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.

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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

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Sociology,

#401

Alison Adam

#32795

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Alison Adam is a British researcher in the field of Science and Technology Studies and is known for her work on gender in information systems and the history of forensic science. She is Professor Emerita of science, technology and society at Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK.

#402

Alicia Gutiérrez

#105293

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Alicia Beatriz Gutiérrez is an Argentine sociologist and author. She is a professor and chair of the department of sociology in the at the National University of Córdoba. Career She is a professor and chair of the department of sociology in the at the National University of Córdoba. Gutiérrez is an adjunct professor of anthropology in the at the University of Buenos Aires. She is an investigator with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council. Gutiérrez completed a doctorate in sociology at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. She was a close colleague of Pierre ...

#403

Stevi Jackson

#99183

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Stevi Jackson , is an academic and writer working in the field of gender and sexuality. She has been Professor of Women's studies at the University of York, England since 1998, and is Director of the University's Centre for Women's Studies.

#404

Islah Jad

#77894

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Islah Jad is a tenured assistant professor of Gender and Development at Birzeit University. She is also the co-founder and current Director of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit and a Core Group Member of the Arab Families Working Group. A prominent figure in the Palestinian women’s movement, Jad also helped to establish the Women’s Affair Centre in Gaza and Nablus, Les Amies du Francis, the Child Corner project in el-Bireh, and the WATC . Jad carried out Gender Consultancy for the United Nations Development Programme and was a co-author of the United Nation’s Arab Human Development Report of 2005.

#405

Elaine Howard Ecklund

Elaine Howard Ecklund

#46211

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a published author and professor of sociology at Rice University. She is also the director of the Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance at Rice, a Rice Scholar at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, and the president of the Religious Research Association. Her research focuses on institutional change in the areas of religion, immigration, science, medicine, and gender.

#406

Melinda Mills

#64229

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Melinda Mills, is a Canadian and Dutch demographer and sociologist. She is currently the Nuffield Professor of Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Mills’ research spans a range of interdisciplinary topics at the intersection of demography, sociology, molecular genetics and statistics. Her substantive research specializes in fertility and human reproductive behaviour, assortative mating, labour market, life course and inequality.

#407

Sirry Alang

#34686

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Sirry Alang is a Cameroonian-American Health Services Researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Health, Medicine and Society at Lehigh University. Alang is also a Medical Sociologist. Her research examines the structural causes of health inequity and the social determinants of health.

#408

Irena Klepfisz

#75553

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Irena Klepfisz is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist. Early life Klepfisz was born in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 17, 1941, the daughter of Michał Klepfisz, a member of the Jewish Labour Bund , and his wife, Rose Klepfisz . In late April 1943, when she had just turned two years old, her father was killed on the second day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising .

#409

Susanne Karstedt

#62370

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Susanne Karstedt is a German criminologist. She is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Biography A native of Germany, Kartstedt trained in sociology at the University of Hamburg. Prior to joining Griffith University, she held positions at the University of Leeds, Keele University, Bielefield University, and the University of Hamburg.

#410

Simone Browne

#12603

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Simone Arlene Browne is an author and educator. She is on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Early life and education Browne was born in 1973, and grew up in Toronto, Ontario, where she received a BA , MA, and PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her 2001 Masters thesis was titled Surveilling the Jamaican body, leisure imperialism, immigration and the Canadian imagination. Her doctoral dissertation in 2007 was titled ...

#411

Ketzia Alon

#103550

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ketzia Alon is an Israeli academic, social activist, Mizrahi feminist, art curator and critic, and owner of Gama Publishing. She is one of the founders of the Ahoti – for Women in Israel movement.

#412

Linda Burton

#100850

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Linda M. Burton is a sociologist who is the dean of Berkeley’s social welfare school. She previously held the title of James B. Duke Professor of Sociology and Director of the Sociology Department’s Undergraduate Honors Program at Duke University. She specializes in family structure, poverty and inequality, and child development.

