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,
#201
Carol Cohn
#10333
Overall Influence
Carol Cohn is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Cohn is recognised for addressing issues of gender in global politics, particularly conflict and security issues. She has published in academic and policy contexts with major research interests lying in the realm of gender and armed conflict, the gendered discourses of US national security elites and gender mainstreaming in international security institutions. In addition to her research, Cohn facilitates training and workshops ...
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Wendy Griswold
#53936
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Wendy Griswold is an American sociologist, professor of sociology and the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, prior to that she was the Arthur E. Andersen Research and Teaching Professor, also at Northwestern University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and well-known for her contributions to the sociology of culture and the sociology of literature. She is the author of nine books, among them, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria won the "Best Book" award from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association in 2002 and the academi...
Go to Profile#203
Sabine Hark
#43048
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Sabine Hark is a German feminist and sociologist, and sits on the editorial board of the journal Feministische Studien . Education She studied sociology and political science at Mainz and Frankfurt am Main. She received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1995.
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Anne Fausto-Sterling
#28946
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Anne Fausto-Sterling is an American sexologist who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality. She is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University.
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Cecilia Menjívar
#35734
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Cecilia Menjívar, born and raised in El Salvador, is an American sociologist who has made significant contributions to the study of international migration, the structural roots of inequalities, state power, gender-based violence against women, and legal regimes. Menjívar is currently a Professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she is the Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair.
Go to Profile#206
Ruth Milkman
#63592
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ruth Milkman is an American sociologist of labor and labor movements. She is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and the director of research at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Between 1988 and 2009 Milkman taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directed the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Go to Profile#207
Sara Arber
#77476
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sara Lynne Arber is a British sociologist and Professor at University of Surrey. Arber has previously held the position of President of the British Sociological Association and Vice-President of the European Sociological Association . She is well known for her work on gender and ageing, inequalities in health and has pioneered research in the new field of sociology of sleep.
Go to Profile#208
Danielle Juteau
#82462
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Danielle Juteau is a Québécoise professor of sociology. Biography Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Montreal, Juteau holds a Bachelor of Arts from Marguerite-Bourgeoys College, a bachelor's degree in Sociology from the University of Montreal, and a master's degree and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto. Juteau is one of the pioneers of ethnic studies in Canada and around the world.
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Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
#51721
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein is an American sociologist and emeritus distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Fuchs Epstein served as president of the American Sociological Association in 2006.
Go to Profile#210
Margaret Cruikshank
#40470
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Margaret Louise Cruikshank is an American lesbian feminist writer and academic. She was one of the first American academics to be out during a time when gay rights were an unfamiliar concept. Cruikshank played a central role in establishing the importance of lesbian studies within both women's studies and the academy through the publication of her edited anthologies.
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Ulrike Felt
#31411
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Ulrike Felt is an Austrian social scientist, active in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Currently, she holds the chair for Social Studies of Science and is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. She also acted as the president of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology . From 2002 to 2007, she has been editor-in-chief of the journal "Science, Technology, & Human Values".
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Liah Greenfeld
#24360
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Liah Greenfeld is an Israeli-American Russian-Jewish interdisciplinary scholar engaged in the scientific explanation of human social reality on various levels, beginning with the individual mind and ending with the level of civilization. She has been called "the most iconoclastic" of contemporary sociologists and her approach represents the major alternative to the mainstream approaches in social science. Throughout her analyses, she emphasizes the empirical foundation of claims that she makes about human thought and action, underlining the importance of logical consistency between different...
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Matilda White Riley
#52772
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
Matilda White Riley was an American gerontologist who began working at Rutgers University as a research specialist before becoming a professor from 1950 to 1973. Here she wrote a textbook and discovered her interest in aging. In 1973, Riley became the first woman full professor at Bowdoin College, where she worked until 1981. She spent much of her career as a sociologist specializing in aging at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Riley worked with the Russell Sage Foundation from 1974 to 1977 where she wrote works on the age-stratificatio...
Go to Profile#214
Charis Thompson
#66861
Overall Influence
Charis Thompson was Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and before that a Professor at Harvard and Berkeley. She was a professor of Gender and Women's Studies in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She was also associate director, and the founding Director, of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley.
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Gabriele Klein
#55918
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gabriele Klein is a sociologist, dance theorist and professor at the University of Hamburg. Life From 1977 to 1987 Gabriele Klein studied Sociology, History, Sports Sciences, Contemporary Dance and Education at the Universities of Bielefeld, Bochum and Essen, as well as at the Amsterdam School of the Arts . She completed her Doctorate in Social Sciences at the University of Bochum in 1990. Her dissertation was published in 1992 under the title: Women Bodies Dance. A Civilization Theory of Dance . She was habilitated in 1998 with the study, published in 1999: Electronic Vibration. Pop Culture Theory .
