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.

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#951

Colin Mills

#68362

Overall Influence

Colin Mills is a professorial fellow in sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Mills has research interests in social inequality, social mobility, social demography, historical social mobility, and social measurement. He was editor in chief of the British Journal of Sociology from 2007 to 2008. Mills had previously served as associate editor of the journal for seven years until 2003, when Stephen Hill was chief editor.

#952

Paul C. Stern

#100626

Overall Influence

#953

Leonard Broom

#84107

Overall Influence

1911 - 2009 (98 years)

Vale Leonard Broom also known as Leonard Bloom, was an American sociologist whose career spanned seven decades. He was known for his research on discrimination and social inequality, which began with his studies on the effects of Japanese internment.

#954

Gerhard Amendt

#72589

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Gerhard Amendt is a German sociologist, and was Professor at Bremen University, in the Research Institute for Gender and Generation until his retirement in 2003. Career Amendt studied sociology in Frankfurt am Main and in London. During his studies he was involved in the Socialist German Student League. Amendt published books and essays on the welfare of children and abortion. In an article in Die Welt, he argued that domestic violence is initiated equally often by both members of the couple, and proposed that specialized counseling centers for families with unresolved violent conflicts should replace "women's shelter".

#955

William T. Bielby

#55591

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

William T. Bielby is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is Distinguished Research Scholar at the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. He was the President of the American Sociological Association in 2002–2003. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was on the faculty of University of California, Santa Barbara from 1977 to 2004, where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology for six years. From 2005 to 2007 he...

#956

Niklas Luhmann

#101008

Overall Influence

#957

Michael Baurmann

#69318

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Michael Baurmann is a German sociologist whose main research interests are general theory of sociology, rational choice theory, social epistemology, and the epistemic dimensions of democracy. He is a senior professor at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and co-editor of Analyse & Kritik.

#958

Robin Williams

#28992

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Robin Williams is a British soil scientist who is Professor of Social Research on Technology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and director of the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation. He is an interdisciplinary researcher in the field of Science and Technology Studies and contributed much to the social shaping of technology by studying the interplay between 'social' and 'technical' factors in the design and implementation of a range of technologies.

#959

Christian Giordano

Christian Giordano

#24726

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

Christian Giordano was a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist born in Lugano, Switzerland. Since 1989, he has been Professor of Ethnology and Social Anthropology and Head of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has also been teaching 'Contemporary Social Theories' at the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural Exchanges, Bucharest in Romania.

#960

Karolina Wigura

#60774

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Karolina Wigura is a sociologist, historian of ideas and journalist. She is Member of the Board of Kultura Liberalna Foundation , which publishes Kultura Liberalna, one of Poland's leading weekly magazines. She is also a Senior Fellow of the Zentrum Liberale Moderne , an assistant professor at Warsaw University's Institute of Sociology and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

#961

Bonnie Zimmerman

#53296

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Bonnie Zimmerman is an American literary critic and women's studies scholar. Her works explore women's roles, lesbian history and criticism, and women's literature. She has received numerous prestigious awards. Zimmerman retired from teaching in 2010. Her contributions to academia include classes, articles, and several books.

#962

Armand Mauss

#37579

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Armand Lind Mauss was an American sociologist specializing in the sociology of religion. He was Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Religious Studies at Washington State University and was the most frequently published author of Sociology works on Mormons during his long career. A special conference on his work in Mormon studies was held in 2013 at California's Claremont Graduate University , the papers from which were subsequently published by the University of Utah Press in the format of a Festschrift, where he was honored as "one of the most prominent Mormon intellectuals of the late twent...

#963

Jean-Marie Brohm

#50854

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Jean-Marie Brohm is a French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. Professor of sociology at the University of Montpellier III, he was also the founder of the journal Quel Corps ?, member of the editorial staff of the monthly Répertoire and is actually director of the journal Prétentaine. Brohm has written many books and is the leading proponent of the radical critique of sport in France.

