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.

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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#1901

Eric Margolis

#69441

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Eric Margolis is an American sociologist and associate professor at Arizona State University in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, known for his work on higher education and in the field of visual sociology.

#1902

Ravi Arvind Palat

#89907

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ravi Arvind Palat is Professor at the Department of Sociology, Binghamton University, The State University of New York. He has undertaken research in historical sociology, political economy, nationalism and ethnic conflict, social theory. The common theme in his work is "excavating the Eurocentric biases of social theory".

#1903

Shere Hite

#48996

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Shere Hite was an American-born German sex educator and feminist. Her sexological work focused primarily on female sexuality. Hite built upon biological studies of sex by Masters and Johnson and by Alfred Kinsey. She also referenced theoretical, political and psychological works associated with the feminist movement of the 1970s, such as Anne Koedt's essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm". She renounced her United States citizenship in 1995 to become German.

#1904

Lynn Miles

#67860

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

Lynn Alan Miles was an American human rights activist in Taiwan. Miles was born in New Jersey and first went to Taiwan in 1962, at the invitation of his college classmate whose father was a ranking security official. But after a few months of living happily with the family, Lynn came to realize that the so-called Free China was neither "Free" nor "China".

#1905

Sarah Ben-David

#124540

Overall Influence

Sarah Ben-David is an Israeli Professor of Criminology whose scientific and public activity focuses mainly on victimology and criminology and overlapping areas between these two fields. In recent years, Ben-David has worked to encourage research, awareness and therapy in the field of sexual harassment of men and women, and regarding awareness of the reciprocal nature of intimate partner violence and domestic violence.

#1906

Heike Mauer

#43384

Overall Influence

Heike Mauer is a German gender theorist. She wrote a monograph about prostitution in Luxembourg and written about gender studies through the lens of postcolonialism and intersectionality. She works at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

#1907

Graham Ousey

#79632

Overall Influence

Graham C. Ousey is an American sociologist and criminologist. He is a professor of sociology at the College of William & Mary, where he is also the chair of the sociology department. He is known for researching immigration and crime.

#1908

Paul Sebag

#57844

Overall Influence

1919 - 2004 (85 years)

Paul Sebag , born 26 September 1919 in Tunis and died 5 September 2004 in Paris, was a French-Tunisian sociologist and historian. Biography After having begun studies in law and philosophy in Paris interrupted by World War II and the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime, Paul Sebag in Tunisia took an important part in the action of the Tunisian Communist Party against the partisans of Vichy. Arrested and tortured, he is sentenced by a Bizerte court for life. However, he spent only ten months in prison. Released in the aftermath of the allies' landings in North Africa on 8 November 1942, he re...

#1909

Marie-Andrée Bertrand

Marie-Andrée Bertrand

#41271

Overall Influence

1925 - 2011 (86 years)

Marie-Andrée Bertrand was a French-Canadian criminologist, a feminist and anti-prohibitionist. Biography Bertrand was born in Montreal and started her career as a social worker for female offenders, mainly sex workers. In 1963, she received a master's degree from the Université de Montréal. She went on to study criminology at the School of Criminology, University of California, Berkeley, where she got her Ph.D. in 1967. She held a professorship in criminology at the School of Criminology, Université de Montréal. She continued to work, until her death, doing research, teaching and publishing.

#1910

Kathleen Lynch

#68598

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Kathleen Lynch is an Irish sociologist, activist and professor emeritus of equality studies at University College Dublin. Career Lynch began her career as a social worker, working in North Dublin city. Her seminal work is a co-authored study with Anne Lodge, Equality and Power in Schools: Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation. It was a two-year study of twelve Irish schools, studying all aspects from streaming to sexual orientation. Lynch was involved in the establishment of the Equality Studies Centre in University College Dublin in 1990. In 2005, she was involved in the creation of the UCD School of Social Justice.

#1911

Cora Bagley Marrett

Cora Bagley Marrett

#95745

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Cora Bagley Marrett is an American sociologist. From May 2011 until August 2014, Marrett served as the deputy director of the National Science Foundation. Biography Early life Cora Bagley Marrett was born in 1942 in Kenbridge, Virginia. Her parents only had a sixth grade education and Marrett was the youngest of 12 children.

