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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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#1151

George Lakey

#27018

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

George Russell Lakey is an activist, sociologist, and writer who added academic underpinning to the concept of nonviolent revolution. He also refined the practice of experiential training for activists which he calls "Direct Education". A Quaker, he has co-founded and led numerous organizations and campaigns for justice and peace.

#1152

Biko Agozino

#51445

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#1153

Ray Pahl

#63072

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

Raymond Edward Pahl was a British sociologist, best known for his studies of social interaction, polarisation, work and friendship in suburban and post-industrial communities. Biography He was born in London, and attended St Albans School before studying at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and then the London School of Economics.

#1154

Henry Rubin

#64443

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Henry S. Rubin is an American sociologist known for work on transsexualism. Early life and education Rubin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1988 from University of California, Santa Cruz and a master's degree and Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University in 1996.

#1155

Duane Francis Alwin

#112831

Overall Influence

#1156

John Eldridge

#94065

Overall Influence

1936 - 2022 (86 years)

John Eric Thomas Eldridge was a British sociologist known for his writings on Industrial Sociology and on Max Weber as well as for being a founder member of the media analysis research group the Glasgow Media Group. Eldridge was a professor emeritus at the University of Glasgow and a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Strathclyde He was President of the British Sociological Association from 1979 to 1981.

#1157

Richard A. Peterson

Richard A. Peterson

#80589

Overall Influence

1932 - 2010 (78 years)

Richard Austin Peterson was an American sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Early life and education Richard Peterson was born in Mussoorie, British India, where his father was a missionary. He graduated from Oberlin College with a bachelor's, and attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he worked with the sociologist Alvin Gouldner and completed his PhD in 1962 In 1965, Peterson received a job in the sociology department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. It was there that he began to study the coun...

#1158

David Pellow

#44998

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

David Naguib Pellow is Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously he was Professor, Don Martindale Endowed Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His area of specialisation include issues concerning environmental justice, race and ethnicity, labour, social protest, animal rights, immigration, free trade agreements, globalization, the global impacts of the high tech ...

#1159

Marshall Sklare

#69274

Overall Influence

1921 - 1992 (71 years)

Marshall Sklare was an American sociologist whose work focused on American Jews and the American Jewish Community. Sklare was the Klutznick Family Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Sociology at Brandeis University. Because of his contributions to the social scientific study of Jewry, Sklare is known as the "father of American Jewish sociology".

#1160

Georgi Dimitrov Dimitrov

#84433

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Georgi D. Dimitrov is a Bulgarian sociologist and Professor at the European Studies department of Sofia University. Doctor Habilis in Sociology . He works in the field of historical sociology. Major works on: history and sociology of sociology, education reform, modernity, European civilisation, Bulgarian society.

#1161

Evelyn M. Kitagawa

#49353

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Evelyn Mae Kitagawa was an American sociologist and demographer who worked as a professor at the University of Chicago and became president of the Population Association of America and chair of the U.S. Census Bureau's Advisory Committee on Population Statistics. She is known for her book with Philip Hauser, Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology, which discovered systematic correlations between the death rates of Americans and their income and level of education. Kitagawa wrote the first paper on decomposing statistics into components associated with the joint movement of the levels and returns to predictors.

#1162

Miriam M. Johnson

#55417

Overall Influence

1928 - 2007 (79 years)

Miriam M. Johnson was an American sociologist and professor emerita of the University of Oregon's Sociology Department. Life Miriam Johnson was born Miriam Massey in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 12, 1928, to Leola and Herbert Massey. While attending the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she met Benton Johnson. They were married in 1951. In 1955 they had a son , followed by a daughter in 1957. Johnson died on November 21, 2007, in Eugene, Oregon, at the age of 79 of lung cancer after a short illness.

#1163

Frank Parkin

#40229

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Dr. Frank Parkin was a British sociologist and novelist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of Kent and editor of the Concepts in the Social Sciences series published by Open University Press.

#1164

Jill Quadagno

#77898

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jill S. Quadagno is Professor of Sociology at Florida State University where she holds the Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar Chair in Social Gerontology. She has been a recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women, the Distinguished Scholar Award of the ASA Section on Aging, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. In 1994 she served as Senior Policy Advisor on the President's Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, and in 1998 she served as president of the American Sociological Association.

#1165

Regina Becker-Schmidt

#79169

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Regina Becker-Schmidt is an emeritus professor at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology at the Leibniz University Hannover. Her research focuses on corporate and subject theory, critical theory, psychoanalytically oriented social psychology and gender studies. She is considered a seminal figure in feminist critical theory.

#1166

Barbara Adam

#101773

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Barbara E. Adam, , FLSW is a retired British sociologist and academic. She specialises in social theory particularity in reference to time. From 1988 to her retirement in 2011, she lectured at Cardiff University; she was appointed Professor of Sociology in 1999. She was the founding editor of the academic journal Time & Society.

