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.

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Sociology,

#301

Vera King

#59772

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Vera King is a German sociologist and social psychologist. She has been Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main since 2016.

#302

Debra Umberson

#110840

Overall Influence

Debra J. Umberson is an American sociologist. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Population Research Center. Early life and education Umberson earned her Bachelor of Arts degree and MSW at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her Master's degree and PhD from Vanderbilt University.

#303

Mary O'Brien

#59861

Overall Influence

1926 - 1998 (72 years)

Mary Mamie O'Brien was a feminist philosopher and professor. She taught sociology and feminist social theory in Canada until her death. She was a founding member of the Feminist Party of Canada. Life Mary Mamie O'Brien was born on 8 July 1926 in Walmer, Kent. Unable to take care of her children, her mother took Mary and her brother to Glasgow at the age of four, where they were raised by three aunts. According to The Women's Review of Books obituary, "Mary always said she was English by birth, Irish by name and Scottish by choice; later, she became a Canadian by choice."

#304

Annie Cohen-Solal

#15953

Overall Influence

Annie Cohen-Solal is a writer, historian, cultural diplomat and public intellectual in a trajectory that spans more than four decades. Born in Algiers, in a Jewish family from multiple Mediterranean origins , she faced numerous geographical displacements and devoted her entire career to issues of migration and creation. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. An award-winning writer from Sartre: 1905-1980 to Leo & His Circle: the Life of Leo Castelli and A Foreigner Called Picasso , her books, exhibitions, and lectures have been widely covered both by academic reviews and by the press at large.

#305

Karen A. Cerulo

#86529

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Karen A. Cerulo is an American sociologist specializing in the study of culture, communication and cognition. Currently, she is a Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and the editor of Sociological Forum, the flagship journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. From 2009 to 2010, she served as the Chair of the American Sociological Association's Culture section, and since 1999, she has directed the section's Culture and Cognition Network. Her book Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation won the section's award for the best book of 1996 and her article "Scents and Sensibil...

#306

Elena Osipova

#61249

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Elena Vladimirovna Osipova is a Russian philosopher and sociologist. Education and career Elena Osipova graduated from the Lomonosov University in 1950, where she went on to obtain a candidate degree in 1954. For her candidate degree, she performed research in the philosophy of Enlightenment in Poland. In 1974, she successfully defended her thesis “Sociology of Émile Durkheim” and became a Doctor of Sciences. She led research at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her publications have to do mainly with the history of Western sociology, the problems of power, and t...

#307

Prema Kurien

#54599

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Prema Ann Kurien is Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. She specializes in the interplay between religion and immigration experiences, with focus on people from India. She has written a number of articles and books on aspects of this subject. Her 2002 book Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India was co-winner of the 2003 Asia/Asian America book award from the American Sociological Association.

#308

Sheila Allen

#84822

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Sheila Allen was an English sociologist and academic. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Bradford from 1972 to 1999, and served as president of the British Sociological Association from 1975 to 1977.

#310

Gladys Beckwith

#85184

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Gladys Eloise Beckwith was an American academic and women's rights activist. She was the co-founder of the Michigan Women's Studies Association and the founder of the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. Beckwith was one of the first professors of women's studies in the United States, teaching at Michigan State University. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2012 for her accomplishments in the fields of education and women's rights.

#311

Jean Burnet

#80874

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Jean Robertson Burnet was a Canadian academic specializing in ethnic studies. Burnet, a specialist in Canadian ethnic relations, founded the Glendon Sociology Department at York University. Burnet was a native of Toronto and studied for her undergraduate degree in Sociology at Victoria College, Toronto, including under Harold Innis. She received her master's degree and PhD at the University of Chicago.

#312

Gaye Tuchman

#69220

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gaye Tuchman is an American sociologist. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Tuchman is best known for her 1978 book, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, about the sociology of news production. She is a past president of the Eastern Sociological Society.

