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,
#1101
Aihwa Ong
#24022
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.
Go to Profile#1102
David W. Garland
#36620
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and professor of sociology at New York University, and an honorary professor in Criminology at Edinburgh Law School. He is well known for his historical and sociological studies of penal institutions, for his work on the welfare state, and for his contributions to criminology, social theory, and the study of social control.
Go to Profile#1103
Geoffrey Hawthorn
#63756
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Geoffrey Hawthorn was a British Professor on International Politics and Social and Political Theory and Head of the Department of Political Sciences and International Politics at the University of Cambridge, as well as a reputed author.
Go to Profile#1104
Anton Eduard Kunst
#109577
Overall Influence
#1105
Corey Keyes
#3233
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Corey Keyes is an American sociologist and psychologist. He is known for his work with positive psychology. Keyes currently teaches at Emory University in Georgia. Work Keyes works in the areas of complete mental health and methods for attaining positive social relationships. He also studies the psychology of aging. Keyes is known for coining the psychological terms "flourishing" and "Languishing" which describes mentally healthy adults and has published widely in this field. He is considered to be a pioneer in the field of positive psychology . Keyes is a member of advisory board for the World Happiness Forum and is a member of the Positive Psychology Network.
Go to Profile#1106
Mauro Guillén
#25539
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Mauro F. Guillén is a Spanish/American sociologist, political economist, management educator. In March 2021 he was announced as the new Director of the Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Fellow of Queens' College at the University of Cambridge before resigning in 2023 to return to his family and his professorship at Wharton. Until July 2021, he was the Zandman Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Penn Lauder Center for International Business Education and Research . He was the Anthony L. Davis Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies from 2007 to 2019.
Go to Profile#1107
William H. Frey
#6159
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
William Henry Frey is a noted American demographer and author. He is currently a Senior Fellow with Brookings Metro at the Brookings Institution and a Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center. According to Michael Barone, "Frey is widely acknowledged as America’s leading demographer."
Go to Profile#1108
Nigel Dodd
#58652
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Nigel B. Dodd was a British sociologist. Dodd earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1991, and began his teaching career as a lecturer at University of Liverpool. He moved to the London School of Economics in 1995. He was the editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Sociology since 2014. Dodd was co-editor of Re-Imagining Economic Sociology and volume six of A Cultural History of Money with Federico Neiburg .
Go to Profile#1109
Alan Warde
#82460
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alan Warde, FBA, FAcSS is a British sociologist and academic. He has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester since 1999. Education and career Born in 1949, Warde was educated at Downing College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1971. He then completed an MA at Durham University and carried out doctoral studies at the University of Leeds; his PhD was awarded in 1976 for his thesis "Ideology, strategy and intra-party division in the British Labour Party, 1956-74".
Go to Profile#1110
Wolfgang Zapf
#63036
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Wolfgang Zapf was a German sociologist. Education Zapf visited basic school and secondary school emphasizing modern languages in Frankfurt am Main. He obtained his final examination in 1957. From 1957 to 1961 he studied sociology and economics at the universities of Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne. He received a scholarship from the “Cusanuswerk” and during his studies he obtained practical training in market research and industry. In Frankfurt in 1961 he finished his studies with the diploma in sociology.
Go to Profile#1111
Christiaan Monden
#103710
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Christiaan Willem Simon Monden is a Dutch sociologist and a professorial fellow in sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Monden has research interests in family sociology; social demography; social inequalities; social variations in health and mortality.
Go to Profile#1112
William Petersen
#55519
Overall Influence
1912 - Present (112 years)
William Petersen was an American sociologist and demographer. Life Petersen was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on August 3, 1912. He gained a PhD from Columbia University in 1954. He taught in the Sociology Department at the University of California at Berkeley from 1953 to 1956 and 1959 to 1966. He created the term "model minority" to describe his thesis that Japanese American success posed challenges to simple discrimination-based accounts of group socioeconomic differences. From 1966 to 1967, Petersen was professor of sociology at Boston College, and from 1967 to 1978 he was the Robert Lazarus Professor of Social Demography at Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#1113
Maureen T. Hallinan
#73140
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Maureen T. Hallinan was an American sociologist and the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She conducted research on the sociology of education, and she was the founding director of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity in the Institute for Educational Initiatives. In 1996, she served as president of the American Sociological Association.
