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,

#1201

Gaye Tuchman

#69220

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gaye Tuchman is an American sociologist. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Tuchman is best known for her 1978 book, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, about the sociology of news production. She is a past president of the Eastern Sociological Society.

#1202

Alexander H. Leighton

#26063

Overall Influence

1908 - 2007 (99 years)

Alexander H. Leighton was a sociologist and psychiatrist of dual citizenship . He is best known for his work on the Stirling County Study and his contributions to the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Leighton died at the age of 99 at his home in Digby, Nova Scotia.

#1203

Valerie Smith

#33748

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Valerie Smith is an American academic administrator, professor, and scholar of African-American literature and culture. She is the 15th and current president of Swarthmore College. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she is a graduate of Bates College and the University of Virginia. She taught at Princeton University from 1980 to 1989 and at University of California, Los Angeles from 1989 to 2000. In 2001, Smith returned to Princeton upon being appointed the director of Princeton's African-American studies program. From 2006 to 2009, Smith was the founding director of Princeton's interdisciplinary Center for African American Studies.

#1204

Otto Newman

#67571

Overall Influence

1922 - 2015 (93 years)

Otto Newman was an Austrian-born sociologist who was a professor at Stirling University in Scotland, Chairman of the Sociology Department at South Bank University in London, and adjunct professor at San Diego State University in California. His extensive writings have been published on four continents. His main works include: Gambling: Hazard and Reward and The Challenge of Corporatism . He also authored extensive research reports leading to policy implementation, and books and papers on globalism including, "The Third Way" and "American Declinism".

#1205

Kathleen Harris

#89032

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kathleen Mullan Harris is a distinguished professor of sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Education and career She received a bachelor's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1972. Then, she went on to receive a masters of arts and a doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and 1988 respectively. Through her career as a sociologist, she specialized in research on social inequality based on family, poverty, and health. One important highlight upon her research...

#1206

Ara Wilson

#51129

Overall Influence

Ara Wilson is a university professor and author. Overview Her work focuses on the feminist ethnography of globalization through description and analysis of various market economies. Her work examines the cultural, social, and sexual aspects of Bangkok economies, as well as illustrating the inaccuracies of Eurocentric ideology.

#1207

Leslie McCall

#35963

Overall Influence

Leslie McCall is an American sociologist and political scientist. She is a Presidential Professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Associate Director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality there. She studies wealth and social inequality in American society, as well as opinions about inequality, from an intersectional perspective.

#1208

Stjepan Meštrović

#91899

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović is an Croatian American sociologist. He is professor of sociology at Texas A&M University. Meštrović has served as an expert witness in war crimes trials, including at the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse case. He has written over 15 books.

#1209

Pablo Huneeus

#77412

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Pablo Miguel Huneeus Cox raised in New Jersey, is a Chilean writer and social critic. His more than thirty books are known for their lively personal style, sense of humor, and vivid portraits of real people. Several have been bestsellers.

#1210

Leokadiya Drobizheva

Leokadiya Drobizheva

#114834

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Leokadiya Mikhailovna Drobizheva was a Russian sociologist. She was made an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation in 1999, Laureate of the Prize of the President of the Russian Federation for Contribution to Strengthening the Unity of the Russian Nation , and Honorary Doctor of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

#1211

Mohammad Koohmaraie

#116193

Overall Influence

#1212

John Westergaard

#101789

Overall Influence

1927 - 2014 (87 years)

John Harald Westergaard was British-Danish sociologist and academic. He was chair in sociological studies at the University of Sheffield between 1975 and 1986, and president of the British Sociological Association .

#1213

Inderpal Grewal

#92062

Overall Influence

Inderpal Grewal is a professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and a key figure in the academic discipline of women's studies. She is an influential feminist scholar whose research interests include transnational and postcolonial feminist theory; feminism and human rights; nongovernmental organizations and theories of civil society and citizenship; law and subjectivity; travel and mobility and South Asian cultural studies. Together with Caren Kaplan, Grewal is best known for her work as a founder of the field of transnational feminist cultural studies or transnational feminism.

