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.

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#1001

Neil Guppy

#66316

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Neil Guppy is a professor and sociologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He was the department head of sociology until 2013. He has written several works relating to social inequality and education.

#1002

Carl R. May

#67142

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Carl May FAcSS is a British sociologist. He researches in the fields of medical sociology and science and technology studies. Formerly based at Southampton University and Newcastle University, he is now Professor of Medical Sociology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Carl May was elected an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences in 2006. He was appointed a Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research in 2010. His work falls into two distinct themes.

#1003

R. Scott Frey

#81507

Overall Influence

1951 - 2018 (67 years)

R. Scott Frey was an American sociologist at the University of Tennessee. He specialized in the interrelated areas of public policy, environment, and social change and social development. His later work centered on risk and globalization issues.

#1004

Peter H. Rossi

#31511

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Peter Henry Rossi was a prominent sociologist best known for his research on the origin of homelessness, and documenting the changing face of American homelessness in the 1980s. Rossi was also known for his work devising ways to evaluate federally funded initiatives in education, health services, crime control, and housing. He influentially applied his sociological expertise to affect related policy-making and funding agencies. At his death, he was the Stuart A. Rice professor emeritus of Sociology and the director emeritus of the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University o...

#1005

Andrew Ross

#17225

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Andrew Ross , a Scottish-born social activist and analyst, is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University . He has authored and edited numerous books, and written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organisation of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labour in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth.

#1006

Víctor Nee

#41281

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Victor G. Nee is an American sociologist and professor at Cornell University, known for his work in economic sociology, inequality and immigration. He published a book with Richard Alba entitled Remaking the American Mainstream proposing a neo-assimilation theory to explain the assimilation of post-1965 immigrant minorities and the second generation. In 2012, he published Capitalism from Below co-authored with Sonja Opper examining the rise of economic institutions of capitalism in China. Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University.

#1007

Edgar Z. Friedenberg

#37706

Overall Influence

1921 - 2000 (79 years)

Edgar Zodaig Friedenberg was an American scholar of education and gender studies best known for The Vanishing Adolescent and Coming of Age in America . The latter was a finalist for the 1966 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

#1008

Håkan Håkansson

#18650

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Håkan Håkansson is a Swedish organizational theorist, and Professor of International Management at the BI Norwegian Business School, known for his work on business networks. Biography Håkansson attended the Technical High School in Örebro, where he graduated as engineer in 1967. He obtained his BS in Business Administration in 1970 at the Uppsala University, where in 1975 he also obtained his PhD in Business Administration with the thesis, entitled "Studies in Industrial Purchasing with special reference to Determinants of Communication Patterns."

#1009

Aage B. Sørensen

#54047

Overall Influence

1941 - 2001 (60 years)

Aage Bottger Sørensen was born on May 13, 1941, in Silkeborg, Denmark, and died on April 18, 2001, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. In 1967, Sørensen was the first recipient of a master's degree in Sociology from the University of Copenhagen. He went on to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he earned a Ph.D. in Social Relations in 1971. From 1971 to 1984, Professor Sørensen taught at the University of Wisconsin, serving as department chair in Sociology from 1979 to 1982. He was appointed to the faculty at Harvard University in 1984. As chair of the Sociology Department from 1984 until 1992, he led a substantial renewal of its faculty and programs.

#1010

David Walls

#31868

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Walls is an activist and academic who has made significant contributions to Appalachian studies and to the popular understanding of social movements. He is professor emeritus of sociology at Sonoma State University in California, where he was dean of extended education from 1984 to 2000.

#1011

Dražen Lalić

#62401

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Dražen Lalić is a Croatian educator and academic at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Zagreb and one of the better known sociologists in the country. Lalić graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences in 1983 and received a doctorate in sociology from the Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb in 1993. Lalić has authored or co-authored several articles and books on various topics, including elections in Croatia, youth subcultures, non-governmental organizations.

