The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Sociology,

#1951

Eve Ewing

#31926
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Eve Louise Ewing is an American sociologist, author, poet, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois. Ewing is a tenured professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her academic research in the sociology of education includes her 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, a study of school closures in Chicago. She is the former editor at Seven Scribes and the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches which was released in September 2017. In 2019, she published 1919, a poetry collection centered around the Chicago race riot of 1919.
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#1952

Harriet Presser

Harriet Presser
#80060
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Harriet B. Presser was a sociologist and demographer. Having served on the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, for more than 30 years, at the time of her death she was a Distinguished University Professor. She was elected president of the Population Association of America for the year 1989. In addition, she was awarded the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association in 2010, and was elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002. As a scholar, she studied the intersection of gender, work and family, and pioneered the sociological specialization in that area.
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#1953

Peter Mayo

#54774
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Mayo is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and former head of the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta, in Malta. He is responsible for the UNESCO Chair in Global Adult Education at the same university. He formerly served as the university's head of the Department of Education Studies from 2008 to 2012. Mayo was a member of the Collegio Docenti for the doctoral research programme in Educational Sciences and Continuing Education at the Università degli Studi di Verona. He teaches in the areas of sociology of education and adult continuing education, as well as in comparative and international education and sociology in general.
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#1954

Betsy Ettorre

#150391
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elizabeth Mary Ettorre is an Anglo-American feminist sociologist. Career Ettorre completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology at Fordham University, New York, before earning a Ph.D. in the subject with a thesis 'The Sociology of lesbianism: female "deviance" and female sexuality' at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She attended the UK's first National Lesbian Conference in Bristol in 1974 and helped to organise the UK's ninth national Women's liberation movement conference in London in 1977. Ettorre did sociological research at Institute of Psychiatry, Birkbeck Colle...
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#1955

Denise Gottfredson

#88757
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Denise Claire Gottfredson is an American criminologist and professor in the department of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an expert on school violence and juvenile delinquency. She is recognized for her research applying the techniques of program evaluation to certain crime prevention initiatives, such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education, the Strengthening Families Program, and the Baltimore City Drug Treatment Court. She has also researched the effects of school resource officers on schools, finding that such officers spend an average of about half of their time engaged in law enforcement activities.
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#1956

Reijo Luostarinen

#42374
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Reijo Kalevi Luostarinen was a Finnish organisational theorist, Professor of International Business at the Aalto University School of Business, and chairman of Biohit. He is known for his work on internationalization and International business operations.
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#1957

David McDowall

#76873
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David McDowall is an American criminologist and distinguished teaching professor in the School of Criminal Justice at University at Albany, SUNY, where he is also co-director of the Violence Research Group. Educated at Portland State University and Northwestern University, he taught at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1990 until joining the University at Albany in 1996. He has published a number of studies pertaining to gun violence in the United States.
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#1958

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen

#57570
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Malene Freudendal-Pedersen is professor of urban planning at Aalborg University and has an interdisciplinary background linking sociology, geography, urban planning and the sociology of technology. Her research has been strongly inspired by the mobilities turn.
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#1959

Stanley Presser

#164432
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stanley Presser, a social scientist, is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he teaches in the Sociology Department and the Joint Program in Survey Methodology . He co-founded JPSM with colleagues at the University of Michigan and Westat, Inc., and served as its first director. He has also been editor of Public Opinion Quarterly and president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
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#1960

Joanne Hort

#57742
Overall Influence
Joanne Hort is a New Zealand food science academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Massey University and holds the 'Fonterra Riddet Chair in Consumer and Sensory Science'. Academic career After a 1997 PhD titled 'Cheddar cheese : Its texture, chemical composition and rheological properties' at the Sheffield Hallam University, Hort moved to University of Nottingham, rising to full professor. Hort then moved to Massey University, where she currently teaches.
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#1961

Hannah Landecker

#85691
Overall Influence
Hannah L. Landecker is an Australian author and academic working as a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. Education Landecker earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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#1962

Richard H. R. Harper

#130789
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Richard H. R. Harper is a British computer scientist and prolific author. Career He served as Professor in the Department of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University and Co-Director of the Institute for Social Futures. He has published over 160 scientific articles and was elected as Academy in honour of leadership in the field of Human-Computer Interaction by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014. He completed his Phd at University of Manchester in 1989. In the late 20th century, he focused on deploying technology in public service and air traffic control. He studied how technology was embedded at the International Monetary Fund.
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#1963

