the sociology of education and the history of feminism. Early life Banks was born in Enfield Highway, Middlesex, the only child of Herbert Alfred Davies and Jessie Louise Tebby. She married Joseph Ambrose Banks in June 1944 and they both entered the London School of Economics to study sociology. Her PhD thesis was turned into her first book, Parity and Prestige in English Secondary Education: a Study in Educational Sociology .

#197

Sherene Razack

#55766

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Sherene Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. As a feminist critical race scholar, her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is best known for her contributions to feminist and critical race studies about discrimination against Muslim and Indigenous women in Canada, systemic racism in the Canadian justice system, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network Racial Violence Hub .

#198

Mary C. Waters

#52430

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Mary C. Waters is an American sociologist and author. She is a professor at Harvard University. Personal Waters grew up in Brooklyn, New York and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is married and has three children.

#199

Elise M. Boulding

Elise M. Boulding

#19952

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Elise M. Boulding was a Norwegian-born American Quaker sociologist, and author credited as a major contributor to creating the academic discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies. Her holistic, multidimensional approach to peace research sets her apart as an important scholar and activist in multiple fields. Her written works span several decades and range from discussion of family as a foundation for peace, to Quaker spirituality to reinventing the international "global culture". Particularly of note is her emphasis on women and family in the peace process. Boulding was inducted into the Colo...

#200

Czarina Saloma

#63121

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Czarina Aya-ay Saloma-Akpedonu is a Filipino sociologist who is the current dean of the School of Social Sciences at Ateneo de Manila University. Education Saloma-Akpedonu has a bachelor's degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman, a master's degree from Peking University in China, and a doctorate from Bielefeld University in Germany.

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