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 people in Sociology,
#651
Abdelmalek Sayad
#34878
Overall Influence
1933 - 1998 (65 years)
Abdelmalek Sayad , was a sociologist, first as an assistant to Pierre Bourdieu, then as a research director at the French CNRS and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. An expert of the North-African community in France, he was central to the introduction of the study of migration issues in French social sciences.
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Frank Webster
#16769
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Frank Webster is a British sociologist. His critical writing on the "information society" has been translated into many languages, widely discussed and criticized. In Theories of the Information Society, he examined six analytically separable conceptions of the information society, arguing that all are suspect, so much so that the idea of an information society cannot be easily sustained.
Go to Profile#653
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy
#33812
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy was one of the founding feminists of the field of women's studies and is a lesbian historian whose book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of the Lesbian Community documents the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York, in the decades before Stonewall.
Go to Profile#654
Martin Kohli
#45232
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Martin Kohli is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the European University Institute in Fiesole/Florence and Professor at Freie Universität Berlin. Life Martin Kohli attended high school at the Kantonsschule Solothurn and spent a year as an AFS International Scholarship recipient at the high school in Upland, California. After graduating from high school in 1962 and serving in the Swiss military, he studied sociology and economics in Geneva, Cologne and Bern until 1968. The following three years, he worked as an educational consultant in the Education Directorate of the Canton of Zurich, before becoming a research assistant at the University of Constance in 1971.
Go to Profile#655
Paul Gebhard
#11172
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
Paul Henry Gebhard. Jr. was an American anthropologist and sexologist. Born in Rocky Ford, Colorado, he earned a BS and a PhD from Harvard in 1940 and 1947, respectively. Between the years 1946 and 1956, Gebhard was a close colleague to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. It was acknowledged in Gebhard's New York Times obituary that Kinsey was in fact his mentor and that Gebhard was fascinated when Kinsey first met him and revealed to him that the men's room at Grand Central Terminal in New York City was a frequent site for gay cruising.
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Mallika Sengupta
#34199
Overall Influence
1960 - 2011 (51 years)
Mallika Sengupta was a Bengali poet, feminist, and reader of Sociology from Kolkata, known for her "unapologetically political poetry". Biography Mallika Sengupta was the head of the Department of Sociology in Maharani Kasiswari College, an undergraduate college affiliated with the University of Calcutta in Kolkata. She was much better known for her literary activity. The author of more than 20 books including 14 volumes of poetry and two novels, she was widely translated and was a frequent invitee at international literary festivals.
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Joan Busfield
#27100
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joan Busfield , is a British sociologist and psychologist, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and former President of the British Sociological Association . Her research focuses on psychiatry and mental disorder.
Go to Profile#658
Juliette Rennes
#14603
Overall Influence
Juliette Rennes is a French sociologist. Since 2021, she has been the director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences . She is also the director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements . Rennes' research topics are related to the history and sociology of gender, work, and discrimination.
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Gibson Burrell
#25310
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Gibson Burrell is a British sociologist and organizational theorist, Professor of Organisation Theory at University of Manchester, Honorary Professor at the University of York, and formerly the University of Leicester. He became known as writer of the 1979 book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis with Gareth Morgan, and is recognized for introducing the critical management project to the University of Leicester.
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Helena Flam
#51323
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Helena Flam is a Polish-born sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, known for her work on social organization, emotions and social movements. Life and work After leaving Poland for Sweden in 1969, Flam studied sociology at Lund University, where she obtained a Filosofie kandidat degree in 1977. She then obtained an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of Sociology in 1977, 1978 and 1982, respectively. Returning to Sweden, she did research at the Scandinavian Institutes of Administrative Research and SIFO as well as Uppsala University .
Go to Profile#661
Joel M. Charon
#59493
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Joel M. Charon was a professor emeritus of sociology at Minnesota State University at Moorhead. He was the author of a number of academic articles and books. He received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota.
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John Scott
#26097
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Peter Scott is an English sociologist working on issues of economic and political sociology, social stratification, the history of sociology, and social network analysis. He is currently working independently, and has previously worked at the Universities of Strathclyde, Leicester, Essex, and Plymouth. He is a Fellow of the British Academy , a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts , and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences . He has been a member of the British Sociological Association since 1970. In 2015 he became Chair of Section S4 of the British Academy. In 2016 he was awarded an...
