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,
#751
James A. Davis
#63920
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
James A. Davis was a distinguished American sociologist who is best known as a pioneer in the application of quantitative statistical methods to social science research and teaching. Most recently, he was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#752
Brígida García Guzmán
#65025
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Brígida García Guzmán was a sociologist and demographer. She was born in Moca in the Dominican Republic in 1947. In 1969, she moved to Mexico to pursue studies in demographics at The College of Mexico. She later obtained her doctorate in Sociology at the School of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She became a Mexican citizen in 1991.
Go to Profile#753
Park Yu-ha
#30137
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Park Yu-ha is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts, Sejong University. Her research focuses on Japanese–Korean relations. Her 2013 book Comfort Women of the Empire criticized the Korean interpretation of comfort women as exclusively "sex slaves".
Go to Profile#754
Hamza Alvi
#54669
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Hamza Alavi was a Pakistani Marxist academic sociologist and activist. Biography Alavi was born in the Bohra community in Karachi, then in British India and migrated in adulthood to the UK. The focus of his academic work was nationality, gender, fundamentalism and the peasantry. His most noted work was perhaps his 1965 essay Peasant And Revolution in the Socialist Register which stressed the militant role of the middle peasantry. These middle peasants were then viewed as the class in the rural areas which were most naturally the allies of the urban working class. In the 1960s he was one of the co-founders of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination.
Go to Profile#755
Anthony Heath
#43492
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Anthony Francis Heath, CBE, FBA is a British sociologist who is a professor of sociology at Oxford University and a professorial fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. Life and career Anthony Heath studied classics and economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving a double first. After a spell in the Treasury he returned to Cambridge to study for a doctorate on social exchange theory with John H Goldthorpe as supervisor. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford, as a tutorial fellow, followed by an official fellowship and then a professorial fellowship at Nuffield College, when he became Oxford's first professor of sociology in 1999, and founded the Oxford Department of Sociology.
Go to Profile#756
Karel Dobbelaere
#23777
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Karel Dobbelaere is a Belgian educator and noted sociologist of religion. Dobbelaere is an Emeritus Professor of both the University of Antwerp and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He is past-President and General Secretary of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.
Go to Profile#757
Jan Nederveen Pieterse
#43050
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jan Nederveen Pieterse is a Dutch-born scholar whose work centers on global political economy, development studies and cultural studies. He currently serves as the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Distinguished Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#758
Patrik Aspers
#36975
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#759
Adam Gamoran
#40088
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Adam Gamoran is an American sociologist. Early life and education He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology of Education from the University of Chicago in 1984. Career Until 2013 he had held the John D. MacArthur Chair in Sociology and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and chaired the Department of Sociology. He was also the director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. A particular focus of his research has been school structure, educational inequality, and school reform.
Go to Profile#760
Donald Kraybill
#18323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Donald B. Kraybill is an American author, lecturer, and educator on Anabaptist faiths and culture. Kraybill is widely recognized for his studies on Anabaptist groups and in particular the Amish. He has researched and written extensively on Anabaptist culture. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College and Senior Fellow Emeritus at Elizabethtown's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.
Go to Profile#761
Václav Bělohradský
#25113
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Václav Bělohradský is a Czech philosopher and sociologist. Life and career A graduate in philosophy and Czech from Charles University, Prague, from 1970 to 2010s he lived in Italy, where he was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Trieste. He is said to be a successor of Jan Patočka. He is a representative of biocentrism, which he developed to refusing anthropocentric overestimation of symbol and culture. He also thinks we need to step back from "us" to be able to lay foundations of new and freer society. He co-participated with Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek at Monument to Transformation.
Go to Profile#762
Garry Crawford
#53786
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Garry Crawford is a British sociologist. His interests in fans, audiences, and consumption have led Garry Crawford to publish on a wide range of subjects including cultural studies, cosplay, gender, leisure, classical music, and, most notably, sports fans and video game culture.