Go to Profile#1114
Bienvenido Ochoa Juliano
#110355
Overall Influence
#1115
Suzanne M. Bianchi
#88765
Overall Influence
1952 - 2013 (61 years)
Suzanne M. Bianchi was an American sociologist. She was known for her work studying the evolving American family and gender roles. Personal life Suzanne M. Bianchi was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa to Rita and Pesho Bianchi. Her mother was a housewife and her father was a meat packing plant employee. Bianchi was the oldest of six children. She and her husband, Mark Browning, had three children.
Go to Profile#1116
Kurt C. Schlichting
#61541
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kurt C. Schlichting is the E. Gerald Corrigan Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of sociology and anthropology at Fairfield University in the United States. He was a recipient of a Fairfield University Distinguished Faculty/Administrator Award in 2003.
Go to Profile#1117
Barbara Risman
#96506
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Barbara Risman is Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Early life and education Barbara J. Risman was born on 20 July 1956 in Lynn, Massachusetts to an immigrant Jewish family. Risman's grandparents fled antisemitism in Europe and immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. She grew up in a multi-generational extended family home with grandparents, aunts, and cousins as well as her parents and three siblings. An early experience of sexual discrimination occurred at her bat mitzvah in 1968. At that time, only boys were permitted to read from the Torah.
Go to Profile#1118
Shahrzad Mojab
#39253
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Shahrzad Mojab is an academic activist and professor, teaching at the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education and Women and Gender Studies Institute, at the University of Toronto. Shahrzad has been living in Canada since 1986 with her lifelong partner, colleague and comrade, Amir Hassanpour, and their son, Salah.
Go to Profile#1119
Brianne H. Rowan
#110635
Overall Influence
#1120
Cherryl Walker
#60847
Overall Influence
Cherryl Walker is professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, which she joined in 2005, and is DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in the Sociology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch since 2016. She is an authority on South African society - specialising in South Africa's land redistribution/restitution, land reform, gender and cosmopolitanism, and environmental sociology.
Go to Profile#1121
Dan Clawson
#43470
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
Daniel "Dan" Conness Clawson was an American sociologist, professor, and activist. Clawson was Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and former executive committee member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Massachusetts affiliate of the National Education Association.
Go to Profile#1122
Gary LaFree
#28427
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gary LaFree is a Professor and Chair of the Criminology and Criminal Justice department at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Director of the Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center and the Founding Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism . His main areas of expertise are sociology, criminology, race and crime, cross-national comparative research and political violence and terrorism.
Go to Profile#1123
Daniel Foss
#52037
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Daniel A. Foss was an American-Canadian sociologist. He is the author of Freak Culture: Life Style and Politics , and Beyond Revolution: A New Theory of Social Movements . Early life and education Daniel A. Foss was born in the Bronx, New York on 26 July 1940. He attended The Bronx High School of Science and later received his bachelor's degree in Sociology from Cornell University. He went on to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his master's degree in 1962, and his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1969. His book Freak Culture is an abridged version of his Ph.D. dissertation. In 1964 and 65 he taught Sociology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
Go to Profile#1124
Devah Pager
#37619
Overall Influence
1972 - 2018 (46 years)
Devah Iwalani Pager was an American sociologist best known for her research on racial discrimination in employment and the American criminal justice system. At the time of her death, she was Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Harvard University. She was a class of 2011 William T. Grant Scholar.
Go to Profile#1125
Marshall W. Meyer
#101240
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Marshall Warner Meyer is an American sociologist and management scientist. After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree at Columbia University in 1964, Meyer pursued graduate study at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Master of Arts and doctorate in 1965 and 1967, respectively, Meyer taught at Harvard University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Riverside before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 as Anheuser-Busch Term Professor of Management. He held the professorship until 1992. In 2002, Meyer was awarded the Richard A. Sapp Professorship. He was ...
