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

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Subdiscipline

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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#801

Amber Case

#19023

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (37 years)

Amber Case is an American cyborg anthropologist, user experience designer and public speaker. She studies the interaction between humans and technology. Biography Case was born in about 1986. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology from Lewis & Clark College in 2008, having written a thesis about cell phones. In 2008, she co-founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and computers.

#802

Leonard Beeghley

#25147

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Leonard Beeghley is Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of Florida since 1975. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Riverside in 1975 and has since published seven books over the course of his career. Two of these seven books, The Emergence of Sociological Theory and The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States "become standard references in the field." His interests include the relationships between social stratification, public policy and societal problems. He has been covering the socio-economic class structure of the United States in five...

#803

Menachem Friedman

Menachem Friedman

#48812

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Menachem Friedman was an Israeli Emeritus Professor of sociology at Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan. His expertise was religion and the confrontations between religious and secular Judaism in modern history. He also studied the modern process of Halachic decision making. Friedman was considered one of the leading researchers of Haredi Judaism.

#804

Olive Banks

#44566

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Olive Banks was an English professor at Leicester University who worked upon the sociology of education and the history of feminism. Early life Banks was born in Enfield Highway, Middlesex, the only child of Herbert Alfred Davies and Jessie Louise Tebby. She married Joseph Ambrose Banks in June 1944 and they both entered the London School of Economics to study sociology. Her PhD thesis was turned into her first book, Parity and Prestige in English Secondary Education: a Study in Educational Sociology .

#805

David R. Segal

#70902

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David R. Segal is an American sociologist who specializes in civil-military relations, military sociology, and military organization, in the tradition of Morris Janowitz. He is a distinguished scholar-teacher and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Maryland. He is the founding director of the Center for Research on Military Organization, and is a former president of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, as well as a former editor of the journal Armed Forces & Society. He has also served as president of the District of Columbia Sociological Society and of t...

#806

Sherene Razack

#55766

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Sherene Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. As a feminist critical race scholar, her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is best known for her contributions to feminist and critical race studies about discrimination against Muslim and Indigenous women in Canada, systemic racism in the Canadian justice system, and colonial violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network Racial Violence Hub .

#807

Émile Poulat

#40508

Overall Influence

1920 - 2014 (94 years)

Émile Poulat , was until 1954 a Catholic priest, associated with the Prêtres Ouvriers movement, and thereafter a French historian and sociologist. Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, he was also director of research at CNRS and historian of the contemporary church. He was a founding member of the Group of Sociology of Religion, director and member of the editorial boards of several journals including Politica Hermetica. His research concentrated on the conflict between Catholic culture and modern culture in the history of contemporary Catholicism.

#808

David R. Gibson

#68916

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

David Richard Gibson is an American sociologist and associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a scholar of social interaction, social networks, organizations, decision-making and deception. In a review article, Eviatar Zerubavel described him "as one of sociology's leading conversational analysts". His publication Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis won the 2013 Melvin Pollner Prize for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.

#809

Volkmar Sigusch

#51181

Overall Influence

1940 - 2023 (83 years)

Volkmar Sigusch was a German sexologist, physician and sociologist. From 1973 to 2006, he was the director of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft at the clinic of Goethe University Frankfurt. Sigusch was born in Bad Freienwalde. He studied medicine, psychology and philosophy in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Hamburg. In 1966 and 1972, Sigusch obtained his German M. D. and PhD at the university in Hamburg. He then worked from 1973 as a professor at Goethe University. In 1972, Sigusch founded the Institute for Sexology at the University Hospital in Frankfurt and was its director until his reti...

#810

Hubert Knoblauch

#58701

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Hubert Knoblauch is a German sociologist. He is known for his work on Sociology of knowledge, Sociology of Religion, Qualitative research and Videography. Biography Knoblauch has a degree in Sociology from the University of Konstanz where he also did his PhD. He did research and taught among others at the University of California at Berkeley, King’s College London, the Universities of Konstanz, Zurich, Bern and Vienna. From 1996 he was a Heisenberg scholar of the German Research Association . In 2000 he became Professor in Religious Studies at the Theological Faculty of the University of Zurich.

#811

Jack Nusan Porter

#58224

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Jack Nusan Porter is an American writer, sociologist, human rights and social activist, and former treasurer and vice-president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is a former assistant professor of social science at Boston University and a former research associate at Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute. Currently, he is a research associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, where he conducts research on Israeli-Russian relations. Some of his research focuses include the life of Golda Meir, the application of mathematical and statistical models to predict genocide and terrorism, and modes of resistance to genocide.