#1167

Christine Musselin

#83525

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Christine Musselin is French sociologist specializing in the sociology of organizations. From 2002 to 2010 she was the director of the Center for the Sociology of Organizations . From 2011 to 2018 Musselin headed the research department of Sciences Po Paris.

#1168

Chris Allen

#24050

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Chris Allen is a British sociologist and associate professor at the Centre for Hate Studies based in the Department of Criminology at the University of Leicester. He was named by the Deutsche Welle as an expert on the topic of contemporary Islamophobia.

#1169

Rob Shields

#64173

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Robert MacArthur Shields is a Canadian sociologist and cultural theorist. He is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Endowed Research Chair at University of Alberta. Shields directs the City Region Studies Centre in the Faculty of Extension. From 1991 to 2004 he rose to Professor of Sociology and Directed the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada, with an interlude in 1995-97 as a lecturer in Culture and Communications at Lancaster University, Lancaster UK.

#1170

Kenneth Andrews

#86177

Overall Influence

Kenneth Andrews is professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his doctorate in sociology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1997. In 1993, Andrews earned his Master's degree in sociology from the same institution. His bachelor's degree is from Millsaps College. Prior to his position at the University of North Carolina, Andrews was a member of the department of sociology at Harvard University and served as a visiting scholar for the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.

#1171

Elena Esposito

#45409

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Elena Esposito is an Italian sociologist who works in the field of social systems theory. She teaches general sociology at Bielefeld University and prediction and the future of public policy at the University of Bologna . Her research is embedded in Luhmannian social systems theory.

#1172

Rafał Pankowski

#24537

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Rafał Pankowski is a Polish sociologist and political scientist. Pankowski is a Phd and associate professor at Collegium Civitas, as well as the head of "Never Again" Association's East Europe Monitoring Center. He is also the deputy editor of Never Again's magazine. He is also involved in monitoring football hooliganism as part of UEFA's Fare network.

#1173

Jenny Kitzinger

#114249

Overall Influence

#1174

Christopher Ellison

#92972

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Christopher Gaillard Ellison is an American sociologist specializing in the sociology of religion. He is Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has taught since 2010. Previously, he spent nineteen years on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He has served as president of the Southern Sociological Society and the Association for the Sociology of Religion. In 1999, he received the Exemplary Paper in Humility Theology Award from the John Templeton Foundation, and in 2004, he was named an ISI Highly Cited Res...

#1175

Thomas Cushman

#89753

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Thomas Cushman, an American sociologist, is Deffenbaugh de Hoyos Carlson Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Cushman is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Human Rights and founder and editor-at-large of the Journal of Human Rights. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

#1176

Victor Rios

#22926

Overall Influence

Victor M. Rios is a professor, author, and speaker. His research examines how inequality plays a determining role in the educational and life outcomes of marginalized populations. Rios is of Mexican American origin. He has written several books and is known for developing the theories of the youth control complex, Cultural Misframing, Legitimacy Policing, Masbloom, and Educator Projected Self-Actualization.

#1177

Geoffrey Pleyers

Geoffrey Pleyers

#78679

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Geoffrey Pleyers is an F.R.S.–FNRS researcher and professor of sociology at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium., and a researcher at the Collège d'Etudes Mondiales where he chairs the program "Social Movements in the Global Age". He is the author of the book "Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age" .

#1178

Svetlana Tatunts

#77831

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Svetlana A. Tatunts, - Armenian born Russian researcher of sociology, ethnicity, ethnic and national conflicts. Full professor at the Department of World Politics of Moscow State University named after Lomonosov .

#1179

Vera King

#59772

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Vera King is a German sociologist and social psychologist. She has been Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main since 2016.

#1180

Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński

Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński

#76283

Overall Influence

1944 - 2015 (71 years)

Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński was a Polish sociologist, political scientist, and writer. A professor of sociology, he was the founder and first head of the Polish Academy of Sciences' Institute of Political Studies, and rector of the Warsaw-based Collegium Civitas.

#1181

Debra Umberson

#110840

Overall Influence

Debra J. Umberson is an American sociologist. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Population Research Center. Early life and education Umberson earned her Bachelor of Arts degree and MSW at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and her Master's degree and PhD from Vanderbilt University.

#1182

Frank Kameny

#3671

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Franklin Edward Kameny was an American gay rights activist. He has been referred to as "one of the most significant figures" in the American gay rights movement. During the Lavender scare, in 1957, Kameny was dismissed from his position as an astronomer in the U.S. Army's Army Map Service in Washington, D.C., because of his homosexuality, leading him to begin "a Herculean struggle with the American establishment" that would "spearhead a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s".

#1183

Jack Gibbs

#60587

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Jack Porter Gibbs was an American sociologist known for his work on social control theory and deterrence. In the early 1960s, he and Leonard Broom helped plan the founding of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which was founded in 1963. A 2015 book described Gibbs as "a giant of his time".