#1912

Robert C. Atchley

#96296

Overall Influence

1939 - 2018 (79 years)

Robert C. Atchley was an American gerontologist and sociologist. Atchley graduated from Miami University in 1961, and taught at his alma mater from 1966 to 1998, when he joined the Naropa University faculty. Atchley led the American Society on Aging from 1988 to 1990 as president, and founded the journal Contemporary Gerontology.

#1913

Seymour M. Miller

#124949

Overall Influence

1922 - 2021 (99 years)

Seymour Michael "Mike" Miller was an economic-political sociologist, activist, and emeritus professor of sociology at Boston University. Biography Miller's parents immigrated separately as teenagers from Tagancha and Stepanitz, two shtetls in the Ukraine. Miller grew up poor in Philadelphia and New York with prolonged periods of homelessness.

#1914

Jackie Smith

#123282

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Jackie Smith is an American sociologist. She specializes in Political economy and Transnational organization social movements. Since 2011, she has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Smith currently serves as editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research, an official journal of the American Sociological Association and published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. She is an advocate for the Open Access movement, arguing that scholarly societies should consider publishing options beyond those of major publishers. She is a leading advocate for ...

#1915

Barry Schwartz

#100631

Overall Influence

1938 - 2021 (83 years)

Barry Schwartz was an American sociologist. Career Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Schwartz received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from Temple University , University of Maryland , and University of Pennsylvania , respectively. He has taught at the University of Chicago and University of Georgia and been a fellow at the University of Georgia Institute for Behavioral Research , the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences in Stanford, CA, the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle, NC, the Smithsonian Museum of National History in Washington, DC , and the University of Georgia Humanities Center .

#1916

David A. Sonnenfeld

#134391

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Allan Sonnenfeld is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology and environmental policy at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, known for his work in the field of ecological modernisation.

#1917

Allan L. McCutcheon

#136263

Overall Influence

1950 - 2016 (66 years)

Allan Lee McCutcheon was an American sociologist and statistician. He is best known for his work in survey research and methods, as well as for his contributions to categorical data analysis, especially to latent class analysis.

#1918

Josep M. Armengol

#137896

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (47 years)

Josep María Armengol Carrera is a Spanish literary scholar and researcher in the field of gender and masculinity studies. Career BA and PhD in English from the University of Barcelona , having authored the first doctoral thesis in Spain on cultural and literary representations of masculinity. In 2007 he moved to the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, USA, where he carried out his postdoctoral research together with Dr. Michael Kimmel.

#1919

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

#93374

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is an Australian academic, Indigenous feminist, author and activist for Indigenous rights. She is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people from Minjerribah in Queensland. She completed a PhD at Griffith University in 1998, her thesis titled Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism in Australia. The thesis was published as a book in 1999 and short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the Stanner Award. A 20th Anniversary Edition was released in 2020 by University of Queensland Press. Her 2015 monograph The White Possessive: ...

#1920

Gargi Bhattacharyya

#124894

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Gargi Bhattacharyya is a British sociologist. They are professor of sociology at the University of East London . Life Bhattacharyya's parents are from Bengal. Their younger sister is the playwright Sonali Bhattacharyya. They were a lecturer at Aston University and the University of Birmingham before coming to UEL in 2013.

#1921

Pinar Karaca-Mandic

#40410

Overall Influence

Pinar Karaca-Mandic is an American economist who is C. Arthur Williams Jr. Professor in Healthcare Risk Management and Academic Director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research . She was previously on the faculty of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and an economist for the RAND Corporation.

#1922

Jeffery Ulmer

#123953

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Jeffery Todd Ulmer is a professor of sociology and criminology at Pennsylvania State University . He served as the associate head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology from 2013 to 2019. Education Ulmer received his B.A. from Susquehanna University in 1988, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Penn State in 1990 and 1993, respectively, all in sociology. He graduated from Springdale High School in Springdale, AR, in 1984.

#1923

Charles Moskos

#108063

Overall Influence

1934 - 2008 (74 years)

Charles Constantine Moskos, Jr. was a sociologist of the United States military and a professor at Northwestern University. Described as the nation's "most influential military sociologist" by The Wall Street Journal, Moskos was often a source for reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and other periodicals. He was the author of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which prohibited homosexual service members from acknowledging their sexual orientation from 1994 to 2011.

#1924

Heather Hamill

#94112

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Heather Hamill is a sociologist who is currently an associate professor at the University of Oxford, St Cross College. She specializes in the study of crime and extralegal governance. Her book, The Hoods: Crime and Punishment in Belfast, about paramilitary punishment attacks in Northern Ireland, won the James Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books in History and Social Sciences, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies. According to the award committee:

#1925

Nancy Lee Peluso

#89036

Overall Influence

Nancy Lee Peluso is an American rural sociologist. She is the Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor of Forest Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#1926

Assata Shakur

#26974

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Assata Olugbala Shakur is an American political activist who was a member of the Black Liberation Army . In 1977, she was convicted in the first-degree murder of State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. She escaped from prison in 1979 and is currently wanted by the FBI, with a $1 million FBI reward for information leading to her capture, and an additional $1 million reward offered by the Attorney General of New Jersey.

#1927

Sherman James

#40392

Overall Influence

Sherman A. James is an American epidemiologist. He is currently the Susan B. King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and previously taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 1973 to 1989 and at the University of Michigan as the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health from 1989 to 2003. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2000.

#1928

Alberto Cambrosio

#120452

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Alberto Cambrosio is a sociologist of biomedicine at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the Université de Montréal. He holds a bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and a master's degree in Environmental Science from the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada.

#1929

Eva Gothlin

#93073

Overall Influence

1957 - 2006 (49 years)

Eva Gothlin was a Swedish historian of ideas. Biography Eva Lundgren was born on 26 January 1957 in Norrköping. Gothlin defended her thesis on the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg in 1991 with the dissertation Kön och existens: studier i Simone de Beauvoirs Le Deuxième Sexe . In 1998, she became the first director of the then newly-formed National Secretariat for Gender Research. In 2001, she became an Associate Professor of History of Ideas. From 2004 until her death, she was a senior lecturer at the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg.

#1930

Gerhard Grohs

#60457

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Gerhard Grohs was a German sociologist and African studies scholar. He was one of the pioneers of African Studies in Germany, Professor of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin and at the University of Mainz .

#1931

Katharine Betts

#141882

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Katharine Betts is an Australian sociologist specialising in environmental and population issues. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology with Swinburne University. She is also a member of The Australian Sociological Association and Sustainable Population Australia.

#1932

Jan Rath

#144468

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Jan Rath is a Dutch social scientist who is holding a chair in Urban Sociology in the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His academic studies have focused on the nexus of urban structures and processes on the one hand and their social, ethnic and religious dimensions on the other. His work is highly cited in the sub-fields related to the problematization of immigrant ethnic minorities, and on urban economies, entrepreneurship, and cultural consumption.

#1933

Moncef Ouannes

#155091

Overall Influence

1956 - 2020 (64 years)

Moncef Ouannes was a Tunisian sociologist. Biography After studying classical history, Ouannes earned a doctorate in sociology at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of Tunis. He would become head of the sociology department at his alma mater before teaching sociology at Tunis University for many years.

#1934

Michael Flood

#77287

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Michael G. Flood is an Australian sociologist and a professor at the Queensland University of Technology School of Justice. Flood gained his doctorate in gender and sexuality studies from the Australian National University. His areas of research are on violence against women, fathering, pro-feminism, domestic violence, the effects of pornography on young people, safe sex among heterosexual men, men's movements as a backlash to the feminist movement, men's relationships with each other and with women, homophobia, men's health, and gender justice. He is a regular contributor to and is regularly ...

#1935

Christopher Marquis

#10569

Overall Influence

Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, England, and a Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. Marquis's research takes a sociological perspective and focuses on corporate strategies, entrepreneurship and social innovation, building sustainable businesses, and doing business in China. He is the author of the award-winning books Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism and and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise

#1936

Mark A. Hall

#169206

Overall Influence

#1937

James D. Wright

#75704

Overall Influence

1947 - 2019 (72 years)

James David Wright was an American sociologist. He had been the Provost's Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida since 2001. Since 2013, he had also been a Pegasus Professor there. He wrote 17 books and over 250 peer-reviewed papers. From 1978 until 2014, he was the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Social Science Research.