#413

Nina Bandelj

#117915

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Nina Bandelj is an economic sociologist, author and academic. She is a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Vice Provost for faculty development, and co-director of the Center for Organizational Research at the University of California, Irvine . She is also a visiting professor at the IEDC-Bled School of Management and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

#414

Lindsey Doe

#15781

Overall Influence

Lindsey Takara Doe is a sexologist, sex educator, and host of Sexplanations on YouTube. Personal life Lindsey Takara Doe was born in . she had three children. In 2015, when one of her daughters complained about a boy who would not stop pestering her for a date, Doe took the opportunity and published a video addressing such harassment from boys; the video received international attention, spirited debate, and over 76,000 views in ten days.

#415

Bina D'Costa

#73663

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Bina D'Costa is an Australian-Bangladeshi academic who specializes in conflict and gender studies in South Asia. Career D'Costa was at the Global Justice Center in New York City in 2008. D'Costa was a professor of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs of the Australian National University. She was a visiting scholar at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva from 2012 to 2014. She was a visiting scholar at the Refugee Studies Centre under Department of International Development of University of Oxford from 2011 to 2012. She served as the Asia Rapporteur of Asia-Europe Meeting in 2017.

#416

Jennifer Berdahl

#83592

Overall Influence

Jennifer Berdahl is a professor in the department of sociology at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Prior to that she was a business school professor for 20 years, at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. Berdahl was raised in Eugene, Oregon, Princeton, New Jersey, and Göttingen Germany and studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she received a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1999.

#417

Renata Forste

#106374

Overall Influence

Renata Tonks Forste is an American sociologist who specializes in the health and well being of women and children in Latin America. She has served as the chair of the department of sociology at Brigham Young University and has also directed that institutions women's studies program.

#418

Janet L. Jacobs

#79645

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

For the American former baseball player, see Janet Jacobs. Janet Liebman Jacobs is an American sociologist specializing in gender and religion. Jacobs' research focuses on women, religion, ethnicity, genocide and the social psychology of gender. She has authored seven books, including Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews, for which she won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory, and The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivor...

#419

Deborah Lynn Steinberg

#71489

Overall Influence

1961 - 2017 (56 years)

Deborah Lynn Steinberg was a British-based American academic, author, educator and sociologist. She was a Professor of Gender, Culture and Media Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

#420

Lois B. DeFleur

#18514

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Lois B. DeFleur was president of Binghamton University from 1990 to 2010. She came to the university after being provost at the University of Missouri. Before that she had served as a sociology professor at Missouri State University and Washington State University. She has a doctorate in sociology from the University of Illinois. She studied juvenile delinquency in Latin America and has done extensive work in the fields of deviant behavior and occupational socialization.

#421

Wenona Giles

#104782

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Wenona Mary Giles is a professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at York University. In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Through the university, Giles helped launch the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees project which allowed people in refugee camps to earn degrees, diplomas and certificates from Moi and Kenyatta Universities in Kenya, and from York University and UBC in Canada.

#422

Michelle Spring

#86832

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Michelle Stanworth is a Canadian sociologist and writer of mystery fiction, who has published both academic work under her own name and mystery fiction under the pen name Michelle Spring. She is most noted for her 2001 novel In the Midnight Hour, which won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel in 2002.

#423

Lori Peek

#116396

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Lori Peek is a professor of Sociology at University of Colorado at Boulder and director of the Natural Hazards Center. Peek has received many awards for her scholarship, her career in teaching, and her service to the discipline of sociology and broader hazards and disaster field. On April 20, 2021 President Joe Biden nominated Peek to be a Member of Board of Directors of the National Institute of Building Sciences, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.

#424

Sandra Walklate

#92173

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sandra Walklate is a British criminologist. She is the Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool and President of the British Society of Criminology. In January 2014, she became the Editor in Chief of The British Journal of Criminology.

#425

Linsey McGoey

#90268

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Linsey McGoey is a Canadian sociologist and academic based in England. She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She is known for having written about philanthropy in her book No Such Thing as a Free Gift and co-editing the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies with Matthias Gross. Her next book, The Unknowers: How Elite Ignorance Rules the World, was published in 2019.