#1012

Milton Diamond

#24186

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Milton Diamond is an American Professor Emeritus of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. After a career in the study of human sexuality, Diamond retired from the university in December 2009 but continued with his research and writing until retiring fully in 2018.

#1013

Sara McLanahan

#92946

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Sara McLanahan was an American sociologist. She is known for her work on the family as a major institution in the American stratification system. Her early work examined the consequences of divorce and remarriage for parents and children, and her later work focused on families formed by unmarried parents. She was interested in the effects of family structure on social inequality and the roles that public policies can play in addressing the needs of families and children.

#1014

Carl Bowman

#38901

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Carl Bowman is an American sociologist, who is widely recognized for his studies of Anabaptist religious groups and is perhaps the foremost expert on the social and cultural history of the Church of the Brethren.

#1015

Riley E. Dunlap

#105144

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#1016

Vahakn Dadrian

#24181

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Vahakn Norair Dadrian was an Armenian-American sociologist and historian, born in Turkey, professor of sociology, historian, and an expert on the Armenian genocide. Life Dadrian was born in 1926 in Turkey to a family that lost many members during the Armenian genocide. Dadrian first studied mathematics at the University of Berlin, after which he decided to switch to a completely different field, and studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, and later, international law at the University of Zürich. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. Dadrian understood many ...

#1017

Anne Waldschmidt

#61502

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Anne Waldschmidt is a German sociologist. She is a professor at the University of Cologne and teaches disability studies and sociology and politics of rehabilitation. She holds the first university position for disability studies in German-speaking countries.

#1018

Saad Eddin Ibrahim

Saad Eddin Ibrahim

#11408

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Saad Eddin Ibrahim was an Egyptian sociologist and author. He was one of Egypt's leading human rights and democracy activists and a strong critic of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Biography Born in Bedeen, Mansoura, Egypt, Ibrahim was credited with playing a leading role in the revival of Egypt's contemporary research-based civil society movement. For most of his professional career, Ibrahim was a professor in the American University in Cairo's Department of Sociology, having previously taught sociology at Indiana's DePauw University from 1967 to 1974. He was a visiting professor ...

#1019

Lewis Samuel Feuer

#53338

Overall Influence

1912 - 2002 (90 years)

Lewis Samuel Feuer was an American sociologist. Initially a committed Marxist, he became a neo-conservative. Life Feuer was born in Manhattan, grew up on the Lower East Side, and attended DeWitt Clinton High school. He graduated from City College with distinction in 1931, and was awarded a Ph. D. at Harvard University in 1935. for a dissertation in philosophy entitled "The philosophical analysis of space and time", supervised by Alfred North Whitehead. While at Harvard, Feuer joined Paul and Alan Sweezy in founding the Harvard Teachers Union. This represents one obvious example of his persistent involvement in radical politics throughout the 1930s.

#1020

Sasha Roseneil

#72789

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sasha Roseneil is a group analyst and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Roseneil became the ninth vice chancellor of the University of Sussex in August 2022. Early life and education Roseneil obtained a 1st class BSc in economics from the London School of Economics, where she studied between 1985 and 1988 before undertaking a Ph.D. at the same institution. Roseneil's Ph.D. thesis is titled Feminist political action: the case of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp which she completed in 1994. Roseneil undertook postgraduate training in Group Analysis at the Turvey Institute for Group Analy...

#1021

Delphine Gardey

Delphine Gardey

#53476

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Delphine Gardey is a French historian and sociologist. She is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the journal Travail, Genre et Sociétés. She is also affiliated with "Groupement De Recherche Européen" and "Marché du travail et genre en Europe" . She is a member of the "Genre, Travail, Mobilités" Laboratory of "Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris" . Her work focuses mainly on the history of s...

#1022

Max Fellow Weber

#105333

Overall Influence

#1023

Dale Spender

#8547

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dale Spender was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation". She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987. Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the cont...