Martin Tolich

#102292
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Martin Tolich is a New Zealand sociologist and ethicist. Career Tolich specialises in qualitative research methods and research ethics committees. He earned a master's degree in sociology from the University of Auckland and completed his PhD at the University of California, Davis in 1991. He was a lecturer in sociology at Massey University from 1992 to 2004. In 2005 he transferred to the University of Otago to establish that university's first sociology major progamme. Tolich was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Otago in 2009. He retired from teaching in 2022.
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#1964

Ellwyn R. Stoddard

#48570
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Ellwyn Reed Stoddard was an American sociologist. He was Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso where he began teaching in 1965. Biography Ellwyn Reed Stoddard was born in Garland, Utah on February 16, 1927.
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#1965

Margrit Brückner

#104418
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Margrit Brückner is a feminist German sociologist and a retired professor of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. Her publications on girls and women at work, and, especially, her work on violence against women, have become core academic texts. Another of her more notable specialities involves her contributions to the international debate on care.
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#1966

Matt DeLisi

Matt DeLisi
#82216
Overall Influence
Matthew "Matt" DeLisi is an American criminologist, author, forensic consultant, and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Iowa State University, where he is also Coordinator of Criminal Justice and a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Violence.
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#1967

Rebecca Piekkari

#61899
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Rebecca Marschan-Piekkari is a Finnish organizational theorist and Professor of International Business at the Aalto University, and Vice Dean of its Department of Management Studies, known for her work on "international business research." and on multinational corporations.
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#1968

Pardis Mahdavi

#46034
Overall Influence
Pardis Mahdavi is an American scholar and the Provost and Executive Vice President of the University of Montana. Previously, she served as Dean of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. Previously she was Acting Dean of Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Prior to that, she served as Dean of Women, and Chair and professor of anthropology at Pomona College.
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#1969

Eva Kahana

#149208
Overall Influence
Eva Kahana is an American sociologist. Career Kahana is the Pierce T. and Elizabeth D Robson Professor of Humanities, Chair of the Department of Sociology, and the Director of the Elderly Care Research Center at Case Western Reserve University. She has published over 200 academic articles on Holocaust survivors, aging, and stressors.
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#1970

Corey Lee Wrenn

#118087
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Corey Lee Wrenn is an American sociologist specializing in human-animal studies, the sociology of the animal rights movement, ecofeminism, and vegan studies. She is presently a lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.
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#1971

René Dumont

#12487
Overall Influence
1904 - 2001 (97 years)
René Dumont was a French engineer in agronomy, a sociologist, and an environmental politician. Biography Dumont was born in Cambrai, Nord, in the north of France. His father was a professor in agriculture and his grandfather was a farmer. He graduated from the INA P-G, as an engineer in agronomy. First sent to Vietnam at the end of his studies, he was disgusted by colonialism and returned to Paris to spend most of his career as a professor of agricultural sciences . René Dumont started his career as a promoter of the use of chemical fertilizers and mechanisation. He wrote articles in La Terre Française , favoring agricultural corporatism.
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#1972

Anna Freixas

Anna Freixas
#114609
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Anna Freixas Farré is a Spanish feminist writer and retired university professor. Biography Anna Freixas graduated with a PhD in psychology at the University of Barcelona, where she was a pupil of , and where she developed the first years of her teaching career. In her doctoral thesis, she analyzed the self-perception of the aging process of women. In 1981 she arrived in Andalusia, when she entered the University of Córdoba, first at the Institute of Education Sciences and then the Faculty of Educational Sciences, where she was Professor of Evolutionary Psychology and Education. She also crea...
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#1973

Roman Kuhar

#122293
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Roman Kuhar is a Slovenian sociologist and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana. His research fields are gender equality, discrimination, homophobia, citizenship and human rights, and he is described as "one of the world's foremost experts on the anti-gender movement." His works include the widely cited book Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe, co-authored with David Paternotte.
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#1974

Alena V. Ledeneva

Alena V. Ledeneva
#74643
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alena Valeryevna Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies , University College London . She is known for her studies of blat, corruption and informal practices in Russia.
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#1975

Elaine Brody

#71250
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Elaine Marjorie Brody was an American gerontologist and sociologist, who studied cases on elderly Americans tended to by caregivers. In a career lasting six decades, she was one of the first social workers to research her clients, particularly of "women in the middle", a term she used to refer to women who raised their children and cared for their elderly parents simultaneously. Brody contributed to the foundation of gerontology, and her works established a precedent in this field.
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#1976

Eric Anderson

#122967
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Eric Anderson is an American sociologist and sexologist specializing in adolescent men's gender and sexualities. He holds the position of Professor of Masculinities, Sexualities and Sport at the University of Winchester, in England. His research has been recognized for excellence by the British Academy of Social Sciences and he is an elected Fellow of the International Academy of Sex Research. Anderson is an advocate for the inclusion of gay men in sport and is America's first openly gay high-school coach, having come out at Huntington Beach High School, the same high-school that produced the...
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#1977

Akwugo Emejulu

Akwugo Emejulu
#109759
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Akwugo Emejulu is a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. She focuses on political sociology, including inequalities across Europe and grassroots campaigns for women of colour. Early life and education Emejulu completed her bachelor's degree in political science at the American University. She joined the University of Glasgow for her graduate studies, earning a Master of Philosophy in Urban Policy. She moved to the University of Strathclyde for her PhD, which she was awarded in 2010. Her PhD thesis considered community development as a discourse, identities and social practises ...
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#1978

Manali Desai

#142470
Overall Influence
Manali Desai is a Reader in Sociology and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is currently the Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and is believed the first woman of color to lead a department at the University of Cambridge.
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#1979

Nancy Denton

#23149
Overall Influence
Nancy Anne Denton is an American sociologist. She is a professor of sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she Professor Emeritus. SUNY Albany, where Dr. Havidan Rodriguez is currently the president of the university. She is known for her research on racial segregation in the United States with Douglas Massey, with whom she co-authored the book American Apartheid. A book, well reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, when first published. Upon retiring from SUNY Albany, she received the Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award from the Community and Urban Sociology section from ...
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#1980

Agustin Cueva

Agustin Cueva
#77085
Overall Influence
1937 - 1992 (55 years)
Agustín Cueva Dávila was an Ecuadorian writer, literary critic, and Marxist sociologist. He had great interest in dependency theory and was at the center of many political debates both within Ecuador and throughout Latin America. He received the Essay Award from the Siglo XXI Publishing House for his book El desarrollo del capitalismo en América Latina . In addition to writing many essays on the social, political and cultural issues of South America, Cueva was a professor at the Central University of Ecuador, President of the Latin American Sociological Association, and directed the Graduate ...
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#1981

Marilyn Salzman Webb

#67733
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Marilyn Salzman Webb , also known as Marilyn Webb, is an American author, activist, professor, feminist and journalist. She has been involved in the civil rights, feminist, anti-Vietman war and end-of-life care movements, and is considered one of the founders of the Second-wave women's liberation movement.
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#1982

David Gordon Scott

#34109
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
David Gordon Scott is a British criminologist, abolitionist and author. He is a criminologist at The Open University in Milton Keynes. Scott's research interests span the field of criminology, particularly focusing on socialist ethics, abolitionism, social harm, liberative justice, harms of capitalist states, and state-corporate harm.
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#1983

Preston Valien

#105504
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Preston Valien was an African-American sociologist. He was a Sociology professor at Fisk University and Brooklyn College, and he worked for the U.S. federal government, including as a cultural attaché in Nigeria. He was the author of several books about school desegregation in the Southern United States
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#1984

Mirt Komel

#77145
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Mirt Komel is a Slovenian philosopher, novelist, sociologist, playwright, essayist and translator. Komel is currently employed as assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and researcher at the Center of Cultural and Religious Studies .
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#1985

David S. Wiley

#147985
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David S. Wiley is professor of sociology at Michigan State University . Wiley worked on race relations in Zimbabwe 1961-63 and then conducted research on sociology of urban and rural environments in Zambia, Kenya, and South Africa 1968-2010. From 1968 to 1976 he was a sociology faculty member and director of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and from 1977 to 2008 served as director of the MSU African Studies Center and Professor of Sociology - and Acting Chair of the MSU Department of Sociology .
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#1986

Ricardo Manapat

#47671
Overall Influence
1953 - 2008 (55 years)
Jose Ricardo de Leon Manapat was an activist, scholar, writer, researcher, and educator who was the Director of the Records Management and Archives Office of the Philippines from 1996 to 1998 and 2002 to 2008. He is best known as the author of the book, "Some Are Smarter Than Others: The History of Marcos' Crony Capitalism", a work on anti-cronyism exposing the wealth of the Marcos dynasty, and as Editor-in-Chief of the "Smart File", Smart File Magazine Animal Farm Series.
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#1987