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Victor Montori
#61643
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Victor Montori is a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA. He was born and raised in Lima, Peru. He completed medical school at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru, before joining the Internal Medicine Residency Program at the Mayo Clinic. He was named Chief Resident of the Department of Internal Medicine from 1999 to 2000.
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Wilhelm Heitmeyer
#32847
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Wilhelm Heitmeyer is sociologist and professor of education specializing in socialisation. From 1996 to 2013 he headed the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at Bielefeld University. Since retiring as director, he has held the position of Senior Research Professor at IKG.
Go to Profile#665
Dean Spade
#12062
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. Background In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective in New York City that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. Spade was a staff attorney at SRLP from 2002 to 2006, during which time he presented testimony to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and helped achieve a major victory for transgender youth in foster care in the Jean Doe v.
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Janet Abu-Lughod
#22316
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod was an American sociologist who made major contributions to world-systems theory and urban sociology. Early life Raised in Newark, New Jersey, United States, she attended Weequahic High School, where she was influenced by the works of Lewis Mumford about urbanization.
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Robert D. Bullard
#24081
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Doyle Bullard is an American academic who is the former Dean of the Barbara Jordan - Mickey Leland School Of Public Affairs and currently Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. Previously Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard is known as the "father of environmental justice". He has been a leading campaigner against environmental racism, as well as the foremost scholar of the problem, and of the Environmental Justice Movement which sprung up in the United States in the 1980s.
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Paul Connerton
#18416
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Paul James Connerton was a British social anthropologist best known for his work on social and body memory. Biography Born in Chesterfield to James Connerton, and his wife, Mary , he was first educated at Chesterfield Grammar School for Boys, then studied history at Jesus College, Oxford. After Graduating Connerton went to Nuffield College to study the works of neo-Marxist philosopher György Lukács who is best known for his concept of Reification. His interest in Lukács motivated him to deepen his knowledge of literary theory so he enrolled at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and gained another first degree in English.
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Jadwiga Staniszkis
#34617
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jadwiga Staniszkis is a Polish sociologist and political scientist, essayist, a former professor at the University of Warsaw and the Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu , a Polish campus of National-Louis University.
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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.
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Michael P. Johnson
#28996
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Paul Johnson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and African and African American Studies at Penn State, where he taught sociology and women’s studies for over thirty years and was designated an Alumni Teaching Fellow, Penn State’s highest teaching award. He is an internationally recognized expert on domestic violence, invited to speak at conferences and universities throughout the United States and around the world.
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Kazuo Yamaguchi
#67690
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kazuo Yamaguchi is a Japanese sociologist and is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Selected bibliography Books Journal article Papers Honours Person of Cultural Merit
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Gérard Bouchard
#11282
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Gérard Bouchard is a Canadian historian and sociologist affiliated with the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Born on 26 December 1943 in Jonquière, Quebec, he obtained his master's degree in sociology from Université Laval in 1968 and later obtained his PhD in history from the University of Paris in 1971. Bouchard had authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 26 books, and published 230 papers in scientific journals as of 2005.
Go to Profile#674
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...
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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.
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Guenther Roth
#27799
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Guenther Roth was a German-American sociologist. He was recognized as the leading scholar, translator and editor of the work of Max Weber in the English-speaking world; together with Claus Wittich, he translated and edited the first complete version of Weber's classic Economy and Society in English. He was professor emeritus at Columbia University. Later, his research interest extended to the biographical aspects of the sociological classics, in particular the genealogy of Weber's family.
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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.
Go to Profile#678
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.
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Marshall Ganz
#12977
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Marshall Ganz is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Introduced to organizing in the American civil rights movement, he worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years, became trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups, and returned to Harvard where he earned his PhD in Sociology . He is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#680
Şerif Mardin
#11064
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Şerif Mardin was a prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker. In a 2008 publication, he was referred to as the "doyen of Turkish sociology." Early life and education He was born in Istanbul in 1927 as Ahmed Halil Şerif Arif Mardin. His father was Şemsettin Mardin, a Turkish ambassador. Şemsettin Mardin was a member of very long-established family and was uncle to Arif Mardin and Betul Mardin. Şerif Mardin's mother was Reya Mardin who was the daughter of Ahmet Cevdet, the founder of an Ottoman newspaper called İkdam. His ancestors claim direct lineage from Husain...
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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.