#964

Y. Michal Bodemann

#53546

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Y. Michal Bodemann is professor emeritus, University of Toronto, sociologist, best known for his work on German Jewry, the concept of ideological labor and "memory theater" and his contributions to sociological praxis, interventive field work, here in particular, his interventive observation method in qualitative field work. In the approach to interventive observation, Bodemann advocates the reciprocal nature of researcher and the people in a setting, as active participation, against the notion of passive or neutral role of the observer. Bodemann's theoretical foundation continues to be infl...

#965

Kenneth Land

#80529

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Kenneth Carl Land is the John Franklin Crowell Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Duke University, where he is also a research professor at the Social Science Research Institute. He is also a fellow at the Center for the Study of Aging at Duke University Medical Center and a faculty fellow at the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy.

#966

Andrew Cherlin

#57174

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Andrew J. Cherlin is an American sociologist, focusing in economic disparities, currently at Johns Hopkins University and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

#967

Johannes Angermuller

Johannes Angermuller

#25725

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Johannes Angermuller is a discourse researcher in linguistics and sociology. He is Professor at Open University. He is also affiliated to CEMS/EHESS in Paris and the Centre for Applied Linguistics at Warwick . He mostly lives in London and Paris.

#968

John R. Sutton

#77954

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

John Raymond "Jack" Sutton is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sutton specializes in organizations, the sociology of law, and crime and punishment. His research has established relationships among unemployment, economic inequality, social welfare, race, and incarceration in modern Western democracies. He has also used quantitative analysis of complex networks to develop dynamic relational models of legal policies and management practices of employers in the United States.

#969

Joseph Gabel

#20295

Overall Influence

1912 - 2004 (92 years)

Joseph Gabel was a French Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher. His work was always strongly influenced by Marxism; he was against Stalinism and critical of the work of Louis Althusser. He left Hungary because of a Numerus Clausus for Jewish citizens and first studied Psychopathology with Eugène Minkowski, then he turned to Sociology . He taught at the Mohammed-V University of Rabat from 1965 to 1971, and at Amiens University from 1971 to 1980.

#970

Steffen Roth

#49182

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Steffen Roth is an academic and author on management, economics, and sociology. He is currently Full Professor of Management at the La Rochelle Business School and Full Professor of Social Science as well as President of the Senate of Kazimieras Simonavičius University.

#971

Danièle Hervieu-Léger

#41768

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Danièle Hervieu-Léger is a French sociologist specialized in the sociology of religion. Biography A graduate of the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris with a doctorate in sociology, she is also editor of the journal Archives des sciences sociales de la religion.

#972

Jane Lewis

#74673

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jane Elizabeth Lewis, is a British social scientist and academic, specialising in gender and welfare. She was Barnett Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford from 2000 to 2004 and Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics from 2004 to 2016.

#973

Elizabeth Shove

#65580

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Elizabeth Shove is a British sociologist who has written about social practice theory, consumption, everyday life and energy demand. She is Director of the Centre on the Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand at Lancaster University. The DEMAND Centre is one of six End Use Energy Demand Centres.

#974

Jean-Claude Chamboredon

#50549

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Jean-Claude Chamboredon was a French sociologist. He graduated from the École normale supérieure in Paris, and subsequently worked alongside Pierre Bourdieu until 1981. With Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Chamboredon wrote Le Métier de sociologue in 1967. In addition to his various sociological works, Chamboredon translated Basil Bernstein's Langage et classes sociales.

#975

Edward Benjamin Shils

#36669

Overall Influence

1915 - 2004 (89 years)

Edward Benjamin Shils was a noted and innovative management professor, who received six degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an institution at which he taught for over five decades. Shils most significant contribution to Penn was the 1973 founding of the Wharton Entrepreneurial Center, renamed in 1985 to the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Center, at Penn's Wharton School of Business. While entrepreneurship is widely accepted as an academic discipline today, the Center was the first of its kind in the world. Shils served as the Center's director until 1986.

#976

Johanna T. Dwyer

#87402

Overall Influence

Johanna T. Dwyer is an American nutrition scientist and dietitian. She is a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health's Office of Dietary Supplements and director of the Frances Stern Nutrition Center at Tufts Medical Center. Dwyer is a professor of nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

#977

Starr Roxanne Hiltz

#11214

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Starr Roxanne Hiltz is a retired Distinguished Professor of Information Science/Information Systems at New Jersey Institute of Technology . She, along with Murray Turoff , are the authors of The Network Nation, a book that is described as "the seminal book that helped define the electronic frontier".