Pamela Smock

#137610
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Pamela Jane Smock is an American sociologist and demographer. She is a research professor in the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center, of which she was the director from 2010 to 2013. She is also a professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Michigan. She is known for her research on issues related to the family, such as cohabitation, which she has been studying for over two decades.
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#1988

Subcomandante Marcos

Subcomandante Marcos
#2249
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente is a Mexican insurgent, the former military leader and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the ongoing Chiapas conflict, and a prominent anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal. Widely known by his initial nom de guerre Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos , he has subsequently employed several other pseudonyms: he called himself Delegate Zero during the Other Campaign , and since May 2014 has gone by the name Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano , which he adopted in honor of his fallen comrade Jose Luis Solis Lopez, his nom de guerre being Galeano, aka "Teacher Galeano".
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#1989

Jaap Dronkers

#150861
Overall Influence
1945 - 2016 (71 years)
Jaap Dronkers was a Dutch sociologist of education. After studying sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in his native Amsterdam, he taught at the Catholic University of Brabant from 1986 to 1990. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the University of Amsterdam, where he remained on the faculty until 2001. He then taught at the European University Institute from 2001 to 2009 before becoming an honorary professor in international comparative research on educational performance and social inequality at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market in the University of Maastricht's School for Business and Economics.
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#1990

Jens Beckert

#171806
Overall Influence
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#1991

David M. Kennedy

David M. Kennedy
#31393
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David M. Kennedy is a criminologist, professor, action researcher, and author specializing in crime prevention among inner city gangs, especially in the prevention of violent acts among street gangs. Kennedy developed the Operation Ceasefire group violence intervention in Boston in the 1990s and the High Point Model drug market intervention in High Point, North Carolina, in 2003, which have proven to reduce violence and eliminate overt drug markets in jurisdictions around the United States. He founded the National Network for Safe Communities in 2009 to support cities using these and related ...
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#1992

Delia Davin

#59952
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Delia Davin was a writer and lecturer on Chinese society and particularly Chinese women's stories. She was one of the first foreign scholars to consider the impact of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party on women.
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#1993

Claire Wallace

Claire Wallace
#109334
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Claire Wallace is Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen and was President of the European Sociological Association between 2007 and 2009, during which she helped to organise the Annual Conference in Lisbon in 2009 and in Glasgow in 2007. She has also been editor in chief of the international journal European Societies between 2001 and 2006.
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#1994

Alison Jones

Alison Jones
#62283
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Barbara Alison Jones is a New Zealand academic who works in the field of sociology of education. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of Andrew Buchanan, New Zealand politician 1862–1874; great-great granddaughter of William Baldwin New Zealand politician 1863–1867; great granddaughter of Admiral William Oswald Story of the British Royal Navy. She has two sons, Finn McCahon Jones and Frey McCahon Jones
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#1995

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

#32857
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is an American sociologist who examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationships between culture and learning styles. She is the Emily Hargroves Fisher professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a 1984 MacArthur Genius.
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#1996

Francisca de Haan

#111482
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Francisca de Haan is a Dutch historian and writer who specializes in women's and gender history. From 2002 until 2022, she has taught at the Central European University, first in Budapest and since 2020 located in Vienna, where she is now Professor Emerita of Gender Studies and History, as well as being a fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her publications include A Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries and she is the founding editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and South Eastern European Women’s and Gender History .
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#1997

Gilbert Gee

#89848
Overall Influence
Gilbert C. Gee is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for researching the effects of racial discrimination on mental and physical health. He was appointed editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior in 2013. Gee and his colleague Chandra Ford were awarded the 2019 Paul Cornely Award for their work on how health is affected by racism.
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#1998

Lawrence D Bobo

#172096
Overall Influence
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#1999

Joanne Belknap

#119628
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Joanne Elizabeth Belknap is an American criminologist and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Belknap was named a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. She trained at Temple University's Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. She studies jail-to-community reentry and implementing college courses in prisons. She was awarded the 2009 Elizabeth D. Gee Memorial Lectureship Award, which recognizes efforts to advance women in academia, interdisciplinary scholarly contributions and distinguished teaching.
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#2000

Dzodzi Tsikata

#134899
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Dzodzi Tsikata is a Ghanaian feminist, academic, professor of Development Sociology and Director of Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Biography Dzodzi Tsikata is a professor at the Institute of Statistical Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana. Her academic interests include gender and development Issues, gender equity policies and practices. She was elected in June 2015 as the president of Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa at their 14th general assembly meeting in Senegal.
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