#313

Valerie Smith

#33748

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Valerie Smith is an American academic administrator, professor, and scholar of African-American literature and culture. She is the 15th and current president of Swarthmore College. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she is a graduate of Bates College and the University of Virginia. She taught at Princeton University from 1980 to 1989 and at University of California, Los Angeles from 1989 to 2000. In 2001, Smith returned to Princeton upon being appointed the director of Princeton's African-American studies program. From 2006 to 2009, Smith was the founding director of Princeton's interdisciplinary Center for African American Studies.

#314

Kathleen Harris

#89032

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kathleen Mullan Harris is a distinguished professor of sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Education and career She received a bachelor's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1972. Then, she went on to receive a masters of arts and a doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and 1988 respectively. Through her career as a sociologist, she specialized in research on social inequality based on family, poverty, and health. One important highlight upon her research...

#315

Ara Wilson

#51129

Overall Influence

Ara Wilson is a university professor and author. Overview Her work focuses on the feminist ethnography of globalization through description and analysis of various market economies. Her work examines the cultural, social, and sexual aspects of Bangkok economies, as well as illustrating the inaccuracies of Eurocentric ideology.

#316

Leslie McCall

#35963

Overall Influence

Leslie McCall is an American sociologist and political scientist. She is a Presidential Professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Associate Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality there. She studies wealth and social inequality in American society, as well as opinions about inequality, from an intersectional perspective.

#317

Leokadiya Drobizheva

Leokadiya Drobizheva

#114834

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Leokadiya Mikhailovna Drobizheva was a Russian sociologist. She was made an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation in 1999, Laureate of the Prize of the President of the Russian Federation for Contribution to Strengthening the Unity of the Russian Nation , and Honorary Doctor of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

#318

Inderpal Grewal

#92062

Overall Influence

Inderpal Grewal is a professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and a key figure in the academic discipline of women's studies. She is an influential feminist scholar whose research interests include transnational and postcolonial feminist theory; feminism and human rights; nongovernmental organizations and theories of civil society and citizenship; law and subjectivity; travel and mobility and South Asian cultural studies. Together with Caren Kaplan, Grewal is best known for her work as a founder of the field of transnational feminist cultural studies or transnational feminism.

#319

Bahija Ahmed Shihab

#68665

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Bahija Ahmed Shihab was an Iraqi sociologist and one of the pioneering women that helped establish the Sociology department at the College of Arts, University of Baghdad, Iraq in the 1950s. Professor Shihab was specialized in Social Work and Community Organization and Development. She has authored several important books, articles, and studies and taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the department and supervised countless Ph.D. dissertations. Professor Shihab persistently promoted social justice causes especially relating to the emancipation of women in Iraq and the Arab world. Prof....

#320

Rosa Cobo Bedía

Rosa Cobo Bedía

#46363

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Rosa Cobo Bedía is a Spanish feminist, writer, and professor of sociology of gender at the University of A Coruña. She is also the director of the Center for Gender Studies and Feminists at the same university. Her main line of research is feminist theory and the sociology of gender.

#321

Suzanne Keller

#95202

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Suzanne Infeld Keller was an American sociologist. She was the first female faculty member to be granted tenure at Princeton University. Early life and education Keller was born as Suzanne Infeld on April 16, 1927, in Vienna, Austria. Her family moved to New York City when she was a child and she graduated from Hunter College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. While earning her graduate degrees, Keller worked with the United States Air Force as an interpreter and researcher in Munich due to her grasp of multiple languages.

#322

Rosemary Crompton

#41410

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Rosemary Crompton, was a British sociologist and academic, specialising in gender and social class. She was Professor of Sociology at City University from 1999 to 2008: she was then appointed professor emeritus. She had previously been a research assistant at the University of Cambridge, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia and at the University of Kent, and held a chair at the University of Leicester.

#323

Arline Geronimus

#41592

Overall Influence

Arline T. Geronimus is an American public health researcher and a professor of Health Behavior & Health Education at the University of Michigan, as well as a research professor at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center. Geronimus is known for proposing the weathering hypothesis in 1992, which posits that cumulative racism experienced by black women cause them to experience inferior birth outcomes as their maternal age increases. She has also studied other issues regarding pregnancy, including the effect of teenage childbearing on the mother's economic status and the effect of immigration enforcement raids on low birth weight.