#1214

Dennis Altman

#23362

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dennis Patkin Altman is an Australian academic and gay rights activist. Early childhood Altman was born in Sydney, New South Wales to Jewish immigrant parents, and spent most of his childhood in Hobart, Tasmania.

#1215

Bahija Ahmed Shihab

#68665

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Bahija Ahmed Shihab was an Iraqi sociologist and one of the pioneering women that helped establish the Sociology department at the College of Arts, University of Baghdad, Iraq in the 1950s. Professor Shihab was specialized in Social Work and Community Organization and Development. She has authored several important books, articles, and studies and taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the department and supervised countless Ph.D. dissertations. Professor Shihab persistently promoted social justice causes especially relating to the emancipation of women in Iraq and the Arab world. Prof....

#1216

Rosa Cobo Bedía

Rosa Cobo Bedía

#46363

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Rosa Cobo Bedía is a Spanish feminist, writer, and professor of sociology of gender at the University of A Coruña. She is also the director of the Center for Gender Studies and Feminists at the same university. Her main line of research is feminist theory and the sociology of gender.

#1217

Daniel J. Myers

#70954

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Daniel J. Myers is the President of Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania and a professor of Sociology. His best known research is on the urban unrest of the 1960s and the media coverage of those riots, specializing in identifying the patterns of unrest diffusion. He has written several books and articles, and is co-author of the best-selling sociological social psychology textbook, Social Psychology.

#1218

Suzanne Keller

#95202

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Suzanne Infeld Keller was an American sociologist. She was the first female faculty member to be granted tenure at Princeton University. Early life and education Keller was born as Suzanne Infeld on April 16, 1927, in Vienna, Austria. Her family moved to New York City when she was a child and she graduated from Hunter College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. While earning her graduate degrees, Keller worked with the United States Air Force as an interpreter and researcher in Munich due to her grasp of multiple languages.

#1219

Fabio Rojas

#92728

Overall Influence

Fabio Rojas is Virginia L. Roberts Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of several sociological books, and starting with the first issue of 2018, he will be the co-editor of Contexts magazine with Rashawn Ray. Rojas has also made contributions to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and has been interviewed and appeared on C-SPAN, National Public Radio, and Vox magazine.

#1220

Benjamin H. Bratton

Benjamin H. Bratton

#14922

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Benjamin H. Bratton is an American Philosopher of Technology known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design, artificial intelligence, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms "planetary scale computation".

#1221

Jean-Marc Ela

#48802

Overall Influence

1936 - 2008 (72 years)

Jean-Marc Ela was a Cameroonian sociologist and theologian. Working variously as a diocesan priest and a professor, Ela was the author of many books on theology, philosophy, and social sciences in Africa. His most famous work, African Cry has been called the "soundest illustration" of the spirit of liberation theology in sub-Saharan Africa. His works are widely cited as exemplary of sub-Saharan African Christian theology for their focus on contextualisation and their emphasis on community-centered approaches to theology.

#1222

Rosemary Crompton

#41410

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Rosemary Crompton, was a British sociologist and academic, specialising in gender and social class. She was Professor of Sociology at City University from 1999 to 2008: she was then appointed professor emeritus. She had previously been a research assistant at the University of Cambridge, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia and at the University of Kent, and held a chair at the University of Leicester.

#1223

Stephen Miller Mark J. Salaff Janet W. Castles

#116971

Overall Influence

#1224

Arline Geronimus

#41592

Overall Influence

Arline T. Geronimus is an American public health researcher and a professor of Health Behavior & Health Education at the University of Michigan, as well as a research professor at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center. Geronimus is known for proposing the weathering hypothesis in 1992, which posits that cumulative racism experienced by black women cause them to experience inferior birth outcomes as their maternal age increases. She has also studied other issues regarding pregnancy, including the effect of teenage childbearing on the mother's economic status and the effect of immigration enforcement raids on low birth weight.