#1024

Jens Alber

#80996

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Jens Alber is a German sociologist and political scientist. He was awarded the 1983 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. Career In 1972, Jens Alber graduated from University of Konstanz in sociology, political science and psychology. From 1972 to 1973 he was a certified research assistant at the department of sociology at University of Mannheim.

#1025

Mary Daly

#88878

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mary Daly, is an Irish sociologist and academic. Since 2012, she has been Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. She previously researched and/or taught at the University of Limerick, the Institute of Public Administration, University College Dublin, the European University Institute, the Institute of Social Policy, University of Göttingen, and at Queen's University Belfast.

#1026

Yehouda Shenhav

#38192

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Yehouda Shenhav is an Israeli sociologist and critical theorist. He is known for his contributions in the fields of bureaucracy, management and capitalism, as well as for his research on ethnicity in Israeli society and its relationship with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

#1027

Ashley Mears

#36619

Overall Influence

Ashley Mears is an American writer, sociologist, and former fashion model. She is currently a professor of sociology at Boston University. Mears is the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model and Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, and is regularly quoted in media as an academic expert in the culture and economics of fashion.

#1028

Timothy Shortell

#43395

Overall Influence

Timothy Shortell is an associate professor of sociology at the City University of New York, known for his critiques of religion, especially Christianity, and of the administration of President George W. Bush.

#1029

Graham Spanier

#38341

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Graham Basil Spanier is a South African-born American sociologist and university administrator who became the 16th president of Pennsylvania State University on September 1, 1995. On November 9, 2011, in the wake of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, Spanier and longtime football coach Joe Paterno were “removed from their positions” by the Penn State board of trustees.

#1030

Daniel Dayan

#40128

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Daniel Dayan is a French social scientist born in 1943. A fellow of the Marcel Mauss Institute at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Levinas European Institute, Dayan has been Director of Research in Sociology at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, professor of Media Theory at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris, and a Hans Speier Visiting Professor at the New school for Social Research.

#1031

Peter K. Manning

#42746

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Peter K. Manning is an American sociologist who is an author and speaker on the topic of policing organizations. Background Peter K. Manning was born in Salem, Oregon on September 27, 1940. He graduated from Willamette University in 1961. Manning went on to earn his M.A. and Ph.D in Sociology from Duke University in 1963 and 1966 respectively.

#1032

Debra L. Roter

#106014

Overall Influence

#1033

Toby Huff

#7786

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Toby E. Huff is an American academic and emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was born in Portland, Maine. He was trained as a sociologist but has research interests in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He has published Weber-inspired studies of the Arab and Muslim world, as well as China, including field work in Malaysia. He is best known for his book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, which has been translated into multiple languages.

#1034

Hayagreeva Rao

#41380

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Hayagreeva "Huggy" Rao is an American academic. He is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Early life Rao was born in India. Rao graduated from the Andhra University in 1978 and earned Post-Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from XLRI, Jamshedpur in 1980. He then earned a PhD in 1989 from Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

#1035

John R. Logan

#80338

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

John Richard Logan is a professor of sociology at Brown University, where he has taught since 2004. He is known for his research on housing discrimination and racial segregation in the United States.

#1036

Jens Rydgren

#43876

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Jens Rydgren is a Swedish writer, political commentator and a professor of sociology, at Stockholm University. Specialising in research of political sociology, for many years he has studied populist right-wing parties. In 2002 he defended his thesis Political Protest and Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization: The Case of the French National Front in a debate with Sidney Tarrow of Cornell University. He has appeared as an expert on right wing populist parties, including the Sweden Democrats, in various news media.