#1184

Roger Bartra

#54746

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Roger Bartra Murià is a Mexican sociologist and anthropologist, son of the exiled Catalan writers Agustí Bartra and Anna Murià, who settled in Mexico after the defeat of the democratic forces in the Spanish Civil War. Roger Bartra is recognized as one of the most important contemporary social scientists in Latin America.

#1185

Mario Luis Small

#105049

Overall Influence

Mario Luis Small is a sociologist and Quetelet Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. Small's research interests include urban poverty, inequality, personal networks, and qualitative and mixed methods. Small was previously a faculty member at Harvard University, University of Chicago, and Princeton University.

#1186

Mary O'Brien

#59861

Overall Influence

1926 - 1998 (72 years)

Mary Mamie O'Brien was a feminist philosopher and professor. She taught sociology and feminist social theory in Canada until her death. She was a founding member of the Feminist Party of Canada. Life Mary Mamie O'Brien was born on 8 July 1926 in Walmer, Kent. Unable to take care of her children, her mother took Mary and her brother to Glasgow at the age of four, where they were raised by three aunts. According to The Women's Review of Books obituary, "Mary always said she was English by birth, Irish by name and Scottish by choice; later, she became a Canadian by choice."

#1187

Annie Cohen-Solal

#15953

Overall Influence

Annie Cohen-Solal is a writer, historian, cultural diplomat and public intellectual in a trajectory that spans more than four decades. Born in Algiers, in a Jewish family from multiple Mediterranean origins , she faced numerous geographical displacements and devoted her entire career to issues of migration and creation. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. An award-winning writer from Sartre: 1905-1980 to Leo & His Circle: the Life of Leo Castelli and A Foreigner Called Picasso , her books, exhibitions, and lectures have been widely covered both by academic reviews and by the press at large.

#1188

Karen A. Cerulo

#86529

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Karen A. Cerulo is an American sociologist specializing in the study of culture, communication and cognition. Currently, she is a Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and the editor of Sociological Forum, the flagship journal of the Eastern Sociological Society. From 2009 to 2010, she served as the Chair of the American Sociological Association's Culture section, and since 1999, she has directed the section's Culture and Cognition Network. Her book Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation won the section's award for the best book of 1996 and her article "Scents and Sensibil...

#1189

Elena Osipova

#61249

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Elena Vladimirovna Osipova is a Russian philosopher and sociologist. Education and career Elena Osipova graduated from the Lomonosov University in 1950, where she went on to obtain a candidate degree in 1954. For her candidate degree, she performed research in the philosophy of Enlightenment in Poland. In 1974, she successfully defended her thesis “Sociology of Émile Durkheim” and became a Doctor of Sciences. She led research at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her publications have to do mainly with the history of Western sociology, the problems of power, and t...

#1190

Michael Lounsbury

#65254

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Michael Lounsbury is an American organizational theorist, Associate Dean of Research, Thornton A. Graham Chair and Professor of strategic management, organizations and sociology at the University of Alberta, and expert in innovation and institutions.

#1191

Prema Kurien

#54599

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Prema Ann Kurien is Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. She specializes in the interplay between religion and immigration experiences, with focus on people from India. She has written a number of articles and books on aspects of this subject. Her 2002 book Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India was co-winner of the 2003 Asia/Asian America book award from the American Sociological Association.

#1192

Philip N. Howard

#3739

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Philip N. Howard is a sociologist and communication researcher who studies the impact of information technologies on democracy and social inequality. He studies how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute from March 2018 to March 26, 2021. He is the author of ten books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up.

#1193

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#687

Overall Influence

1919 - 2021 (102 years)

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind , which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".

#1194

Sheila Allen

#84822

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Sheila Allen was an English sociologist and academic. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Bradford from 1972 to 1999, and served as president of the British Sociological Association from 1975 to 1977.

#1195

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#115167

Overall Influence

#1197

Vern L. W. Bengtson

#115170

Overall Influence

#1198

Gladys Beckwith

#85184

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Gladys Eloise Beckwith was an American academic and women's rights activist. She was the co-founder of the Michigan Women's Studies Association and the founder of the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. Beckwith was one of the first professors of women's studies in the United States, teaching at Michigan State University. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2012 for her accomplishments in the fields of education and women's rights.

#1199

Howard Schuman

#64332

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (96 years)

Howard Schuman was an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. He is known for his work on survey research, such as the design of polling questions. Biography Howard Schuman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 16, 1928. He received his A.B. from Antioch College in philosophy in 1953, his M.S. in psychology from Trinity University in 1956, and his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1961. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1964 as an assistant professor, and became a full professor there in 1971. From 1982 to 1990, he directed the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

#1200

Jean Burnet

#80874

Overall Influence

1920 - 2009 (89 years)

Jean Robertson Burnet was a Canadian academic specializing in ethnic studies. Burnet, a specialist in Canadian ethnic relations, founded the Glendon Sociology Department at York University. Burnet was a native of Toronto and studied for her undergraduate degree in Sociology at Victoria College, Toronto, including under Harold Innis. She received her master's degree and PhD at the University of Chicago.

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