#1225

Bruce P. Dohrenwend

#117100

Overall Influence

#1226

Graham R. Gibbs

#117199

Overall Influence

#1227

Dana R. Fisher

#45393

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Dana R. Fisher is an American sociologist, professor of sociology, and public speaker and author. Her most recent book is American Resistance: from the Women’s March to the Blue Wave . She is a professor at the University of Maryland who speaks and writes about activism, democracy and environmental policy.

#1228

David Voas

#71114

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David Voas is a quantitative social scientist. He is currently Professor of Social Science and Head of the Department of Social Science at the UCL Institute of Education. He was previously Professor of Population Studies at the University of Essex and Simon Professor of Population Studies at the University of Manchester.

#1229

Hugh Davis Graham

#43053

Overall Influence

1937 - 2002 (65 years)

Hugh Davis Graham was an American historian and sociologist. He was the author of several books about the civil rights movement. Early life Graham was born on September 2, 1936, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three sons of a Presbyterian minister. He studied history at Yale University and completed a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University in 1964.

#1230

Marion J. Levy Jr.

#65774

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

Marion Joseph Levy Jr. was an American sociologist noted for his work on modernization theory. Born in Galveston, Texas, Levy received his doctorate in sociology from Harvard, studying under Talcott Parsons. Levy was hired at Princeton in 1947. He served as Musgrave Professor of Sociology and International Affairs until retirement in 1989.

#1231

Edwin Amenta

#60843

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Edwin Amenta is an American sociologist best known for his study of social policy, social movements and the New Deal. Career Through his Political Mediation Theory, developed as a consequence of studying the Townsend Plan, an organization demanding old-age pensions during the Great Depression, and other New Deal-era movements, Amenta has influenced how scholars conceptualize, study, and explain social movement impacts. He is also known for theorizing the role of political institutions in policy-making. Amenta's recent work includes the development of a newspaper coverage database that allows s...

#1232

Zdzisław Krasnodębski

#56501

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Zdzisław Marek Krasnodębski is a Polish sociologist, social philosopher, publicist and professor at the University of Bremen , who has been a Member of the European Parliament since the 2014 election.

#1233

James Nazroo

#88776

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

James Nazroo, PhD, MBBS FBA FaCSS, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is the founding and Deputy Director of the ESRC Centre of Dynamics of Ethnicity , co-Principal Investigator of the Synergi Collaborative Centre, which is investigating ethnic inequalities in severe mental illness, and founding and co-Director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing . Issues of inequality, social justice and underlying processes of stratification have been the primary focus of his research activities, centring on ethnicity/race, ageing, gender, and the interrelationships between these.

#1234

Soumaya Naamane Guessous

#64223

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Soumaya Naamane Guessous is a Moroccan sociologist, champion of women's rights, and columnist. She is best known as author of the book Au-delà de toute pudeur, first published in 1988, about the sexual life of Moroccan women. Based on Naamane Guessous' academic research in the 1980s among 500 women of different social backgrounds and ages, the book became soon a best-seller in Morocco, selling 40.000 copies in 5 years, and was dubbed "a little revolution" in the French presse, observing that "the first time a 'decent woman', a Muslim, calls a spade a spade".

#1235

Steven Nock

#91018

Overall Influence

1950 - 2008 (58 years)

Steven L. Nock was a researcher, author, and the Commonwealth Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He was a recognized expert on the role of marriage in society, and worked in the Federal Department of Health and Human Services as a consultant on American family policy.

#1236

Shmuel Trigano

#40928

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Shmuel Trigano is a sociologist, philosopher, professor emeritus of sociology at Paris Nanterre University . He was Tikvah Fund Visiting Professor in Jewish Law and Thought at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York , and Templeton Fellow at the Herzl Institute program "Philosophy of the Tanakh, Midrash and Talmud" , . Elia Benamozegh European Chair of Sephardic Studies, Livorno, Italy .

#1237

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

#1309

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel is an Argentine activist, community organizer, painter, writer and sculptor. He was the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship , during which he was detained, tortured, and held without trial for 14 months. He also received, among other distinctions, the Pacem in Terris Award.