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Maxine Leeds Craig
#54668
Overall Influence
Maxine Leeds Craig is a professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Davis . Craig was a doctoral student of Todd Gitlin at the University of California, Berkeley; her doctoral dissertation became the book, Ain't I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race . Her second book, Sorry I Don't Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move , was awarded the 2014 Best Publication Award of the American Sociological Association's section on Body and Embodiment.
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Asoka Bandarage
#59312
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Asoka Bandarage is a Sri Lankan academic specializing in international development, political economy, women and gender studies, multiculturalism, conflict analysis and resolution, peace and security, South Asia, Sri Lanka, population and ecology. She has headed the Women's Studies Program at Mount Holyoke College and also taught at institutions including Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute in Washington, DC. She is also a yoga instructor.
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Janet Lever
#78594
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Janet Lever is an American sociologist and professor emerita of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. She is recognized for her research on sex, intimate relationships, gender, and sport.
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Elisabeth S. Clemens
#62446
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Elisabeth Stephanie Clemens is an American sociologist, who is currently the William Rainey Harper Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and the college at the University of Chicago. Clemens's research is focused on social movements, organizations, and American political development. As of 2016, Clemens has served as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Sociology.
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Carole Joffe
#40305
Overall Influence
Carole E. Joffe is an American sociologist and reproductive rights advocate who has published several books on abortion. In 2013, she was awarded the Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award for her research on the sociology of abortion and family planning. She has also earned the UC Davis Public Service Award , the Irwin Kushner Lecture by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals , and the David Gunn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Abortion Care Network .
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Patricia Yancey Martin
#46060
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Patricia Yancey Martin is an American sociologist. She is the Daisy Parker Flory Professor of Sociology Emerita at Florida State University. Education Martin was inducted into Alpha Lambda Delta her freshman year at University of Alabama in 1959. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from University of Alabama in 1962 with Phi Beta Kappa honors. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1962. In 1964, she completed a Master of Arts in sociology from Florida State University and was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi and Alpha Kappa Delta. She later earned a doctorate in sociology from the same institution in 1969.
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Lynne Segal
#39113
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Lynne Segal is an Australian-born, British-based socialist feminist academic and activist, author of many books and articles, and participant in many campaigns, from local community to international. She has taught in higher education in London, England since 1970, at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1973. In 1999 she was appointed Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she now works in the School of Psychosocial Studies.
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Margunn Bjørnholt
#11658
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Margunn Bjørnholt is a Norwegian sociologist and economist. She is a research professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies and a professor of sociology at the University of Bergen. Her research has focused on financial institutions, management and working life and later on gender equality, migration and violence. She has also worked as a consultant, a civil servant, served as an expert to the European Commission and been president of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights.
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Judith Blau
#64993
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Judith Blau is an American sociologist and professor emerita of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most of her academic career has been devoted to teaching and writing about human rights, and she retired to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she continues to teach.
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Fiona Williams
#24521
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jonquil Fiona Williams, is a British retired academic of social policy whose research covers gender, race, ethnicity, and the welfare state. From 1996 to 2012, she was Professor of Social Policy at the University of Leeds. She was previously a lecturer at the Polytechnic of North London, Plymouth Polytechnic, and the Open University, before becoming Professor of Applied Social Studies at the University of Bradford.
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María Ángeles Durán
#21814
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
María Ángeles Durán Heras is a Spanish sociologist best known for being a pioneer in research on unpaid work, the social situation of women and their social and work environment, health economics, and inequality in the use of time. She was the first woman to attain a chair of sociology in Spain, in 1982. She was one of the first researchers in her field who carried out works with a feminist perspective in the Spanish academic world. In 1979, she was the founder and director of the of the Autonomous University of Madrid, the first university institute for women's studies created in Spain. In 2002 she received the in Economic and Legal Sciences.
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Eszter Hargittai
#72725
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Eszter Hargittai is a communication studies scholar and Professor at the University of Zurich. Biography She holds a BA in Sociology from Smith College and a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar.
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Sarah Mustillo
#74257
Overall Influence
Sarah Anne Mustillo is an American sociologist. She is the Dean of the Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters. Mustillo's research interests include health, statistics, children and youth, social psychology, gender and family. Her work includes contributions on longitudinal data, discrete outcomes, model specification, and missing data.
Go to Profile#229
Judith Treas
#25866
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Judith K. Treas is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Demographic and Social Analysis at the University of California, Irvine. Treas is recognized for her research on gender, family, inequality, and the life course.
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Bess Bukodi
#65778
Overall Influence
Erzsebet "Bess" Bukodi is an Associate Professor in Quantitative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and a professorial fellow in sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is a specialist in the role of education in social mobility.
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Henriette Dahan Kalev
#42749
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Henriette Dahan Kalev is an Israeli Senior Lecturer of political science and the founder of the Gender Studies Program at Ben Gurion University. She is one of the founders of the Mizrahi feminist movement, and one of the leading theorists of Mizrahi feminism.
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Marta Tienda
#77269
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Marta Tienda is an American sociologist. From 1997 to 2001, she served as the director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. She is the co-author and co-editor of many books, including The Hispanic Population of The United States .