#426

Eva Lundgren

#103066

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Eva Lundgren is a Norwegian-Swedish sociologist. She is an expert on violence against women and sexual violence, particularly in religious contexts. She is professor emerita of sociology at Uppsala University.

#427

El Jones

#68273

Overall Influence

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was Halifax's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. Biography She was born in Wales and grew up in Winnipeg. Her book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! published in 2014 by Roseway, an imprint of Fernwood Publishing, is a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. In 2015, she was a resident at the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. Her work focuses on social justice issues such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism, and decolonization; she wrote in The Washington Postin J...

#428

Melanie Bartley

#43114

Overall Influence

Melanie Jane Bartley, FBA, is a medical sociologist and retired academic. She was Professor of Medical Sociology at University College London from 2001 to 2012. Career and research Bartley completed her undergraduate studies in sociology and philosophy at the University of Reading. After several years of research, she completed a master of science degree in medical sociology at Bedford College, London, and worked outside of academia for a number of years, including time as a research assistant at the British Regional Heart Study. She then completed a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh un...

#429

Miranda Lubbers

#116774

Overall Influence

Miranda J. Lubbers is a Dutch social scientist specializing in the analysis of migration, segregation, and social identity through personal networks. She is Professor in Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and director of the COALESCE Lab.

#430

Stefanie DeLuca

Stefanie DeLuca

#68522

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Stefanie Deluca is a sociologist and the James Coleman Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She co-wrote the book, Coming of Age in the Other America. Deluca received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University in 2002 and bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Sociology at the University of Chicago.

#431

Jo Phelan

#42747

Overall Influence

Jo Carol Phelan is a Special Research Scientist in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Social Inequalities and Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She is known for working with Bruce Link to develop the theory of fundamental causes of social inequalities in health. She was a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar from 2012 to 2013. She also received a Health Policy Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 1996, and the 1999 book Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, which she co-edited,...

#432

Alondra Nelson

#18319

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Alondra Nelson is an American academic, policy advisor, non-profit administrator, and writer. She is the Harold F. Linder chair and professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2021 to 2023, Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy , where she performed the duties of the director from February to October 2022. She was the first African American and first woman of color to lead OSTP.

#433

Miriam Glucksmann

#46927

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Miriam A. Glucksmann FBA is a British sociologist and academic, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, and visiting professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. Early life She studied at the London School of Economics.

#434

Bonnie J. Morris

#95630

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Bonnie J. Morris is an American scholar of women's studies. She completed a PhD in women's history at Binghamton University in 1989 and has taught at various universities including Georgetown University, George Washington University, and University of California, Berkeley.

#435

Irene Tinker

#62666

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (97 years)

Irene Tinker , is professor emerita in the Departments of City and Regional Planning & Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching from 1989 to 1998. She was the founding Board president of the International Center for Research on Women, founder and director of the Equity Policy Center and co-founder of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.

#436

Zelda F. Gamson

#115056

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Zelda Gamson is an American sociologist, writer and activist. Her scholarly work has primarily focused on the sociology of higher education, in particular innovation and change. Personal life and education Born Zelda Finkelstein in Philadelphia, Gamson is the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. She attended public schools in Philadelphia, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Antioch College before completing her undergraduate degree at University of Michigan in 1958. She received a Master's Degree in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1959 and a PhD from the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in 1965.

#437

Nora Cate Schaeffer

#67408

Overall Influence

Nora Cate Schaeffer is an American sociologist and survey statistician. She is Sewell Bascom Professor of Sociology, Emerita, and was director of the Survey Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

#438

Sonia Sanchez

#4857

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, includ...

#439

Jane Menken

#67187

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Jane Menken , née Golubitsky, is an American sociologist and demographer known for her work in sociology in public and international affairs, population studies, social statistics. Menken has published a co-authored book Mathematical Models of Conception and Birth, and is co-editor of Natural Fertility , Teenage Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Childbearing , World Population and U.S. Policy: The Choices Ahead , and Aging in Sub-Saharan Africa . In addition, Menken was a founding member of the editorial board of two academic journals in the demography discipline: Demographic Research and Southern Afr...