#978

Sarah Pink

#38299

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sarah Pink is a British-born social scientist, ethnographer and social anthropologist, now based in Australia, known for her work using visual research methods such as photography, images, video and other media for ethnographic research in digital media and new technologies. She has an international reputation for her work in visual ethnography and her book Doing Visual Ethnography, first published in 2001 and now in its 4th edition, is used in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, photographic studies and media studies. She has designed or undertaken ethnographic research in UK, Spain, ...

#979

Jean Duvignaud

#27862

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Jean Duvignaud was a French novelist, sociologist and anthropologist. He was born in La Rochelle, Charente-Maritime, on February 22, 1921. Duvignaud was a secondary school teacher first at Abbeville, then at Étampes , where he taught Georges Perec. After submitting his doctoral thesis, he taught at the University of Tours. In 1972, he founded the magazine Cause commune with Georges Perec and Paul Virilio. For a time he was in a relationship with Clara Malraux, the ex-wife of novelist André Malraux.

#980

Aviad Raz

#30114

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Aviad Raz is an Israeli professor of sociology. He is director of the Behavioral Sciences program of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Academic career Aviad Raz earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University. He was a Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard and held fellowships from the Japan Foundation and the Israeli Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on religious/ethnic groups and identities in contemporary Israeli society, especially in the context of health and family studies. He studies the social and bioethical aspects of medical organizations, community genetics and patient support organizations.

#981

Orlandina de Oliveira

#63286

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Orlandina de Oliveira is a Brazilian-born, naturalized Mexican sociologist and professor. Her areas of expertise are on social inequality, the status of women and youth, and the dynamics of labor markets. She has earned numerous honors for her academic research from international universities including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Harvard University.

#982

Vince Tinto

#29462

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Vincent Tinto is a Distinguished University Professor of sociology at Syracuse University's School of Education. He is a noted theorist in the field of higher education, particularly concerning student retention and learning communities.

#983

Kieran Healy

#61229

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Kieran Healy is an Irish sociologist, a professor of sociology at Duke University, a member of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke, and a regular visitor to the Research School in Social Science at the Australian National University. He earned his PhD in sociology from Princeton University, having begun his studies at University College Cork, in Ireland. His research interests include the social basis of self-interest and altruism, the organization of exchange in human goods , and the role of volunteering in the open source software movement. In 2002, he received the American Sociological ...

#984

Danny Jorgensen

#28152

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Danny Lynn Jorgensen is an American professor at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of South Florida, for which he also served as chair from 1999 to 2006. Jorgensen's research interests include Sociology of Culture, Knowledge, and Religion, Science and Religion, Cults and Sects, American religion, Native American religions, new religions, Mormonism, Shakerism, Occultism, Neopaganism, Witchcraft, Scientology, and others.

#985

Julieta Castellanos

#40412

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Julieta Castellanos is a Honduran sociologist and the dean of the National Autonomous University of Honduras since 2009. Castellanos is known for campaigning against violence in Honduras, focusing on both drug cartels and police corruption. She has advocated for both judicial and police reform. Castellanos founded the Observatorio de la Violencia at UNAH in 2004, a center that analyzes crime statistics in Honduras. She was also a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was tasked with clarifying the facts related to the 2009 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

#986

Steven J. Gold

#75656

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Steven James Gold is a sociologist involved in research on ethnic economies, international migration, the development of ethnic communities, visual sociology, and qualitative methods. Having served as President of the International Visual Sociology Association and Chair of the American Sociological Association Section on International Migration , he is a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Sociology

#987

C. T. Vivian

#8272

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Cordy Tindell Vivian was an American minister, author, and close friend and lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Vivian resided in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded the C. T. Vivian Leadership Institute, Inc. He was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

#988

Alexandra Juhasz

#53279

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Alexandra Jeanne "Alex" Juhasz is a feminist writer and theorist of media production. Education Juhasz received her B.A. in American Studies and English at Amherst College in 1986. Shortly after graduating she participated in a year-long artist's program sponsored by the Whitney Museum . Juhasz also attended New York University and earned her doctorate with distinction in Cinema Studies . She was awarded the Society for Cinema Studies' First Prize in 1993 for her doctoral dissertation: "Re-Mediating AIDS: The Politics of Community Produced Video."

