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.

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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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#1251

Barrie R. Cassileth

#15176

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Barrie Joyce Rabinowitz Cassileth was an American medical sociologist and researcher of complementary medicine and a critic of alternative medicine. She published extensively on alternative cancer treatments.

#1252

Roger V. Gould

#93686

Overall Influence

1962 - 2002 (40 years)

Roger V. Gould was an American sociologist who emphasized the importance of basing theories upon research into actual events. Gould was born Roger van Blerkom Benjamin in Brookline, Massachusetts and largely grew up in Manhattan. Gould was the son of two writers, both former journalists, Lois Gould and Philip Benjamin. Gould's adoptive father Robert E. Gould, M.D., whose name he took in 1967 following the death of his father, was a professor at New York Medical College.

#1253

Margaret Abraham

Margaret Abraham

#90784

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Margaret Abraham is a professor of sociology at Hofstra University and served as the 18th president of the International Sociological Association. She is known for her research regarding gender issues, specifically concerning women, and the ways gender issues are connected to concepts such as globalization, societal customs and norms, and violent behavior.

#1254

Dorceta Taylor

#54502

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Dorceta E. Taylor is an American environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the senior associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale School of the Environment, as well as a professor of environmental justice. Prior to this, she was the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability , where she also served as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history...

#1255

Jean Halley

#47556

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jean Halley is an American writer and sociologist based in New York City. Her work revolves around issues of social power, violence, trauma, gender, and animal studies. Halley is also a professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

#1256

Rabab Abdulhadi

#41893

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi is a Palestinian-born American scholar, activist, educator, editor, and an academic director. She is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies, and the founding Director of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies at San Francisco State University . She is a controversial political figure, which is in part due to larger political issues around her field of study.

#1257

Judith Stacey

#89220

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Judith G. Stacey is an author and Professor Emerita of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University. Her primary focus areas include gender, family, sexuality, feminist and queer theory, and ethnography. Her book Unhitched explores family configurations that deviate from the standard Western concept of "marriage", including polygamous families in South Africa, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, and intimacy and parenthood among gay men in Los Angeles, California. She has published many works. She is perhaps most known for her paper, co-authored with Timothy Biblarz,...

#1258

John Ogbu

#12749

Overall Influence

1939 - 2003 (64 years)

John Uzo Ogbu was a Nigerian-American anthropologist and professor known for his theories on observed phenomena involving race and intelligence, especially how race and ethnic differences played out in educational and economic achievement. He suggested that being a "caste-like minority" affects motivation and achievement, depressing IQ scores. He also concluded that some students did poorly because high achievement was considered "acting white" among their peers. Ogbu was also involved in the 1996 controversy surrounding the use of African American Vernacular English in public schools in Oakland, California.

#1259

Monica Prasad

#42523

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Monica Prasad is an American sociologist who has won several awards for her books on economic and political sociology. Prasad is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a 2015 Guggenheim fellow. Her research interests are in the areas of economic sociology, political sociology and comparative historical sociology. , her research investigated market-oriented welfare policies in Europe and their economic consequences.

#1260

David A. Karp

#27887

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

David Allen Karp is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College where he has taught since 1971. He received his B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University in 1971. He has written or co-authored nine books and more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. His work appears in such periodicals as Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Qualitative Health Research, the Gerontologist, and the International Journal of Aging and Human Development. His work has largely clustered in three areas: urban life and ...

#1261

David Fasenfest

#67748

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dr. David Fasenfest is an American sociologist and an associate professor at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1984. He also holds a M.A. in economics and Chinese studies. A few of his research interests are urban sociology, race/class/gender, labor markets and workforce development, income inequality, and community economic development. He has been an active urban sociologist, editing and publishing several articles and books.Editor, Critical Sociology SAGE UK Book Series Editor, Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Brill Academic Publishers, Lei...

#1262

Metta Spencer

#46654

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Metta Spencer is a Canadian sociologist, writer, peace researcher, and activist. Biography After completing a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1969 at the University of California, Berkeley, Spencer joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto’s Erindale College in 1971. She taught regularly in the university’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program, which she founded in 1989 and coordinated until her retirement in 1997. In 1976 Spencer authored the Foundations of Modern Sociology textbook, which was subsequently published in four American and seven Canadian editions.

#1263

Maryanne Dever

#78531

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Maryanne Dever is an Australian academic whose research focuses on feminist literary and archival studies. Education Dever completed a BA at the University of Queensland in 1984, an MA , followed by a PhD, at the University of Sydney.

#1264

Malcolm C. Bourne

#119235

Overall Influence

#1265

Henrich R. Greve

#67291

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Henrich R. Greve is a Norwegian organizational theorist, and Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, and the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Chair in Entrepreneurship. He was the editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly.

#1266

Marc Angenot

#27513

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Marc Angenot is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.

#1267

Meredith Minkler

#80549

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Meredith Minkler is an American public health researcher who is emeritus Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work on community-based participatory research and its use in public policy, criminal justice reform and democratizing access to food.

#1268

Avtar Brah

#119570

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Avtar Brah is a Ugandan-British sociologist. She is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, and a pioneer of diaspora studies. Life Avtar Brah was born in the Punjab and grew up in Uganda. Her mother tongue was Punjabi, and she recalls reading the novelist Nanak Singh, the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah and the contemporary poet Amrita Pritam as a young person. In the late 1960s she studied on a scholarship in the United States before coming to Britain in the early 1970s, where she worked as a researcher at the Ethnic Relations Unit at Bristol University. She was left a stateless refugee in Britain after Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians from Uganda.

#1269

Rhys H. Williams

#73115

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Rhys H. Williams is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. He is also Director of the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion. Biography He received his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico in 1979 and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#1270

Jason Boardman

#55220

Overall Influence

Jason David Boardman is Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the Health and Society Program at the Institute of Behavioral Science. He is known for his research on the genetics of educational attainment.

#1271

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

#35235

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Beverly Guy-Sheftall is an American Black feminist scholar, writer and editor, who is the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies and English at Spelman College, in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the founding director of the Spelman College Women's Research and Resource Center, the first at a historically Black college or university.

#1272

Brooke Harrington

#86277

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Elisabeth Brooke Harrington, born 1968, is an American academic and author, and professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College. Early life In 1990, Harrington earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Stanford University. In 1996, Harrington earned a master's degree in sociology, from Harvard University. In 1999, Harrington earned a PhD degree in sociology, from Harvard University.

#1273

Alice Goffman

#37436

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

#1274

Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam

#61295

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jack Halberstam , known also as Judith Halberstam, is an American academic and author, best known for his book Female Masculinity . His work focuses largely on feminism and queer and transgender identities in popular culture. Since 2017, Halberstam has been a professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Previously, he worked as both director and professor at The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California . Halberstam was the associate professor in the Department of...

#1275

Lynne G. Zucker

#120133

Overall Influence

#1276

Elspeth Probyn

#45124

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Elspeth Probyn is an Australian academic. She is currently professor of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

#1277

Doug Guthrie

#68789

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Doug Guthrie is an American academic administrator, sociologist, and China scholar. He is currently professor of global leadership and director of China initiatives at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at The Arizona State University. He was previously the dean of The George Washington University School of Business, and professor of management and sociology and director of executive education and NYU's Stern School of Business. He has also served as a visiting professor of management at the business schools of Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Emory, and INSEAD and as director of the Busi...

#1278

Joan Fujimura

#74409

Overall Influence

Joan Hideko Fujimura is an American sociologist and the Martindale-Bascom Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the president of the Society for the Social Studies of Science. She was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1999 to 2001 and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 2014 to 2015.

#1279

Rick Fantasia

#73835

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rick Fantasia is a Professor in the Social Sciences at Smith College in the United States and Director of its Kahn Liberal Arts Institute. He frequently conducts research in France, and his research interests include the interaction between labor and culture in the United States and France. He was particularly influenced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and is the former Director of the Louise W. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#1280

Mary Romero

#83140

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mary Romero is an American sociologist. She is Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, with affiliations in African and African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Asian Pacific American Studies. Before her arrival at ASU in 1995, she taught at University of Oregon, San Francisco State University, and University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Professor Romero holds a bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in Spanish from Regis College in Denver, Colorado. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado. In 2019, she served as the 110t...

#1281

Ju Eun Jung

#120346

Overall Influence

#1282

Horace Mitchell Miner

#28995

Overall Influence

1912 - 1993 (81 years)

Horace Mitchell Miner was an American anthropologist, particularly interested in those languages of his time that were still closely tied to the earth and agricultural practices. During World War II, he served as a counterintelligence agent in Italy and Japan. In 1937, he earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago, going on to teach there, as well as at other universities in the United States, and on a Fulbright Fellowship at a college in Uganda. He later worked elsewhere in Africa, and in South America.

#1283

Jerome Skolnick

#72039

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Jerome Herbert Skolnick is a professor at New York University and a former president of the American Society of Criminology. He is also affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. Skolnick has a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University.

#1284

Raphaël Liogier

Raphaël Liogier

#21040

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Raphaël Liogier is a French sociologist and philosopher. He received his PhD in social sciences at the University Paul Cézanne in France, where he also received master's degrees in public law and in political science. Other degrees include a degree in philosophy from the University of Provence, and a Masters of Science by research in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Liogier has also studied social sciences as a visiting undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley.

#1285

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

#15040

Overall Influence

1946 - 2011 (65 years)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was an American academic, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. She published a wide range of books, most notably biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. Her 1982 biography of Arendt won the first Harcourt Award while The Anatomy of Prejudices won the Association of American Publishers' prize for Best Book in Psychology in 1996. She was a member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and co-founder of Caversham Productions, a company that makes psychoanalytic educational materials.

#1286

Jacquelyne Jackson

#48636

Overall Influence

1932 - 2004 (72 years)

Jacquelyne Mary Johnson Jackson was an American sociologist, educator, and researcher on issues that affect elderly minority populations. She was involved in public policy debates on programs for this group for over 30 years. From 1978 onward she started a dialogue on social security accessibility for elderly minorities in consideration of sociological influence.

#1287

Clifford Clogg

#96533

Overall Influence

1949 - 1995 (46 years)

Clifford Collier Clogg was an American sociologist, demographer, and statistician. He is best known for his contributions to population statistics, categorical data analysis, and latent class analysis.

#1288

Julia Brannen

#52373

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Julia Brannen, FRSA, FAcSS, is Professor of the Sociology of the Family at the Institute of Education, University of London. She has an international reputation for her research on family life, work-life issues, and intergenerational relations.

#1289

Daniel Levy

#79012

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Daniel Levy is a German–American political sociologist and an Associate Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Levy earned a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and political science and a Master of Arts in sociology from Tel Aviv University, as well as a Doctorate of sociology from Columbia University in 1999. He is a specialist on issues relating to globalization, collective memory studies, and comparative historical sociology. Levy, along with the historians Paul Gootenberg and Herman Lebovics, is a founder and organizer of the Initiative for Historical Soc...

#1290

Arvid Brodersen

#119312

Overall Influence

1904 - 1996 (92 years)

Arvid Brodersen was a Norwegian sociologist, a UNESCO leader, and later a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Born in Trondheim, Brodersen studied sociology at the University of Berlin. During World War II he was a member of the Norwegian resistance movement, and is known for establishing a communication channel to central Wehrmacht officers. He died in Oslo.

#1291

Steve H. Murdock

#116833

Overall Influence

1948 - 2023 (75 years)

Steve H. Murdock was an American sociologist and the former director of the United States Census Bureau. He held named professorships in sociology at Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at San Antonio and Rice University. Murdock served as the first official Texas State Demographer.

#1292

Ronit Lentin

#78264

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ronit Lentin is an Israeli/Irish political sociologist and a writer of fiction and non-fiction books. Life Lentin was born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, in 1944: she has lived in Ireland since 1969. A political sociologist, she was an associate professor of sociology at Trinity College, Dublin until her retirement in 2014. From 1997 until 2012 Lentin was the director of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict, Department of Sociology. She was head of the Department of Sociology and a founder member of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, Trinity College, Dublin. Lentin has published extensivel...

#1293

Doris Y. Wilkinson

#49609

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Doris Yvonne Wilkinson is an American sociologist from Lexington, Kentucky, who was an instigator of racial integration at the University of Kentucky as the first African American to graduate from the University of Kentucky in 1958 as an undergraduate student. At the University of Kentucky, she was the director for the African American Heritage in the Department of Sociology. And in 1969 Wilkinson was the first African-American woman to become a full-time faculty member at University of Kentucky when she joined the Department of Sociology.

#1294

Maddie Breeze

#83780

Overall Influence

Maddie Breeze is a British sociologist, and lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Strathclyde. In 2016 she won the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize of the British Sociological Association for her book Seriousness in Women’s Roller Derby: Gender, Organization, and Ambivalence.

#1295

Julius Gould

#65586

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Samuel Julius Gould was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained an MA in PPE, he worked at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker.

#1296

Frank Schmalleger

Frank Schmalleger

#30875

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

#1297

Alan Fox

#45645

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Alan Fox DFM was an English industrial sociologist, who revolutionised the separate discipline of industrial relations. Fox, who grew up in Manor Park, London, was the son of Walter Henry Fox and Rhoda Fox, née Rous. Walter Fox was a machine enameller by trade and a veteran of the First World War. Alan Fox failed his eleven plus examination and — like most British working class children of his generation — left school at the age of 14. He worked first as a laboratory assistant at a grammar school and then in a photographic film factory.

#1298

Matthew Hughey

#80622

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Matthew Windust Hughey is an American sociologist known for his work on race and racism. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he is also an adjunct faculty member in the Africana Studies Institute; American Studies Program; Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, & Policy; Sustainable Global Cities Initiative, and; graduate certificate program in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, & Politics. His work has included studying whiteness, race and media, race and politics, racism and racial assumptions within genetic and genomic science, and racism and racial...

#1299

Margot Jefferys

#97192

Overall Influence

1916 - 1999 (83 years)

Margot Jefferys was Professor of Medical Sociology at Bedford College, London, from 1968 to 1982. She went to Berkhamsted Girls School.

#1300

Robert Winthrop White

#121613

Overall Influence

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