Go to Profile#763
Øystein Gullvåg Holter
#36793
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Øystein Gullvåg Holter is a Norwegian sociologist and expert on men's studies. Son of Harriet Holter. He is Professor of men's studies at the University of Oslo, the first to be appointed to such a chair in Norway. He worked as a researcher at the Work Research Institute from 1980 to 2006, and at the Nordic Gender Institute from 2006 to 2008. His fields of research are work and family, gender equality and historical sociology. He was a member of the Equality Commission, established by a Royal Decree of 12 February 2010 in order to report on Norway’s equality policies.
Go to Profile#764
Vytautas Kavolis
#36866
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Vytautas Kavolis was a Lithuanian sociologist, literary critic, and culture historian. Biography Kavolis was born in Kaunas. With his parents, Kavolis left Lithuania in the wake of the Soviet occupation in 1944, living first in West Germany and then in the United States. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Chicago, receiving his master's degree and doctorate from Harvard University. He then taught at Tufts University and Dickinson College, where he was the head of the sociology department. He was Charles A. Dana Professor of Comparative Civilizations and Professor of Sociology at Dickinson from 1964 until his sudden death in 1996.
Go to Profile#765
Paul Amato
#48951
Overall Influence
Paul Amato is a professor at Pennsylvania State University in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. He is most well known for his research in social science related fields. His research focuses on marital quality, divorce, and other family related issues.
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Thomas Shapiro
#16604
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Thomas M. Shapiro is a professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Brandeis University and is the author of The Hidden Cost of Being African American and the co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth. Shapiro's current professional titles include the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy and the Director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The primary areas of focus for Shapiro's research and publications are racial inequality and public policy.
Go to Profile#767
Ralph Nader
#221
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Ralph Nader is an American perennial presidential candidate, political activist, author, lecturer, and attorney noted for his involvement in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes. He became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for his book Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized the automotive industry for its safety record and helped lead to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966.
Go to Profile#768
Kevin B. Anderson
#44440
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kevin B. Anderson is an American sociologist, Marxist humanist, author, and professor. Anderson is Professor of Sociology, Political Science and Feminist studies at University of California, Santa Barbara . He was previously Professor of Sociology at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb and Professor of Political Science, Sociology and Women's Studies at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#769
Lynette Spillman
#46847
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Lynette Patrice Spillman is a sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and a Faculty Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, as well as the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. She is particularly known for the application of cultural sociology to the sub-fields of political sociology and economic sociology.
Go to Profile#770
Boris Kagarlitsky
#14124
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. He is an associate of the Transnational Institute. Kagarlisky hosts a YouTube channel Rabkor, associated with his online newspaper of the same name.
Go to Profile#771
Georgi Derluguian
#19048
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Georgi M. Derluguian , also tr. Georgy Derlugyan, is a sociologist and historian of Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian descent. His area of specialty is in ethnic violence, guerrilla movements and revolutions, particularly in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Africa, as well as post-Cold War globalization. He is currently a professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Go to Profile#772
Lisa Taraki
#47428
Overall Influence
Lisa Taraki is an Afghan-born Palestinian journalist, teacher and sociologist. She is an associate professor of sociology at Birzeit University in the West Bank and former Dean of its graduate students. She is the co-founder of the university's Institute of Women's Studies and founding Director of the doctoral program in social sciences. Taraki is also the co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel , a campaign that spearheaded the BDS movement and advocates for academic and cultural boycotts of Israel until it stops what they see as violations of the Palestinians' human rights.
Go to Profile#773
Patricia H. Thornton
#32484
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Patricia H. Thornton is an American organizational theorist, and Grand Challenge Initiative Professor of Sociology and Entrepreneurship at Texas A&M University as well as Adjunct Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She is known for her work on "the sociology of entrepreneurship" and "the Institutional Logics Perspective."