#989

Ruha Benjamin

#18611

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want .

#990

Martin King Whyte

#66778

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Martin King Whyte is an American sociology professor emeritus at Harvard University who is best known for his research on contemporary Chinese society in both the Mao and reform eras. He joined the Harvard Faculty in 2000. Previously, he served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and George Washington University. Whyte completed his graduate work at Harvard in the 1960s. Professor Whyte's primary research and teaching focuses on comparative sociology, sociology of the family, sociology of development, the sociological study of China, and the study of post-communist transitions.

#991

T.heodore P. Labuza

#103278

Overall Influence

#992

Sami Zubaida

#37307

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Sami Zubaida , left Iraq in 1953 at the age of sixteen. He is now an Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and, as a Visiting Hauser Global Professor of Law in Spring 2006, taught Law and Politics in the Islamic World at New York University School of Law. He is a regular participant at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and organized a conference at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, in 1992, which focused on the culinary cultures of the Middle East. The conference papers were published in book form in 1994.

#993

Graham Scambler

#82776

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Graham Scambler is a sociologist, specializing in medical sociology. Life and work Scambler completed a B.Sc in Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Surrey in 1971, followed by a Ph.D. in Sociology

#994

Talja Blokland

#97778

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Talja V. Blokland is a Dutch and German social scientist and urban researcher. She studied sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and was a PhD student in social sciences at the Amsterdam School for Social Research from 1994 to 1997, and at the New School University in 1996. After her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Yale University and Manchester University. She was appointed as part-time Gradus Hendriks Professor in Community Development at Erasmus University and became a senior researcher and program director at the OTB Institute for Urban, Housing and Mobility Studies at the Delft University of Technology.

#995

Eileen M. Crimmins

#80893

Overall Influence

Eileen M. Crimmins is the AARP Chair in Gerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology of the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on the connections between socioeconomic factors and life expectancy and other health outcomes.

#996

Erdman B. Palmore

#44960

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Erdman Ballagh Palmore is an American gerontologist. He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Sociology at Duke University and has written several books, including Facts on Aging Quiz, and numerous articles on aging.

#997

Rauf Ceylan

#100094

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Rauf Ceylan is a German-Turkish sociologist and author. He is professor of sociology of religion and sociology of migration at the University of Osnabrück. Life and career Ceylan was born into an Kurdish family in Duisburg, Germany. From 1996 to 2001 Ceylan studied at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies in Düsseldorf. From 2001 to 2006 he was also a research associate there. He also worked in parallel from 2001 to 2002 at the Institute for Urban and Regional Development and studied at the Ruhr-University Bochum. In 2006 he graduated with magna cum laude on social segregation. Between 2...

#998

Franziska Schutzbach

#80143

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Franziska Schutzbach is a gender researcher and sociologist living in Switzerland. Life and work Franziska Schutzbach studied sociology, media studies and gender studies at the University of Basel and graduated in 2008 with a masters degree. She defended her doctorate in 2019 at the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Basel with her dissertation on "Population politics, gender and health. The example of the World Health Organization" .

#999

Keith Hampton

#45510

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Keith N. Hampton is professor of media and information at Michigan State University. His research interests focus on the relationship between information and communication technology, such as the Internet, social networks, and community democratic engagement, social isolation, and participation in the urban environment.

#1000

Nachman Ben-Yehuda

#46891

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Nachman Ben-Yehuda is a professor emeritus and former dean of the department of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Masada myth One of his notable subjects of research is the fall of the Masada fortress, the last refuge of a Jewish group, the Sicarii, to the Romans in 73 CE. The Sicarii committed mass suicide rather than surrender to slavery.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions