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,
#101
Eileen Barker
#2268
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Eileen Vartan Barker is a professor in sociology, an emeritus member of the London School of Economics , and a consultant to that institution's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. She is the chairperson and founder of the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements and has written studies about cults and new religious movements.
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Andre Gunder Frank
#1597
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
Go to Profile#103
Mustafa Emirbayer
#13342
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#104
Edgar Morin
#622
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information who has been recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought" , and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. As he explains: He holds two bachelors: one in history and geography and one in law. He never did a Ph.D. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Euro...
Go to Profile#105
Nan Lin
#7295
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Nan Lin is the Oscar L. Tang Family Professor of Sociology of the Trinity College, Duke University. He is most notable for his research and writing on social networks and social capital. Biography Lin received his undergraduate degree from Tunghai University, Taiwan, in 1960; his M.A. from Syracuse University in 1963; and his doctorate degree from Michigan State University in 1966. He entered the sociology department at the University at Albany, SUNY in 1971, became a full professor there in 1976 and served as department chair from 1979 to 1982. In 1979, he established contacts with sociologi...
Go to Profile#106
Paul Gilroy
#2334
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London . Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".
Go to Profile#107
John W. Meyer
#4796
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
John Wilfred Meyer is a sociologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Meyer has contributed fundamental ideas to the field of sociology, especially in the areas of education, organizations, and global and transnational sociology. He is best known for the development of the neo-institutional perspective on globalization, known as world society or World Polity Theory. In 2015, he became the recipient of American Sociological Association's highest honor - W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award.
Go to Profile#108
David J. McClements
#27695
Overall Influence
David Julian McClements is a British food scientist who is a distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Food Science. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, American Chemical Society, and Institute of Food Technologists, as well as the editor of the Annual Review of Food Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#109
Norman K. Denzin
#12082
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Norman Kent Denzin was an American professor of sociology. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was research professor of communications, College of Communications scholar, professor of sociology, professor of cinema studies, professor in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Denzin's academic interests included interpretive theory, performance studies, qualitative research methodology, and the study of media, culture and society.
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Michael Löwy
#2746
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales . Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, José Carlos Mariátegui, Lucien Goldmann and Franz Kafka, he received the CNRS Silver Medal in 1994.
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Bill Felstiner
#6419
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
William L. F. Felstiner , usually known as Bill Felstiner, is a socio-legal scholar. Education and early career Bill Felstiner was born in New York, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College. He received his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1958. In 1965, he was hired as regional legal advisor of the USAID Mission to Greece & Turkey and in due course appointed assistant director of the US AID Mission to India .
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Wolfgang Streeck
#6219
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Early life Streeck was born "just outside Münster", the son of refugees – ethnic Germans from eastern Europe displaced at the end of the Second World War. His mother was a Sudeten German from Czechoslovakia.
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Yuri Levada
#4176
Overall Influence
1930 - 2006 (76 years)
Yuri Alexandrovich Levada was a well known Russian sociologist, political scientist and the founder of the Levada Center. Scientific activity to 1988 In 1952 Levada graduated from the Philosophical faculty of the Moscow State University. He got a PhD in philosophy in 1966 with a dissertation on the sociological problems of religion.
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Andrew Abbott
#6367
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Andrew Delano Abbott is an American sociologist and social theorist working at the University of Chicago. He is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Sociology and the college. His research topics range from occupations and professions to the philosophy of methods, the history of academic disciplines, to the sociology of knowledge. He is also the founder of the field of sequence analysis. He was the editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 2000 to 2016.
Go to Profile#115
Donald Black
#9777
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#116
Ann Oakley
#6954
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ann Rosamund Oakley is a British sociologist, feminist, and writer. She is professor and founder-director of the Social Science Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education of the University College London, and in 2005 partially retired from full-time academic work to concentrate on her writing, especially on new novels.
Go to Profile#117
Stephen Mennell
#9505
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen Mennell is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College Dublin. Mennell was educated at Huddersfield New College in West Yorkshire, and gained his BA in Economics in 1966 from St Catharine's College, Cambridge and his Doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. He was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow at Harvard University. After returning from America, he taught at the University of Exeter, England, from 1967 to 1990, when he became Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University in Australia, before returning to Europe as Professor at University College Dublin in 1993.
Go to Profile#118
Douglas Massey
#6712
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Douglas Steven Massey is an American sociologist. Massey is currently a professor of Sociology at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and is an adjunct professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Robert Nisbet
#5770
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Robert Alexander Nisbet was an American conservative sociologist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Riverside, and an Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University.
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Gloria Steinem
#118
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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Michael R. Gottfredson
#5660
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Ryan Gottfredson is the former President of the University of Oregon, serving from August 1, 2012 to August 6, 2014. Biography He has a B.A from the University of California, Davis, a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany.
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Colin Crouch
#4143
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Colin John Crouch, is an English sociologist and political scientist. He coined the post-democracy concept in 2000 in his book Coping with Post-Democracy. Colin Crouch is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
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Edwin Lemert
#13807
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Edwin M. Lemert was a sociology professor at the University of California. Lemert was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He acquired his bachelor's degree in sociology from Miami University and his doctorate from Ohio State University . He distinctly specialized in sociology and anthropology. For a short period of time he became a professor at Kent State and at Western Michigan Universities.
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Harvey Molotch
#13036
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Harvey Luskin Molotch is an American sociologist known for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He helped create the field of environmental sociology and has advanced qualitative methods in the social sciences. In recent years, Molotch helped develop a new field—the sociology of objects. He is currently a professor of Sociology and of Metropolitan Studies at New York University. His Introduction to Sociology is featured as one of NYU Open Education's courses available to stream freely. Other courses that he teaches include Approaches to Metropolitan Studies and Urban Objects.
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Lewis A. Coser
#7413
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Lewis Alfred Coser was a German-American sociologist, serving as the 66th president of the American Sociological Association in 1975. Biography Born in Berlin as Ludwig Cohen, his father was a successful Jewish industrialist. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris and in 1941 he left war-torn Paris for the United States where he married Rose Laub. In the Fifties, he enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, taking his PhD at the age of forty-one. Coser first taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California. He then founded the sociology department at Bran...
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Eric Dunning
#12952
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Eric Dunning was a British sociologist who was Emeritus Professor of sociology at the University of Leicester. Career Eric Dunning was a pioneer in the sociology of sport and the founder, with Patrick Murphy and John Williams, of the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research. He was the author of a number of books and articles on sport and the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. Although officially retired, Dunning remained an Emeritus Professor of the University of Leicester as well as a Visiting Professor at the Chester Centre for Research into Sport and Society. Dunning was also...
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Tom R. Burns
#12440
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Tom R. Burns is an American/Swedish sociologist, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and founder of the Uppsala Theory Circle. Biography He grew up in Arkansas, and was in a Franciscan Monastery for a number of years. As a teenager, he attended Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, before going to Stanford University to study physics and mathematics, where he obtained his BS in physics in 1959. In the years 1959–60 he studied physics and sociology for almost two years at the University of Warsaw, Poland as an exchange student from Stanford. He returned ...
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Trevor Pinch
#5504
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Trevor J. Pinch was a British sociologist, part-time musician and chair of the science and technology studies department at Cornell University. In 2018, he won the J.D. Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science for "distinguished contributions to Science and Technology Studies over the course of [a] career."
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Arlie Russell Hochschild
#1855
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#130
Paul Willis
#6169
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Paul Willis is a British social scientist known for his work in sociology and cultural studies. Paul Willis' work is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, his work emphasizing consumer culture, socialization, music, and popular culture. He was born in Wolverhampton and received his education at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Birmingham. He worked at Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and subsequently at the University of Wolverhampton. He was a Professor of Social/Cultural Ethnography at Keele University. In the autumn of 2010, he...
Go to Profile#131
Jock Young
#2531
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist. Biography Jock Young was educated at the London School of Economics. His PhD was an ethnography of drug use in Notting Hill, West London, out of which he developed the concept of moral panic. The research was published as The Drugtakers. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conferences and a group of critical criminologists in which milieu he wrote the groundbreaking, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance in 1973, with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton and The Manufacture of News .
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Stanislav Andreski
#11565
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Stanisław Andrzejewski was a Polish-British sociologist. He is known for his indictment of the "pretentious nebulous verbosity" endemic in the modern social sciences in his classic work Social Sciences as Sorcery .
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Bryan R. Wilson
#4255
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Bryan Ronald Wilson , was Reader Emeritus in Sociology at the University of Oxford and President of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion . He became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1963.
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Andrea Dworkin
#838
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
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Julia Serano
#1486
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Julia Michelle Serano is an American writer, musician, spoken-word performer, transgender and bisexual activist, and biologist. She is known for her transfeminist books, such as Whipping Girl , Excluded , and Outspoken . She is also a public speaker who has given many talks at universities and conferences. Her writing is frequently featured in queer, feminist, and popular culture magazines.
Go to Profile#136
Hans Joas
#5156
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans Joas is a German sociologist and social theorist. Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2011 until 2014 he was a Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies ; from 2002 until 2011 he was the Director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. Since 2000 he has also been Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought and a Member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Hans Joas is Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brande...
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Thomas Fararo
#16722
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Thomas J. Fararo was Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. After earning a Ph.D. in sociology at Syracuse University in 1963, he received a three-year postdoctoral fellowship for studies in pure and applied mathematics at Stanford University . In 1967, he joined the faculty of University of Pittsburgh; during 1972-1973, he was visiting professor at the University of York in England.
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Giovanni Arrighi
#4414
Overall Influence
1937 - 2009 (72 years)
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
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Basil Bernstein
#5143
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Basil Bernard Bernstein was a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education. He worked on socio-linguistics and the connection between the manner of speaking and social organization.
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Deena Weinstein
#7572
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Deena Weinstein is a professor of sociology at DePaul University whose research focuses on popular culture. She is particularly well known for her research on heavy metal culture, on which subject she wrote a ground-breaking book, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology , later published in a revised and updated version as Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture .
Go to Profile#141
Adam Podgórecki
#7394
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Adam Podgórecki was a sociologist and one of the founders of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law. Podgórecki was also one of the founders of the first institute at Warsaw University which was devoted to the social scientific studies of law. He moved to Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada, and took up a Chair in sociology and anthropology, when the communists expelled him from his professorship for "anti-communist academic activities". "He worked tirelessly and fearlessly" to ensure the independence of the sociology of law "against the pull of the large disciplines of sociology on the ...
Go to Profile#142
Yogendra Singh
#16670
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Yogendra Singh was an Indian sociologist. He was one of the founders of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, where he was a professor emeritus of Sociology, and where he has been a professor since 1971. Prior to that, he went to Stanford University, USA in 1967–68 on a Fulbright Fellowship and was Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, Jodhpur University.
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Robert J. Sampson
#5109
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 2005 through 2010, Sampson served as the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In 2011–2012, he was elected as the President of the American Society of Criminology.
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James Q. Wilson
#809
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
James Quinn Wilson was an American political scientist and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board , and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT.
Go to Profile#145
David G. Bromley
#1354
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David G. Bromley is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult movement.
Go to Profile#146
Shunya Yoshimi
#20350
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Shunya Yoshimi is a Japanese sociologist. He is a professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. He is one of the most influential cultural sociologists in Japan and best known for helping introduce cultural studies to Japan. His research topics include cultural studies, media studies and urban sociology.
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Gail Dines
#5004
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Gail Dines is professor emerita of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. A radical feminist, Dines specializes in the study of pornography. Described in 2010 as the world's leading anti-pornography campaigner, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. Dines is co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality .
Go to Profile#148
Steve Woolgar
#3461
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stephen William Woolgar is a British sociologist. He has worked closely with Bruno Latour, with whom he wrote Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts . Education Stephen Woolgar holds a BA in engineering and a PhD in sociology, both at the University of Cambridge.
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Walter W. Powell
#9440
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Walter W. Powell , born August 15, 1951, is a contemporary American sociologist. Powell is Professor of Education, Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education since 1999 and is known for his contributions to organizational theory, in particular to the new institutionalism and network theory. Since 2000, he has been an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.
Go to Profile#150
Robert F. Bales
#9985
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Robert Freed Bales was an American social psychologist. He specialized in small group interpersonal interaction and developed the SYMLOG method of group observation. Biography Bales was born in Ellington, Missouri on March 9, 1916. He received a B.A. and M.S. in sociology from the University of Oregon. In 1945 he received a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. Bales then became a professor at Harvard, working in the university's Laboratory of Human Relations. In 1950, Bales published a book titled Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups in which he describ...
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