#812

Michael Schwartz

#57407

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Herman Schwartz is an American sociologist and prominent critic of the Iraq war. He is a Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York, where he also serves as faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies and Chair of the Sociology Department. Schwartz has written extensively in the areas of economic sociology and social movements.

#813

Michel Pinçon

#49686

Overall Influence

1942 - 2022 (80 years)

Michel Pinçon was a French sociologist. He served as and taught at the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Most of his work was written in collaboration with his wife, Monique Pinçon-Charlot, and devoted to the study of the upper middle class and social elites.

#814

John L. Hagan

#78115

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John L. Hagan is an American sociologist focusing on criminology. He is currently the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and University Professor Emeritus of Law and Sociology at University of Toronto and also formerly the Dahlstrom Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Law at University of North Carolina .

#815

Mark C. Suchman

#63000

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Mark C. Suchman is an American sociologist, Professor in Sociology at Brown University, known for his work on Institutional theory, and particularly on "managing legitimacy." Biography Suchman obtained his AB in sociology at Harvard University in 1983 and his MA in sociology in 1985 at Stanford University. At Stanford he also obtained his PhD in sociology in 1994 with the thesis entitled "On Advice of Counsel: Law Firms and Venture Capital Funds as Information Intermediaries in the Structuration of Silicon Valley", under the supervision of W. Richard Scott. In addition, he holds a JD from Yal...

#816

Rory M. McVeigh

#24246

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Rory M. McVeigh is an American sociologist, Nancy Reeves Dreux Chair professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements and former chair of the department of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. From 2015 through 2020 he served as one of the lead editors of the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association. He is widely cited in the field of social movements, particularly right-wing movements. He also edited the academic journal Mobilization from 2008 through 2015 and is the current the co-editor of the acade...

#817

Richard Felson

#47136

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Richard Felson is a professor of Crime, Law, and Justice and Sociology at The Pennsylvania State University. He is also adjunct professor of Sociology at State University of New York at Albany. Research on Aggression and Coercive Actions In 1994 Felson co-authored the controversial book "Violence, Aggression and Coercive Actions: A Social-Interactionist Perspective" with James Tedeschi. This book challenged the theory that rape was a crime motivated by an aggressive desire to dominate the victim. Felson and Tedeschi argued that sexual fulfillment was a motive of rapists.

#818

Didier Demazière

#59841

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Didier Demazière is a French sociologist specializing in the study of unemployment; in 2012, he was a Senior Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research., assigned to the Centre de sociologie des organisations , in partnership with Sciences Po.

#819

Ray Pawson

#57287

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Ray Pawson is Professor of Social Research Methodology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Pawson's main interest lies in research methodology. He has written widely on the philosophy and practice of research, covering methods qualitative and quantitative, pure and applied, contemporaneous and historical. He is the author of 'Realist Synthesis', a new approach of literature review that, in the last years, has widely influenced systematic review practices of complex programmes and policies all over the world.

#820

Frane Adam

#42259

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Frane Adam is a Slovenian sociologist, editor and former dissident political activist. During the early 1970s, he was one of the leaders of the student protest movement in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.

#821

Mary C. Waters

#52430

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Mary C. Waters is an American sociologist and author. She is a professor at Harvard University. Personal Waters grew up in Brooklyn, New York and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is married and has three children.

#822

Peter B. Clarke

#11370

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Peter Bernard Clarke was a British scholar of religion and founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Academic career Clarke served as Professor Emeritus of the History and Sociology of Religion at King's College London, having taught there from 1994 to 2003, the Director of the Centre for New Religions at King's College, and a professorial member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford ; earlier in his career he was Professor of African History at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

#823

James Burk

#66291

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

James S. Burk is an American sociologist and professor at Texas A&M University. He is most notable as a scholar of military sociology, political sociology, and the history of sociology. He is a central figure in the study of civil-military relations in democratic societies.

#824

Elise M. Boulding

Elise M. Boulding

#19952

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Elise M. Boulding was a Norwegian-born American Quaker sociologist, and author credited as a major contributor to creating the academic discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies. Her holistic, multidimensional approach to peace research sets her apart as an important scholar and activist in multiple fields. Her written works span several decades and range from discussion of family as a foundation for peace, to Quaker spirituality to reinventing the international "global culture". Particularly of note is her emphasis on women and family in the peace process. Boulding was inducted into the Colo...