#1238

Howard M. Bahr

#106223

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Howard M. Bahr has been a professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University since 1973 and was director of field research for the Middletown IV study in 1999. Bahr received his bachelor's degree in Sociology with a minor in Psychology from BYU in 1962. He then went to study at the University of Texas at Austin where he received an M.A. in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1965. Both of these were in Sociology with minors in Geography.

#1239

Daniel Chirot

#49803

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Daniel Chirot is an American historian and writer on Russia. He is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington. Chirot is also the founder of the journal East European Politics and Societies, and has written and edited many books and articles.

#1240

William Freudenburg

#113154

Overall Influence

1951 - 2010 (59 years)

William Robert Freudenburg, was an environmental sociologist and social theorist, best known for his work in rural sociology on the topics of risk perception, social disruption, and the causes of environmental degradation. Born in Madison, Nebraska, raised in West Point, Nebraska, he was educated at the University of Nebraska and Yale University. Freudenburg was a professor of sociology at a number of universities; his ultimate position was as Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He died at his home in Santa Barbara, of cholangiocarcinoma...

#1241

Yong Pil Rhee

#60925

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Yong Pil Rhee was a Korean political scientist, systems scientist and professor and chairman of the board of trustees at the Seoul National University, South Korea. He was one of the first systems theorists, who demonstrated that the system is dynamic and experiences change.

#1242

Katherine Newman

#56917

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Katherine S. Newman is an American academic administrator who currently serves as the System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst. Newman previously served as the interim Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston from July 1, 2018 to August 1, 2020. She previously served as the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of The University of Massachusetts system in the Office of the President in Boston, Provost of UMass Amherst, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Harvard University, and is an American author.

#1243

Charles Derber

#20273

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Charles Derber is an American Professor of Sociology at Boston College. His work focuses on the crises of capitalism, globalization, corporate power, neo-fascism, American militarism, the culture of hegemony, the climate crisis, and the new peace and global justice movements.

#1244

Patrick Sharkey

#29391

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Patrick Sharkey is an American urban sociologist and criminologist. He has been Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University since 2019. He was formerly Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, with an affiliation at NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

#1245

Franklin Zimring

#82024

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Franklin E. Zimring is an American criminologist, law professor, and the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Early life and education Zimring was born on December 2, 1942 in Los Angeles, California, to television and film writer Maurice Zimring, better known by his stage name Maurice Zimm, and his wife Molly, a lawyer who passed the California Bar in 1933. After graduating from Los Angeles Public Schools, he received his B.A. with distinction from Wayne State University in 1963 and his J.D. cum laude from the University of Chicago in 1967.

#1246

Sheila Jeffreys

#35838

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality. Jeffreys' argument that the "sexual revolution" on men's terms contributed less to women's freedom than to their continued oppression has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism. She argues that women suffering pain in pursuit of beauty is a form of submission to patriarchal sadism; that transgender people reproduce oppressive gender roles and mutilate their bodies through sex reassignme...

#1247

Osmo Kontula

#40440

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Osmo Johannes Kontula is a Finnish sociologist and sexologist currently employed as a research professor at the Population Research Institute of the Family Federation of Finland . He is also honorary associate professor at the Faculty of Health Science, University of Sydney, Australia.

#1248

Steven Seidman

#80254

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Steven Seidman is a sociologist, currently professor at State University of New York at Albany. He is a social theorist working the areas of social theory, culture, sexuality, comparative sociology, theory of democracy, nationalism and globalization.

#1249

Eva Cox

#9316

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Eva Maria Cox is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a "more civil" society. She was a long-term member of the Women's Electoral Lobby , and is still pursuing feminist change by putting revaluing social contributions and wellbeing onto political agendas, as well as recognising the common ground between Australia's First Nations and feminist values of the importance of the social.

#1250

Marie Jaisson

#79509

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Marie Jaisson is a sociologist studying the sociology of medical practices and of biological phenomena, and the history of Sociology. After a Ph.D. in Sociology at EHESS , she was junior professor at the [University of Tours] and she is full professor at the University Sorbonne Paris-Nord .

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