Go to Profile#774
Renata Salecl
#6622
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of emotions and law. Every year she lectures at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law , on Psychoanalysis and Law, and she has also been teaching courses on neuroscience and law. Since 2012 she has been visiting professor at the Department of Social Science, Heath and Medicine at King's College London.
Go to Profile#775
Catherine Delcroix
#67454
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Catherine Delcroix is a French sociologist whose work employs methods drawn from sociology and biographical tools. Her major sociological works concern poverty, inequality and homelessness. She is a professor of sociology in the French Strasbourg University and a fellow of the “UMR Printemps”, a French research institute specializing in sociological and biographical studies.
Go to Profile#776
Chris Weedon
#32578
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Chris Weedon is a British academic, and Professor Emerita at Cardiff University. Life She graduated from Southampton University and took her doctorate at the University of Birmingham. After her Phd she went into teaching whilst living in the UK and Germany. She joined Cardiff University in 1984.
Go to Profile#777
Tim B. Heaton
#71217
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Tim B. Heaton is an American educator and sociologist. He has been called the leading expert on the demographics of Mormons. Heaton holds the Camilla Kimball Chair in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University . He has done research in both the United States on trends and sources of divorce and in Latin America on how the family characteristic effects the health of children.
Go to Profile#778
Philip N. Cohen
#38328
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Philip N. Cohen is an American sociologist. He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and director of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences. Early life Cohen grew up in Ithaca, New York and attended the Lehman Alternative Community School.
Go to Profile#779
Samih Farsoun
#28666
Overall Influence
1937 - 2005 (68 years)
Samih K. Farsoun was a professor emeritus of sociology at American University, where he taught for thirty years until his retirement in 2003. He graduated from Hamilton College in New York. He received a master's degree in 1961 and a PhD in 1971, both in sociology from the University of Connecticut. He died June 9 of a heart attack while on a walk with his wife in New Buffalo, Michigan. He was a resident of Florida and Washington, D.C. During his career at AU, Farsoun served as chairman of the Department of Sociology for eleven years, chairman and member of numerous university-wide committees.
Go to Profile#780
Richard J. F. Day
#64198
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#781
Mary Susan McIntosh
#28554
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Mary Susan McIntosh was a British sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the United Kingdom. Early life and education Mary Susan McIntosh was born on 13 March 1936 in Hampstead, North London, to Helena Agnes Britton and her husband Albert William McIntosh, a Jedburgh-born businessman and graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who went on to become the first Professor of Marketing at the London Business School. Both parents were socialists, members of the 1917 Club and later the Communist Party. Her elder brother, Andrew Robert McIntosh, was a...
Go to Profile#782
Vili Lehdonvirta
#19678
Overall Influence
Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is also a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, an associate member of the Department of Sociology, Oxford and a former Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, London. Lehdonvirta is an economic sociologist, whose research draws on theories and approaches from economic sociology, new institutional economics, labour sociology, and science and technology studies. His research focuses on digital technologies—such as apps, platforms, and marketplaces—a...
Go to Profile#783
Richard Ofshe
#9868
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Richard Jason Ofshe is an American sociologist and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his expert testimony relating to coercion in small groups, confessions, and interrogations.
Go to Profile#784
Christian Smith
#48389
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#785
Walter Korpi
#63272
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Walter Korpi is a Swedish sociologist. Korpi is a pioneer of power resource theory. Together with the Swedish politician and sociologist Joakim Palme, he wrote the work "The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality", which has some detractors about its principles.
Go to Profile#786
Howard Zehr
#19754
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Howard J. Zehr is an American criminologist. Zehr is considered to be a pioneer of the modern concept of restorative justice. He is Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and Co-director Emeritus of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.
Go to Profile#787
John Holmwood
#61846
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Holmwood is a British sociologist. His work has focused on social stratification and the relationship between social science and explanation. His later work has concentrated on issues of pragmatism in public sociology. Holmwood is particularly known for his work concerning Talcott Parsons.