#825

Reiner Grundmann

#29371

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Reiner Grundmann , is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Nottingham and Director of its interdisciplinary STS Research Priority Group. He is a German sociologist and political scientist who has resided in the UK since 1997. Previous appointments include Aston University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

#826

Czarina Saloma

#63121

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Czarina Aya-ay Saloma-Akpedonu is a Filipino sociologist who is the current dean of the School of Social Sciences at Ateneo de Manila University. Education Saloma-Akpedonu has a bachelor's degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman, a master's degree from Peking University in China, and a doctorate from Bielefeld University in Germany.

#827

Carol Cohn

#10333

Overall Influence

Carol Cohn is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Cohn is recognised for addressing issues of gender in global politics, particularly conflict and security issues. She has published in academic and policy contexts with major research interests lying in the realm of gender and armed conflict, the gendered discourses of US national security elites and gender mainstreaming in international security institutions. In addition to her research, Cohn facilitates training and workshops ...

#828

Michael Hout

#40720

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael Hout is a Professor of Sociology at New York University. His contributions to sociology include using demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. His current work used the General Social Survey to estimate the social standing of occupations introduced into the census classification since 1990. He digitized all occupational information in the GSS and coded it all to the 2010 standard. Other recent projects used the GSS panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and happiness. In 2006, Mike and Claude Fischer published Century of Difference, a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States.

#829

Wendy Griswold

#53936

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Wendy Griswold is an American sociologist, professor of sociology and the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, prior to that she was the Arthur E. Andersen Research and Teaching Professor, also at Northwestern University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and well-known for her contributions to the sociology of culture and the sociology of literature. She is the author of nine books, among them, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria won the "Best Book" award from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association in 2002 and the academi...

#830

Don Slater

#36994

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Don Slater is a British sociologist. A reader in sociology at the London School of Economics, Slater has researched the use of light in public infrastructure, and new media. He became chief editor of the British Journal of Sociology in 2013, succeeding Richard T. Wright. Slater was replaced by Nigel Dodd in 2014.

#831

Igor Škamperle

#56481

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Igor Škamperle is a Slovenian sociologist, cultural theorist, novelist, essayist, mountaineer and translator. He was born in a Slovene-speaking family in Trieste, Italy. He studied comparative literature and cultural sociology at the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in 1990. He continued his studies at the Universities of Bologna and Perugia, where he studied cultural and social changes in the Renaissance period and the cosmologic thought of Giordano Bruno. Since 1999, he works as a professor of sociology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.

#832

Joseph Galaskiewicz

#61090

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Joseph Galaskiewicz is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, known for his work on interorganizational relations and social network analysis. Biography Born in Chicago, Galaskiewicz obtained his BA in Sociology at the Loyola University Chicago in 1971. He continued his studies at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his MA in Sociology in 1973 advised by Morris Janowitz, and his PhD in Sociology in 1976 under supervision of Edward O. Laumann.

#833

Simon Schwartzman

#24092

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Simon Schwartzman is a Brazilian social scientist. He has published extensively, with many books, book chapters and academic articles in the areas of comparative politics, sociology of science, social policy, and education, with emphasis on Brazil and Latin America. He was the President of the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics and is a retired professor from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He is member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, holder of the Grand Cross of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit . He is currently associate researcher at the Institute for...

#834

Sabine Hark

#43048

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Sabine Hark is a German feminist and sociologist, and sits on the editorial board of the journal Feministische Studien . Education She studied sociology and political science at Mainz and Frankfurt am Main. She received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1995.

#835

Charles Bidwell

#59948

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Charles Edward Bidwell was a sociologist and the William Claude Reavis Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his contributions to the sociology of education. His research topics included the formal and informal organization of schools, the role of schools in society and how their role has changed over time. Bidwell was editor of the American Journal of Sociology, the Sociology of Education and the American Journal of Education. In 2007, he received the Willard Waller Award in recognition of his career of distinguished scholarship.

#836

Ruud Koopmans

#52341

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ruud Koopmans is a Dutch sociologist and professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on migration, social integration and transnationalization. Biography A native of Uithoorn, Ruud Koopmans studied political science at the University of Amsterdam , where he obtained a MA in 1987. In 1992, he received a PhD from UvA for his dissertation on the post-war social movements and political system in West Germany, which he wrote under the supervision of Hanspeter Kriesi. After a short stint as researcher at the Social and Cultural Planning Office in The Hague, Koopmans joined ...