#324

Dana R. Fisher

#45393

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dana R. Fisher is an American sociologist, professor of sociology, and public speaker and author. Her most recent book is American Resistance: from the Women’s March to the Blue Wave . She is a professor at the University of Maryland who speaks and writes about activism, democracy and environmental policy.

#325

Soumaya Naamane Guessous

#64223

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Soumaya Naamane Guessous is a Moroccan sociologist, champion of women's rights, and columnist. She is best known as author of the book Au-delà de toute pudeur, first published in 1988, about the sexual life of Moroccan women. Based on Naamane Guessous' academic research in the 1980s among 500 women of different social backgrounds and ages, the book became soon a best-seller in Morocco, selling 40.000 copies in 5 years, and was dubbed "a little revolution" in the French presse, observing that "the first time a 'decent woman', a Muslim, calls a spade a spade".

#326

Katherine Newman

#56917

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Katherine S. Newman is an American academic administrator who currently serves as the System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst. Newman previously served as the interim Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston from July 1, 2018 to August 1, 2020. She previously served as the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of The University of Massachusetts system in the Office of the President in Boston, Provost of UMass Amherst, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Harvard University, and is an American author.

#327

Sheila Jeffreys

#35838

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality. Jeffreys' argument that the "sexual revolution" on men's terms contributed less to women's freedom than to their continued oppression has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism. She argues that women suffering pain in pursuit of beauty is a form of submission to patriarchal sadism; that transgender people reproduce oppressive gender roles and mutilate their bodies through sex reassignme...

#328

Eva Cox

#9316

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Eva Maria Cox is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a "more civil" society. She was a long-term member of the Women's Electoral Lobby , and is still pursuing feminist change by putting revaluing social contributions and wellbeing onto political agendas, as well as recognising the common ground between Australia's First Nations and feminist values of the importance of the social.

#329

Marie Jaisson

#79509

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Marie Jaisson is a sociologist studying the sociology of medical practices and of biological phenomena, and the history of Sociology. After a Ph.D. in Sociology at EHESS , she was junior professor at the [University of Tours] and she is full professor at the University Sorbonne Paris-Nord .

#330

Barrie R. Cassileth

#15176

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Barrie Joyce Rabinowitz Cassileth was an American medical sociologist and researcher of complementary medicine and a critic of alternative medicine. She published extensively on alternative cancer treatments.

#331

Margaret Abraham

Margaret Abraham

#90784

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Margaret Abraham is a professor of sociology at Hofstra University and served as the 18th president of the International Sociological Association. She is known for her research regarding gender issues, specifically concerning women, and the ways gender issues are connected to concepts such as globalization, societal customs and norms, and violent behavior.

#332

Dorceta Taylor

#54502

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dorceta E. Taylor is an American environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the senior associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale School of the Environment, as well as a professor of environmental justice. Prior to this, she was the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability , where she also served as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history...

#333

Jean Halley

#47556

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jean Halley is an American writer and sociologist based in New York City. Her work revolves around issues of social power, violence, trauma, gender, and animal studies. Halley is also a professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

#334

Rabab Abdulhadi

#41893

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi is a Palestinian-born American scholar, activist, educator, editor, and an academic director. She is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies, and the founding Director of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies at San Francisco State University . She is a controversial political figure, which is in part due to larger political issues around her field of study.

#335

Judith Stacey

#89220

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Judith G. Stacey is an author and Professor Emerita of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University. Her primary focus areas include gender, family, sexuality, feminist and queer theory, and ethnography. Her book Unhitched explores family configurations that deviate from the standard Western concept of "marriage", including polygamous families in South Africa, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, and intimacy and parenthood among gay men in Los Angeles, California. She has published many works. She is perhaps most known for her paper, co-authored with Timothy Biblarz,...