Go to Profile#788
Linda Aiken
#53360
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Linda H. Aiken, is an American nurse and researcher who is currently the Director for the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research and a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. She also is the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing Science and a professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#789
Penny M. Kris-Etherton
#90025
Overall Influence
Penny Margaret Kris-Etherton is an American dietitian. She is the Evan Pugh University Professor of Nutritional Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at Pennsylvania State University. Early life and education Kris-Etherton completed her Bachelor of Science degree at Rochester Institute of Technology before enrolling at Case Western Reserve University for her Master of Science degree. She concluded her post-secondary education at the University of Minnesota. In 1987, Kris-Etherton was recognized by Case Western as an Outstanding Alumni. In 2017, Kris-Etherton was recognized as a Dis...
Go to Profile#790
John Van Maanen
#11420
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Eastin Van Maanen is an American organizational theorist, Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and best known for his contributions to qualitative studies in management and to organizational ethnography.
Go to Profile#791
Jerry A. Jacobs
#70483
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jerry A. Jacobs is an American sociologist noted for his work on women, work, and family. He is professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since earning his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard in 1983.[a] His webpage includes links to many of his published articles as well as an essay on growing up at his parents' hotel in the Catskill Mountains.
Go to Profile#792
Lewis Yablonsky
#30397
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Lewis Yablonsky was an American sociologist, criminologist, author, and psychotherapist best known for his innovative and experiential work with gang members as well as with the Counterculture of the 1960s. He wrote seventeen books and taught for over thirty years at California State University, Northridge.
Go to Profile#793
Charles Kurzman
#21396
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Charles Kurzman is a Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in Middle East and Islamic studies. Education and employment After completing his B.A. at Harvard University in 1986, he completed his M.A. and PhD. at University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and 1992 respectively. He has been affiliated with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1998.
Go to Profile#794
Leonid Grinin
#10633
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Leonid Efimovich Grinin is a Russian philosopher of history, sociologist, political anthropologist, economist, and futurologist. Born in Kamyshin , Grinin attended Volgograd State Pedagogical University, where he got an M.A. in 1980. He got his Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1996.
Go to Profile#795
Kristin Luker
#38651
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kristin Luker is Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier she was the Doris Stevens Chair of Women's Studies at Princeton University and professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#796
Werner Cohn
#4018
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Werner Cohn was a sociologist who wrote on the sociology of Jews and of Romani people, and political sociology. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Biography Born in Berlin, Germany, Cohn received his BSS in Sociology from City College in 1951. He completed his MA and PhD at the New School for Social Research. He joined the University of British Columbia's Department of Anthropology and Sociology in 1960 and remained there until taking early retirement in 1986. Cohn's research focused on the sociology of Jews and small political movements, and he developed an interest in researching Romani people.
Go to Profile#797
Stein Ringen
#35272
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Stein Ringen is a Norwegian sociologist and political scientist. He is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford .
Go to Profile#798
W. Bradford Wilcox
#30597
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
William Bradford Wilcox is an American sociologist. He serves as director of the National Marriage Project and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Go to Profile#799
Stephen Cole
#48853
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen Cole was an American sociologist, who was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Stony Brook University . His scholarly work was on the development of the sociology of science as an academic field. He was a founding member of Columbia's Program in the Sociology of Science, along with Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, and his brother Jonathan R. Cole. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation for 20 years and produced a substantial body of both theoretical and empirical work.
Go to Profile#800
Vilen Ivanov
#54370
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Vilen Nikolaevich Ivanov – a Russian sociologist, Ph.D., Professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences ; since October, 2005 he has been a RAS adviser; member of the Bureau for Social Sciences under the RAS; Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Social Sciences; Editor-in-Chief of the Nauka. Kultura. Obshchestvo Journal; member of the Presidium of Moscow Sociological Association; honorary member of the Russian Association of Sociologists; full member of the Belarusian Academy of Social Sciences; Vice-President of the International Academy of Russia-Belarus Union; member of the Union of Russian Writers; full member of the Academy of Literature .
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