#837

Robert Burgess

#40482

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sir Robert George Burgess DL, FAcSS was a British sociologist and academic. He was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester in 1999, succeeding Ken Edwards. He was President of the British Sociological Association 1989–1991 and chair of the board of GSM London.

#838

Andrew Arato

#14256

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Andrew Arato is a professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at The New School, best known for his influential book Civil Society and Political Theory, coauthored with Jean L. Cohen. He is also known for his work on critical theory and constitutions and was from 1994 to 2014 co-editor of the journal Constellations with Nancy Fraser and Nadia Urbinati.

#839

Samuel Heilman

#18534

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Samuel C. Heilman is a professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, who focuses on social ethnography of contemporary Jewish Orthodox movements. Personal Heilman was born in May, 1946, to Henry and Lucia Heilman, both Polish survivors of the Holocaust who were saved by Oskar Schindler. After World War II, the family went to West Germany with the encouragement of the American occupation forces, who wanted a Jewish presence there. Heilman is married to Ellin Marcia Heilman, a psychologist in private practice. Together, they live in New Rochelle, New York and have four c...

#840

Anthony Bryk

#42846

Overall Influence

Anthony S. Bryk is an American educational researcher and served as the ninth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Biography Bryk earned his B.S. from Boston College and his Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before becoming president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2008, he held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2004, he was the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded the Center for Urban School Improvement.

#841

Jamshid Behnam

#44493

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Jamshid Behnam was an Iranian sociologist, writer, and translator. He is known for his work in the development of sociology and modernization in 20th century–Iran. He was a published author of books on Demographics, Sociology of Iran, Family Structure, and Modernity.

#842

Gregor Tomc

#31132

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Gregor Tomc also known as Grega Tomc is a Slovenian sociologist, musician and activist. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he was the founder and member of the Slovenian punk rock band Pankrti. Biography Tomc was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He is the younger half-brother of the columnist and historian Alenka Puhar. Their mother Helena Puhar was a renowned pedagogue and a partisan veteran from Kranj, who was a grandnephew of the photographer Janez Puhar, inventor of a process for photography on glass.

#843

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Anne Fausto-Sterling

#28946

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Anne Fausto-Sterling is an American sexologist who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality. She is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University.

#844

Cecilia Menjívar

#35734

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Cecilia Menjívar, born and raised in El Salvador, is an American sociologist who has made significant contributions to the study of international migration, the structural roots of inequalities, state power, gender-based violence against women, and legal regimes. Menjívar is currently a Professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she is the Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair.

#845

Anson D. Shupe

#28475

Overall Influence

1948 - 2015 (67 years)

Anson D. Shupe, Jr. was an American sociologist noted for his studies of religious groups and their countermovements, family violence and clergy misconduct. Work Shupe was a professor of sociology at the Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne campus at Fort Wayne, Indiana. He completed his doctorate in political sociology at Indiana University in 1975 and held office in various professional associations, including the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Association for the Scientific Study of Religion. Shupe often collaborated with other scholars, notably David G.

#846

Joseph Woelfel

#43385

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Joseph Woelfel is an American sociologist. Born in Buffalo, New York, Dr. Woelfel is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

#847

Paul Hollander

#16263

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Paul Hollander was a Hungarian-born political sociologist, communist-studies scholar, and non-fiction author. He is known for his criticisms of communism and left-wing politics in general. Background Born in 1932 in Budapest, he lived in Hungary with his Jewish family. When the Nazis persecuted Jews throughout the city, he had to hide from them when he was 12. His family was deported to work, after the communists came to power.

#848

Edward Laumann

#59332

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Edward Otto Laumann is an American sociologist. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Laumann earned his Ph.D. in the Harvard Department of Social Relations in 1964, where he worked with George Homans, Talcott Parsons, and Harrison White. He served as Dean of the social sciences and Provost at Chicago. He is best known for his work on social stratification, urban sociology, organizational sociology, health and aging, and is widely recognized as a pioneer in the areas of social network analysis and the sociology of sexuality. In 2013, he was elec...

#849

Ruth Milkman

#63592

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ruth Milkman is an American sociologist of labor and labor movements. She is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and the director of research at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Between 1988 and 2009 Milkman taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directed the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

#850

Sara Arber

#77476

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Sara Lynne Arber is a British sociologist and Professor at University of Surrey. Arber has previously held the position of President of the British Sociological Association and Vice-President of the European Sociological Association . She is well known for her work on gender and ageing, inequalities in health and has pioneered research in the new field of sociology of sleep.

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