#336

Monica Prasad

#42523

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Monica Prasad is an American sociologist who has won several awards for her books on economic and political sociology. Prasad is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a 2015 Guggenheim fellow. Her research interests are in the areas of economic sociology, political sociology and comparative historical sociology. , her research investigated market-oriented welfare policies in Europe and their economic consequences.

#337

Metta Spencer

#46654

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Metta Spencer is a Canadian sociologist, writer, peace researcher, and activist. Biography After completing a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1969 at the University of California, Berkeley, Spencer joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College in 1971. She taught regularly in the university’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program, which she founded in 1989 and coordinated until her retirement in 1997. In 1976 Spencer authored the Foundations of Modern Sociology textbook, which was subsequently published in four American and seven Canadian editions.

#338

Maryanne Dever

#78531

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Maryanne Dever is an Australian academic whose research focuses on feminist literary and archival studies. Education Dever completed a BA at the University of Queensland in 1984, an MA , followed by a PhD, at the University of Sydney.

#339

Meredith Minkler

#80549

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Meredith Minkler is an American public health researcher who is emeritus Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work on community-based participatory research and its use in public policy, criminal justice reform and democratizing access to food.

#340

Avtar Brah

#119570

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Avtar Brah is a Ugandan-British sociologist. She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, and a pioneer of diaspora studies. Life Avtar Brah was born in the Punjab and grew up in Uganda. Her mother tongue was Punjabi, and she recalls reading the novelist Nanak Singh, the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah and the contemporary poet Amrita Pritam as a young person. In the late 1960s she studied on a scholarship in the United States before coming to Britain in the early 1970s, where she worked as a researcher at the Ethnic Relations Unit at Bristol University. She was left a stateless refugee in Britain after Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda.

#341

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

#35235

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Beverly Guy-Sheftall is an American Black feminist scholar, writer and editor, who is the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies and English at Spelman College, in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the founding director of the Spelman College Women's Research and Resource Center, the first at a historically Black college or university.

#342

Brooke Harrington

#86277

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Elisabeth Brooke Harrington, born 1968, is an American academic and author, and professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College. Early life In 1990, Harrington earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Stanford University. In 1996, Harrington earned a master's degree in sociology, from Harvard University. In 1999, Harrington earned a PhD degree in sociology, from Harvard University.

#343

Alice Goffman

#37436

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

#344

Elspeth Probyn

#45124

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Elspeth Probyn is an Australian academic. She is currently professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

#345

Joan Fujimura

#74409

Overall Influence

Joan Hideko Fujimura is an American sociologist and the Martindale-Bascom Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the president of the Society for the Social Studies of Science. She was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1999 to 2001 and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 2014 to 2015.

#346

Mary Romero

#83140

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110t...

#347

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

#15040

Overall Influence

1946 - 2011 (65 years)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was an American academic, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. She published a wide range of books, most notably biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. Her 1982 biography of Arendt won the first Harcourt Award while The Anatomy of Prejudices won the Association of American Publishers' prize for Best Book in Psychology in 1996. She was a member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and co-founder of Caversham Productions, a company that makes psychoanalytic educational materials.

#348

Jacquelyne Jackson

#48636

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Jacquelyne Mary Johnson Jackson was an American sociologist, educator, and researcher on issues that affect elderly minority populations. She was involved in public policy debates on programs for this group for over 30 years. From 1978 onward she started a dialogue on social security accessibility for elderly minorities in consideration of sociological influence.

#349

Julia Brannen

#52373

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Julia Brannen, FRSA, FAcSS, is Professor of the Sociology of the Family at the Institute of Education, University of London. She has an international reputation for her research on family life, work-life issues, and intergenerational relations.

#350

Ronit Lentin

#78264

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ronit Lentin is an Israeli/Irish political sociologist and a writer of fiction and non-fiction books. Life Lentin was born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, in 1944: she has lived in Ireland since 1969. A political sociologist, she was an associate professor of sociology at Trinity College, Dublin until her retirement in 2014. From 1997 until 2012 Lentin was the director of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict, Department of Sociology. She was head of the Department of Sociology and a founder member of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, Trinity College, Dublin. Lentin has published extensivel...

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