#1037

Jacquelyn Grant

#30417

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jacquelyn Grant is an American theologian, a Methodist minister. Alongside Katie Cannon, Delores S. Williams, and Kelly Brown Douglas, Grant is considered one of the four founders of womanist theology. Womanist theology addresses theology from the viewpoint of Black women, reflecting on both their perspectives and experience in regards to faith and moral standards. Grant is currently the Callaway Professor of Systematic Theology at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

#1038

Pedro Brieger

#59131

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Pedro Rubén Brieger is an Argentine journalist and sociologist. He is a professor of Middle East Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Social Sciences. He worked for different newspapers, including Clarín, El Cronista, La Nación, Página/12, Perfil and Miami Herald; and magazines like Noticias, Tres Puntos, Revista Veintitrés and Le Monde diplomatique.

#1039

Stephen J. Hunt

#14047

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Stephen John Hunt is a British professor of sociology at the University of the West of England. Prior to his appointment at the University of West England in 2001, Hunt had taught at the Sociology Department at the University of Reading for thirteen years, as well as in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Surrey, Roehampton.

#1040

Howard J. Ehrlich

#55442

Overall Influence

1932 - 2015 (83 years)

Howard J. Ehrlich was a sociologist, educator, and author. Early life and career Howard J. Ehrlich was born and raised in New York City. He later graduated from Columbus, Ohio, public schools. He studied sociology at Ohio State University and received a bachelor's in 1953 and a master's in 1955. He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology and anthropology at Michigan State University in 1959.

#1041

Barbara Reskin

#87060

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Barbara Reskin is a professor of sociology. As the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, Reskin studies labor market stratification, examining job queues, nonstandard work, sex segregation, and affirmative action policies in employment and university admissions, mechanisms of work-place discrimination, and the role of credit markets in income poverty and inequality.

#1042

Peter Davis

#67967

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Peter Byard Davis is a New Zealand sociologist, professor, and the husband of Helen Clark, who was the Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008. Early life Davis was born in Milford on Sea, Hampshire, England, on 25 April 1947, and spent his childhood in Tanzania, where his father worked for a mining company. His father was born in China and his mother in India, but a great-great-grandfather had grown up in New Zealand. Davis gained a master's degree in sociology and statistics at the London School of Economics. He moved to New Zealand in 1970 to work at the University of Canterbury and completed a PhD at the University of Auckland.

#1043

Philomena Essed

Philomena Essed

#54693

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Philomena Johanna Maria Essed is a professor of Critical Race, Gender and Leadership Studies at Antioch University Yellow Springs, Ohio. Biography Essed's parents are Surinamese. Her father Max Essed was a pediatrician. She grew up in Suriname and the Netherlands. From the age of fifteen she lived in Nijmegen, until moving in 1974 to Amsterdam.

#1044

Åsa Wettergren

#63245

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Åsa Wettergren is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests include social movements, migration, processes of identification and change in organization and society, and the sociology of emotions.

#1045

Burton R. Clark

#106688

Overall Influence

#1046

Robert Alexander Nisbet

#106759

Overall Influence

#1047

Salvatore Babones

Salvatore Babones

#29066

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Salvatore Babones is an American sociologist, and an associate professor at the University of Sydney. Biography Babones received a B.S. in sociology from University of Montevallo in 1991, M.A. in Sociology in 1997, M.S.E in Mathematical Sciences in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2003 from Johns Hopkins University.

#1048

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky

#100305

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is a German-Argentine sociologist. She is a professor of general sociology and gender studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and president of the German Sociological Association.

#1049

Jerome Karabel

#23976

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jerome Bernard Karabel is an American sociologist, political and social commentator, and Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written extensively on American institutions of higher education and on various aspects of social policy and history in the United States, often from a comparative perspective.

#1050

Daria Khaltourina

Daria Khaltourina

#29023

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Daria Andreyevna Khaltourina is a Russian sociologist, anthropologist, demographer, and a public figure. She is the head of the Group of the Monitoring of Global and Regional Risks of the Russian Academy of Sciences, co-chairperson of the Russian Coalition for Alcohol Control, as well as the Russian Coalition for Tobacco Control. She is a laureate of the Russian Science Support Foundation Award in "The Best Economists of the Russian Academy of Sciences" nomination .

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