Go to Profile#1126
Jill Manthorpe
#111258
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#1127
Ellis Cashmore
#40600
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ellis Cashmore is a British sociologist and cultural critic. He is currently a visiting professor of sociology at Aston University. Before teaching at Aston, he used to teach culture, media and sport at Staffordshire University, starting in 1993. Before 1993, he taught sociology at the University of Tampa, Florida; and, before this, he was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He is a regular contributor at Fair Observer.
Go to Profile#1128
Richard Machalek
#70014
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Machalek is a social theorist, sociobiologist, and professor of sociology. A student and colleague of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, Machalek is best known for using traditional sociological frameworks and theories to explain complex social behavior and structures in non-human societies, with a special emphasis on ant populations.
Go to Profile#1129
Lee Rainwater
#41247
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Lee Rainwater was an American sociologist. He was a professor of sociology at Harvard University for 23 years and was a co-founder of the Luxembourg Income Study, for which he was research director between 1983 and 2005. He was the author, co-author, or editor of over twenty books, including Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum , a study of the notorious St Louis, Missouri, housing development Pruitt–Igoe. A series of memorial lectures has been founded in his name at CUNY and began in 2017.
Go to Profile#1130
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
#4558
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Fernando Henrique Cardoso , also known by his initials FHC , is a Brazilian sociologist, professor, and politician who served as the 34th president of Brazil from 1 January 1995 to 31 December 2002. He was the first Brazilian president to be reelected for a subsequent term. An accomplished scholar of dependency theory noted for his research on slavery and political theory, Cardoso has earned many honors including the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation and the Kluge Prize from the US Library of Congress .
Go to Profile#1131
Judith Shuval
#79898
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Judith Shuval is an Israeli professor emerita of sociology who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in public health and immigration. Biography Judith Tannenbaum Shuval was born in 1926 in New York City. She attended Hunter College and later earned a bachelor's degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1949, she immigrated to Israel and worked at the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology from Radcliffe College at Harvard University in 1955. That same year, she was appointed an adviser on immigrant absorption for UNESCO.
Go to Profile#1132
Barry Hindess
#30195
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Barry Hindess was an Emeritus Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. He was for many years an academic sociologist in the UK and has published widely on social and political theory, and on the history of political thought.
Go to Profile#1133
Michael Macy
#68265
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael W. Macy is a Cornell University sociologist who is the Director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology. In his profile in the Information Sciences department, it says he is the Goldwin Smith of Arts and Sciences in Sociology.
Go to Profile#1134
John Shelton Reed
#27399
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Shelton Reed is an American sociologist and essayist, author or editor of 23 books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed has also written for a variety of non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Oxford American. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement, in 2000, as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology and director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science.
Go to Profile#1135
Horst Helle
#74296
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Horst Jürgen Helle is a German sociologist, who is currently Professor Emeritus at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Munich, Germany. Career Horst Helle received a business degree from the university in his hometown of Hamburg before receiving an MBA from the University of Kansas on a Fulbright Scholarship, 1956-1957. Thereupon, he returned to the University of Hamburg and obtained the Ph.D. in sociology as well as the license to teach sociology as Privatdozent. He has since held tenured professorships at the RWTH Aachen University, the University of Vienna, and the University of ...
Go to Profile#1136
Christopher Jenks
#19549
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Christopher Jenks is a British sociologist who was Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University from 2006 to 2012. He was educated at Westminster City School, the University of Surrey and the University of London . From 1971 to 1994, he taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London, rising to become Reader in Sociology. In 1995, he joined Brunel as Professor of Sociology and Pro-Warden. He was then pro-vice-chancellor from 2004 to 2006, before being appointed Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University in 2006. He retired in 2012 and was made emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#1137
Kari Wærness
#85394
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Kari Wærness is a Norwegian sociologist. Her research has focused on women and gender studies, family and caring. Early and personal life Wærness was born on 13 January 1939 in Leknes to Einar Loe and Aslaug Marie Eidsvåg. She married physician Endre Wærness in 1962.