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Brett Clark
#51964
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Brett Clark is an American sociologist working as a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. From 2008 to 2012, he was an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. His areas of interest are ecology, political economy and science.
Go to Profile#683
Jesús M. de Miguel Rodríguez
#64863
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jesús M. de Miguel Rodríguez is a sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Barcelona where he is director of the sociological research group GRS. He is also the representative for Spain on the committee of Social Sciences of the European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research at the European Commission.
Go to Profile#684
Guy Benton Johnson
#38670
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Guy Benton Johnson was an American sociologist and social anthropologist. He was a distinguished student of black culture in the rural South and a pioneer advocate of racial equality. Biography Johnson was born in Caddo Mills, Texas on February 28, 1901. He married Guion Griffis, a noted historian, and together they had two sons: Guy Benton, Jr. and Edward. Johnson died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on March 23, 1991, at the age of 90.
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Henning Eichberg
#20073
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Henning Eichberg was a German sociologist and historian, teaching at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. He became notable by his contributions to the philosophy of body culture and by his political radical writings on folk and nation.
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Nicholas Christakis
#29717
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Nicholas A. Christakis is a Greek-American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of human welfare . He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.
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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.
Go to Profile#688
Jeffrey Broadbent
#65228
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jeffrey Praed Broadbent is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota whose academic focus includes comparative sociology; culture and structure; environmental sociology; Japanese society; networks and identity; political sociology; qualitative methods; social movements; and East Asian society. He is also a member of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#689
Anthony Walsh
#22178
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#690
Andrzej Sakson
#67242
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Andrzej Sakson is a Polish sociologist and historian. Since 2004 he has been the director of the Western Institute in Poznań. Sakson is a professor of sociology at the Institute of Sociology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and the Western Institute. He specializes in research on national and ethnic minorities, with special focus on the German minority in Poland and the Polish ethnic groups of Mazurians and Warmians in the north-eastern Polish region of Warmia-Masuria, for which he was awarded by the provincial assembly.
Go to Profile#691
Markku Kivinen
#51414
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Markku Jalmari Kivinen is a professor of sociology and the director of the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, Finland, since 1996. Kivinen's academic expertise is social theory, Russian domestic and foreign policy, transition studies in comparative perspective, social inequality, power and democracy, cultural structures and macro processes. He has more than 300 publications on key sociological topics. He is director of the Finnish Graduate School for Russian and East European Studies, as well as many research projects funded by the Academy of Finland, EU and NordForsk. Since...
Go to Profile#692
Bob Blauner
#23481
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Robert "Bob" Blauner was an American sociologist, college professor and author. He introduced the theory of internal colonialism. Biography He was born in Chicago, Illinois. Bob spent his high school years at Sullivan High School in Chicago. He was the editor of the school paper, the Sentinel. He was also the valedictorian of his high school class. He was interested in sports and was an avid tennis player. His friends in high school included LeRoy Wollins who went on to be active in Veterans for Peace and earned his living importing Russian language materials. Another friend was Charles Ga...
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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...
Go to Profile#694
Stelian Tănase
#19509
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Stelian Tănase is a Romanian writer, journalist, political analyst, and talk show host. Tănase was from November 2013 to October 2015 the president of TVR. Having briefly engaged in politics during the early 1990s, after the fall of the Communist regime, he has remained a leading figure of the Romanian civil society.
Go to Profile#695
Barbara Engelking
#24282
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#696
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.
Go to Profile#697
James F. Short Jr.
#56643
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
James Franklin Short Jr. was an American sociologist. Biography Born on June 22, 1924, James Franklin Short Jr. was raised on a farm near Pleasant Plains, Illinois. His father was a teacher. Short Jr. served in the United States Marine Corps before completing his doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he became known for his work with Fred Strodtbeck. He joined the faculty of Washington State University upon graduation in 1951, and retired in 1997. He was editor of the American Sociological Review from 1972 to 1975, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, and served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1984.
Go to Profile#698
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.
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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.
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Clifford Nass
#21205
Overall Influence
1958 - 2013 (55 years)
Clifford Ivar Nass was a professor of communication at Stanford University, co-creator of The Media Equation theory, and a renowned authority on human-computer interaction . He was also known for his work on individual differences associated with media multitasking. Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford and held courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Education, Law, and Sociology. He was also affiliated with the programs in Symbolic Systems and Science, Technology, and Society.
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