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Pamela Abbott
#29045
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Pamela Abbott, FAcSS is an English academic in sociology, gender and development studies. She is Director of the Centre for Global Development and Professor in the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen, and Director of the Centre for Global Development.
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Viviana Zelizer
#73665
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#235
Ana María Díaz Stevens
#55794
Overall Influence
Ana María Díaz Stevens is a Puerto Rican-American sociologist with a focus on Latinos and Latinas in religion, especially Roman Catholicism. She was inaugurated as a full faculty member at Union Theological Seminary in 1999, making her the first Latin American to hold that position at the university. She later became the Chairperson of the Church and Society at the seminary.
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Linda K. George
#90815
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Kaufman George is an American sociologist and gerontologist who is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Duke University. Her research focuses on the sociology of mental health, physical health, and aging, among other topics. She was president of the Gerontological Society of America from November 1993 to October 1994, and she received the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociological Study of Mental Health from the American Sociological Association in 2013.
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Karolina Wigura
#60774
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Karolina Wigura is a sociologist, historian of ideas and journalist. She is Member of the Board of Kultura Liberalna Foundation , which publishes Kultura Liberalna, one of Poland's leading weekly magazines. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Zentrum Liberale Moderne , an assistant professor at Warsaw University's Institute of Sociology and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
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Bonnie Zimmerman
#53296
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Bonnie Zimmerman is an American literary critic and women's studies scholar. Her works explore women's roles, lesbian history and criticism, and women's literature. She has received numerous prestigious awards. Zimmerman retired from teaching in 2010. Her contributions to academia include classes, articles, and several books.
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Danièle Hervieu-Léger
#41768
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Danièle Hervieu-Léger is a French sociologist specialized in the sociology of religion. Biography A graduate of the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris with a doctorate in sociology, she is also editor of the journal Archives des sciences sociales de la religion.
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Jane Lewis
#74673
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jane Elizabeth Lewis, is a British social scientist and academic, specialising in gender and welfare. She was Barnett Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford from 2000 to 2004 and Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics from 2004 to 2016.
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Elizabeth Shove
#65580
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Elizabeth Shove is a British sociologist who has written about social practice theory, consumption, everyday life and energy demand. She is Director of the Centre on the Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand at Lancaster University. The DEMAND Centre is one of six End Use Energy Demand Centres.
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Johanna T. Dwyer
#87402
Overall Influence
Johanna T. Dwyer is an American nutrition scientist and dietitian. She is a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements and director of the Frances Stern Nutrition Center at Tufts Medical Center. Dwyer is a professor of nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.
Go to Profile#243
Starr Roxanne Hiltz
#11214
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Starr Roxanne Hiltz is a retired Distinguished Professor of Information Science/Information Systems at New Jersey Institute of Technology . She, along with Murray Turoff , are the authors of The Network Nation, a book that is described as "the seminal book that helped define the electronic frontier".
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Sarah Pink
#38299
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, ...
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Orlandina de Oliveira
#63286
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Orlandina de Oliveira is a Brazilian-born, naturalized Mexican sociologist and professor. Her areas of expertise are on social inequality, the status of women and youth, and the dynamics of labor markets. She has earned numerous honors for her academic research from international universities including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#246
Julieta Castellanos
#40412
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Julieta Castellanos is a Honduran sociologist and the dean of the National Autonomous University of Honduras since 2009. Castellanos is known for campaigning against violence in Honduras, focusing on both drug cartels and police corruption. She has advocated for both judicial and police reform. Castellanos founded the Observatorio de la Violencia at UNAH in 2004, a center that analyzes crime statistics in Honduras. She was also a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was tasked with clarifying the facts related to the 2009 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya.
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Alexandra Juhasz
#53279
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alexandra Jeanne "Alex" Juhasz is a feminist writer and theorist of media production. Education Juhasz received her B.A. in American Studies and English at Amherst College in 1986. Shortly after graduating she participated in a year-long artist's program sponsored by the Whitney Museum . Juhasz also attended New York University and earned her doctorate with distinction in Cinema Studies . She was awarded the Society for Cinema Studies' First Prize in 1993 for her doctoral dissertation: "Re-Mediating AIDS: The Politics of Community Produced Video."
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Ruha Benjamin
#18611
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want .
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Talja Blokland
#97778
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Talja V. Blokland is a Dutch and German social scientist and urban researcher. She studied sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and was a PhD student in social sciences at the Amsterdam School for Social Research from 1994 to 1997, and at the New School University in 1996. After her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Yale University and Manchester University. She was appointed as part-time Gradus Hendriks Professor in Community Development at Erasmus University and became a senior researcher and program director at the OTB Institute for Urban, Housing and Mobility Studies at the Delft University of Technology.
Go to Profile#250
Eileen M. Crimmins
#80893
Overall Influence
Eileen M. Crimmins is the AARP Chair in Gerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology of the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the connections between socioeconomic factors and life expectancy and other health outcomes.
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