Go to Profile#1138
Ann-Dorte Christensen
#39351
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ann-Dorte Christensen is a Danish professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University. Education In 1982 Christensen graduated as Master of Philosophy in social science at Aalborg University. Subsequently, Christensen worked as a postgraduate fellow on the project "The new social movements of the 60s and 70s" at the Department of Education and Socialization at Aalborg University.
Go to Profile#1139
Anna Leander
#37128
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Anna Leander is a sociologist and political scientist. Leander is currently a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She previously taught at the Copenhagen Business School and the Inst. de Relacoes Internacionais, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Leander is well known for her work in critical security studies and international political sociology. Theoretically, Leander has played an important role in bringing the work of Pierre Bourdieu into conversation with the discipline of International Relations, as well as more recently working with materialist and pragmatist sociologies.
Go to Profile#1140
Steven Stack
#88263
Overall Influence
Steven Stack is an American sociologist and professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Wayne State University, where he is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience.
Go to Profile#1141
Gunnar Heinsohn
#12891
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Gunnar Heinsohn was a German author, sociologist and economist and professor emeritus at the University of Bremen where he had a chair in social pedagogy from 1984. Heinsohn published on a wide array of topics, starting from economics, demography and its relationship with security policy and genocide, and revisionist chronology theories in the tradition of Immanuel Velikovsky.
Go to Profile#1142
Peter Atteslander
#85286
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Peter Atteslander was a Swiss sociologist. His research fields are industrial sociology, urban sociology, medical sociology and research methods. A recognized expert on the interaction between health and society, he has also worked as a consultant of the tobacco industry.
Go to Profile#1143
Scott Frickel
#52531
Overall Influence
Scott Frickel is an American sociologist, currently an associate professor at Brown University, previously a professor at Tulane University and Washington State University, where he was the Boeing Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sociology. He is also a published author, being both cited and collected by libraries.
Go to Profile#1144
Gustavo V. Barbosa‐cánovas
#112430
Overall Influence
#1145
Mabel Berezin
#103584
Overall Influence
Mabel Berezin is an American sociologist and a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Education and career Berezin earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University in 1987. She worked at Harvard as a lecturer from 1987 to 1989, as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1996, and as a visiting associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1996 to 2001. She joined the Cornell University faculty in 2002, and chaired the sociology department there from 2010 to 2014.
Go to Profile#1146
Danielle Bleitrach
#31847
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Danielle Bleitrach is a French sociologist and journalist. From the 1970s through the end of the century, she was CNRS researcher and lecturer at the Aix-Marseille University, focusing on the sociology of the working class and urbanization. From 1981 to 1996 she was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France, then the National Committee of the Party. She was also assistant editor-in-chief of the party weekly Révolution. She has contributed to La Pensée, Les Temps Modernes and Le Monde Diplomatique. In the 2000s and 2010s, after retiring from teaching, she co-authored t...
Go to Profile#1147
Soleiman Pakseresht
#91459
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Soleiman Pakseresht is an Iranian sociologist and associate professor at Bu-Ali Sina University whose work focuses on social impact assessment, political sociology and sociology of cyberspace. Career Pakseresht is a former representative of the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare in the International Labour Organization and also previously held positions such as the head of the Iran Technical and Vocational Training Organization, the cultural and social deputy of the Center for Strategic Studies and the director of applied research in the Iranian government delegation office....
Go to Profile#1148
Stephen Borgatti
#106183
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Stephen Peter Borgatti is an American business professor and author, currently the Professor and Chellgren Endowed Chair of Corporate Strategy at the Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky. His work is highly cited by peers and held in libraries worldwide.
Go to Profile#1149
Albert Bergesen
#79139
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Albert James Bergesen is an American sociologist and Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at University of Arizona. He is also a Professor of Government and Public Policy, and Professor of Sociology in the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship, at the Eller College of Management. He has published three books, edited five anthologies, authored hundreds of articles, and is cited in numerous fields, such as collective violence, international relations, world-systems analysis, environmental sociology, cultural sociology and organizational sociology.
Go to Profile#1150
Paula England
#92975
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paula S. England , is an American sociologist and Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research has focused on gender inequality in the labor market, the family, and sexuality. She has also studied class differences in contraception and nonmarital births.
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