#1938

Frédéric Martel

#17395

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Frédéric Martel is a French writer, researcher and journalist. His most famous books are The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 , Mainstream and In the Closet of the Vatican , a New York Times bestseller.

#1939

Khizar Humayun Ansari

#68213

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Khizar Humayun Ansari OBE is a British academic who was awarded an OBE in 2002 for his work in the field of race and ethnic relations. He is the director of the Centre for Minority Studies, at the University of London. Ansari's research focuses on the history of Islam, minorities in South Asia, and the experience of Muslims living in Western nations.

#1940

Jose Itzigsohn

#47494

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

José Itzigsohn is a Professor of sociology at Brown University. He is the author of two books and has written numerous journal articles. Background Itzigsohn graduated from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1989 with a bachelor's of arts degree cum laude in sociology. He received his PhD in Sociology from The Johns Hopkins University in 1995.

#1941

Rodney M. Coe

#149058

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Rodney M. Coe was an American medical sociologist notable for his research in the intersection of sociology and medicine. He was on the faculty at Saint Louis University School of Medicine for 29 years, the last ten of which, Coe spent as chair of the department of family and community medicine. He was a longtime advocate for single-payer healthcare.

#1942

Samuel Abraham Goldblith

#72867

Overall Influence

1919 - 2001 (82 years)

Samuel Abraham Goldblith was an American food scientist. While involved in World War II, he studied malnutrition, and later was involved in food research important for space exploration. Early life A native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Goldblith was the son of a Russian immigrant. He received his S.B. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. During his student days, he was also involved in Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and began serving with the United States Army Corps of Engineers as a Second Lieutenant in the Philippines.

#1943

Desmond King

#60652

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Desmond King is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of American Government at Nuffield College, Oxford. King was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Biography King grew up in Dublin and graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a first in political science and was awarded the Bastable Prize. He went on to carry out his postgraduate studies at Northwestern University, where he worked with Ted Robert Gurr, Alexander Hicks and Jane Mansbridge. He completed his M.A. and PhD at Northwestern, and was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, later moving to an Offici...

#1944

Richard Rosenfeld

#169526

Overall Influence

#1945

Kjell Grønhaug

#72091

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Kjell Grønhaug is a Norwegian organizational theorist, management consultant and Professor emeritus of Business Administration at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Biography Grønhaug obtained his MS in sociology from the University of Bergen, his MBA and his PhD in marketing from the Norwegian School of Economics. Early 1970s he obtained a postgraduate degree from the University Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Washington.

#1946

Armand Mattelart

Armand Mattelart

#11922

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Armand Mattelart is a Belgian sociologist, known as a leftist French scholar. His work deals with media, culture and communication, specially in their historical and international dimensions. Life, experience, and academic work After finishing his undergraduate studies Mattelart joined a community of secular monks in Brittany for one year, but went on to study Law and Political Science at the Catholic University of Louvain. Afterwards he studied demography at the Institute of Demographic Studies in Paris . Upon finishing his studies he was appointed as an expert on the politics of population by the Vatican, and in 1962 was sent to the Universidad Católica de Chile.

#1947

Fenggang Yang

#24168

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Fenggang Yang is professor of sociology and founding director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. He was elected and served as the president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 2014–15, the first Chinese American, nonwhite president since the founding of the association in 1949. He is also the founding president of the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 2018–2020. He has been listed in the Marquis' Who's Who in America since 2002. Fenggang Yang is openly Christian and has spoken critically and frequently in international media about China's lack of religious freedom.

#1948

Susan Sorenson

#128934

Overall Influence

Susan B. Sorenson is a professor of social policy, and of health and societies, at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior fellow in public health, director of the PhD program in social welfare, and director of the Evelyn Jacobs Ortner Center there. She is known for studying gun violence from a public health and political perspective, and she has argued for increasing the availability of data to researchers regarding this subject.

#1949

John Pease

#136114

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

John Alan Pease is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and co-chair of the department. He is also recognized as an advocate for strengthening academic standards, mentoring students, and making higher education affordable to students who come from less privileged backgrounds.

#1950

David T. Takeuchi

#169739

Overall Influence

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