#440

Hilary Graham

#74003

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Hilary Mavis Graham, is a British sociologist and social policy academic, who specialises in public health. Since 2005, she has been Professor of Health Sciences at the University of York. She previously lectured at the University of Bradford, the Open University, Coventry Polytechnic, the University of Warwick, and Lancaster University.

#441

Sikivu Hutchinson

Sikivu Hutchinson

#63080

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Sikivu Hutchinson is an American author, playwright, director, and musician. Her multi-genre work explores feminism, gender justice, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, humanism and atheism. She is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical , White Nights, Black Paradise , Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels , Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars , and Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles . Her plays include "White Nights, Black Paradise", "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" and "Narcolepsy, Inc.".

#442

Riitta Jallinoja

#142757

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Riitta Jallinoja is a Finnish sociologist, who was appointed Finland's first family sociology professor at the University of Helsinki in 2002. She is known, among other things, for studying the role of women, the family and modern life.

#443

Stephanie Moller

#132132

Overall Influence

Stephanie Moller is an American sociologist who is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Career After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003, Moller joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2003 as an assistant professor of sociology. She left the university in 2008 to work in Brand and Advertising Research at Bank of America. Moller returned to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte August 2019. She was named full professor and department chair in 2014. She served as chair until 2019 when she transitioned to the Director of the Public Policy Doctoral Program.

#444

Ilse Korotin

#111697

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Ilse Erika Korotin is an Austrian philosopher and sociologist. She researched and published on the history of ideas of Nazism. At the Institute for Science and Art in Vienna, she heads the Documentation Centre for Women's Studies. Her work focuses on feminist biographical research and history of science.

#445

Mary J. Hickman

#86780

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Mary J. Hickman is Professorial Research Fellow at St Mary's University, Twickenham. She was formerly a Professor of Irish Studies and Sociology at London Metropolitan University and director of its Institute for the Study of European Transformations. She was a member of the Irish Governments Task Force on Policy Regarding Emigrants . She has been Visiting Professor at: New York University, Columbia University and Victoria University, Melbourne. Her current research interests centre on migrations and diasporas. She has been a key figure in the documentation of The Irish Diaspora.

#446

Kathleen Gerson

Kathleen Gerson

#110266

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Kathleen Gerson is an American sociologist. She is considered as an authority on such subjects as gender equality particularly within relationships and marriages, changing gender roles, family housework patterns, travel patterns, finances and how they affect household formation, and other aspects of changing family life. Her research is often based on qualitative interviews. She is a tenured professor at New York University.

#447

Caroline Moser

#21839

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Caroline Olivia Nonesi Moser is an academic specializing in social policy and urban social anthropology. She is primarily known for her field-based approach to research on the informal sector generally - but particularly aspects such as poverty, violence, asset vulnerability and strategies for accumulation in the urban setting. Gender analysis is central to her approach. She has looked at many countries, but the Americas have been her main interest. Countries studied closely include Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Jamaica.

#448

Karin Flaake

#95833

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Karin Flaake is a German sociologist and professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Her publications on the adolescence of young women and men are part of the literature of socio-psychologically oriented gender research. Another focus of her work is on the chances of changing gender relations in families.

#449

Susan Silbey

#88644

Overall Influence

Susan S. Silbey, a sociologist, is the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences, Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#450

Suzan Shown Harjo

Suzan Shown Harjo

#32773

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Suzan Shown Harjo is an advocate for Native American rights. She is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of tribal lands. After co-producing the first American Indian news show in the nation for WBAI radio while living in New York City, and producing other shows and theater, in 1974 she moved to Washington, D.C., to work on national policy issues. She served as Congressional liaison for Indian affairs in the President Jimmy Carter administration and later as president of the National Council of American Indi...

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